Beyâzîzâde'nin Eş'arî-Mâtürîdî Karşılaştırması: 50 Mesele ve Sünni Birliği

Kamāl al-Dīn al-Bayāḍī (d. 1098/1687) is one of the outstanding late Ottoman representatives of the Māturīdite tradition, and one of the few scholars who deliberately stood apart from the prevailing tendency toward Ashʿarite-Māturīdite harmonization. Ulrich Rudolph describes his approach as a conscious attempt to construct a new image of the school based on the original sources. **Methodology — Against the harmonizing clichés:** By the late Ottoman period, the standard academic position held that the differences between al-Ashʿarī and al-Māturīdī were merely *lafẓī* (linguistic) — a convention that al-Bayāḍī set aside. After examining the primary sources, he judged that the "recurring statement that the contradictions between al-Ashʿarī and al-Māturīdī are merely linguistic (*lafẓī*) is a complete delusion (*wahm*), and wishful thinking on the part of such commentators. In reality the disagreement is based on matters of content (*maʿnawī*)." This position represents a sharp methodological departure from his contemporaries. **Findings — Fifty problems:** In his *Ishārāt al-marām*, al-Bayāḍī painstakingly documented fifty specific issues across a wide range of themes and types on which the two schools genuinely diverge — not in form but in substance. **Reconciling conclusion — Sunni civil order:** Despite this finding, al-Bayāḍī maintained that these fifty problems still only constitute minutiae, and concluded with a maxim of decided import: both theological schools must mutually respect one another and have no right to dismiss or defame the other as heretical (*tabdīʿ*). Rudolph reads this as privileging Sunni communal solidarity over doctrinal particularism — creating a paradox with his methodological rigor. The *Ishārāt al-marām* remains the primary Ottoman-era source for mapping the precise relationship between Ashʿarite and Māturīdite theology.