أهل الحديث
Historian Daniel W. Brown describes "Ahl al-Kalam" as one of three main groups engaged in polemical disputes over sources of authority in Islamic law during the second century of Islam -- "Ahl ar-Ra'y" and "Ahl al-Hadith" being the other two. "Ahl al-Kalam" agreed with "Ahl al-Hadith" that the example of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, was authoritative, but it did not believe it to be divine revelation, a status that only the Quran had (in its view). It also rejected the authority of hadith on the grounds that its corpus was "fill with contradictory, blasphemous, and absurd" reports, and that in jurisprudence, even the smallest doubt about a source was too much. Thus, they believed, the true legacy of the prophet was to be found elsewhere i.e. in "Sunnah" which is separate from Hadith. "Ahl al-Hadith" prevailed over the "Ahl al-Kalam" (and Muslims, or at least mainstream Muslims, now accept the authority of hadith) so that most of what is known about their arguments comes from the writings of their opponents, such as Imam al-Shafi'i. Brown also describes the Muʿtazili as "the later "ahl al-kalām"", suggesting the "ahl al-kalām" were forerunners of the Muʿtazili.