Development of Muslim Theology: III: Theology: Chapter III

CHAPTER III

The rise of orthodox kalam; al-Ash‘ari; decline of the Mu‘tazilites; passing of heresy into unbelief; development of scholastic theology by Ash‘arites; rise of Zahirite kalam; Ibn Hazm; persecution of Ash‘arites; final assimilation of kalam.

As we have already seen, the traditionalist party at first refused to enter upon any discussion of sacred things. Malik ibn Anas used to say, "God's istiwa (settling Himself firmly upon His throne) is known; how it is done is unknown; it must be believed; questions about it are an innovation (bid‘a)." But such a position could not be held for any length of time. The world cannot be cut in two and half assigned to faith and half to reason. So, as time went on, there arose on the orthodox side men who, little by little, were prepared to give a reason for the faith that was in them. They thus came to use kalam in order to meet the kalam of the Mu‘tazilites; they became mutakallims, and the scholastic theology of Islam was founded. It is the history of this transfer of method which we have now to consider.

Its beginnings are wrapped in a natural obscurity. It was at first a gradual, unconscious drift, and people did not recognize its existence. Afterward, when they looked back upon it, the tendency of the human mind to ascribe broad movements to single men asserted itself and the whole was put under the name

Al-Jubba‘i replied, "The first will be rewarded in Paradise; the second punished in Hell, and the third will be neither rewarded nor punished." Al-Ash‘ari continued, "But if the third said, 'Lord, Thou mightest have granted me life, and then I would have been pious and entered Paradise like my brother,' what then? "Al-Jubba‘i replied, "God would say, 'I knew that if thou wert granted life thou wouldst be godless and unbelieving and enter Hell.'" Then al-Ash‘ari drew his noose, "But what if the second said, 'Lord, why didst Thou not. make me die as a

al-aslah--namely, that God is constrained to do that which may be best and happiest for His creatures. Orthodox Islam, as we have seen, holds that God is under no such constraint, and is free to do good or evil as He chooses.

But the story has also another and somewhat broader significance. It is a protest against the religious rationalism of the Mu‘tazilites, which held that the mysteries of the universe could be expressed and met in terms of human thought. In this way it represents the essence of al-Ash‘ari's position, a recoil from the impossible task of raising a system of purely rationalistic theology to reliance upon the Word of God, and the tradition (hadith) and usage (sunna) of the Prophet and the pattern of the early church (salaf).

The stories told above represent the change as sudden. According to the evidence of his books that was not so. In his return there were two stages. In the first of these he upheld the seven rational Qualities (sifat aqliya) of God, Life, Knowledge, Power, Will, Hearing, Seeing, Speech: but explained away the Qur’anic anthropomorphisms of God's face, hands, feet, etc. In the second stage, which fell, apparently, after he had moved to Baghdad and come under the strong Hanbalite influences there, he explained away nothing, but contented himself

wujud) as only one of the qualities belonging to an existing thing (mawjud). It was there all the time, but it lacked the quality of "existence"; then that quality was added to its other qualities and it became existent. But al-Ash‘ari and his followers held that existence was the "self" (ayn) of the entity and not a quality or state, however personal or necessary. See, on the whole, Appendix of Creeds.

On the other vexed question of free-will, or, rather, as the Muslims chose to express it, on the ability of men to produce actions, he took up a mediating position.

308-315 belongs to his school. He and at-Tahawi were followers of the broad-minded Abu Hanifa, who was more than suspected of Mu‘tazilite and Murji’ite leanings. Muslim theologians usually reckon, up some thirteen points of difference between al-Mataridi and al-Ash‘ari and admit that seven of these are not much more than combats of words. Those which occur in an-Nasafi's creed are marked with a star.

We are now in a position to finish shortly with the Mu‘tazilites. Their work, as a constructive force, is done. From this time on there is kalam among the orthodox, and the term mutakallim denotes nothing but a scholastic theologian, whether of one wing or another. And so, like any other organ which has done its part and for the existence of which there is no longer any object, they gradually and quietly dropped into the background. They had still, sometimes, to suffer persecution, and for hundreds of years there were men who continued to call themselves Mu‘tazilites; but their heresies came to be heresies of the schools and not burning questions in the eyes of the masses. We need now draw attention to only a few incidents and figures in this dying movement. The Muslim historians lay much stress on the orthodox zeal of the Khalifa al-Qadir, who reigned 381-422, and narrate how he persecuted the Mu‘tazilites, Shi‘ites and other heretics and compelled them, under oath, to conform.

But there are several difficulties in the way of this

Indica and of chronology and calendars, a man whose attainments and results show that our so-called modern methods are as old as genius. On religion, he maintained a prudent silence, but earned the favor of Mahmud by an unsparing exposure of the weakness in the Fatimid genealogy. In this sketch he has a place as a man of science who went his own way without treading on the religious toes of other people.

His contemporary Ibn Sina (d. 428), for us Avicenna, was of a different nature, and his lines were cast in different places. He was a wanderer through the courts of northern Persia. The orthodox and stringent Mahmud he carefully avoided; the Buwayhids and those of their ilk took such heresies as his more easily. Endowed with a gigantic memory and an insatiable intellectual appetite, he was the encyclopædist of his age, and his scientific work, and especially that in medicine, went further than anything

A very different man was Abu-l-Ala al-Ma‘arri, the blind poet and singer of intellectual freedom. In Arabic literature there is no other voice like his, clear and confident. He was a man of letters; no philosopher nor theologian nor scientist, though at one time he seems to have come in contact with a circle like that of Ikhwan as-safa, perhaps the same; and his spirit was like that of one of the heroic poets of the old desert life, whose hand was taught to keep his head, whose tongue spared nothing from heaven to earth, and who lived his own life out in his own way, undaunted. In his darkness he nourished great thoughts and flung out a sœva indignatio on hypocrisy and subservience which reminds of Lessing. But Abu-l-Ala was a great poet, and his scorn of priests and courtiers and their lies, his pity for suffering humanity and his confidence in the light of reason are thrown into scraps of burning, echoing verse without their like in Arabic. He died at the town of his birth, Ma‘arrat an-Nu‘man, in northern Syria, in 449. The problem is how he was suffered to live out his long life of eighty-six years.

We can now return to the development of scholastic theology in the orthodox church at the hands of

i‘tibars) existing subjectively in the mind of the knower, and not things. But a relationship, they argued, if real, must exist in something, and a quality cannot exist in another quality, only in a substance. Yet it could not exist in either of the two things which it brought together; for example, in the cause or the effect. It must be in a third thing. But to bring this third thing and the first two together, other relationships would be needed and other things for these relationships to exist in. Thus we would be led back in an infinite sequence, and they had taken over from Aristotle the position that such an infinite series backward (tasalsal) is inadmissible. Relationships, then, had no real existence but were mere phantoms, subjective nonentities. Further, the Aristotelian view of matter was now impossible for them. All the categories had gone except substance and quality; and among them, passion. Matter, then, could not have the possibility of suffering the impress of form. A possibility

i.e., accidents. These qualities may be positive or they may be negative; the ascription to things of negative qualities is one of their most fruitful conceptions. When, then, the qualities fall out of existence, the substances themselves must also cease to exist. Substance as well as quality is fleeting, has only a moment's duration.

But when they rejected the Aristotelian view of matter as the possibility of receiving form, their path of necessity led them straight to the atomists. So atomists they became, and, as always, after their own fashion. Their atoms are not of space only, but also of time. The basis of all the manifestation, mental and physical, of the world in place and time, is a multitude of monads. Each has certain qualities but has extension neither in space nor time. They have simply position, not bulk, and do not touch one another. Between them is absolute void. Similarly as to time. The time-atoms, if the expression may be permitted, are equally unextended and have also absolute void--of time--between them. Just as space is only in a series of atoms, so time is only in a succession of untouching moments and leaps across

Huwa-l-haqq," he does not mean, "He is the Truth," in our Western sense of Verity, or our New Testament sense of "The Way, the Truth, and the Life," but simply, "He is the Fact"--the one Reality.

To return: from their ontology they derived an

fiqh in the narrowest and most technical sense. They labored over the systems and treatises of their predecessors and neglected the great original sources of the Qur’an and the traditions. The immediate study of tradition (hadith) had died out. Ibn Hazm, on the other hand, went straight back to hadith. Taqlid he absolutely rejected, each man must draw from the sacred texts his own views. So the whole system of the canon lawyers came down with a crash and they, naturally, did not like it. Analogy (qiyas), their principal instrument, he swept away. It had no place either in law or theology. Even on the principle of agreement (ijma) he threw a shadow of doubt.

But it was in theology rather than in law that Ibn Hazm's originality lay. Strictly, his Zahirite principles when applied there should have led him to anthropomorphism (tajsim). The literal meaning of the Qur’an, as we have seen, assigns to God hands and feet, sitting on and descending from His throne. But

But the most original point in his system is his doctrine of the names of God, and his basing of that doctrine upon God's qualities. The Ash‘arites, he contended with justice, had been guilty of a grave inconsistency in saying that God was different in nature, qualities, and actions from all created things, and yet that the human qualities could be predicated of God, and that men could reason about God's nature. He accepted the doctrine of God's difference (mukhalafa) on highly logical, but, for us, rather startling grounds. The Qur’an applies to Him the words, "The Most Merciful of those that show mercy," but God, evidently, is not merciful. He tortures children with all manner of painful diseases, with hunger and terror. Mercy, in our human sense, which is high praise applied to a man, cannot be predicated of God. What then does the Qur’an mean by those words? Simply that they--arhamu-rrahimin--are one of God's names, applied to Him by Himself and that we have no right to take them as descriptive of a quality, mercy, and to use them to throw light on God's nature. They form one of the Ninety-nine Most Beautiful Names (al-asma al-husna) of which the Prophet has spoken in a tradition. Similarly, we may call God the Living One

Development of Muslim Theology: III: Theology: Chapter III

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