Journal of Islamic Studies (2023) pp.

1 of 7

BOOK REVIEW

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Transcendent God, Rational World: A M:tur;d; Theology
By RAMON HARVEY (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Scripture and Theology), xv þ 280 pp.
Price HB £80.00. EAN 978–1474451642.

Ramon Harvey is Aziz Foundation Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Cambridge

Muslim College. Transcendent God, Rational World: A M:tur;d; Theology is
his second book and is the first publication of the series ‘Edinburgh Studies in
Islamic Scripture and Theology’ of which Harvey is the series editor. Harvey’s
book lies at the intersection of several areas of study. In Western academic
Islamic studies, it contributes to the increased interest in Islamic philosophy
and kal:m in the past two decades, particularly the burgeoning field of
M:tur;d; studies. The key studies on the Samarqandi theologian Ab< ManB<r
al-M:tur;d; (d. 333/944) and his school being those of Mustafa Cerič,1 Ulrich
Rudolph,2 Angelika Brodersen,3 Ayedh Aldosari,4 Philip Dorroll,5 and numerous
Turkish academics, a list to which Harvey’s name must be added. Additionally,
his book joins the chorus of Muslim voices doing constructive theology and
philosophy in academia. In this capacity, it situates itself in a particular set of
conversations in philosophy of religion in the Anglo-American analytic tradition.
Thus, Harvey’s book is in the spirit of kal:m jad;d, rooted in the academic study
of Islam, and takes inspiration from M:tur;d; to contribute to problems in ana-
lytic philosophy of religion in formulating a new basis for kal:m.

1
Mustafa Cerič, Roots of Synthetic Theology in Islam: A Study of The Theology of Ab<
ManB<r al-M:tur;d;, (d. 333/944) (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: International Institute of
Islamic Thought and Civilization, 1995).
2
Ulrich Rudolph, Al-M:tur;d; und die sunnitische theologie in Samarkand (Leiden: Brill,
1997); Al-Maturidi and The Development of Sunni Theology in Samarqand (transl. Rodrigo
Adem; Leiden: Brill, 2015).
3
Angelika Brodersen, Tradition und Transformation in der M:tur;diyya des 6./12.
Jahrhunderts: mit einer kritischen edition des Kit:b al-kif:ya f; l-hid:ya f; uB<l ad-d;n des
AAmad b. MaAm<d b. Ab; Bakr N<r ad-D;n aB-4:b<n; al-Eanaf; al-Buh :r; (gest. 580/1184)
(Leiden; Brill, 2022). Also, Zwischen M:tur;d;ya und Aš6ar;ya: Ab<  ˘ as-S:limi und sein
Sak<r
Tamh;d f; bay:n at-tauA;d (Gorgias Press, 2018). Also, Ibr:h;m al-Saff:r, Talkh;B al-adilla
li-qaw:6id al-tawA;d (ed. Angelika Brodersen; Beirut: al-Ma6had al-Alm:n; li-l-AbA:th
al-Sharq;yah, 2011).
4
Ayedh S. Aldosari, Eanaf; M:tur;d;sm: Trajectories of a Theological Legacy, with a
Study and Critical Edition of al-Khabb:z;’s Kit:b al-H:d; (Sheffield: Equinox, 2020).
5
Philip Dorroll, Islamic Theology in the Turkish Republic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2021). See also the works of the contributors in M:tur;d; Theology: A
Bilingual Reader (eds. Lejla Demiri, Philip Dorroll, and Dale Corea; Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2022).

ß The Author(s) (2023). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for
Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]
2 of 7 JOURNAL OF ISLAMIC STUDIES, 20 23, VOL. 00, NO. 0
For such a project to be successful, two challenges become immediately clear.

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The first is to make space within contemporary philosophy of religion for Islamic
voices, while the second is to make a case to Muslim theologians for utilizing the
tools of contemporary analytic philosophy of religion in kal:m. Harvey seeks to
accomplish the latter through an excavation and recovery of Ab< ManB<r
al-M:tur;d;’s theology to speak to analytic philosophy of religion. To this end,
he contrasts M:tur;d;’s theological doctrines and method with those of the
school that came to bear his name. Thus, we find each chapter carrying out three
tasks: (1) an investigation into intellectual history in order to recover the teach-
ings of M:tur;d; (and select early followers) before the school succumbed to the
dominance of Avicennan–Neoplatonic and Ash6ar; thought, (2) a recovery of
M:tur;d;’s doctrine through reading Kit:b al-TawA;d with an eye to the prob-
lematics of analytic thought, and finally (3) an intervention in the problems of
contemporary philosophy of religion using those recovered doctrines. This re-
view will focus on Harvey’s account of the first two tasks, leaving analytic
philosophers of religion to assess the last.
The book comprises seven chapters, generally corresponding to the salient
discussions of the first chapter (b:b) of five from M:tur;d;’s Kit:b al-TawA;d.
The topics include rationality, the world, God’s existence, and God’s attributes,
with a focus on two attributes that are hallmarks of M:tur;d; theology (wisdom,
Aikma, and creative action, takw;n), and finally the attribute that is the name-
sake of the discipline, divine speech (kal:m).
The first chapter, ‘Tradition and reason’, takes up the problem of epistemology
and sets the tone and orientation of the book. After providing the context in
which M:tur;d; develops his epistemology, Harvey offers a periodization of the
school’s development from its early formation (fourth/tenth century to the end of
the fifth/eleventh), classical articulation (fifth/eleventh to eighth/fourteenth), late
classical reconciliation (eighth/fourteenth to thirteenth/nineteenth), and finally to
the present. In its classical articulation, M:tur;dism is shaped by its contestation
with the proponents of Ash6arism. This occurs first through Ash6arism’s
Khurasanian apologists, and then Ash6arism’s re-formulation after Fakhr al-D;n
al-R:z;. In the late classical period, M:tur;dism is engaged in conciliatory efforts
with Ash6arism, conceding some of its own unique doctrines and methods while
holding onto others as identity markers. The modern period sees the calls for a
‘new kal:m’ (al-kal:m al-jad;d), wherein Harvey situates his own contribution.
The focus of Harvey’s work is the formative period, as he characterizes kal:m at
this time as an ‘open theology’, able to engage other theological traditions.
Central to Harvey’s narrative is a rupture between M:tur;d; and his school on
the question of epistemology. Harvey characterizes the later school as founda-
tionalist, that is to say that they maintain that all non-basic propositions are
inferred from basic propositions, the latter being those propositions that do
not require further justification. Harvey summarizes his reading of M:tur;d;’s
epistemology by stating that ‘while he proposes a correspondence theory of
knowledge, in which different aspects of the world reach the human being via
a number of means, his justificatory system is non-foundationalist. Instead,
M:tur;d; highlights the centrality of tradition itself in constituting any epistemic
 BOOK REVIEW 3 of 7
activity, a position that implies its grounding within a comprehensive metaphys-

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ical system’ (p. 12). What stands out for Harvey in M:tur;d;’s epistemology is a
dyad between revelation on the one hand and a tradition of rationalist theology
on the other. Rationality, and this is central for Harvey, is conceived of as not
resting on the laws of thought articulated by Aristotelian logic and thus without
the attendant metaphysical claims of those principles; rather, rationality is
formed by the very tradition of theological investigation itself.
Chapter 2 (‘Rational reality’) considers the knowability of the world around
us. Harvey argues three points regarding M:tur;d;’s ontology: (1) pace his peers
among the mutakallim<n, M:tur;d; was not an atomist; rather, (2) M:tur;d;’s
account of bodies can best be described as a bundle theory. Finally, (3) M:tur;d;
posited a conception of natures (3ab:8i6) as the accidents that compose bodies with
specific modes of activity. The first two points demonstrate Harvey’s reading of
M:tur;d; against both the later tradition as well as the secondary literature on
kal:m physics in the formative period (Rudolph is highly suggestive of a form of
bundle theory but does not go so far as Harvey, whereas Mehmet Bulgen presents
substantial evidence for M:tur;d; being a type of atomist6). According to bundle
theory, objects are not substrata for accidents that are the instantiation of uni-
versals; rather, objects are comprised of bundles of tropes, which are particulars
that have resemblance with one another (this ‘green’ resembles that ‘green’ and
thus we can call them both ‘green’). This avoids the problem of universals and
results in a metaphysical nominalism. This also stands in stark contrast to the
kal:m notions of bodies being constituted of atoms and accidents. Bundle theory
and tropes both appear again in ch. 4 with far more radical consequences.
Chapter 3 (‘Natural theology’) addresses arguments for the existence of God.
Harvey summarizes M:tur;d;’s version of the kal:m cosmological argument
(KCA) from Kit:b al-TawA;d. In the process, he addresses some of the contem-
porary challenges to the work of the KCA’s most tireless contemporary advocate,
William Lane Craig. In addition to the KCA, Harvey also notes M:tur;d;’s teleo-
logical argument. Harvey breaks from classical kal:m (and seemingly Craig) by
maintaining that the premises that form the KCA are not deductive and certain
and in this way he takes away from the foundationalism implicit in the argu-
ment. M:tur;d; relies on reductio ad absurdum rather than a clear demonstrative
argument, which Harvey interprets as further evidence of M:tur;d;’s
non-foundationalist rationality and instead a tradition-based rationality. Yet,
following a conception of bodies as bundles of tropes would make the classical
articulation of the KCA untenable, as the argument in its classical formulation
rests on a notion of bodies as substrates for accidents. For Harvey, this would
seem to be of little consequence, as the arguments are not demonstrative and
only ‘serve their purpose if they show that it is rationally defensible to believe in
the existence of God’ (p. 123) and provide a scaffolding for considering the
divine nature, the subject of the following chapter.
Chapter 4 (‘Divine nature’) centres on two problems, the limits of language as
well as the ontology of the divine nature. To the latter point, Harvey’s main

6
Mehmet Bulgen, ‘al-Maturidi and atomism,’ ULUM 2/2 (2019): 223–64.
4 of 7 JOURNAL OF ISLAMIC STUDIES, 20 23, VOL. 00, NO. 0
intervention is to re-cast M:tur;d;’s conception of dh:t to break away from the

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essence–attribute distinction maintained by Ash6ar;s and later M:tur;d;s under
the influence of Avicenna. He argues that dh:t does not mean ‘essence’ or ‘sub-
stratum’, but rather it should be understood as ‘nature’, comprised of God’s
attributes and His actions. Contrasting his reading of M:tur;d; with Sunni
kal:m, Harvey summarizes his account as follows: ‘Taking a step back, the
theological development is as follows. For al-M:tur;d;, God is a concrete par-
ticular (6ayn) with an eternal nature (dh:t), which is comprised of the attributes
(Bif:t) predicated of Him. By the classical period, however, God is analysed as an
eternal essence (dh:t) of which His attributes are predicated. The difference, in
short, is from a bundle theory of attributes to a substrate–attribute theory’
(p. 150). Harvey then turns to the classical formulation of Sunni conceptions
of the attributes in the formula ‘neither Him, nor other than Him’, l: huwa wa-l:
gharyuhu (which Harvey incorrectly gives in the accusative, ghayra huwa).
Harvey interprets this as an apparent violation of the law of the excluded middle
(LEM) which is seen as indicative of an early kal:m commitment to a non-
Aristotelian framework of reasoning and metaphysics (another instance of
non-foundationalist epistemology). Harvey returns to the notion of tropes that
he introduced in ch. 2 to apply this now to the divine attributes. Adopting the
ideas of Brian Leftow, Harvey advocates a trope-theoretic nominalism, where the
divine attributes are considered tropes, but unlike the tropes for creatures, these
are non-free-floating and non-resembling (p. 155).
The next two chapters are each dedicated to divine attributes that are unique
doctrines of M:tur;d; theology. Chapter 5 (‘Omniscience and wisdom’) focuses
on the interplay between knowledge and wisdom (Aikma). Chapter 6 explores
the most distinguishing doctrine of M:tur;d; and his school, the attribute of
takw;n, which Harvey aptly translates as ‘creative action’, the title of the chapter.
In M:tur;dism’s engagement and reconciliation with Ash6arism, both attributes
continued to be part of the doctrine but had different fates. Wisdom was brought
closer conceptually to the attribute of knowledge and did less explanatory work
for M:tur;d; theologians, whereas takw;n became one of the key distinguishing
markers of M:tur;dism against Ash6ar;s.
In ch. 7 (‘Divine speech and the Qur8an’) Harvey provides a useful reconstruc-
tion of M:tur;d;’s terse yet complex discussion in Kit:b al-TawA;d, contextual-
izing it with a rich survey of the reception of these views among M:tur;d;
scholars. Harvey then puts these notions in conversation with Nicholas
Wolterstorff’s reflections on divine speech, distinguishing between illocutionary
and locutionary speech, the latter characterized as human and the former divine,
to account for how God can be characterized as speaking (an occurrent) while
retaining the divine’s eternality.
Underlying Harvey’s Transcendent God, Rational World is a vision of history
akin to that of modernist and purist Salafi readings of Islamic intellectual history,
one that valorizes a particular person or time while emphasizing rupture, dis-
continuity, and error for what came after. The imams are seen as authoritative
while their followers are not. The culprits in such readings of history have been
the Sunni schools of law, Sufism and its institutionalization in orders, Ash6arism
 BOOK REVIEW 5 of 7
(particularly after its absorption of Avicennan ideas), and in Harvey’s case

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M:tur;dism in its Ash6ar;-reconciled form. Thus, Harvey is keen to claim
M:tur;d; but also keen to note that he is not beholden to the M:tur;d; school.
The difficulty that arises in framing this project with the name of M:tur;d; is
that it imposes upon Harvey the task of making M:tur;d; say what Harvey needs
him to say. It is an exercise that risks anachronisms and conclusion-driven read-
ings, pitting Harvey against secondary scholarship and the later M:tur;d; trad-
ition when they do not deliver what he needs. Moreover, the choice of M:tur;d;
is also not without its challenges. As noted by scholars working on the
Samarqandi theologian and adherents to his school, Kit:b al-TawA;d is not par-
ticularly easy to decipher, not due to some terse scholasticism of later madrasa
texts but due to its awkward language. It is in this peculiar feature of Kit:b al-
TawA;d that interpretive space opens for Harvey to offer alternative readings.
The starting point that frames the book is a good example, the question of
foundationalism. The question itself is anachronistic and Harvey acknowledges
this only to dismiss it in a footnote (p. 11 n. 5). Nonetheless, Harvey finds room
to read M:tur;d; as non-foundationalist because M:tur;d; does not explicitly
state that the means of knowledge (asb:b al-6ilm)—the senses, the intellect,
and testimony—ultimately end with self-evident and certain propositions, the
position that the bearers of his tradition of kal:m explicitly maintain. Harvey
takes the absence of statements that we find in later M:tur;d; theologians—
kal:m requiring ‘necessary knowledge’ and ‘proof leading to certainty’—as an
opportunity to read M:tur;d; differently. Because Harvey advocates a non-
foundationalist epistemology, M:tur;d; must be interpreted to hold the same.
This conclusion-driven reading also frames the discussion on the question of the
world and God’s attributes as well.
The notion of ‘tradition’ that Harvey invokes ubiquitously is deployed super-
ficially. Harvey cites Alasdair MacIntyre throughout but seems not to have con-
sidered the scope of MacIntyre’s insights into the rationality of traditions. One
can read MacIntyre’s notion of tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive
enquiry in a non-foundationalist manner, as indeed some of his interpreters have.
However, a more careful reading of MacIntyre’s corpus and thought will show
that the latter in fact targets the very anti-foundationalist epistemology that
Harvey is championing. In his essay, ‘First principles, final ends, and contempor-
ary philosophical issues’,7 MacIntyre provides an account of how a tradition of
enquiry comes to express its first principles. Participants in a tradition, he notes,
employ the laws of thought that are evident to all rational persons, whether those
laws are explicitly invoked or not, to argue about the goods of that tradition.
These laws of thought are the principle of identity, the LEM, and the principle of
noncontradiction (MacIntyre singles out the latter for mention). It is by employ-
ing these most basic laws that tradition-constitutive and tradition-constituting
modes of enquiry are possible. MacIntyre’s point is that as the telos of a given

7
Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘First principles, final ends, and contemporary philosophical
issues’ in The Tasks of Philosophy: Volume 1: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 143–78.
6 of 7 JOURNAL OF ISLAMIC STUDIES, 20 23, VOL. 00, NO. 0
tradition of enquiry becomes more refined over time through dialectic and its

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moves toward becoming a perfected science, its first principles become clearer
and more refined. As that occurs, the order and hierarchy of sciences become
apparent, that is to say, which sciences are subordinate to others and which
problems are investigated in which science.
What a more careful reading of MacIntyre would have offered is a richer
historical account of M:tur;d;’s kal:m project than the one posited by Harvey.
Kal:m in M:tur;d;’s time was primarily but not exclusively dialectical. We can
see a need in generations preceding M:tur;d; to articulate their school’s first
principles with greater clarity as its dialectical activities increased. M:tur;d;’s
concern for epistemology at the very start of his Kit:b al-TawA;d is an indication
that this move toward articulating first principles had already begun in the
greater kal:m tradition. This is abundantly clear in the Mu6tazil; theorization
of naCar and the critiques of sophistry, amply demonstrated by M:tur;d;’s chief
opponent, Ab< al-Q:sim al-Balkh; al-Ka6b; (d. 319/931). As the telos of the
tradition of enquiry is continuously interrogated, one of the moves that
M:tur;dism makes, inspired by M:tur;d; himself, is to make explicit the very
foundationalism from which Harvey recoils. To be sure, a non-MacIntyrean
reading of tradition does not undermine Harvey’s project as he invokes
MacIntyre purely instrumentally.
There are other issues of greater concern in the substance of Harvey’s project,
perhaps the most important being Harvey’s radical reading of M:tur;d; on the
question of divine attributes. Harvey’s solution to the problem of attributes is
neither the Mu6tazil;–Peripatetic argument that affirms the unity and simplicity
of the divine essence at the expense of the attributes, nor the Sunni kal:m pos-
ition of retaining both the simplicity of the divine essence and the attributes
expressed in the formula ‘neither Him, nor other than Him’. Instead, he posits
a notion of the divine attributes as a bundle theory that ultimately affirms only
attributes, sacrificing the essence—‘While God is neither His attributes nor other
than them, His dh:t comprises these attributes’ (p. 150). A form of a bundle
theory vis-à-vis the world was maintained by the likes of Dir:r b. 6Amr (d. ca.
200/815) and ‘the proponents of accidents’ (aBA:b al-a6r:@) in the formative
period of kal:m (and M:tur;d; too, if one follows Harvey’s reading).
However, it seems to the present reviewer that Harvey might be the first person
in Islam to apply this theory to the divine. Harvey does not provide an account
for what it is that unites these tropes such that we can even make reference to this
bundle. What is the principle of unity for this bundle of multiple divine attrib-
utes? To merely state they are ‘non-free-floating’ does not answer the question
but provokes it more. Further, Harvey’s discussion of the Sunni expression that
the attributes are ‘neither Him, nor other than Him’ seems to be a deliberately
uncritical prima facie reading to cast this phrase as a violation of the LEM. This
expression does not violate the LEM because the point of consideration for each
half of the statement is different: the attributes are ‘neither Him’ with respect to
their intension (that is to say, conceptually ‘essence’ is not ‘attribute’ and vice
versa) and they are ‘not other than Him’, with respect to their extension (that is
to say, in terms of the referent, which is the divine essence). Finally, still related to
 BOOK REVIEW 7 of 7
the phrase ‘neither Him, nor other than Him’, Harvey’s discussion of the use of

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the term ghayr in early kal:m is equally thin, resulting in his misreading of this
phrase. For this expression to violate the LEM, one would have to be affirming
two contradictories (X and non-X). However, Abdurrahman Mihirig convincing-
ly excavates the textual and philosophical archive of early kal:m to demonstrate
that the term ghayr is not at all a contradictory and that the phrase expresses at
once a denial of identity and a denial of metaphysical separability of the attrib-
utes from the divine essence.8
There is much more to be said about the particulars of Harvey’s work but
generally it seeks to do too much at once: exegesis, intellectual history, polemics,
summaries of literature in philosophy of religion, and philosophical/theological
argument. The set of references in each chapter becomes dizzying and they do
not always seem to cohere, with little justification being offered for their juxta-
position. More fatally, there is the problem of the role that M:tur;d; plays in this
work—why twist M:tur;d;’s words to voice one’s own philosophical ideas in-
stead of simply stating the latter and letting them stand on their own strengths?
Thus, a reader seeking a historically contextualized presentation of M:tur;d;’s
doctrine will not find that here. Likewise, a reader looking for a dispassionate
discussion of M:turidism on central kal:m issues will have to look elsewhere.
What a reader will find is a theology guided by problematics of analytical phil-
osophy of religion that takes inspiration from an imagined Ab< ManB<r al-
M:tur;d;. This theology advocates a non-foundationalist epistemology, accounts
for the world by embracing metaphysical nominalism as a consequence of inter-
preting objects using a bundle–trope theory, and posits an understanding of
God’s nature as comprised of bundles of tropes.
Such a theology can only be considered a provocation to the different audi-
ences that might read this book. For academic historians of kal:m, Harvey offers
new interpretations in the development of M:tur;dism on central matters of
theology (a number of which the present reviewer finds to be incorrect). For
researchers who study Sunni kal:m, Harvey provokes them to relate the content
of those texts to current philosophical and theological problems rather than
study kal:m solely through the lens of exegesis or intellectual history. For
Muslims engaged in constructive philosophical and theological work within
the analytic tradition, Harvey adds his voice on the central issues pertaining to
God. For present-day claimants of M:tur;dism, a new interpretation of their
imam is argued that stands in stark contrast to the memory of their school.
Like any provocation, there is much to criticize, yet much to contend with and
commend.
Jawad Anwar Qureshi
Zaytuna College
E-mail: [email protected]
https://doi.org/10.1093/jis/etad045

8
See Abdurrahman Mihirig, ‘On the linguistic and technical meanings of Ghayr and their
consequences for understanding the divine attributes in classical Kal:m’, Kader, 20 (2022):
894–921.