Does the science of kalam go back to Ali?

Ibn al-Mutahhar al-Hilli counted among the virtues of Ali ibn Abi Talib that the science of kalam goes back to him. Ibn Taymiyya replied that the Companions and Successors did not know this kind of kalam, and dated its appearance to after the first century. ¹

In Ibn Taymiyya's quotation al-Hilli says: as for the science of kalam, Ali is its origin; people learned it from his sermons, and all people are his pupils. ¹

Ibn Taymiyya holds that kalam contrary to the Book and the Sunna is false. No Companion or Successor, he says, argued that the world is originated because bodies are originated, or proved that bodies are originated from accidents, motion and rest, building this on the impossibility of a beginningless series of events. ¹ He says that this kalam first appeared in Islam after the first century, through al-Ja'd ibn Dirham and al-Jahm ibn Safwan, and then passed to the circle of Amr ibn Ubayd, such as Abu al-Hudhayl al-Allaf. ¹

He adds that Ali's authenticated sermons contain nothing of the five principles of the Mu'tazila, and that the early Mu'tazila did not revere Ali. Some of them even doubted his probity: they said one of the two parties had become sinful, though not which one, either Ali or Talha and al-Zubayr, so they would not accept the testimony of one together with the other. This view, he says, is known from Amr ibn Ubayd and those like him. ² He states that the early Shia, such as Hisham ibn al-Hakam and Hisham ibn Salim, affirmed the divine attributes and accepted predestination. Their later scholars, he says, differed from them by relying on Mu'tazili books on the attributes and predestination. ^{2 3}

Mu'tazili and Shia authors trace kalam and the Mu'tazili school back to Ali in their own books; their statements have not yet been added from their sources, nor have academic studies of the origins of kalam.