The weight of philosophic endeavour in Islam lies on the theoretical and intellectual side. With the actual proceedings of social and political life they are able to make but a scanty compromise. Even the Art of the Muslims, although it exhibits more originality than their Science, does not know how to animate the crude material, but merely sports with ornamental forms. Their Poetry creates no Drama, and their Philosophy is unpractical.
3. Doctrinal Systems.
1. In the Koran there had been given to Muslims a religion, but no system,—precepts but no doctrines. What is contrary to logic therein,—what we account for by the shifting circumstances of the Prophet’s life, and his varying moods,—was simply accepted by the first believers, without asking questions about the How and Why. But in the conquered countries they were faced by a fully-formed Christian Dogmatic as well as by Zoroastrian and Brahmanic theories. We have laid frequent stress already upon the great debt which the Muslims owe to the Christians; and the doctrinal system has certainly been determined the most by Christian influences. In Damascus the formation of Muslim Dogmas was affected by Orthodox and Monophysite teaching, and in Basra and Bagdad rather perhaps by Nestorian and Gnostic theories. Little of the literature belonging to the earliest period of this movement has come down to us, but we cannot be [[42]]wrong in assigning a considerable influence to personal intercourse and regular school-instruction. Not much was learned in the East at that time out of books, any more than it is to-day: more was learned from the lips of the teacher. The similarity between the oldest doctrinal teachings in Islam and the dogmas of Christianity is too great to permit any one to deny that they are directly connected. In particular, the first question about which there was much dispute, among Muslim Scholars, was that of the Freedom of the Will. Now the freedom of the will was almost universally accepted by Oriental Christians. At no time and in no place perhaps was the Will-problem—first in the Christology, but afterward in the Anthropology—so much discussed from every point as in the Christian circles of the East at the time of the Muslim conquest.
Besides these considerations which are partly of an a priori character, there are also detached notices which indicate that some of the earliest Muslims, who taught the Freedom of the Will, had Christian teachers.
A number of purely philosophic elements from the Gnostic systems, and afterwards from the translation-literature, associated themselves with the Hellenistic-Christian influences.
2. An assertion, expressed in logical or dialectic fashion, whether verbal or written, was called by the Arabs,—generally, but more particularly in religious teaching—a Kalam (λόγος), and those who advanced such assertions were called Mutakallimun. The name was transferred from the individual assertion to the entire system, and it covered also the introductory, elementary observations on Method,[[43]]—and so on. Our best designation for the science of the Kalam is ‘Theological Dialectics’ or simply ‘Dialectics’; and in what follows we may translate Mutakallimun by ‘Dialecticians’.
The name Mutakallimun, which was at first common to all the Dialecticians, was in later times applied specially to the Antimutazilite and Orthodox theologians. In the latter case it might be well, following the sense, to render the term by Dogmatists or Schoolmen. In fact while the first dialecticians had the Dogma still to form, those who came later had only to expound and establish it.
The introduction of Dialectics into Islam was a violent innovation, and it was vehemently denounced by the party of the Tradition. Whatever went beyond the regular ethical teaching was heresy to them, for faith should be obedience, and not,—as was maintained by the Murdjites and Mutazilites—, knowledge. By the latter it was laid down without reserve that speculation was one of the duties of believers. Even to this demand the times became reconciled, for according to tradition the Prophet had said already: ‘The first thing which God created was Knowledge or Reason’.
3. Very numerous are the various opinions which found utterance in the days even of the Omayyads, but especially in those of the early Abbasids. The farther they diverged from one another, the more difficult it was for the men of the Tradition to come to an understanding with them; but gradually certain compact doctrinal collections stood out distinctly, of which the rationalist system of the Mutazilites, the successors of the Qadarites, was most widely extended, particularly among Shiʻites. From Caliph Mamun’s [[44]]time down to Mutawakkil’s, it even received State recognition; and the Mutazilites, who had been in earlier days oppressed and persecuted by the temporal power, now became Inquisitors of the Faith themselves, with whom the sword supplied the place of argument. About the same time, however, their opponents the Traditionalists commenced to build up a system of belief. Upon the whole there was no lack of intermediary forms between the naive Faith of the multitude and the Gnosis of the dialecticians. In contrast to the spiritualistic stamp of Mutazilitism these intermediary forms took an anthropomorphic character with regard to the doctrine of the Deity, and a materialistic character with regard to the theory of man and the universe (Anthropology and Cosmology). The soul, for example, was conceived of by them as corporeal, or as an accident of the body, and the Divine Essence was imagined as a human body. The religious teaching and art of the Muslims were greatly averse to the symbolical God-Father of the Christians, but there was an abundance of absurd speculations about the form of Allah. Some went so far as to ascribe to him all the bodily members together, with the exception of the beard and other privileges of oriental manhood.