The Debates between Ash'arism and Maturidism in Ottoman Religious Scholarship: A Historical and Bibliographical Study
Creators: name: Haidar, Yahya
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2016
Subjects: Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari
Abu Mansur al-Maturidi
Ash'arism
Maturidism
Kalam
Islamic Theology
Ottoman Intellectual History

description: The intellectual life during the Ottoman Empire – which came to dominate large parts of the Muslim world from the fifteenth to the end of the nineteenth century CE – has received relatively limited attention in modern scholarship. This study is a historical investigation of an intellectual debate between the two major schools of Islamic theology (Ash‛arism and Māturīdism) which by the eighteenth century had become a prominent theme in Ottoman scholarly literature. Māturīdism is one of two schools that dominated Islamic theology after the disintegration of the rationalist school of the Mu‛tazilah. The other school, Ash‛arism, eventually became the common doctrine among followers of the Shāfi‛ī and Mālikī schools of law, while Māturīdism became, almost exclusively, the theology of the Ḥanafis. Both schools wrote in the name of Sunnī orthodoxy (ahl al-Sunna wa al-jama‛a) and took a middle course between the doctrines of the Mu‛tazilah and the literalists, attempting to achieve a balance between reason (‛aql) and revelation (naql). Despite the sheer similarity between the two schools in terms of overall objectives, pioneers of Māturīdism during the school’s formative period (ninth – thirteenth century) methodically objected to Ash‛arī positions over a number of problems – including, the conception of faith (imān), doctrine of predestination (qadar), the punishment of sins, and God’s active attributes (ṣifāt al-‘af‛āl). By the end of the fourteenth century, Ash‛arism was recognized as the universal authority on mainstream theological discourses – having attracted the greater number of followers, and produced extensive and systematic theological canon which addressed problems from philosophy, logic and natural science. Based on extensive historical and bibliographical research – including a number of previously unpublished manuscripts – this study traces Ottoman scholars’ attitude towards the school of Ash‛arī in three phases. The first is the classical Ottoman phase (mid. fourteenth – end of fifteenth century) which saw the persistence of the Ash‛arī paradigm in Ottoman theological scholarship; this study found that – although Ḥanafism was the common and officially-sanctioned school of Law – early Ottoman Ḥanafī theological treatises display greater inclines to Ash‛arism rather than Ḥanafism’s traditional doctrine of Māturīdī. The second phase covers the sixteenth century which witnessed a growing interest among Ottoman theologians to affirm the ‘sound’ doctrine of Sunnism in strict concord with the theology of Abū Ḥanīfa as presented in classical Māturīdī texts. The disputes with Ash‛arī were also brought into attention. But, in the absence of a new appraisal of theological problems from an exclusively Māturīdī perspective, on the disputes with Ash‛arī, Ottoman theologians remained largely within the radius of Ash‛arism. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, this situation is inverted at the hand of Istanbul-based scholar Aḥmad Bayāḍīzādah who produced his influential Ishārāt al-marām – an extensive theological treatise which sought to defend Māturīdism over fifty disputed problems with Ash‛arism and to restore the status of Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī as the foremost theologian of Islam. The third phase covers the period between the early seventeenth century, towards the final years of the empire in the end of the nineteenth century whereby Ottoman scholars produced numerous works – varying in size and scope – with Ash‛arī-Māturīdī debates as their primary subject-matter. This study begins with a comparative historical background of the emergence of Ash‛arism and Māturīdism, followed by a discussion of key theological disputes as presented in authoritative pre-Ottoman texts. It then attempts to examine the extent to which Ash‛arism influenced early Ottoman theological discourses, and the intellectual context which saw the emergence of a late Ottoman Māturīdī canon. Finally, the study documents nearly forty works on Ash‛arī-Māturīdī disputations that were produced between the seventeenth and late nineteenth century, amounting to the establishment of a novel genre of later Islamic theological literature.