A Contribution to Māturīdī Kalam Thought: ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Usmandī on Human Freedom

Annotatsiya

The field of knowledge aimed at ensuring that the fundamental principles of Islamic belief are correctly understood, explained, adopted by believers, and that attacks against this belief are repelled, is called Kalam. With the formation of the Kalam discipline towards the end of the 2nd Hijri century many different schools of thought emerged within this field. One of these schools of thought that emerged in the history of Kalam is Māturīdism. Māturīdism is a school of thought that originated in the Samarkand region, predominantly populated by Turks. The Samarkand region stands out compared to other areas due to its role as a fertile ground for philosophical and theological thoughts. It is inevitable that this philosophical and theological intellectual structure has influenced the character of the Māturīdī school. With this, at the same time, it is based on the thoughts of Abū Ḥanafī (d. 150/767) in its intellectual background, it is a structure developed epistemologically, theologically, and philosophically by Abū Mansūr al- Māturīdī (d. 333/944). In the development of this structure, there is no doubt that many of Māturīdī's students and followers who came after him played a significant role in following and expanding his system. Among these was ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Usmandī (d. 552/1157), who, like Māturīdī, lived in the Samarkand region, who contributed to Māturīdī's Kalam thought by writing an independent work titled Lubāb al-Kalām and defended this thought in the 6th Hijri century, 12th century CE. Usmandī is a Kalam scholar who attempted to prove that the correct understanding and defense of Islamic faith could be based on the Māturīdī perspective by referencing the fundamental principles of Māturīdī's Kalam thought. In this study, his approach that emphasizes the relationship between Allah and humans in grounding human freedom, as well as his development of a theology that combines textual and rational elements has been examined. In addressing human freedom, its li