“Exalted is Allah above what they describe.”

(Quran 37:159)

In 2020, when I was planning to teach an undergraduate course on theories of rev- elation according to Muslim thinkers, I needed to return to the question that in my view lies at the core of these theories, i.e. the question of how Allah’s attribute of speech (ṣifa al-kalām) is to be apprehended.

It is true that in the modern context it is the very experience of revelation, i.e. how the revelation is given to and experienced by the human subject, that lies at the center of the enquiry. However, in the let us say classic controversies about this problem, the principal issue was more about what ‘in’ Allah makes it possible for Him to speak. The answer to this question was, simply put, His attribute of speech. Nevertheless, how this attribute is to be spelt out and how it stands in relationship to His essence, as well as many other related questions, were the subject of count- less disputes and a source of grave disagreements among the philosophers and the theologians.

My search for secondary literature on the attribute of speech, however, revealed to me how little this subject had been investigated and how limited are the second- ary sources on the controversies over it. I was looking for sources of academic qual- ity, which on the one hand would introduce some of the principle primary literature on this topic, and on the other hand could also be used by undergraduate students. Despite the theoretical importance and centrality of this theme in the intellectual tradition of Muslims, I discovered that many aspects of it have remained untouched until our time. Furthermore, it also struck me how little attention in the research has been paid to the fundamental debate over Allah’s attributes in general.

The question of Allah’s attributes asks about how to conceptualize Allah. Apart from being the origin of all creation, what more can be said about Him, with which concepts and attributes is He to be described and how can the relationship between His multiple attributes and His essence be set out so that His unity is not put in jeopardy? These and similar questions have been discussed intensively by Muslim theologians and philosophers throughout the history of Islamic thought. The vari- ous solutions they proposed in this regard led to the emergence and development

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of various schools of thought, which together represent a rich spectrum of radically different positions on the matter – from the radical apophatic positions, accord- ing to which even the “existent” (al-mawjūd) and the “thing” (al-shayʾ) cannot be predicated of Allah (the position of al-muʿaṭṭila), to the radical cataphatic posi- tions, which construed the concrete descriptions of Allah in Quran in a thoroughly anthropomorphic manner (as in the case of al-mujassima).

The debate on Allah’s attributes does not pertain only to the manner in which Muslims reflected on and conceptualized Allah; rather, it provides the ultimate basis for many other disputes. As mentioned earlier, the decisive and still very vivid dispute regarding revelation and its nature, for example, has its origin in the way Allah’s attribute of speech is grasped. In order to systematically and coher- ently conceptualize Allah’s attributes, some Muslim thinkers even moved away from the confined framework of Aristotelian binary logic and tried to define a new model, with a third instance between existence and non-existence (the theory of aḥwāl of Abū Hāshim).

That Allah is ‘built of’ an essence plus a plurality of attributes, is the com- mon model presupposed and further developed by most of these thinkers. This model is not only philosophically and theologically motivated; rather, it seems to be the only model within which the Quranic descriptions of Allah can consistently be construed. However, despite the simplicity of its general make-up, the closer description of this model has always aroused intense controversies. The relation- ship between the essence and its multiple attributes, as well as the ‘nature’ of each attribute needed to be clarified.

The lack of the adequate secondary sources on this major debate in the Islamic thought motivated me to plan a collected volume that could to some extent fill this gap, introduce some of the main primary literature on the debate to the scholarship, and be usable by the students of Islamic philosophy and theology. With regard to these considerations the emphasis in this volume is put primarily on the text-based contributions on individual thinkers situated within a broader historical and theo- retical context of various schools of thought. Nevertheless, it should be added that the study of Allah’s attributes is not merely of historical relevance. Rather, it also aims at underlining the plurality that has always existed in the Islamic thought in this respect. It tries to make it clear that even an apparently self-evident concept such as Allah, which lies at the heart of every reading of Islam, is highly ambigu- ous and polysemous, so that one can reasonably speak about Allahs, systematically questioning every claim considering the orthodoxy of a very particular reading.

Through highlighting the philosophical and theological reflections on the con- cept of Allah, the results of this study should also challenge the juristic reading of Islam, i.e. the reading of the fuqahā. The Muslim jurists, as widely known, propagate for a very particular concept of Allah, whose function consists mainly in providing a highly detailed plan for the human life in every respect and also rewarding or punishing the ones who deviate from it. Engaging with the sophisti- cated, philosophical and theological, disputes on the concept of Allah help expose the simplistic nature of fuqahā’s understating, which has always been the most socially and politically dominant understanding in the history of Islam. In this

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sense, this volume also attempts to demonstrate the relevance and the actuality of the tradition and to stress its contemporaneity. In brief, reviving a question around which many discussions and disputes were developed throughout the centuries in the Islamic world is the ultimate aim of the planned volume. This should pave the way for re-reflecting Allah, a concept that is largely taken as self-evident and hence not disputable.

In concluding this preface, I would like to express my thanks to all those who have contributed to this volume, the authors of the chapters as well as the review- ers, whose comments and remarks were so helpful in the work of enhancing its academic value. I also particularly want to thank Oliver Leaman, editor of the Routledge Studies in Islamic Philosophy series, for accepting this volume for the series.