156 | CHAPTER 5
predicate, among which those relating to quality were most relevant to dis-
cussion of Allāh’s attributes. The Categories would have struck Dirār as useful
for his passages of arms with Kūfan anthropomorphists. He had some fun
with one of these by forcing him to admit he might bump into God in the
street without even recognizing him. “ ‘It could be me,’ ” Dirār could not re-
sist adding, only to be taken down a peg by his interlocutor: “ ‘you are ugly,
(God) is beautiful.’ ” Such encounters between anthropomorphists and
“Origenists” had been common in Alexandria c. 400. Bishop Theophilus had
checkmated a mob of irate monks by saying he saw in them the face of God.^136
As Aristotle gradually came out in full translations, Muslim readers ap-
plied the new methods and knowledge to interpreting the Qurʾān and other
theological issues thrown up by the spread of Islam and the Caliphate. Ques-
tions of “orthodoxy” and “heresy” quickly emerged, hence the translation of
the ancient world’s basic guide to debating techniques, Aristotle’s Topics,
which the Caliph Mahdī commissioned c. 782 from the Church of the East
Patriarch Timothy I. The two men put the rules to test in a disputation about
the Trinity, the nature of Christ and the significance of Muhammad and Is-
lam.^137 We also find Timothy disputing with an Aristotelian philosopher he
met at court, and showing familiarity, like Theodore Abū Qurra, with the
conventions of kalām.^138 Another early translation, under the Caliph Hārūn
al- Rashīd (786–803), was the Physics, designed to counteract physical theo-
ries based on atomistic attempts to explain the world as a bundle of parts “in
a wholly mechanical way, without metaphysical principles, simply as a result
of chance, with no creation and no God.”^139 Unsurprisingly, the Metaphysics
attracted particular attention. In whole or part it was translated seven or
eight times during the ninth and tenth centuries.^140 yet its inadequacies as a
textbook had long been recognized;^141 it did not engage the issues that pre-
occupied the faithful; and its unmoved mover^142 was not the personal, provi-
dential God taught by religions of the Book.
Traditionally, scholarship has held that the Muʿtazilites gained serious, if
short- lived, political influence when at the end of his reign the Caliph
136 Socrates, Ecclesiastical history [ed. G. C. Hansen, tr. (French) P. Périchon and P. Maraval (Paris
2004–7)] 6.7.
137 Gutas, Greek thought [5:92] 61–69; M. Heimgartner, “Die Disputatio des ostsyrischen Patri-
archen Timotheos (780–823) mit dem Kalifen al- Mahdī,” in M. Tamcke (ed.), Christians and Muslims in
dialogue in the Islamic Orient of the Middle Ages (Beirut 2007) 41–56.
138 S. H. Griffith, “The Syriac letters of Patriarch Timothy I and the birth of Christian kalām,” in
W. J. van Bekkum and others (eds), Syriac polemics (Leuven 2007) 103–32.
139 Gutas, Greek thought [5:92] 69–74; J. van Ess (tr. J. M. Todd), The flowering of Muslim theolog y
(Cambridge, Mass. 2006) 81 (for the quotation).
140 A. Bertolacci, “On the Arabic translations of Aristotle’s Metaphysics,” ASAP 15 (2005)
270–71.
141 Plutarch, Alexander [ed. K. Ziegler, Stuttgart 1994] 7.9.
142 Aristotle [5:100], Metaphysics 12.1072ab.