Assimilation and Reaction: The Influence of Greek Philosophy on the Formation of Early Islamic Theology

This investigation assesses the reciprocal engagement between the Hellenic philosophical corpus and the emergent theological idiom of early Islam, focusing on the Abbasid epoch when the institutionalised pacemaking of the Translation Movement matured. The inquiry sharpens on the epistemic predicaments of the predominant doctrinal triad—Mu'tazilah, Asy'ariyah, and Maturidiyah—whose constructs exacted a selective retrieval of the Hellenistic inheritance. Through a conjunction of historical contextualisation and close philological scrutiny, it interrogates axial substantive questions, including the nexus of reason and revelation, the divine attributes, the modality of volition, and the semiotic status of the Qur'ān. The interpretive outcomes disclose that the Greek legacy engendered more than passive inheritance; it provoked an agonistic dialogue that sporadically oscillated between assimilation, refraction, and creative integration. Mu'tazilah rationalism, yielding a predilection for demonstrative syllogism and a metaphysics of divine justice, incorporated Aristotelian logical schemata; by contrast, Asy'ariyah and Maturidiyah wrought a composite idiom registering revelation within stringent logical confines. The magisterial refutations of al-Ghazālī, which circumscribed the epistemic locus of non-prophetic reason, emerge as a historical fulcrum that consolidated the theological nomenclature and defined, within normative Islam, the extents of speculative scrutiny. Thus, this article addresses a gap in the literature by offering a systematic, comparative reconstruction of how Greek philosophical reasoning was selectively appropriated, contested, and normatively integrated within the formative schools of Islamic theology.