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).