EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 163nium—must take account that he was a Muslim philosopher and a central
figure in the growth of kalām, which touched a wide audience and continued
to do so until the hold of madrasa education, established in the eleventh cen-
tury, began to weaken in the late nineteenth.^179 The Muʿtazilite ascendancy,
established in the latter half of the mid- ninth century, had fed into the com-
promise effected by Abū ’l- Hasan al- Ashʿarī (d. 935) and his followers.^180
The Ashʿarites insisted on Qurʾān and sunna and rejected clever allegorical
readings of God’s attributes—after all, we will see God at the Last Judgment.
They accepted that the Qurʾān’s sensible manifestations are created, but not
its essence. They retained (incurring the odium of the Hanbalites) something
of Muʿtazilite esteem for the role of reason in obtaining theological knowl-
edge, and while cool toward philosophy, were open to Aristotelian logic. In
the aftermath of Ibn Sīnā, they facilitated a surprisingly rapid fusion between
his metaphysics (most problematically, his insistence on the eternity of the
natural world) and kalām. And Ashʿarite Islam was gradually accepted as the
voice of orthodoxy—a major symptom of Islam’s tenth- century maturation.
If there was something austere about it, that was alleviated by Ghazālī’s cri-
tique of Ibn Sīnā’s high claims for philosophy, and his further synthesis of it
with not only kalām but also the more personal spiritual dimensions offered
by Sufism.^181 As for the Muʿtazilites, they gradually faded away after the mid-
eleventh century, and it was only thanks to the interest of Zaydi Shiites in
yemen, and Karaite Jews, that many of their works were preserved and finally
published from the 1950s onward.^182
Nonetheless, the significance of Arabic philosophy in the First Millen-
nium context is most fully appreciated when we move outside the frame-
work of strictly Muslim discourse to look at the Baghdadi circles of the ninth
and tenth centuries, in which representatives of different religions, and of
different sects within Islam itself, met and debated issues between and be-
yond the confines of confessional allegiance.^183 The declining Abbasid capital
fostered a level of interaction and synthesis between the theological and
philosophical currents of the First Millennium that has never since been ri-
valed. I shall return to this point in the last chapter, after we have first inves-
tigated some of the First Millennium’s other exegetical cultures.
179 Wisnovsky [5:162], in Adamson and others (eds), Philosophy, science and exegesis [1:35] 152–
58—note especially his comments on the penetration by philosophical terminolog y of a wide spectrum
of works not conventionally regarded as philosophical.
180 Wensinck, Muslim creed [3:24] 86–94, 245–76.
181 Philosophy and kalām: F. Griffel, Al- Ghazālī’s philosophical theolog y (New york 2009).
182 See the editorial Introduction to C. Adang and others (eds), A common rationality: Muʿtazilism
in Islam and Judaism (Würzburg 2007) 11–18; G. Schwarb and others (eds), Handbook of Muʿtazilite
works and manuscripts (forthcoming in the Handbuch der Orientalistik series, Leiden).
183 On the confessional mix in these circles, see Kraemer, Humanism [4:82] 53, 59–60, 115–16,
and below, pp. 208–9.