EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 157Maʾmūn (813–33) required the religious scholarly elite explicitly to accept
their doctrine that the Qurʾān is created rather than being the ungenerated
speech of God, as the pious maintained.^143 It now appears that the Muʿtazilites
were just one of a constellation of rationalists and semirationalists who em-
braced this teaching, and that they gained prominence only toward the end
of the century. It is also disputed, whether Maʾmūn’s policy change should be
taken as just an attempt to undermine the guardians of tradition and doc-
trine, the ʿulamāʾ (and resistance, conversely, as merely bolstering the schol-
ars’ authority), or was a full- blown doctrinal revolution aimed at opening up
Qurʾanic exegesis to rationalist methodologies.^144 It is striking that Maʾmūn
chose a burning issue for all Muslims, not an “obscure” doctrinal point, out
of which to make this political issue.^145 The main consequence of this policy
(apart from discrediting the caliph as arbiter of orthodoxy) was the victory it
handed those who believed scripture should be accepted just as it is, “with-
out asking how” as later generations put it, and without reconciling its con-
tradictions. Foremost among these believers was the unyielding Ahmad ibn
Hanbal (d. 855). By the beginning of the 850s the rationalists were forced to
back down. Rather than being a passing political incident, this was—or,
more crucially, came to be perceived as^146 —a defining moment in the emer-
gence of Sunni Islam, with its exclusive insistence on the authority of Qurʾān
and Prophetic tradition. Ibn Hanbal’s example stands behind the legal com-
munity which later took his name, the Hanbalis, and some of the most vigor-
ous—and rigorous—currents in the Muslim world today.
Nonetheless, Maʾmūn’s support of the translation movement ensured phi-
losophy would continue to sustain interest in rational thought and empirical
science. It was said that Aristotle himself appeared to Maʾmūn in a dream,
and bade him prefer “personal judgment,” or intellect, above all else, evi-
dently including scripture.^147 It was during his reign and that of his son
Muʿtasim (833–42) that Kindī (d. c. 870) emerged, at Baghdad, as the first
noted Arabic (and indeed Arab) philosopher in the sense of one dedicated to
143 Van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft [5:134] 3.446–508; C. Melchert, “The adversaries
of Ahmad ibn Hanbal,” Arabica 44 (1997) 234–53; L. Holtzmann, “Ahmad b. Hanbal,” EIs^3 2009–
4.15–23.
144 Crone, Medieval Islamic political thought [5:132] 131.
145 Cf. Wickham, Inheritance [1:26] 330: “The apparent obscurity of the religious issue at stake is
one element that reminds us of the Christological schisms of the late Roman empire.... Why al- Ma’mun
chose the created Qur’an as the issue to make a stand on is, however, even less clear than the reasons for
the Iconoclast controversy.” A similar debate, pitting sociopolitical considerations against exclusive inter-
est in texts and ideas, ebbs and flows round the Arabic translation movement. Fortunately it is not an ei-
ther/or situation. Gutas’s austerely sociopolitical hermeneutic in Greek thought brilliantly defuses the
charge that periodizations based on religious or philosophical ideas—here, Aristotelianism—lack contact
with everyday life.
146 Robinson, Islamic historiography [3:70] 63–64, 123.
147 Gutas, Greek thought [5:92] 96–104.