El-Alûsī’s Al-Jawāb Al-Fasīh And His Critıcisms of Al-Kindī’s Views on Christ (Miracle–The Miracles of Christ, The Christian Creed, The Trinity and Its Hypostases)

Abstract

his article analyzes the criticisms directed by Nūʿmān al-Ālūsī—one of the leading figures of the 19th-century scholarly milieu of Baghdad—in his refutation al-Jawāb al-Fasīh, against the Christ-centered theological claims attributed to ʿAbd al-Masīḥ b. Isḥāq al-Kindī in the so-called Hāshimī–Kindī correspondence (miracle–the miracles of Christ, the Christian creed, the Trinity and its hypostases). The study adopts a historical-hermeneutical approach that takes into account (i) the conceptual legacy of the early Islamic–Christian polemical tradition, (ii) the intellectual and socio-cultural context of the 19th century in which al-Ālūsī lived, and (iii) the theological logic of the intertextual debate. Through a text-centered and comparative reading of primary sources, it is demonstrated that al-Ālūsī reframed notions of miracle, divinity, and revelation by taking the principle of tawḥīd as the normative axis, and subjected the conceptual ambiguities of the Trinity and its hypostases to criticism by means of both rational argumentation (contradiction, multiplicity of eternals, substance–accident distinctions) and scriptural references and exegetical strategies. The findings reveal that al-Ālūsī located the miracles of Christ not as ontological proofs of divinity, but as violations of cosmic habit “by God’s permission” (bi-idhni’Llāh) within the framework of prophetic verification, while the articles of faith pertaining to the Christian creed (incarnation, atonement, divine sonship) were found to be irreconcilable with the principles of divine simplicity and tawḥīd. Moreover, al-Ālūsī’s linguistic and rhetorical analyses (the distinction between metaphor and literal meaning, lexical polysemy, and internal textual coherence) reinforced the argumentative structure of the polemical work and carried the rational–scriptural balance of the Islamic kalām tradition into a systematic framework of defense against Christian theology.