Kalam (Arabic: کلام ) is one of the "religious sciences" (علم الكلم) of Islam. In Arabic the word means "speaking", there are many interpretations why it was called 'kalam' one of them is that the widest controversy in this field was about Allah's speech, 'Kalam' refers to the Islamic tradition of seeking theological principles through dialectic. A scholar of kalam is referred to as a mutakallam (Muslim theologian; plural mutakallamin).

The original scholars of kalam were recruited by Hunayn Ibn Ishaq (d. 873) for the House of Wisdom under the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad. They collected, translated, and synthesised everything that the genius of other cultures had accumulated before undertaking to augment and expand it. From their translations of Greek, Iranian, and Indian works, they formed the basis of Muslim falsafa (philosophy) in the 9th and 10th centuries.

Major kalam schools

• Ash'ari
• Maturidi
• Murji'ah
• Mu'tazili

See also

• Kalam cosmological argument
• Fiqh
• Madhab

External links

• Philosophy of Kalam — textbook by Harry Wolfson.
• Living Islam
• The Kalam

Islam | Islamic philosophy Theology

Ilm al-Kalam | Kalam | کلام | Kalâm | Kalam (islam) | Калам | Kelâm | کلام