Ideas in Motion: Theological Doctrines and Writings in the Islamicate World

The project is dedicated to the historio-critical study of rational theology (or kalām in Arabic). It attempts to do justice to the fact that kalām was an intellectual endeavour whose practice was not limited to Muslim scholars. Rather, theological schools typically accommodated members of a variety of religious communities. The project explores how travelling ideas transformed communities and theological systems that adopted them, and how these ideas were themselves objects in constant transformation. Methodologically, the project adopts a strong manuscript-based approach. Due to the fact that the historio-critical study of kalām is a relatively young sub-discipline within the field of Islamicate intellectual history, the corpus of available and reliable (and even less reliable) editions is very limited. This poses a major challenge to the field, making extensive study of manuscripts indispensable for advancing the state of the art.