Ḥammād al-Rāwiyah

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Ḥammād al-Rāwiyah

Iraqi scholar

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Arabic:: “Ḥammād the Transmitter [or Reciter]”

Born:: c. 694, Kūfah, Iraq

Died:: c. 772, Kūfah

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Ḥammād al-Rāwiyah (born c. 694, Kūfah, Iraq—died c. 772, Kūfah) was an anthologist of Arab antiquities credited with collecting the seven early odes known as Al-Muʿallaqāt (The Seven Odes).

Ḥammād’s father was not an Arab but was brought to Iraq from the Daylam region of Iran. Ḥammād, whose circle of friends in Kūfah enjoyed wine and poetry, became one of the most learned men of his time in Arabic poetry and was one of the first to collect it. He committed vast numbers of poems to memory and studied the associated lore of battles, genealogies, and folk stories. This knowledge won him the favour of al-Walīd II and perhaps others of the Umayyad caliphs of Damascus. After the Umayyad dynasty fell to the ʿAbbāsids, Ḥammād retired to Kūfah. He was criticized by some Arab scholars because his interest was in poetry rather than philology and grammatical scholarship; and he was suspected by them, moreover, of creating some of the early Arabic poems he collected.

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kalām

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kalām

Islam

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Related Topics:: mutakallimūn

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kalām, in Islam, speculative theology. The term is derived from the phrase kalām Allāh (Arabic: “word of God”), which refers to the Qurʾān, the sacred scripture of Islam. Those who practice kalām are known as mutakallimūn.

In its early stage, kalām was merely a defense of Islam against Christians, Manichaeans, and believers in other religions. As interest in philosophy grew among Muslim thinkers, kalām adopted the dialectic (methodology) of the Greek Skeptics and the Stoics and directed these against the Islamic philosophers who attempted to fit Aristotle and Plato into a Muslim context.

Several schools of kalām developed. The most significant was the Muʿtazilah, often described as the rationalists of Islam, who appeared in the 8th century. They believed in the autonomy of reason with regard to revelation and in the supremacy of reasoned (ʿaqlī) faith against traditional (naqlī) faith. The Muʿtazilah championed the freedom of the human will, holding that it was against divine justice either to punish a good man or pardon an unrighteous one. The Ashʿariyyah, a 10th-century school of kalām, was a mediation between the rationalization of the Muʿtazilah and the anthropomorphism of the traditionalists and represented the successful adaptation of Hellenistic philosophical reasoning to Muslim orthodox theology. They too affirmed the freedom of the human will but denied its efficacy. Closely resembling but more liberal than the Ashʿariyyah was the al-Māturīdiyyah (also 10th-century).