7 Structures and Their Forerunning Models

Chapter Summary

Al-Māturīdī's development of the argumentation within each thematic discussion is based on well-known systematic principles of kalām. This chapter discusses two further elements of the work's internal composition which interrupt the progress of its exposition. The first and more common of these two elements consists of passages in which an issue that has just been discussed is taken up again in deliberate argumentation with explicitly named opponents. This means that the solution which al-Māturīdī favors is already long familiar to the reader, but is now being defended against objections and refortified, while the mistakes and contradictions of competing solutions are pointed out. The second element that occasionally checks the development of ideas in the Kitāb al-Tawḥīd is entirely characteristic to the text itself; namely, al-Māturīdī's many reiterations of his theses and their expositions throughout the work.

Keywords: Al-Māturīdī; Islamic theology; kalām; Kitab al-Taw?id