DISPUTATION

Disputation is the ritual practice of dialectical argument among schools of thought. In early and medieval Islamic societies, disputation is especially important in regard to the elaboration of competing religious doctrines. Two Arabic terms, jadal (and its more intensive form mujadala) and munazara designate dialectics or disputation with an opponent. A culture of disputation was well established in the Middle East prior to the rise of Islam, between and within the Jewish and Christian communities and among philosophical schools, such as the Peripatetics (Aristotelians), Stoics, Neoplatonists, Skeptics, Materialists, and others. Emblematic of this dialectical form of scholarship in the Middle Eastern environment of nascent Islam are the writings of the Church Father, John of Damascus (d. 749). In a tractate "Against the Saracens," written under Umayyad Islamic rule, John instructs Christians in the methods and the limits of disputing with Muslims on matters of belief.

Engaging the opponent through argument is also well attested in the Qur˒an. Humans are referred to "as the most disputatious (jadal) of things" (18:54). The verbal noun mujadala and its active verb form, meaning disputing with an enemy, occur twenty-seven times, in such phrases as "the Satans inspire their friends to dispute with you" (6:121) and "dispute not with the People of the Book" (29:46). Qur˒an 16:125 associates disputing with proselytism or inviting unbelievers to become Muslim: "Invite (humankind) to the way of your Lord with wisdom and kind words and dispute with them (jadilhum) in (a manner) which is less offensive."

By the ninth century, in Baghdad, Basra, and other centers of learning, disputation was recognized as a skill and an art that enhanced one's scholarly status. The biographical dictionaries mention accomplishment in the "science of disputation" (˓ilm al-jadal) or the rules of conduct in debate (adab aljadal), alongside knowledge of law, theology, the Qur˒an, hadith, and the grammar and lexicon of the Arabic language. Although the earliest manuals of instruction in the art of disputation no longer exist, the existence of such works as early as the ninth century is attested by references that appear in the tenth-century catalogue of Arabic works by Ibn al-Nadim (Kitab al-fihrist).

Arabic theological texts from the ninth to eleventh centuries give evidence of the oral environment of debate and argument in which claims were made, scripture was interpreted, rulings were established, and ideas were advanced and criticized. Typical of these texts is the following pattern. An incipit formulation of a problem is stated, for example, the Mu˓tazilite theological school's claim that the Qur˒an, like all material things in the world, is created and not eternal—a view that orthodox Muslims rejected. Next, the claim or doctrine is broken down into constituent subsections of the argument. Often the contending positions of other schools of thought are stated. The text then proceeds to advance the details of counterargument, followed by the teacher's reply to that argument. A typical text reads: "If the interlocutor (alqa˒il) should ask such and such, then the following should be said to him. . . ." The textual forms of these disputes are in reality school texts that were dictated by a shaykh or teacher in his home, at a madrasa, or in the corner or outer halls of a mosque, often to quite large gatherings of students. That the same problems were disputed over and over by succeeding generations of students and teachers, as was, for example, the claim that the Qur˒an was created, or that the Qur˒an was a miracle that proved Muhammad's prophethood, indicates a dynamic conception of religious truth that always had to be tested and defended with strengthened arguments.

This very method of teaching invited disputes in the lecture halls, and both teachers and pupils often became practitioners. At the simplest level, students would often be given a problem to dispute in practice session. Medieval annalistic historians like Abu Mansur ibn Tahrir al-Baghdadi (d. 1037) describe how on many occasions the more advanced students of a shaykh would go or be sent to the sessions of a rival teacher to challenge the latter with counterarguments. Other medieval observers of this form of teaching through public debate commented upon how loud and contentious they would often become, even late at night, disturbing neighbors who were trying to sleep. The theologians Abu ˓Uthman ˓Amr ibn al-Jahiz (d. 869) and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111) argued that common people who were not trained in the rules and discipline of disputation should not be allowed to debate religion and theology in public, because their lack of knowledge and skill often led to public disorder and raucousness.

The advanced cultural context for highly developed disputational skills were the evenings sponsored by local rulers and other patrons, in many cases bringing together Sunni and Shi˓ite religious spokesmen as well as representatives of the Orthodox, Nestorian, and Monoiphysite Christian communities, Rabbanite Jews, philosophers, poets, and other intellectuals to debate whatever important issue of the day interested the patron. In many cases, religious truth was framed as the problem and debated across confessional lines. In many cases, too, disputation over religious truth was conducted across disciplines. In one celebrated debate in the year 932 in Baghdad, for instance, the grammarian Abu Sa˓id al-Sirafi debated the logician Abu Bishr Matta. The logician held that truth is determined in formal logic, not in natural language (which is the medium of the Qur˒an). Al-Sirafi successfully argued that meaning is embedded in the language of the text itself, thus preserving the importance of the text of scripture, which in Islamic religious thought is more than propositional truth.

Not every scholar appreciated or participated in public disputations, especially across confessional lines. The literary historian Abu ˓Abdallah al-Humaydi (d. 1095) tells of a certain Hanbali religious scholar who reported having attended one such public disputation in eleventh-century Baghdad. He complained that nonbelievers (kuffar) were allowed to stand up and say that Muslims would not be allowed to argue using their Book (the Qur˒an), but rather that all disputants would be restricted to rational argument. When all present, including the other Muslims, agreed to the terms of the dispute, the Hanbali reported that he left and never went back.

In modern literary and anthropological terms it is possible to see the phenomenon of jadal and munazara as a form of poetics and social ritual. Taking the form of verbal conflict, such practices occurred in the highly charged atmosphere of competing religious communities living under Islamic rule in the central Islamic lands of the Middle East, especially during the Abbasid Age (750–1258). Potentially dangerous and volatile conflicts were defined and framed, then regulated and controlled by rules of conduct. A measure of how effective these cultural forms were is the fact that often those who refused to dispute according to the rules took their concerns to the streets of Baghdad in more physical and even violent forms of conflict. Violence, however, was often outweighed by the more civil forms of conflict. In no small measure it was the cultural practice of agreeing to disagree in disputation among contending religious communities that made civil society possible in the Islamic Middle Ages.

See alsoChristianity and Islam ; Kalam .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mahdi, Muhsin. "Language and Logic in Classical Islam." In Logic in Classical Islamic Culture, edited by G. E. Grunebaum. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1970.

Miller, Lawrence. "The Development of Islamic Dialectics." American Research Center in Egypt Newsletter 34 (1986): 24–27.

Moreen, V. B. "Shi˓i–Jewish 'Debate' (munazara) in the Eighteenth Century." Journal of the American Oriental Society 119, no. 4 (1999): 570–89.

Richard C. Martin