The Moslem thinker and theologian Ibrahim ibn Sayyar al-Nazzam (died ca. 840) was one of the major figures of the school of thought in Islam known as the Mutazila.

Al-Nazzam was educated in Basra and spent most of his active life (apparently a short one) in the Abbasid capital, Baghdad. Although his main impact was to be upon orthodox Moslem theology, he also engaged in polemics against the Manichaeans, whose ideas were filtering into the Islamic milieu even as they had into Christendom. His writings have come down to us only in fragmentary quotations in later Moslem writers.

Although a knowledge of Greek rationalist thought must be attributed to al-Nazzam, he, along with the rest of the Mutazila, should not be really classified as a philosopher. The main preoccupation of the Mutazilites was theology, and they used philosophical tools to bolster their dogmatism. Moslem thinkers had taken most enthusiastically...