A Scholar's Long Way Back to Kalam
Dr. Waris Mazahri teaches Islamic Studies at Jamia Hamdard in Delhi, and his research has centred on Islamic thought, philosophy, and Ilm al-Kalam — the discipline of Islamic theological argumentation, sometimes translated as “Islamic dialectics” or “scholastic theology.” His recent book, Barr-e-Sagheer Hind mein Jadeed Ilm-e-Kalam (“Modern Ilm-e-Kalam in the Indian Subcontinent”), surveys roughly the last hundred and fifty to two hundred years of theological debate on the subcontinent. In conversation, Mazahri traced his own path to the subject: trained at Dar-ul-Uloom Deoband, he says he felt little pull toward philosophy or kalam as a madrasa student, largely because of how both were taught. The texts were centuries old and treated as closed chapters — Mu’tazilite theologians and Muslim philosophers like Ibn Sina and Farabi were presented less as serious interlocutors than as errors already refuted, their arguments summarized only so they could be dismissed. It was only after leaving an engineering track for Philosophy, Politics and Economics as a young man of twenty-one that his interest was, in his words, thrown open. Reading political and economic theory alongside philosophy, he noticed how often modern secular worldviews — atheism, liberalism, capitalism, communism — were treated in public conversation as self-evident rather than as contestable systems resting on their own assumptions. “These are all philosophies,” he said. “They are the kalam of their own worldviews.” That observation, and a growing sense that Islamic theology was not being taken seriously as a living intellectual project, pulled him back toward Shah Waliullah, then toward Ghazali and Ibn Rushd, and eventually toward the modern debate his book documents.
What Kalam Actually Is
Before tracing that modern debate, Mazahri laid out what distinguishes kalam from the neighbouring categories readers often conflate it with: fiqh (jurisprudence), aqida (creed), and falsafa (philosophy). He described the Islamic intellectual tradition as a rope made of many strands, in which revealed or “transmitted” religious sciences (manqulat) and “rational” sciences (maqulat) were woven together from the very first century of Islam. Kalam itself, he noted, has rationalist origins that go back that far: early sectarian movements such as the Qadariyya, who denied divine predetermination, were already reasoning about scripture in a recognizably rationalist idiom. As the young Muslim empire expanded into Byzantine and Persian territory, it absorbed populations steeped in Greek philosophy, and classical kalam took shape substantially on the foundation of Aristotelian physics and metaphysics — the same framework, Mazahri pointed out, that underwrote the classical textbooks still taught in madrasas today. Within that tradition, he distinguished three broad camps. Muslim philosophers such as Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn Rushd sought to fully reconcile reason and revelation on rationalist terms, treating this as a defence of religion against the charge that faith and reason were incompatible. Theologians, the mutakallimun, pushed back, arguing that the philosophers had hollowed out revelation itself — turning prophecy into a purely internal psychological process, angelic revelation into an inward faculty, and the afterlife into metaphor. And a third camp of traditionalist scholars rejected the entire enterprise of theorizing about belief through pure reason. Mazahri cited Imam Shafi’i’s judgment that those who taught kalam deserved to be flogged and paraded through the streets, and Abu Yusuf’s warning that studying kalam turned a person into a heretic. That hostility, he argued, was not irrational: reasoning about revelation on purely rational grounds inevitably produces errors and excesses, the same risk jurists ran when exercising independent legal reasoning, or ijtihad.
Mu’tazila, Ash’ari, Maturidi: An Internal Argument
Out of these tensions emerged the classical schools whose names still organize sectarian identity today. The Mu’tazila, in Mazahri’s account, over-corrected toward reason, subordinating scripture to the point that the Quranic concept of revelation itself was diminished. The Ash’aris reacted against this, but in his telling over-corrected in the opposite direction, weakening reason and the very idea of causality — the relationship between cause and effect — more than the tradition could really afford. Abu Mansur al-Maturidi then tried to hold a middle position: accepting that the Mu’tazila were a heterodox faction who had gone too far, while also arguing that the Ash’aris had shrunk reason’s legitimate role too much. This was not a purely internal conversation. Mazahri noted that Muslim scholars were also responding to external pressure, particularly from Christian communities and Christian philosophical schools long established in Egypt, Syria, and Alexandria — regions that, after mass conversion, especially across Persia, brought new populations into Islam who carried their own inherited philosophical questions with them. Kalam, in other words, developed simultaneously as an internal clarification of Islamic belief and as an apologetic response to outside challenge, in a milieu Mazahri compared to Christianity’s own encounter with Greek philosophy through figures like Augustine.
The Long Silence
Mazahri located a turning point in the history of this tradition around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Ibn Khaldun, writing in the fourteenth century, was for him among the last towering figures the tradition produced for a very long time; after Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Qayyim, Ibn Rushd, and Ibn Khaldun, he said, no comparably significant intellectual figure appeared anywhere in the Muslim world for centuries. Several factors converged. The Ottomans, whose empire came to dominate the Muslim world from the fifteenth century onward, were consumed by prolonged wars with Europe over their own survival, and, in Mazahri’s assessment, never cultivated the kind of intellectual climate their predecessors had. Sectarian conflict between Sunni Ottomans and Shia Iran absorbed further energy. Citing Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong, Mazahri argued that the deepest problem was that the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries — the very centuries in which Europe was remaking itself intellectually and scientifically — passed with the Muslim world essentially outside that process, neither shaping it nor absorbing it. “We stayed shut inside our own dream-island,” he said, and by the time colonial powers arrived, that failure to register a changing world had already left Muslim societies unable to resist conquest. Awareness of the shortfall, he argued, only truly dawned after the fact — after the Ottoman caliphate’s decline, after colonial administrations had already dismantled Islamic legal institutions, reducing sharia first to “personal law” and then secularizing even that.
Against that backdrop, Mazahri placed Shah Waliullah, the eighteenth-century Delhi scholar, as a transitional figure standing between classical and modern kalam. Waliullah was not yet in dialogue with contemporary European thought in any direct sense — there is no evidence in his writing, Mazahri noted, that he grasped what Kant or Hegel were doing in Europe at the same moment. What made him pivotal instead was his own recognition, from within the Indo-Islamic tradition, that the old intellectual apparatus could no longer meet the moment. His major work, Hujjat Allah al-Baligha, is in Mazahri’s reading essentially a project of rationalizing Islamic thought as a whole: Waliullah states in its preface that Islamic shariah itself must now express and justify itself through the language of reason. His most consequential move was to fold shariah into kalam — arguing that ritual obligations like prayer, fasting, and almsgiving deserved the same rational excavation of their underlying wisdom (hikma) that theological doctrines about God’s existence or the afterlife received. He declared, without apology, that on questions of kalam he would differ from his predecessors whenever necessary, reasoning that kalam, unlike fiqh, is not itself directly derived from Quran and Sunnah but is a rational project undertaken in revelation’s defence — and therefore not bound by taqlid, or precedent, in the way jurisprudence is. In pursuing this, Waliullah drew freely on the Muslim philosophers, on Ibn Arabi, and on Mulla Sadra’s school of Islamic philosophy, even as his framework remained essentially Aristotelian. Mazahri credited Shibli Nomani with first identifying Waliullah’s historical significance in these terms: after Ghazali, no figure of comparable stature had appeared until Waliullah rose “when the treasury of learning had already been plundered and the markets of knowledge had gone cold.”
Sir Syed's Naturalism and Its Costs
The conversation then turned to Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, whom Mazahri credits, alongside a Turkish contemporary, Ismail Hakki, with coining the very term jadeed ilm-e-kalam, or “modern theology.” Sir Syed drew heavily on Shah Waliullah, quoting him extensively in his own writing, and Mazahri suggested he may be counted among the earliest Islamic modernists anywhere in the world — a claim not limited to the subcontinent, given how early, in global terms, he began grappling with these questions. But Sir Syed’s project, in Mazahri’s telling, went wrong in a specific way: deeply influenced by Newtonian science and by the naturalism ascendant in nineteenth-century European thought, he made empirical science the sole and final arbiter of ultimate reality, reasoning that “the Word of God and the Work of God cannot contradict one another” and that whatever science rejected should therefore be rejected. Applied consistently, this scientism led him to deny the possibility of miracles altogether, and to reinterpret Quranic references to prophets like Jesus and Moses, and to revelation itself, accordingly — treating the angel Gabriel not as an external agent but as an inward faculty of the Prophet’s own mind. Mazahri was careful to place this in context rather than simply condemn it: Sir Syed was writing at a moment when Newtonian mechanics genuinely appeared to be the final word on physical reality, an assumption that would not be overturned until Einstein, decades later. “We must always try to understand a thinker within the time and space in which his ideas developed,” he said, extending the same interpretive charity he offers Ghazali and Ibn Sina to Sir Syed. Even so, he noted, the backlash against Sir Syed’s reinterpretations was immediate and substantial, and it fell to the next generation to correct course.
Shibli Nomani's Unfinished Bridge
That correction was attempted by Shibli Nomani, whom Mazahri described as perhaps the most well-read student of Greek philosophy and the kalam tradition of his generation, having written full studies of Ghazali and of Rumi. In two books, Ilm al-Kalam and al-Kalam, Shibli set out explicitly to reconcile classical and modern theology — rejecting Sir Syed’s denial of miracles and prophetic phenomena while agreeing that a genuinely modern kalam was necessary, and insisting that the classical framework should not simply be discarded as Sir Syed’s camp seemed to suggest. But Shibli’s own letters, and Sayyid Sulaiman Nadwi’s biography Hayat-e-Shibli, reveal the limits of the project: Shibli did not read English, and had only partial French, and by his own admission struggled to follow what was actually happening in contemporary Western philosophy even while writing a book meant to engage it. In one letter to the scholar Hamiduddin Farahi, Mazahri noted, Shibli asks directly for help understanding new Western ideas he cannot otherwise track. He ultimately set the project aside as incomplete, turning to other work before his death in 1914. “He laid a very large foundation,” Mazahri said, “but the building he raised on it remained incomplete.”
Iqbal's Foundational Reconstruction
Muhammad Iqbal, in Mazahri’s account, was equipped to go further than either predecessor because he had genuine command of both traditions in their original languages and sources — his own doctoral research in Germany was on Persian metaphysics — and could therefore move fluently between Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, and Ibn Taymiyyah on one side and Einstein, Alfred North Whitehead, William James, Bertrand Russell, and Henri Bergson on the other. This breadth let Iqbal work at a more foundational level than Sir Syed or Shibli. Rather than adjudicating specific doctrines, his book The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam begins with the underlying epistemological question, sharpened by nineteenth-century thinkers like Auguste Comte, of whether religious belief has any rational basis at all, or whether it is merely a social-evolutionary stage superseded by science. Iqbal answers by grounding religious knowledge in intuition, or wijdan — a position influenced by William James — while insisting, against Ghazali, that intuition is not something separate from or opposed to reason but is itself a mode of reason. Because Reconstruction was written in English, Mazahri argued, its reach extended far beyond the subcontinent: Egyptian and Iranian modernists who came after him, including Hasan Hanafi, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Mohammed Arkoun, and Abdolkarim Soroush, all show its imprint, whatever disagreements they may have with particular arguments in it.
The Chapter on Ijtihad
Asked to identify the single most consequential part of Iqbal’s Reconstruction, Mazahri pointed to its sixth lecture, on ijtihad — independent reasoning that breaks, where necessary, from the interpretations of earlier generations. He called it, whether or not one agrees with its every claim, the most important chapter written on the subject in the twentieth century, and said no comparable treatment has appeared since. Ijtihad stands opposed to taqlid, the obligation to follow established legal and theological schools regardless of whether their reasoning can still be independently justified. Mazahri noted that Shah Waliullah himself had already remarked that the “gate of ijtihad” effectively closed after Islam’s fourth century, once major schools of law and theology had hardened into fixed, binding frameworks. Iqbal’s argument was that movement, or harakat, is the basic operating principle of Islamic thought, and that ijtihad’s marginalization — its being pushed to the margins of Islamic intellectual life — is itself the primary explanation for the broader decline of that intellectual tradition.
A Century Later: Diagnosing Today's Crisis
Asked directly whether Iqbal’s framework is sufficient for the present moment, Mazahri was unambiguous: it is not, if only because a hundred years have passed since Reconstruction was written, and the pace of intellectual change since then, driven by mass education and faster diffusion of ideas, has been far greater than in any prior century. He diagnosed a specific crisis in the scholarship that followed Iqbal across Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, and Iran: a dominant strand of Muslim modernist scholarship, in his view, has absorbed Western materialist epistemology so thoroughly that it now uses that framework as the yardstick against which Islamic thought itself is measured and, inevitably, reduced. “If Islam is the larger paradigm and this is a smaller one,” he said, “you are judging the larger paradigm through the lens of the smaller one” — producing, he warned, the same kind of secularization that hollowed out Christianity’s institutional and social role in the West, pushing religion to the margins of public life altogether. The genuine challenge, as he framed it, is to show that Islamic thought can address the demands of contemporary society and draw on modern knowledge without surrendering its own tradition in the process — sustaining, rather than collapsing, the long-running balance between reason and revelation. In the Indian subcontinent specifically, he expressed something close to disappointment: substantial work of this kind continues in Egypt, Iran, and Algeria, but no comparable figure has emerged in South Asia since Iqbal to carry the project forward at scale.
The Madrasa Curriculum and What Comes Next
Mazahri traced this stagnation to a specific institutional failure: the erosion of the rational sciences within madrasa education itself. Citing the scholar Manazir Ahsan Gilani’s history of Indian Islamic education, Hindustan ka Nizam-e-Talim-o-Tarbiyat, he noted that madrasa curricula once included around forty texts in the rational sciences, or maqulat, alongside the transmitted religious sciences. Over time that component was cut down to only a handful of texts — and, critically, those remaining texts were never updated to engage the intervening centuries of philosophical and scientific development. The effect, in his words, is that madrasa students today are left “frozen in time,” familiar only with debates internal to their own tradition’s history rather than equipped to engage the actual intellectual challenges of the present. He contrasted this with countries such as Iran, where, based on his own visits, a basic awareness of modern science is still cultivated within religious education. The practical consequence, he argued, is a widening and mutually reinforcing gap: madrasa graduates, however deeply trained in classical texts, are unprepared for live debates now current even among their own students — he pointed to the recent public controversy sparked by a debate with the lyricist and outspoken atheist Javed Akhtar as one example — while modern universities producing “global” knowledge have no real grounding in the Islamic tradition they are, often unknowingly, challenging. His prescription is neither nostalgia for the classical curriculum nor uncritical absorption of Western frameworks, but a deliberate rebuilding of the rational sciences, including a genuinely updated Ilm-e-Kalam, within the madrasa system itself — the only route, in his assessment, to a modern theology capable of remaining rooted in its own tradition while still playing an active role in the world it now has to answer to.
Discussion
0Readers only · Comments are reviewed by the desk before they appear
The journalism is free for everyone — create a free account to join the discussion.