Theology Entry - Pre-Publication Draft.pdf

PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT Theology RAMON HARVEY Abstract The word theology does not map exactly onto any single term within the medieval Islamic tradition. The closest equivalent is the phrase ʿilm al-kalām (or: kalām), which can be translated as rational, or dialectic, theology in the formative and early classical centuries, and philosophical theology thereafter. There are also aspects of Islamic thought that do not fall strictly under kalām yet are appropriate to address under medieval ‘theology’, such as scriptural theology and Sufism. However, post-classical theology within the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal Empires from the tenth/sixteenth century onwards can be excluded. The historical dimension of the subject encompasses scriptural theology; formative theology (first/seventh to fourth/tenth centuries); and classical theology (fifth/eleventh to ninth/fifteenth centuries). Thematically, the doctrinal views of the main classical theological schools can be assayed under the following headings: epistemology and ontology; divine attributes; prophecy; human faith and actions; and eschatology. 1. Scriptural theology The Qur’an is the primary scripture of Islam. Muslims understand it as God’s personal communication to humanity and treat it as a decisive source of theological views. The messengership of the Prophet Muḥammad is thus framed around his successive reception of revelation over a period of twenty-three years, while the Qur’an’s inimitability is conceived as the miracle that supports his prophetic authority (al-Bāqillānī, ʿIjāz al-qurʾān, pp. 15-16). Though the Prophet’s traditions, or Hadith, also have theological importance, the lesser epistemic weight of the Hadith corpus means that it lacks the uniform acceptance that all strands of Muslim thought grant to the Qur’an. It is for this reason that intra-Muslim debates of scriptural theology, especially in the crucial formative period, usually turn on questions of Qur’anic interpretation, with Hadith treated as a supplementary source (see §2). The Qur’an is not formulated as a theological treatise. Nonetheless it sets the basic parameters within which later schools of thought would operate. Some of these Qur’anic presumptions are clear. It is staunchly monotheistic, speaking from the omniscient viewpoint of the personal God who creates and maintains the world, and directly intervenes within human history, especially through sending prophets and revealed books. The Qur’an places its message and commandments within a broadly conceived Abrahamic tradition, calling upon the narratives of figures known to its Arabian milieu, including prophets recorded within the Bible and related texts: We have sent revelation to you [Prophet] as We did to Noah and the prophets after him, to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, to Jesus, Job, Jonah, Aaron, and Solomon – to David We gave the book [of Psalms] – to other messengers We have already mentioned to you, and also to some We have not. To Moses God spoke directly (Q. 4:163-164) (Abdel Haleem, 2010). Eschatological vistas of the Day of Judgement, Paradise and Hell also loom large as Qur’anic themes, for instance: PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT Have you heard tell [Prophet] about the Overwhelming Event? On that Day, there will be downcast faces, toiling and weary, as they enter the blazing Fire and are forced to drink from a boiling spring, with no food for them except bitter dry thorns that neither nourish nor satisfy hunger. On that Day there will also be faces radiant with bliss, well pleased with their labour, in a lofty garden, where they will hear no idle talk, with a flowing spring, raised couches, goblets placed before them, cushions set in rows, and carpets spread (Q. 88:1-16) (Abdel Haleem, 2010). The rhetorical style that characterises the Qur’an as scripture leads to a degree of ambiguity in some verses that touch upon questions of theological importance. The tension between divine omnipotence and human free will in circumscribing faith and action; the severity of punishment to be meted out to the unrepentant grave sinner; the relationship of the Qur’an to both the eternality of God and the temporal human world of language; and the attribution of apparently anthropomorphic expressions to the divine – each of these would become a flashpoint in later theological discourse. The Qur’an’s capacity for divergent interpretation of these contested questions poses a challenge for anyone seeking to clarify its ‘own’ position. Though various arguments can be made about the existence of an implicit Qur’anic scriptural theology, the conclusions drawn may reflect the presuppositions brought to the text as much as they do facts about it. Naturally enough, then, adherents to later theological schools understood the Qur’an as supporting their own favoured doctrines. The Imāmī Shīʿa collected a number of variant readings in line with Shīʿī theologico-political views, which they used in support of a position claiming the taḥrīf (suppression, or distortion) of the Qur’an (Kohlberg and Amir-Moezzi, 2009, pp. 24-26). In the case of the much larger and diffuse Hadith corpus, divergent theological perspectives are found more explicitly within different hadiths, and especially between the collections deemed acceptable to the major tendencies of Sunnism and Shīʿism (Brown, 2009, pp. 123-124). A third tendency, Ibāḍism, although eventually developing Hadith collections, never emphasised the codification of its living tradition into discrete hadiths to the same degree (Wilkinson, 2010, pp. 433-436). Various explanations can be given for this diversity in traditional reports. Since the influential work of Ignaz Goldziher at the end of the nineteenth century, it has been common for Western academic writing to treat such narrations as invariably invented for specific sectarian agendas (Goldziher, 1971, vol. 2, pp. 89-93). A more nuanced approach is to also consider the differing assumptions brought to the process of Hadith gathering and compilation, especially regarding the reliability of the Companions of the Prophet Muḥammad as a class of narrator, and the prevalence of paraphrasing in the first century (Brown, 2009, pp. 23; 86-89; 136-139). 2. Formative developments in scriptural exegesis As the Qur’an is the primary theological source in Islam, it is within the teaching circles of the Qur’an that some of the earliest Muslim theological articulations are to be found. Traditionary materials point to early theological exegesis carried out in two main centres. The first was the Meccan exegetical circle of the Companion ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbbās (d. 67– 68/686–688), the Prophet Muḥammad’s younger cousin, to whom a vast amount of commentary is attributed. While the authenticity of his reports may be challenged, depending on methodological stance, it is very difficult to credibly dismiss his influence and importance in the nascent tradition (Brockopp, 2017, p. 57). This authority was transferred in the next generation to a number of his prominent students, such as the Followers Saʿīd b. Jubayr (d. 95/714), Mujāhid b. Jabr (d. 103/721-722), and his freed slave ʿIkrima (d. 105/723-724). A PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT second significant circle was that of ʿAbd Allāh b. Masʿūd (d. 32/652–653) in Kufa, and his students, notably ʿAlqama b. Qays (d. 62/681–682). These first/seventh century figures are credited with introducing some figurative interpretations (taʾwīlāt) of ambiguous (mutashabih) divine attributes, such as the interpretation of aydin (lit. ‘hands’) as quwwa (power) in Q. 51:47, ‘And the sky, we built it with [our] power’, attributed to Ibn ʿAbbās, Mujāhid and others (al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, v. 21, pp. 545-546). They also provided commentary elaborating upon eschatological verses, for instance Ibn ʿAbbās gives two alternatives for qaṣr in Q. 77:32, ‘[Hell] throws out sparks as large as a qaṣr’: a mighty palace, or a tree trunk (al-Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, v. 23, pp. 601-602). Some theological exegesis within the first century relies upon Jewish lore, known as isrāʾīliyyāt, brought into conversation with the Islamic scripture by enthusiastic collectors, such as Ibn ʿAbbās, and figures like Kaʿb al-Aḥbār (d. ca. 32/652) who converted from Judaism (Adang, 1996, pp. 8-9). A similar process of theological commentary emerged around the Hadith of the Prophet Muḥammad in the following centuries, often citing the authority of the same class of early figures. Nevertheless, the slower journey of compilation and canonisation taken by reports of the Prophet’s words, and the possibility of the outright rejection of individual hadiths, meant that formative theological tendencies initially mainly articulated their stances around the interpretation of the Qur’an and the teachings of charismatic early Muslim figures (Cook, 1981, p. 17). The emergence to self-identity of the traditionalist Ahl al-Ḥadīth as a theological movement from the late second/eighth century is thus a response to an existing polemical atmosphere (see §10). It joined prevailing debates by formalising the use of accumulated prophetic traditionary materials as its central hermeneutic device instead of rational resources drawn, in part, from Hellenic tradition, or a sectarian narrative (Jackson, 2002, pp. 19-20). 3. The beginning of sectarian identity Study of the formative period of kalām presents a number of difficulties. Within the first two centuries of the post-prophetic era, the problem of verifying a number of the earliest theological treatises has left a question mark over the exact sequence of developments (see Cook, 1981, pp. 68-95). Nonetheless, there is arguably enough evidence to present a broad outline (see van Ess, 1982, pp. 110-123). The various distinctive theological movements that developed within the first two centuries were often directly based on the political experiences and aspirations of groups within Muslim society. Moreover, even the more purely theoretical issues that became important markers of sectarian identity were usually either derived from political questions or connected to them in some way. The first such issue pertained to the leadership of the community after the death of the Prophet Muḥammad. Prominent members of the Prophet’s own Meccan tribe, Quraysh, and the Medinans who had supported him, the Anṣār, both felt they had the greatest right to leadership, an argument which the Quraysh won with the caliphate of the Prophet’s old friend Abū Bakr (r. 11-12/632-634). Furthermore, within the tribe, supporters of the traditionally dominant clan of Banū Umayya, vied with the Prophet’s own clan Hāshim. These tensions bubbled over in the events following the murder of the third caliph ʿUthmān (r. 23-35/644655) for alleged misrule, which led to civil war and the emergence of a faction that supported the claims of the Prophet’s cousin ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭalib (d. 40/660), known as his shīʿa (‘party’), the forerunner of Shīʿism (Watt, 1998, p. 58). 4. The formative Shīʿa tradition PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT Centred in ʿAlī’s caliphal base in Kufa, the Shīʿī tendency within the first/seventh century contained the seeds of its later diverse blooms. It would appear that a significant proportion of this grouping gave political support to members of the Prophet’s clan, or specifically to the descendants of al-Ḥasan (d. 49/669-670) and the martyred al-Ḥusayn (d. 61/680), sons of his daughter Fāṭima (d. 11/632) and ʿAlī, without necessarily repudiating the faith, or religious authority, of non-Shīʿī Muslims (van Ess, 2017, pp. 268-270; 275). Many of the individuals within this class can be understood as overlapping with proto-Sunnī figures in the period before Zaydī and Imāmī strands of Shīʿism took a more hard-line theological stance to differentiate themselves from Sunnism (Haider, 2011, pp. 213-214). More radical elements were also present in a minority within the first/seventh century, including a faction aligned to ʿAlī who believed that the Prophet’s support of his cousin at the location known as Ghadīr Khumm in 10/632, amounted to an explicit designation of his succession. If this was the case, they reasoned, anyone who failed to support ʿAlī’s right to the caliphate, or imamate, had apostatised (Ḍirār b. ʿAmr, Kitāb al-taḥrīsh, pp. 51-52). Ibn Sabaʾ, a Jewish convert, is often mentioned as an instrumental figure in the more extreme manifestations of Shīʿī partisanship and, even though he is shrouded in the sectarian polemics of the early period (Anthony, 2012, pp. 2-4), his name seems to have attached to an extreme Kufan Shīʿī group known as the Sabaʾiyya (Watt, 1998, pp. 59-61). The Sabaʾiyya believed that ʿAlī had not died, but rather went into occultation, to one day return as the Mahdī, a messianic figure mentioned in some hadiths (Watt, 1998, p. 49). This doctrine was later adapted in the imamate theology of Imāmī and Ismāʿīlī Shīʿī groups. Another sect, the Kaysāniyya, held similar views about Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya (d. 81/700-701), the son of ʿAlī and Khawla bint Jaʿfar alḤanafiyya (Watt, 1998, pp. 47-48). Formative Shīʿī theology developed along three main tracks. The earliest was Zaydī, named after the Prophet’s lineal descendant Zayd b. ʿAlī (d. 120/738), who was killed in an uprising at the end of the Umayyad period. It was initially closer to proto-Sunnī tendencies in its earlier Batrī phase and deemed religious guidance from non-ʿAlawīs valid, though differed through its Shīʿī political theology that required a prospective claimant from the Ahl al-Bayt (lit. People of the Household; the Prophet’s family) to rise up in revolution. Thereafter the socalled Jārūdī school of thought began to dominate, holding many doctrinal beliefs in common with Imāmism, though not the same theology of imamate (Haider, 2014, pp. 105-108). The most important Zaydī theologian of the second/third century was Sulaymān b. Jarīr, while the pre-eminent figure of the third/ninth century was the Kufan al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm al-Rassī (d. 246/860) who wrote on human free will and divine transcendence (Ansari, Schmidtke and Thiele, 2016, p. 474). Subsequent Zaydīs were increasingly associated with the early Muʿtazila (see §9): al-Ḥasan b. Zayd (d. 270/884) was connected to the Basran school, Yaḥyā b. al-Ḥusayn (d. 298/911) took from the Baghdadīs (Rizvi, 2008, p. 93), and Imām al-Mahdī li-Dīn Allāh al-Dāʿī (d. 360/970-1) in northern Iran studied with a prominent Bahshamī teacher in Baghdad (Ansari, 2016, p. 182). The second track was that of Imāmism, which held to the idea of religious guidance through infallible imams, each designating his successor, and the repudiation of early Muslims judged to have not sufficiently supported ʿAlī. This transmission of leadership and ultimate religious authority through imams was accompanied by a theological tradition that helped articulate the theoretical basis of the doctrine. An important early Kufan Imāmī theologian was Hishām b. al-Ḥakam (d. 179/795-796) who also became infamous for believing that God was a shapeless body of light (Madelung, 1979, The Shiite and Khārijite Contribution, p. 124). An unbroken chain of inerrant imams to provide guidance was not sustainable in the long term: the theory requires a male heir in each generation and the Eighth and Ninth Imāms left only young sons (Haider, 2014, pp. 94-95). Moreover, the Abbasid dynasty, which also partly drew its legitimacy through its connection to the Prophet’s wider PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT family, was threatened by the seemingly more authentic Imāmīs. This led to the Tenth Imām’s confinement at Samarra by the Caliph al-Mutawakkil (r. 232-247/847-861). The Eleventh Imām thus became part of the Abbasid court and, when he died in 260/874, it was declared his son Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī had gone into Minor Occultation (AmirMoezzi, 2016, p. 81). Many followers switched to Ismāʿīlism, while religious authority became seated in those high in the Imāmī hierarchy who claimed to be in contact with him (Haider, 2014, pp. 95-96), as well as in those who developed rational arguments in support of the sect. Like the Zaydīs before them, this led to an increasing adoption of certain Muʿtazilī notions of the divine nature and of justice. The outstanding figure of the era was Abū Sahl alNawbakhtī (d. 311/924) who wrote widely on theological themes (Schimdtke and Ansari, 2016, p. 199). The third track, Ismāʿīlism, split off from Imāmism at the death of Ismāʿīl (d. 145/762), the son of Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765), who had already been publicly declared the next imam. While the Imāmīs argued that God was able to change his mind (badā) and give the imamate to another son, Mūsā al-Kāẓim (d. 184/800), others said that it rather passed straight through to Ismāʿīl’s son Muḥammad (d. 179/795) (Haider, 2014, p. 91-93). This sect, which became known as the Ismāʿīlīs, drew on Neoplatonic gnosticism to develop an esoteric interpretation of the religion, extracting hidden meanings within scripture, and a Messianic cyclical view of history. In their conception, a nāṭiq (enunciator), such as the Prophet Muḥammad, would be given a revelation, of which the inner meaning would be explained by a wāṣī (executor), such as ʿAlī. Thereafter, seven imams would follow, the last one coming as the Mahdī, also known as the Qāʾim, abrogating the law and ushering in a new era (Haider, 2014, p. 124). This role in the system was played by Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl and, after his disappearance, the Ismāʿīlīs largely dropped out of sight, teaching and recruiting adherents undercover. On a societal level, the next major breakthrough for the Ismāʿīlīs was their inauguration of the Fāṭimid caliphate in North Africa in 296/909 (Haider, 2014, pp. 97-98). 5. The Khawārij and origins of the Ibāḍiyya ʿAlī’s showdown with Muʾāwiya b. Abī Sufyān (r. 40-60/660-680), the Umayyad Governor of Damascus previously appointed by ʿUthmān, at the Battle of Ṣiffīn in 37/657, led to a process of arbitration, precipitating a further split with theological significance. A group previously loyal to ʿAlī seceded from his side under a slogan closely based on the Qur’anic phrase ‘Rule is for God alone (in al-ḥukmu illā li-llāh)’ (Q. 6:57; 12:40; 12:67). They apparently believed him to have failed to uphold God’s command, as they saw it, to continue fighting (Crone and Zimmermann, 2001, pp. 193-194). This group began to be known as the Khawārij (Seceders) and were distinguished for their pietist outlook. They chose their leaders without reference to Arabian tribal prestige and would look upon those who failed to follow them, as well as those who committed major sins among them, as disbelievers (Watt, 1998, pp. 12-22, 37). The movement’s small numbers and conflict with the larger polity led to frequent splits and the emergence of various sub-groups with more and less extreme theological views within the first/seventh century. The most significant in terms of later theological development was the soft-Khārijī tendency that became known as Ibāḍism. Ibāḍism is a theological school with an identity distinct from both Sunnism and Shīʿism. Its roots in the formative period are from Basran Khawārij groups in the first two centuries that did not leave this Iraqī garrison town and deemed it legitimate to continue to outwardly live within the broader Muslim society while running a hidden parallel political structure for their members. They had strict rules prohibiting them from fighting under a ruler that was not, in their reckoning, a true imam. They considered non-Ibāḍīs to be munāfiqs (‘hypocrites’), a term found within the Qur’an for those members of the community that paid PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT lip service to Islam without truly believing. Such people were to be treated as Muslims for the purpose of worldly life, but would be revealed by God as disbelievers on the Day of Judgement (Wilkinson, 2010, pp. 132-133). This repurposing of a scriptural concept allowed Ibāḍīs to negotiate practical worldly matters with their neighbours, while still holding to key elements of a pietist sectarian identity. When central control over peripheral regions of the Muslim empire waned, Ibāḍīs would fight to establish independent emirates. A pertinent example is the instability in the period just before and after the revolution replacing the Umayyad with the Abbasid dynasty, which saw the emergence of short-lived Ibāḍī imamates in Hạdṛamawt (128–130/745–748) and Oman (132–134/750–752). Another imamate in Oman beginning in 177/793 lasted for a century and consolidated the south-east of the Arabian peninsula as an important centre for Ibāḍism, along with North Africa (Hoffman, 2015, p. 299). As a written tradition, Ibāḍism arguably extends back to the first/seventh century with one of the earliest extant theological tracts, the so-called Sīrat Sālim, though some scholars have thought it more likely be from the second/eighth century (Crone and Zimmermann, 2001, pp. 11-12). The Ibāḍī theologian ʿAbd Allāh b. Yazīd al-Fazārī who was active in the mid-late second/eighth century, first in Kufa, then Baghdad and finally Yemen, is a very significant early theological figure with a well-developed system, including distinguishing between the attributes of essence and act (Madelung, 2016, p. 246). Later important Ibāḍī theologians of the formative period include Abū Nūḥ Saʿīd b. Zanghil (fourth/tenth century) and Abū Khazar Yaghlā b. Zaltāf (d. 380/990), both active in Tunisia and authors of works refuting other groups (Hoffman, 2012, p. 21). 6. The Murjīʾa The Murjīʾa was not an organised group, but a significant politico-theological tendency within the formative period of Islam that responded to crucial questions for the community of caliphal legitimacy and faith. The term comes from the word irjāʾ (‘deferral’), derived from Q. 9:106: ‘Others are deferred for the command of God, whether He punishes them, or whether He turns to them in forgiveness (wa-ākharūna murjawna li-amr allāh immā yuʿadhdhibuhum wa-immā yatūbu ʿalayhim)’. It is important to distinguish between two distinct, though related, manifestations of Murjīʿī thought. The first use of the idea of irjāʾ is ‘deferring judgement’ on the status of ʿUthmān and ʿAlī rather than repudiating them both like the Khawārij, or accepting them both like many piety-minded traditionalists. The concept is explained in an apparently early text by al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya (d. 100/718) – though the authenticity of this is disputed (Cook, 1981, pp. 68, 84-85). It states, ‘The community did not fight amongst itself, nor differ, under Abū Bakr and ʿUmar and there was no doubt in their affair. Deferral is only for the person whose [state] is obscure to the people and whom they did not witness’ (van Ess, 1974, p. 23). The early Murjīʾa were based in Kufa and their noncommittal position was most likely an attempt to hold the community together amid the rival accusations of apostasy flying back and forth between sectarian groups (Wilkinson, 2010, p. 129). Generally, Murjīʾism was more accepting of the possibility that the Umayyad state was legitimate, unlike the Khawārij and Ibāḍīs who saw only themselves as legitimate, and the various degrees of Shīʿa who argued that leadership should be with Banū Hāshim. However, they were not quietist and participated in rebellions against Umayyad rule according to their understanding of the Qur’anic principle ‘Enjoining the good and forbidding the evil (al-amr bi-l-maʿrūf wa-l-nahī ʿan al-munkar)’ (See: Q. 3:104, 3:110, 3:114, 9:71, 9:112, 22:41, 31:17) and scholarly figures associated with this position were sometimes arrested and executed (Madelung, 1982, pp. 35-36). PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT A second related Murjīʾī theological position was that actions were to be separated from faith and that committing major sins, or omitting obligatory actions, such as the five daily prayers, did not amount to disbelief. It is not difficult to trace the thread connecting this to the earlier idea and the controversy engendered by the Khawārij. The Khārijī declaration of unbelief for ʿUthmān’s sins as ruler and ʿAlī’s failure to judge according to God’s rule led to a generalisation of the position: the faith of all Muslims was contingent on their actions, hence their reputation for extreme outward piety. In opposite fashion, suspending judgement on the faith of the two caliphs led the Murjīʾa to split outward action from inward faith. These two aspects of Murjīʾī thought are found within the works ascribed to the Kufan theologian and jurist Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767). In the text known as al-Fiqh al-absaṭ (‘The Most Encompassing Understanding’), his Transoxianan student Abū Muṭīʿ al-Balkhī (d. 199/814) says that he asked Abū Ḥanīfa about the ‘greatest understanding (al-fiqh alakbar)’. He replied: That you do not repudiate the faith of anyone from the People of the Qibla [those who pray towards Mecca] on account of sin and do not preclude anyone from faith. That you enjoin the good and forbid the evil; and know that whatever befalls you could not have missed you, and whatever misses you could never have befallen you. That you do not become quit of any of the Companions of the Messenger of God, may peace and blessings be upon him; and that you do not take allegiance with anyone over another. And that you return the matter of ʿUthmān and ʿAlī to God, Most High (alBalkhī, Al-Fiqh al-abṣaṭ, p. 40). Abū Ḥanīfa did not appreciate the Murjīʿī label, seeing it as pejorative. He defended his beliefs in a letter to a Basran interlocutor called ʿUthmān al-Battī (d. 143/760), referring to himself as from ‘the People of Justice and the People of Precedent (ahl al-ʿadl wa-l-ahl alsunna)’ (Abū Hanīfa, Risālat Abī Ḥanīfa, p. 38). Via students such as al-Balkhī, his theological – and jurisprudential – opinions quickly spread to Transoxiana where they suited newly converted populations with a typically lower level of religious knowledge and practice (Madelung, 1982, p. 33). This was crucial in the later development of Ḥanafism as Māturīdism within Samarqand. Nonetheless, Abū Ḥanīfa continued to be categorised as a Murjīʾī, as seen from the heresiography Maqālāt al-islāmiyyīn (‘Doctrines of the Islamic Groups’) by the theologian Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī (d. 324/935-936), because ‘[he] did not treat anything from the religion as removing one from faith’ (al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, vol. 1, p. 204). This demonstrates that the acceptability of this Murjīʾī position within Sunnism (and the contrary from the Ḥanafī point of view) was not secured until after the fourth/tenth century (see Leaman, 2008, pp. 88-89). 7. The Qadariyya The final significant theologico-political development at the end of the first/seventh century is known as Qadarism, which emerged in Basra. A tradition recorded in the canonical collection of Muslim b. al-Ḥajjāj (d. 261/875) mentions a figure known as Maʿbad al-Juhanī (d. 82/704) as the ‘first person to speak about the Decree (qadar) in Basra’ (Muslim, Ṣaḥīḥ, vol. 1, p. 23). This becomes a framing device for the famous Hadith of Gabriel, which, amongst other things, articulates an important catechism of faith (īmān): ‘That you believe in God, His angels, His books, His messengers, the Last Day, and believe in the Decree, its good and ill’ (Muslim, Ṣaḥīḥ, vol. 1, p. 24). The question of how much free will God affords to humanity emerges from the mixed Qur’anic picture with verses both emphasising the absolute omnipotence of God and the PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT reality of human moral choice. In Q. 4:136, ‘Whoever disbelieves in God, His angels, His books, his messengers and the Last Day, then he has strayed far away’, the explicit belief in the divine Decree is not mentioned. This gave room for this belief to be challenged by figures such as Maʿbad and Abū Marwān Ghaylān b. Muslim (d. ca. 125/743) who were allegedly influenced by Christian or Manichean ideas, and were both executed (Judd, 2016, pp. 47-49). The anti-fatalist doctrine also has a political dimension, insofar as it implicitly challenged the Umayyad attempt to shore up criticism of them on the basis of their injustices by arguing that it was God’s divine plan for them to rule (Watt, 1998, pp. 94-95). This context may help to explain the letter written by the Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 6586/685-705) who apparently questioned the teacher and ascetic al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 110/728) for holding beliefs about the divine Decree that were different from those before him and the short treatise al-Ḥasan composed in reply. Like other texts of the period, there has been a fair amount of contemporary discussion over whether the letter and its response are genuine and if so how they should be understood. Van Ess concluded that it seems to be dated between 75/694 and 80/699, while others have argued it is a later Zaydī forgery (Treiger, 2016, pp. 39-41). It seems more likely that if it is genuine, it anticipates theological positions that highlight God’s Decree as founded in His knowledge of human choice (ikhtiyār), such as that of the Muʿtazila (as argued by Schwartz, 1967, pp. 29-30), or Māturīdīs, rather than those who emphasise the acquisition (kasb) of actions on the basis of God’s will, such as the Ashʿarīs (as argued by Salem, 2014, pp. 216-218). Al-Ḥasan also features in the story, possibly apocryphal, that announces the main early teacher associated with the Qadariyya: Wāṣil b. ʿAṭāʾ (d. 131/748). He was apparently a member of al-Ḥasan’s circle in the main mosque in Basra when a man asked whether the person guilty of a grave sin is a disbeliever, as the Khawārij held, or a believer as the Murjīʿa thought. Before he could answer, Wāṣil interjected that he was in manzilatun bayna almanzilatayn (a state of limbo), presumably meaning that such a person was to be counted neither truly a believer or disbeliever in the world and must repent before death to avoid eternal punishment. According to the story, Wāṣil then left (ʿitazala) the pillar at which alḤasan was sitting and started his own circle. One of those who apparently went with him, previously also a student of al-Ḥasan, was ʿAmr b. Ubayd (d. 144/761) and he became known for similar teachings (al-Shahrastānī, Al-Milal wa-l-niḥal, vol. 1, pp. 47-48). Although there is a question mark over the historicity of this event, it does seem that along with political activism and free will, the state of limbo represents an important issue at stake at the inception of the Qadarī movement: all three doctrines would become part of the famous five principles (al-uṣūl al-khamsa) of the Muʿtazila. Moreover, it has been argued that while explicit sources for this early stage of the Qadariyya are lacking, these doctrines are not anachronistic to the era of Wāṣil and ʿAmr (El-Omari, 2016, pp. 137-138). 8. Formative Muslim interaction with other religious and philosophical traditions The kalām tradition also developed due to engagement with other religious traditions, especially Christianity, in the lands outside of the Arabian peninsula. There is some evidence that debates between Muslims and Christians were held as early as 23/644 and that the term kalām may be a translation of the Syriac word mamllā (disputation), which was previously used for intra-denominational disputes within Christianity (Treiger, 2016, pp. 31-33). During the Abbasid era, Christian theologians within the developing Arabic intellectual milieu challenged their Muslim counterparts to respond to their theological claims, and especially to justify the messengership of the Prophet Muḥammad. Important figures are the Jacobite Ḥabīb b. Khidma Abū Rāʾita (d. second/eighth century), the Melkite Abū Qurra (d. c. 210/825), and the Nestorian ʿAmmār al-Baṣrī (d. third/ninth century) whose criticisms PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT provoked responses from Muslim theologians to develop a distinct theory of the prophetic miracle, and to deepen discussion on the idea of Qur’anic inimitability (iʿjāz) (Vasalou, 2002, pp. 27-29). The philosophical heritage of Antiquity was also an important source of ideas that could be brought into theological discourse in order to work through the implications contained within Muslim scripture (Grunebaum, 1970, pp. 15-16). The negative theology of the Neoplatonic tradition and its focus on the transcendence of the ‘One’ was a rich resource for monotheists who wished to rationally think about the nature of God. There is a precedent for such apophatic theology in the work of the Christian figure known as the pseudoDionysius (fifth-sixth century CE). One of the earliest exponents of this approach within Islamic civilisation was Jahm b. Safwān (d. 129/746) an insurrectionist in Transoxiana who developed a radical articulation of God’s oneness that drew, likely through oral transmission, on Neoplatonic ideas. He thus denied that attributes could be applied to God (Küng, 2007, pp. 284-285). The notoriety of Jahm’s approach led to the term Jahmī becoming a pejorative utilised by traditionalists for anyone who utilised the idea of transcendence to deal with apparently anthropomorphic expressions of the divine found in scripture. A prominent example is the book ascribed to Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (d. 241/855) entitled Al-Radd ʿalā alzanādiqa wa-l-jahmiyya (‘Refutation of the Heretics and the Jahmīs’). The translation of the literary legacy of Hellenic philosophy into Arabic, which was centred on the new city of Baghdad in the mid-second/eighth century onwards provided a wealth of technical tools and conceptual frameworks with which to express theological ideas (Gutas, 1998, p. 150). Also important to more sophisticated theological thinking were developments in Arabic grammatical analysis within the older Muslim settlements of Kufa and Basra during the same period (Frank, 1978, pp. 19-23). 9. The formative Muʿtazilī tradition The Muʿtazila was a theological movement that drew on key Qadarī theses with the addition of an emphasis on God’s justice with respect to the creation and His ‘simplicity’ in terms of attributes. The most important theologian bridging the gap between figures such as Wāṣil b. ʿAṭāʾ, ʿAmr b. Ubayd, Jahm b. Safwān and the classical Muʿtazilī schools of Basra and Baghdad was Ḍirār b. ʿAmr (d. 200/815) who was very influential yet held a number of views not acceptable to the latter, such as a theory of kasb for human actions (Schöck, 2016, pp. 7576). He also maintained a strictly negative view of divine attributes, though less radical than Jahm. In his understanding, God could be said to be ‘knowing’, but this just meant that ‘ignorance’ was to be negated for Him (al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 1950, vol. 2, p. 159). Muʿtazilism as a theological movement flourished in the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries. Drawing on older kalām models, their approach to debate was strictly dialectical. That is, they were interested in vindicating their own stance and refuting that of the opposition. This led to the characteristic feature that there was no need to prove a thesis that an opponent already accepted, a principle that was to remain important into the classical period (van Ess, 1982, p. 109). The first and most significant Muʿtazilī school was inaugurated in Basra by figures such as Muʿammar b. ʿAbbād (d. 215/830), Abū Bakr al-Aṣamm (d. 201/816), Abū alHud̲h̲ayl (d. 227/841-2) who was credited with articulating the ‘five principles’ of Muʿtazilism, and Ibrāhīm al-Naẓẓām (d. 221/836), an original thinker and teacher of the famous litterateur al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/869). Thereafter, the most important figures in the formative period were Abū ʿAlī al-Jubbāʾī (d. 303/933) and his son Abū Hāshim (d. 321/933) who became the eponym for a school of thought known as the Bahshamiyya (El Omari, 2016, PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT The Theology of Abū l-Qāsim al-Balkhī, pp. 2-3). Al-Jubbāʾī was also the teacher of Abū alḤasan al-Ashʿarī before he left the fold of Muʿtazilism. In the earlier phase, Abū Hudhayl held the influential doctrine of divine simplicity that, while God was affirmed as being ‘knowing’, ‘powerful’ and so on, these qualities were identical with Him (al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 1950, vol. 2, p. 236). This meant that the Muʿtazila were not willing to analyse God’s ‘knowledge’, ‘power’ and ‘speech’ as distinct eternal attributes, which led to their infamous view that the Qur’an was entirely a creation. Abū Hāshim made a significant innovation in Muʿtazilī theological thinking by utilising the grammatical form of the ḥāl (mode), which is a verbal noun used to describe the state of an actor, for instance the word ‘standing (qāʾiman)’ in the sentence: ‘I saw Zayd standing (raʾaytu zaydan qāʾiman)’. With this move, he was able to articulate God’s ‘knowledge’ as God’s essence in the mode of knowing. Arguably this took him closer to the position upheld by his contemporaries al-Ashʿarī and al-Māturīdī, as the attributes could be termed neither God, nor other than God. However, the important difference remained that Abū Hāshim placed this attenuated understanding within the human mind, rather than a complex of attributes belonging to the divine nature (Gardet, 1991, Al-Djubbāʾī). The Bahshamī tradition that adopted Abū Hāshim’s distinctive doctrines remained important in the classical period, particularly in the Shīʿī tradition. The names associated with Baghdadī Muʿtazilism are somewhat less celebrated in the available sources, though this may reflect dominance of Basran Bahshamī figures after the fourth/tenth century. The founder of the Baghdadī school, Bis̲ h̲r b. al-Muʿtamir (d. 210/825), was a student of Muʿammar b. ʿAbbād, and was followed by Abū Mūsā al-Murdār (d. 226/841), Jaʿfar b. Ḥarb (d. 236/850) and Jaʿfar b. Mubashshir (d. 234/848), and a bit later Abū al-Huṣayn al-Khayyāṭ (d. ca. 300/913), the main teacher of Abū al-Qāsim al-Balkhī (also known as al-Ka’bī) (d. 319/913), who was the major antagonist for Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī due to his proximity in Transoxiana after his return from studying in Baghdad (Rudolph, 2016, p. 286-287). Members of the Baghdadī branch were often ascetic figures, and by the beginning of the fourth/tenth century tended to adhere to a slightly older form of Muʿtazilism compared to the Basran school of their time. An example of this is the retention of the traditional theory of the divine attributes, rather than the innovations developed by Abū Hāshim, as well as upholding the doctrine that God must do the best (aṣlaḥ) for His creation (El Omari, 2016, The Theology of Abū l-Qāsim al-Balkhī, pp. 42-46). Both branches of Muʿtazilism took an objective view of moral value as something that exists in the world, which they combined with an optimistic position on the intuitive moral knowledge available to human beings, though they differed on significant theoretical details (Shihadeh, 2016, pp. 388-396). 10. The Ahl al-Ḥadīth The Ahl al-Ḥadīth, also known as Ahl al-Athar (al-Lalākāʾī, Sharḥ uṣūl iʿtiqād ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa, vol. 1, p. 168), a traditionalist theological movement centred on collectors of Hadith, emerged as a self-conscious grouping from the end of the second/eighth and beginning of the third/ninth century. The focal point was in Baghdad, though as a tendency of theological conservatism it included figures as Mālik b. Anas (d. 179/795) in Medina. Though the collection of discrete traditions and distrust of ʿilm al-kalām had existed much earlier, the Ahl al-Ḥadīth movement represents an emergent self-identity and focus on organising prophetic dicta as a canonical scripture to supplement the Qur’an, initially in the place of rational arguments. The key figure in the development of the Ahl al-Ḥadīth is the important traditionist Aḥmad b. Hanbal (d. 241/855). He gained especial prominence for his imprisonment and torture during the Miḥna, the state inquisition instituted by the Caliph al- PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT Maʾmūn (r. 198-218/813-833) to force adherence to the Muʿtazilī doctrine of the created Qur’an and quell traditionalist opposition. The Ahl al-Ḥadīth and its explicitly Ḥanbalī subset claimed the mantle of the Ahl alSunna wa-l-Jamāʿa (People of Precedent and the Community) for their traditionalist theological understanding. This term is not of Qur’anic provenance, nor mentioned in prophetic Hadith, but has been ascribed to Ibn ʿAbbās by the Hadith critic Ibn Abī Ḥātim (d. 327/938) as commentary upon Q. 3:106, ‘The Day faces are whitened and faces are blackened...’ Ibn ʿAbbās is recorded as saying: ‘the faces of the Ahl al-Sunna wa-l-Jamāʿa are whitened and the faces of Ahl al-Bidaʿ wa-l-Dalāla (People of Heresy and Deviation) are blackened.’ (Ibn Abī Ḥātim, Tafsīr al-qurʾan al-ʿaẓīm, p. 729). This movement deemed that the Qur’an and Hadith were sufficient on their own as theological proof texts, and therefore rejected the rational methods of kalām. The main concession to a theological way of speaking was to use the negation bi-lā kayf (without modality) when affirming divine attributes, which was an attempt to avoid both anthropomorphism (tashbīh) and figurative interpretation (taʾwīl). A number of creeds are attributed to Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, though they may reflect what later followers thought he believed rather than a word-for-word transcription (Hoover, 2016, p. 627). A controversial Ḥanbalī active in the fourth/tenth century was al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī alBarbahārī (d. 329/941), a student of Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal at one remove. He gained significance due to his creedal text Sharḥ al-sunna, in which he advocated an anti-rational and exclusionary definition of Sunnism. This included the affirmation without commentary of outwardly anthropomorphic hadiths and the deviance of the one who said a person’s recitation of the Qur’an was created (al-Barbahārī, Sharḥ al-sunna, pp. 81-83, 100). 11. Traditionalist proto-Sunnī and Sufi Theology Between the rationalist negative theology of the Muʿtazila and the scriptural traditionalism of the Ahl al-Ḥadīth there was a wide space within third/ninth century proto-Sunnism occupied by a number of loosely defined groups with various ideological tendencies. One of these was Kullābism, which was based in Basra and lay the groundwork for the theologian Abū alḤasan al-Ashʿarī and overlapped to some extent with Sufi theological perspectives, which began to solidify during the next two centuries. ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad, better known as Ibn Kullāb (d. ca. 240/854-5), was a Basran theologian active during the lifetime of Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal who was concerned to provide a theological response to the Muʿtazila rooted in traditionalist doctrine. Some of the major developments of his thought repurposed theological solutions already proposed by the Muʿtazila and other groups, but with a sensitivity towards the scriptural boundaries of the Ahl al-Ḥadīth. He adopted a theory of kasb in which all actions were created by God, but earned by humanity, from the Basran al-Najjār (d. ca. 220/835) and deployed a formula previously used by the Zaydī Sulaymān b. Jarīr and the Imāmī Hishām b. al-Ḥakam for the divine attributes as eternally neither God, nor other than Him (Madelung, 1979, The Shiite and Khārijite Contribution, p. 126). His most distinguished theological move was to differentiate between the essential and eternal aspect (maʿnā) of Divine speech and its created manifest expression (ʿibāra) as the Qur’an, which apparently allowed him to escape the strictures of the miḥna (Bin Ramli, 2016, pp. 218-219). Al-Ḥārith b. al-Muḥāsibī (d. 243/857), another Basran, is mainly recognised as an important proto-Sufi. His theological positions were similar to Ibn Kullāb, sometimes said to be his teacher, though more traditionalist, for instance he rejected the latter’s position on divine speech. His doctrines also show some impact from his mystical outlook and it is for PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT these theological and spiritual divergences from the Ahl al-Ḥadīth that he was ‘boycotted’ by Ibn Ḥanbal (Bin Ramlī, 2016, pp. 219-221). Other thinking within the developing Sufi tradition that touched upon theological themes continued in the formative period. An important figure was Dhū al-Nūn al-Miṣrī (d. 254/860) who is credited as a turning point in articulating a path of spiritual wayfaring based on knowledge. He is credited by some as the first to speak in terms of spiritual states (aḥwāl) and stations (maqāmāt) (Nguyen, 2016, p. 329). He upheld a transcendent negative theology, as evidenced by statements such as ‘whatever you imagine of God, He is utterly the opposite of that’ (O’Donnell, 2006, p. 75). The seminal theological figure of Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī was born in Basra and was formerly a pupil of the Muʿtazilī al-Jubbāʾī before adopting a position similar to Ibn Kullāb that combined traditionalist theological positions with a rational framework heavily indebted to Muʿtazilī models. Thus, he took a Kullābī line on questions of free will and more generally God’s attributes, though in this latter case he seems to have been more willing to accept the possibility of figurative interpretation when this was rationally desirable. Notably, he did not consider this the case in dealing with the Beautific vision (ruʾya), a belief that the Muʿtazila were known to interpret figuratively (Watt, 1986, Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī). He also held strictly to the traditionalist understanding of the Qur’an as uncreated (al-Ashʿarī, Al-Ibāna, pp. 24-26). He is notable for developing a radical divine command theory of ethics, in which ethical values are constituted solely by the will of God (al-Ashʿarī, Kitāb al-lumaʿ, p. 117). This theological articulation of a world without moral value until the descent of revelation is arguably one of the most original and influential of al-Ashʿarī’s ideas (Reinhart, 1995, p. 25). His main surviving works are Al-Ibāna ʿan uṣūl al-diyāna (‘Elucidation of the Principles of the Religion’), which apparently aimed (unsuccessfully) to convince al-Barbahārī of his traditionalist credentials; Al-Maqālāt al-islāmiyyīn, one of the earliest comprehensive heresiographical texts; and Kitāb al-lumaʿ fī al-radd ʿalā ahl al-zaygh wa-l-bidaʿ (‘The Resplendence in Refutation of the People of Straying and Deviance’) and Al-Hathth ʿalā albaḥth (‘Encouragement to Research’), both rationally argued works. 12. Ḥanafī proto-Sunnī and Sufi Theology The Ḥanafī tradition, though tracing an origin in Kufan Murjīʿism, developed its distinctive theological trajectory in Transoxiana. Two students of Abū Ḥanīfa are particularly important: Abū Muṭīʿ al-Balkhī, the author of al-Fiqh al-absaṭ and transmitter of the Risālat ʿUthmān al-Battī and Abū Muqātil al-Samarqandī (d. 208/823), author of Kitab al-ʿalim wa-lmutaʿallim (‘The Book of Teacher and Student’). Both texts quote Abū Ḥanīfa extensively, placing his ideas in a more systematic framework. Ḥanafism existed on a broad spectrum, holding certain core doctrines, such as the separation of faith and actions, but taking varying approaches towards traditionalist positions, Muʿtazilism, Sufism and other tendencies. One of the more controversial developments was the school of thought inaugurated by Muḥammad b. Karrām (d. 255/869) from Sīstān in Transoxiana. He combined asceticism and a grounding in Eastern Ḥanafī views with new theological doctrines, including most famously the idea of God sitting corporeally upon His throne (Rudolph, 2015, pp. 77-79). It is possible that Karrāmī ideas were picked up and incorporated into apparent Ḥanafī orthodoxy by Abū Muṭīʿ Makḥūl al-Nasafī (d. 318/930) in his Kitāb al-radd ʿalā ahl al-bidaʿ wa-l-ahwāʾ (‘Book of the Refutation of the People of Deviance and Idle Desires) (Rudolph, 2015, pp. 85-87). However, it was anathema to the more transcendence-focused strand of Ḥanafī thinking represented by his contemporary Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī (d. 333/944), and it was the latter’s position that was adopted in the classical period. PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT Al-Māturīdī was born on the outskirts of the major settlement of Samarqand in the first half of the third/ninth century. Comparatively little is known about his life. He does not seem to have travelled much and, taking from well-regarded local teachers, focused his intellectual energies on jurisprudence, exegesis and theology. His main theological contribution was to develop the positions of the diverse Ḥanafī tradition in the light of the rational ideas of his age, in order to produce a new and more rigorous synthesis. His view on the divine attributes was that they were neither God, nor other than Him, and were eternal whether qualities or actions, as God was to be understood as existing timelessly (al-Māturīdī, 2006, pp. 116, 119). This was true also of His action of speaking, though the worldly form by which this was expressed in human language, such as the Arabic form of the Qur’an, was created (al-Māturīdī, 2006, pp. 121-122). He rejected definitive taʾwīl of mutashabih attributes on the basis that, while they could be read figuratively, it was impossible to determine any single figurative meaning as correct (al-Māturīdī, 2006, p. 138). He also developed a nuanced position on free will in which he affirmed both God’s omnipotent power and real human choice (ikhtiyār) between alternatives (Harvey, 2018, pp. 32-33). In terms of ethics, al-Māturīdī argues for a moral realism in which God creates the moral universe with certain inherent values. Though he thinks belief in God and the essentials of morality are knowable without revelation, he has an empirical mindset, holding that they are discovered via experience and not known intuitively. Furthermore, in contrast to the famous Muʿtazilī position, he does not argue that the human code of values is applicable to God’s actions – rather His wisdom (ḥikma) transcends human understanding (Harvey, 2018, pp. 35-37). Two main works of al-Māturīdī survive: Kitāb al-tawḥīd (‘The Book of Unicity’), a very original theological treatise and Taʿwīlāt ahl al-sunna/ Taʿwīlāt al-qurʾān (‘Interpretations of the People of Precedent/ Interpretations of the Qur’an’), an encyclopaedic tafsīr, presenting a distinctively Ḥanafī theological perspective on the Qur’an. Abū Bakr al-Kalabadhī (d. 385/995) is notable as a Sufi of the latter part of the fourth/tenth century who combined Ḥanafī theological views prevalent in Balkh with the Sufi intellectual discourse drawn from figures such as Abū Naṣr al-Sarrāj (d. 378/988), rather than the general asceticism that had been dominant in Transoxiana. Al-Kalabadhī’s book Kitāb altaʿarruf li-madhhab ahl al-taṣawwuf (‘The Book Introducing the School of the Sufis’) was an important text for introducing these ideas to a wider audience, though its contents appear to be drawn more from literary sources than direct teaching (Karamustafa, 2007, p. 69). A final significant figure in formative Ḥanafī theology was Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭaḥāwī (d. 321/933) who switched over to the school from a family in Upper Egypt prominently associated with the juristic teaching of al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820). His most prominent intellectual specialisation was in jurisprudence and Hadith, rather than kalām, but he wrote a popular creedal text, known as Al-ʿAqīdat al-Ṭahāwiyya aiming to present the agreed essentials of Sunnī belief. The basic stance adopted in the creed is a defence of the acceptability of the positions held by the founding Ḥanafī figures of Abū Ḥanīfa, Abū Yūsuf al-Qāḍī (d. 182/798) and Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī (d. 189/815) with a presentation that would also be largely acceptable to the Ahl al-Ḥadīth. While some of alṬaḥāwī’s positions reflect closely the Murjīʿism of earlier Ḥanafism, such as excluding actions from the definition of faith (al-Ṭaḥāwī, Matn al-aqīdat al-Ṭaḥāwiyya, p. 21), others are firmly in line with traditionalist thinking, for instance, he refrains from explicitly stating that the Arabic form of the Qur’an is created as upheld by al-Māturīdī (al-Ṭaḥāwī, Matn alaqīdat al-Ṭaḥāwiyya, pp. 12-13). By stopping short of presenting a theological system, alṬaḥāwī’s creed was able to garner broad support from the major Sunnī schools, each interpreting the concise statements according to its own presuppositions. PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT 13. Tendencies in classical theology (fifth/eleventh to ninth/fifteenth centuries) In the period of classical Muslim theology, the disparate tendencies in the formative period coalesce into distinct school traditions that develop through the transmission and refinement of literary texts. These schools become ideologically central as identity markers in Muslim intellectual life, such that almost all notable figures can be considered to have belonged to one of them. They are also somewhat flexible, though less so than theological traditions in the formative period, and are liable to be pulled in the direction of the new thinking generated by their given luminaries. Overall, the classical period leads to a process of theological sorting: the boundary points between the various schools are either worn away and it is decided that a given disagreement is more or less verbal (this is relatively common within the broader groupings of Sunnism and Shīʿism), or the differences remain stark, but become well known, even passé. 14. Classical Ashʿarī theology Ashʿarism emerges as one of the dominant theological schools of Sunnism, with an array of scholars in all fields claiming allegiance to it. This is especially true of figures associated with the Shāfiʿī and Mālikī schools of thought across Africa, Andalusia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Khurasan. In terms of its intellectual development, the first notable theologians are Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī (d. 404/1013) who wrote the influential text Kitāb al-tamḥīd (‘The Book of Preliminaries’), Ibn Fūrak (d. 406/1015) who discussed the views of Ashʿarī and other earlier theologians, and al-Isfaraʿīnī (d. 418/1027) who is quoted prominently in later works. All three were students of al-Ashʿarī’s disciples. They considerably developed the theoretical constructs and implications of al-Ashʿarī’s ideas, paving the way for the major intervention of Abu Maʿālī al-Juwaynī (d. 478/1085) who set out the definitive early classical Ashʿarī positions in his lengthy book Al-Shāmil fī uṣūl al-dīn (‘Encompassing the Foundations of Religion’). Al-Juwaynī was also significant, along with his Māturīdī contemporary Abū Yusr alBazdawī (d. 493/1099), for introducing into kalām certain conceptions of Ibn Sīnā, or Avicenna (d. 428/1037), such as linking God’s eternality with His necessity of existence (Wisnovsky, 2004, pp. 91-95). It was al-Juwaynī’s student Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), possibly the most famous of all Ashʿarīs, who is often seen as the beginning of a major turning point involving the explicit entry of the methods of Avicennan falsafa (philosophy), including syllogistic logic, into the kalām enterprise. Al-Ghazālī is famous for providing a scathing critique of Ibn Sīnā in his Tahāfut al-falāsifa (‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’), singling out three positions both as outright disbelief and not following from their stated premises: the eternity of the world, God only knowing universals, and the immateriality of the afterlife (Leaman, 2008, pp. 77-78). Ironically, however, this gave the impression that if one was to steer clear of these problematic issues, the use of falsafa was acceptable. Later Ashʿarīs, such as Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), thus introduced arguments based on demonstration (burhān), rather than merely dialectic (jadal), into their theological arsenal (Shihadeh, 2005, pp. 149-150, 164). Al-Rāzī’s synthesis of Ashʿarī kalām and falsafa into an Islamic philosophical theology made him a key interlocutor for other schools of all persuasions and the major exemplar followed by following Ashʿarī theologians, such as ʿAḍuḍ al-Dīn al-Ījī (d. 756/1356), author of al-Mawāqif (‘The Perspectives’). 15. Classical Māturīdī theology PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT The Māturīdīs are sometimes known simply as Ḥanafīs due to the school’s development within an almost exclusively Ḥanafī milieu and the fact that almost all adherents to its theological doctrines have followed the juristic school. It also reflects the fact that at least in the early classical period, the eponym Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī was the most prominent and important representative of Samarqandī Ḥanafī thinking, rather than a sole ‘founder’ (Rudolph, 2015, pp. 319-323). Thus, one of the next important figures after al-Māturīdī, the aforementioned Abū Yusr al-Bazdawī, wrote a book called Uṣūl al-dīn (‘The Foundations of Religion’) that begins by summarising which texts of other groups an adherent of ‘Ahl alSunna wa-l-Jamāʿa’, of whom al-Māturīdī was ‘one of the leaders’, could profitably read (alBazdawī, Uṣūl al-dīn, pp. 13-14). The central figure in classical Māturīdī theology was Abū al-Muʿīn al-Nasafī (d. 508/1114), a contemporary of al-Ghazālī. In his works such as Baḥr al-kalām (‘The Ocean of Theology’) and especially his magnum opus Tabṣirat al-adilla (‘Enlightenment of the Proofs’), he thoroughly develops the thought of al-Māturīdī, arguing against other theological schools including the views of the later Muʿtazila and the Ashʿarī generation of al-Bāqillānī. The move to a full Avicennan philosophical theology seems to have come slightly later and more gradually to the Māturīdīs than to the Ashʿarīs. Although Shams al-Dīn al-Samarqandī (d. 690/1291) in his Al-Ṣaḥāʾif al-ilāḥiyya (‘Divine Scrolls’) embraces the new style of kalām, the Sharḥ al-umda (‘Commentary of the Support’) of Abū al-Barakāt al-Nasafī (d. 711/1311) from the same period retains the organisation of the earlier dialectically focused works of Māturīdī kalām. Another figure embracing the new direction was Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa al-Maḥbūbī (d. 747/1348), who is known to have taught Avicenna’s works and wrote a book Taʿdīl al-ʿulūm (‘Equalising the Sciences’), consisting of sections on logic, kalām and astronomy (Dallal, 1995, pp. 8-10). The shared project of philosophical theology reflects a growing attempt from the Mamlūk period onwards to bring the Māturīdīs and the Ashʿarīs together as two sides of the same Sunnī theological coin (Rudolph, 2015, pp. 9-11). This is famously represented in the judgement of the Ashʿarī Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 771/1370) that between the Ashʿarīs and Māturīdīs (which he calls Ḥanafīs) there are only differences in thirteen questions: six are meaningful, the rest are verbal. He also wrote a Nūniyya, a popular form of poem with each line ending in the letter nūn, which summarised – and minimised – the differences between the two schools of thought (Rudolph, 2015, pp. 8-9). This attitude is reflected around the same time in the commentary by Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftazānī (d. 793/1390) upon the creedal text of an earlier Māturīdī Abū Ḥafṣ al-Nasafī (d. 537/1142) entitled Sharḥ aqāʾid al-Nasafiyya. Al-Taftazānī adopts a syncretic position between the two schools in this text, which has been a dominant Sunnī pedagogical work ever since (Madelung, 2000, Al-Taftazānī). 16. Classical Ḥanbalī theology Like Ḥanafī, the term Ḥanbalī can denote both a juristic and theological affiliation. In the classical period, the traditionalist phenomenon of the Ahl al-Ḥadīth became increasingly channelled through adherents to the legacy of Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, which was centred in Baghdad. While figures such as al-Barbahārī had doubled down on a fideist approach to the core Muslim creed, the fifth/eleventh century saw some notable Ḥanbalīs adopt kalām methods in defence of traditionalist positions. The first credited with this approach is Abū Yaʿlā (d. 458/1066) who wrote Kitāb al-Muʿtamad (‘The Book of Reliance’), which dealt with epistemological and theological issues in a format familiar from earlier Muʿtazilī and Ashʿarī works (Laoust, 1986; Hoover, 2007, p. 19). This was extended by his student Ibn ʿAqīl (d. 513/1119) who attended the study circles of Muʿtazilī thinkers and gave written support for some of their doctrines, which he later publicly recanted (Makdisi, 1986, Ibn PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT ʿAqīl). His openness to enquiry and voluminous writing became a major resource for subsequent Ḥanbalīs with sympathy for theology, such as Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201) who adopted some of his ideas (Hoover, 2007, p. 19). He was later harshly censured by Ibn Qudāma al-Maqdisī (d. 620/1223) who turned back to the anti-kalām position of the early period (Bell, 1979, p. 54). Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) is a seminal figure in the development of classical Ḥanbalī theology. He upheld a revivalist position on what he saw as the early creed, but did not think that a conservative traditionalist stance was enough to defend it against the Avicennan-tinged philosophical theology of his age. Thus, he developed a radically new approach to theology – a common-sense, even egalitarian, rationality that could uphold scriptural statements as literally true, and defend them against attack from other schools of thought (Hoover, 2007, p. 22; Anjum, 2012, p. 214). He also attempted to refute the dominant theological use of syllogistic logic, though it appears that here he may have mischaracterised some of the issues at stake, and in any case was mainly ignored by the principal proponents at the time (El-Rouayheb, 2016, pp. 418-422). Ibn Taymiyya’s general programme was continued by his student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350) and has profoundly affected that section of Ḥanbalism willing to enter into theological discussion. 17. Classical Shīʿī theology Classical Shīʿī theology in its Zaydī and Imāmī manifestations is shaped by a consolidation of the Muʿtazilī approaches that had already entered into both traditions during the formative period. The adoption was most complete for the Zaydīs who had interacted with Muʿtazilism for longer and had found its theological doctrines to be a good fit. A number of Khurāsānī Zaydī theologians studied with the Bahshamī Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Jabbār (d. 415/1025) after he moved to Rayy, including Abū al-Qāsim al-Bustī (d. c. fifth/eleventh century) who apparently engaged in a debate with the Ashʿarī Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī, and Mankdīm Shashdīw (d. ca. 425/1034) who wrote a popular paraphrastic commentary on ʿAbd alJabbār’s Uṣūl al-khamsa (‘Five Principles’) (Ansari, 2016, pp. 186-187). The main adjustment that such authors would make to core Muʿtazilī positions was the replacement, or addition, of the section on imamate with a discussion in line with Zaydī doctrine (Ansari, 2016, p. 191). Later Yemenī Zaydīs continued this trend. Al-Ḥusayn b. Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad (d. 662/1263-4) wrote both an influential theological work and a short creed with Bahshamī influences. Al-Qāsim al-Muḥallī, who lived in the eighth/fourteenth century, wrote a supercommentary on Shashdīw’s commentary of ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s work that paid special focus to foundational questions and the divine attributes, as well as debating alternative Zaydī and non-Zaydī opinions (Ansari, Schmidtke and Thiele, 2016, p. 483). In the case of the Imāmīs, the classical period was inaugurated by Major Occultation in 329/940, which led to the reliance on fallible religious scholars for their theological scholarship. The key figure was al-Shaykh al-Mufīd (d. 413/1022) of Baghdad who developed a critical synthesis of the Muʿtazilism of al-Kaʿbī with Imāmī theological notions on such subjects as the imamate and eschatology (Schimdtke and Ansari, 2016, p. 201). Important students of al-Shaykh al-Mufīd included al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā (d. 436/1044), who unlike his teacher adopted Bahshamī positions, and al-Shaykh al-Tūsī (d. 460/1067), both of whom argued against more traditionalist theological ideas within Imāmism (Rizvi, 2008, p. 92). Similar in some respects to other theological schools, the later classical tradition articulated a fully fledged philosophical theology incorporating Avicennan themes. Naṣīr alDīn al-Tūsī (d. 672/1274) utilised the ideas of Abū al-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī (d. 436/1044), a student of Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Jabbār who had rejected key Bahshamī doctrines, to make his own Avicennan synthesis that both built upon and responded to the thought of Fakhr al-Dīn al- PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT Rāzī (Pourjavady and Schmidtke, 2016, p. 457). Al-Tūsī’s school became the dominant strand of Imāmī thinking for the remainder of the classical period, with significant figures including his student al-ʿAllāma al-Hillī (d. 726/1325) and al-Hillī’s son Fakhr alMuḥaqqiqīn Muḥammad (d. 771/1369) who became theologians at the Ilkhan court in Northwest Iran (Pourjavady and Schmidtke, 2016, p. 458). Unlike the Zaydī and Imāmī adoption of Muʿtazilism, the Ismāʿīlī tradition utilised Neoplatonism to develop a radical ‘anti-kalām’ position. With a move harking back in some respects to Jahm b. Ṣafwān, Ismāʿīlī thinkers such as Ḥāmid al-Dīn al-Kirmānī (d. 411/1020) argue that God’s transcendence of, and dissimilarity to, the created realm means that God cannot be attributed with properties that can also be applied to human beings, such as knowing and willing. This was not, however, a straightforward denial of these attributes, but the position that human language is unable to refer to God. As such outward expressions are to be found in the Qur’an, it was necessary to accompany this position with the esoteric doctrine that the inner meaning of scriptural language could only be provided by the divinely inspired Ismāʿīlī imam. (De Smet, 2016, pp. 313-316). An example of Ismāʿīlī esoteric interpretation, which became increasingly impacted by Neoplatonic ideas in the classical period, is that apparent scriptural references to divine attributes actually refer to the first Intellect, which God creates, rather than emanates as in the thought of Plotinus (d. 270 CE) and al-Fārābī (d. 339/950-1) (De Smet, 2016, p. 315). 18. Classical Ibāḍī theology Within the classical period, the Ibāḍī tradition continued to refine its distinctive theological synthesis, which included an approach to divine transcendence similar to Muʿtazilism, a doctrine of kasb and a strong emphasis on its own form of imamate drawing on its softKhārijī roots. Significant figures include Abū al-Rabīʿ Sulaymān b. Yakhlaf (d. 471/1078-9), his student Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad (d. 504/1111) and Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf b. Ibrāhīm alWārjilānī (d. 570/1175), author of Kitāb al-dalīl wa-l-burhān (‘The Book of Evidence and Proof’). A contemporary from the same Algerian town of Wargla (Ouargla), Abū ʿAmmār Yūsuf b. Ismāʿīl al-Wārjilānī (d. before 570/1175), is considered to be the most important of the classical Ibāḍī theologians. He wrote a detailed theological text entitled Kitāb al-mūjaz fī taḥṣīl al-suʾāl wa-takhlīṣ al-maqāl fī al-radd ʿalā ahl al-khilāf (‘The Summary in Acquiring the Question and Summarising the Doctrine in Refuting the People of Difference’). Later on, Ismāʿīl b. Mūsa al-Jaytalī (d. 750/1349) wrote several theological works, including a creedal text and a commentary (Hoffman, 2012, pp. 22-23). 19. Classical Sufi theology The classical Sufi tradition continued to generate diverse theological articulations based on a defence of its orthodoxy or as an attempt to bring rational thought into tandem with mystical experience. An example of the former is Abū al-Qāsim al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072) who mixed Ashʿarī creedal positions with his discussion of Sufi topics (Nguyen, 2016, p. 328). One of the most influential of the latter was Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) who generated an independent theological school of thought. His core idea, which later became known as waḥdat al-wujūd (oneness of being), was that the created world was an immanent manifestation of God as the only true existent. This attracted a rich afterlife in the works of later ‘Akbarians’, as well as harsh censure by figures such as Ibn Taymiyya, al-Taftazānī and others for blurring the line between Creator and creation (Nguyen, 2016, pp. 332-333). PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT 20. Epistemology and ontology The classical kalām tradition usually upheld a form of epistemological foundationalism and ontological atomism, which was widely agreed between the various schools. Treatises would typically begin by establishing how facts about the world, and God, could be known, and what those facts were. The older version of this model was the scheme famously presented in Aqāʾid al-Nasafiyya and its many commentaries and supercommentaries. Knowledge is to be grounded in three indubitable sources: sound senses, truthful reports and the mind, by which a priori truths were meant (al-Taftazānī, Sharḥ aqīdat al-Nasafiyya, 1998, pp. 15-25). The world was understood as originated from nothing (muḥdath), the equivalent of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo in the Latin Christian tradition. It was analysed as having two fundamental aspects: concrete particulars (aʿyān), which can exist on their own, and accidents (aʿrāḍ), which must inhere within these more substantial entities. Worldly entities within the former category were bodies (ajsām), which were composed of substances (jawāhīr), usually understood to be indivisible atoms (al-Taftazānī, Sharḥ aqīdat al-Nasafiyya, 1998, pp. 2532). These concepts were brought together to produce the famous kalām cosmological argument for the existence of a Creator, first propounded by the Muʿtazilī Abū Hudhayl: 1) We observe that accidental qualities necessarily inhere within bodies and come to exist, so all bodies are generated 2) The universe is made up of bodies, so it is originated from nothing (muḥdath) 3) Therefore, it must have an originator (muḥdith) (See Davidson, 1987, p. 134). There must be a final appeal to a supreme power at the end of the chain of cause and effect, as otherwise the spectre is raised of the incoherence of an infinite regress (tasalsul) (alTaftazānī, Sharḥ aqīdat al-Nasafiyya, 1998, pp. 32-33). Many classical Muslim theologians, from about the time of al-Juwaynī onwards, went on to argue that as God must be understood as eternal, he is necessarily existent (wājib al-wujūd), an ontological argument using a conceptual framework borrowed from Avicenna (Wisnovsky, 2004, pp. 90-91). With the increasing adoption of such Avicennan philosophical tools, Muslim theology began to encompass more technical terminology and argument. The brief preludes of epistemology and ontology became often replaced with lengthy preliminary discussions of alumūr al-ʿāmma (universal matters), including notions of logic and necessity, which were designed to lay the foundations for the demonstrative arguments to follow (Walbridge, 2011, pp. 117-119). 21. Divine attributes Having proved the existence of a Creator to their satisfaction, the classical theologians would go on to discuss the divine attributes, attempting to establish a balance between reason and scripture, as well as transcendence and immanence. There was broad agreement on the essentials of so-called negative attributes (ṣifāt salbiyya), based on key Qur’anic texts, such as Q. 112:1-4: ‘Say “He is God, singular. God, eternally besought by all. He does not beget, nor was He begotten. And there is nothing at all like him.”’ They thus understood that God is single and unitary; self-subsisting; without beginning or end; and dissimilar to all things (ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Al-Uṣūl al-khamsa, pp. 67-69). To show that there must be a single unitary God they utilised an argument known as mutual nullification (tamānuʿ) associated with Q. 21:22, ‘If there were in [the heavens and earth] gods beside God, the [heavens and earth] would be corrupted.’ This takes the form of a reductio ad absurdum: 1) Assume there could be two omnipotent, freely willing, gods. 2) It is possible god A wants to give life to a body, but god B wants it to be dead. 3) If the body PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT lives, then god B is not omnipotent, and vice versa. 4) Therefore, the initial premise is false (al-Bāqillānī, Kitāb al-tamhīd, p. 25). The main point of disagreement over God’s properties among the different classical theological schools turns on the scripturally known personal or essential attributes (ṣifāt aldhāt), the attributes of action (ṣifāt al-fiʿl), and ambiguous (mutashabih) ones. The Ashʿarīs counted seven essential, and therefore eternal, attributes: life, power, will, knowledge, sight, hearing and speech (al-Bāqillānī, Kitāb al-tamhīd, 1957, pp. 28-29). These attributes were understood as established in the divine essence, neither identical to, or other than, it. Under the Ashʿarī scheme, God’s actions, such as the origination of a given existent, should be explained as the operation of His knowledge, will and power. The act of creation (takwīn) was thus nothing more than the association of the object of creation (mukawwan) with the divine will at the point in which it is brought into being (al-Rāzī, Muḥaṣṣal, p. 186). The Māturīdīs took a similar approach to the Ashʿarīs, but added an additional attribute of ex nihilo creativity (takwīn) under which they placed God’s actions within the created order. This meant that they treated all divine actions as occurring timelessly, though having their effects within time (al-Bazdawī, Uṣūl al-dīn, 2005, pp. 79-80). Though the Muʿtazila faded as an independent theological school within the classical period, its various theological doctrines concerning the divine attributes remained influential with non-Sunnī groups. The particular strand of Muʿtazilī tradition adopted by any given figure played a large role in determining their stance in this area of theology. Zaydīs and Imāmīs tended to follow the later Bahshamī Muʿtazilī position. They considered the divine essence as eternally attributed with the ṣifāt al-dhāt, such that God is ‘willing’ (qādiran) and ‘knowing’ (ʿāliman) and so on, without the affirmation of substantive attributes of will and knowledge (al-Raṣṣāṣ, Al-Khulāṣat al-nāfiʿa, p. 83). Some classical Ibāḍīs followed instead an approach of negative theology to the divine attributes, which recalls the position adopted by Ḍirār b. ʿAmr and some of the early Muʿtazila: God is powerful (qādir), for instance, as the divine essence is not incapable and nothing can incapacitate it (al-Wārjilānī, Kitāb al-dalīl wa-l-burhān, p. 65). Two issues pertaining to divine attributes stand out as particularly controversial in intra-Muslim debate: the status of God’s speech in the form of the Qur’an, and certain ambiguous (mutashabih) expressions of divine attributes in the Qur’an and Hadith that if read literally could be considered anthropomorphic. All classical Muslim theologians agreed that the Qur’an is the speech of God (kalām allāh). However, they differed on what this means. The Muʿtazila, classical Shīʿa and Ibāḍīs understand the Qur’an to be entirely identified with God’s created speech, while at the other end of the spectrum, Ḥanbalīs usually followed a teaching from Ibn Ḥanbal that the Qur’an was uncreated speech, even in its recited form (Ibn ʿAqīl, Juzʾ fī al-uṣūl, pp. 66-67). The Māturidīs and Ashʿarīs both distinguished between the created Arabic ‘uttered speech (kalām lisānī)’ of the Qur’an encountered within the world and its correlate in God’s eternal ‘personal speech (kalām nafsī)’. The two schools of thought differed over a further subtlety with implications for the doctrine of Qur’anic inimitability. Māturīdīs, such as Abū Muʿīn al-Nasafī, referred to the Arabic Qur’an as a hikāya (telling) of the divine speech. This implied that as long as its meaning is preserved, its translation into another language like Persian is also to be considered God’s inimitable speech (Zadeh, 2012, pp. 289-293). Ashʿarīs, such as al-Rāzī, drawing on the linguistic work of ʿAbd al-Qāhir alJurjānī (d. 471/1078), understood the meaning of the divine speech, and the challenge to match it, to be uniquely tied to the particular Arabic words revealed to the Prophet Muḥammad (Zadeh, 2012, pp. 242-245). Qur’anic verses such as Q. 20:5: ‘The Merciful ascended the throne (al-raḥmān ʿalā al-ʿarsh istawā)’ and other ambiguous statements were also hotly debated in the classical milieu. More traditionalist Ḥanbalīs would adopt the fideist method of taking them as they PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT were but adding the caveat ‘without modality (bi-lā kayfa)’ to indicate that their nature was not known (Abrahamov, 1995, pp. 365-367). This could extend to affirming God laughing until He shows His teeth, which is mentioned in a hadith (Hoover, 2016, p. 631). Ashʿarīs and Māturīdīs typically took a similar position to each other on the mutashabih attributes in the classical period and would either consign both their meaning and modality to God, or interpret them figuratively, depending on the authority of the source text and the individual linguistic context. Those with theological doctrines on the divine attributes close to the Muʿtazila, such as the Shīʿa and Ibāḍīs, would instead provide a figurative interpretation. 22. Prophecy After discussing the nature of God, Muslim theologians would turn their attention to the question of prophecy. This reflects the basic form of the testification of faith (shahāda): ‘There is no god except God and Muḥammad is the Messenger of God (lā ilāha illā allāh wamuḥammadun rasūlu allāh)’. In the classical period, a series of propositions already present rhetorically in the Qur’an, were formalised as a proof for the truthfulness of the Prophet Muḥammad, which could be used to establish the veracity of the entirety of the religion. Once it was established that the world had a knowing, powerful and willing creator (see §20 and §21), then the argument would be made that: 1) prophecy and miracles are possible 2) the actuality of miracles indicates the truthfulness of the claimant to prophecy 3) Muḥammad claimed to be a prophet and performed miracles (Heer, 2013, p. 2). This argument demanded attention to the affirmation of the Prophet’s miracles, of which the inimitability of the Qur’an was considered by far the most important. Various aspects were highlighted for attention, though within the classical period greatest stress was placed on two aspects of Qur’anic inimitability: its Arabic eloquence and knowledge about the unseen world (al-Nasafī, Bahr al-kalām, p. 202). The former ‘linguistic’ miracle was most popular with Ashʿarī theologians, such as al-Bāqillānī who drew attention to its sui generis nature, and ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī who discussed the superiority of the Qur’an to Arabic poetry in the light of Arabic rhetoric (Vasalou, 2002, pp. 34-41). Focus on the inimitability of the Qur’anic contents was a popular contention of Ḥanafī jurists and theologians, as arguing that the Qur’anic challenge to ‘produce its like’ should not be restricted to Arabic speakers alone fitted well with their theological position on the translatability of the divine message (Zadeh, 2012, p. 113). Supplementary to the above argument was the finality of the Prophet Muḥammad’s prophecy, as proven from Q. 33:40: ‘Muhammad is not the father of any of your men, but the Messenger of God and seal of the prophets.’ Muslim theologians thus hold that any subsequent claimant to prophecy is automatically rejected (al-Nasafī, Bahr al-kalām, p. 274). 23. Human faith and action Classical theologians staked out well-defined positions on a cluster of issues around faith (īmān), which reflected much more intense polemics in the formative period. Most schools of thought included the performance of deeds within the basic definition of faith and argued that it increased and decreased as a result, while Māturīdīs followed the view of the earlier Ḥanafīs, and before them the Murjīʿa, in taking the opposite view (Gardet, 1986, Īmān). On the question of human action and the divine decree, Ashʿarīs held to the position of kasb, in which God pre-ordains human actions on the basis of His will and provides power at the moment of the act, yet humanity ‘acquires’ the acts in question. The elucidation of this ‘acquisition’ was considered a very difficult proposition, leading to the proverbial saying ‘more subtle than al-Ashʿarī’s acquisition (adaqq min kasb al-ashʿarī)’, with opponents PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT arguing it amounted to a prescriptive view of fate with a merely psychological attribution to the actor (Gardet, 1997, Kasb). Ibāḍīs have a similar view, which predated the Ashʿarīs (Madelung, 2016, pp. 247-248). Māturīdīs typically worked with a more descriptive model of fate based on selection (ikhtiyār), in which God creates a power by which the human agent selects from alternatives (al-Nasafī, Bahr al-kalām, p. 145-146). The Shīʿa upheld the Muʿtazilī position that human actions were not from God, in order – as they saw it – to preserve human freedom and divine justice (al-Raṣṣāṣ, Al-Khulāṣat al-nāfiʿa, p. 123; Madelung, 1979, Imāmism and Muʿtazilite Theology, p. 23). A trace of the early importance of political debates in the kalām tradition is retained in later theological works by the inclusion, usually near the end, of a discussion of who may validly hold the caliphate. The official position of Sunnī manuals was that it should be a member of the tribe of Quraysh, relying on the hadith ‘The leaders are from Quraysh’, and specifying a number of desirable secondary qualities (al-Taftazānī, Sharḥ aqīdat alNasafiyya, pp. 119-121). This issue was particularly important for non-Sunnīs, for whom the question had often been a key reason for their initial identity formation. For Zaydīs, the leader of the community must be a descendant of the sons of ʿAlī, al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn, who possesses a number of secondary qualities, such as knowledge, piety and bravery, and then calls to others to establish a new rule in the face of oppressors (al-Raṣṣāṣ, Al-Khulāṣat al-nāfiʿa, pp. 216, 221, 227). For Imāmīs, there must always be an inerrant imam to carry the legacy of prophecy from the direct lineage of ʿAlī. The twelfth imam, Muḥammad b. alḤasan al-ʿAskarī is considered to be in occultation from 329/941, from which he will reemerge as the Mahdī at the end of time (al-Shaykh al-Mufīd, n.d., pp. 43-44). The question of imamate was also central in Ibāḍī theology, which had long made individual qualities, and not lineage, the basis of qualification. Ibāḍīs developed a distinctive theory of different types of leadership suitable to different political and social contexts. This included the hidden imamate, in a situation of political oppression and weakness; the activist imamate, possible when at least forty men pledge to die for the cause; the emergency appointment of a leader in the face of an enemy; and the appointment of one after enemies have been defeated, but before stability has been ensured (Hoffman, 2015, p. 303). 24. Eschatology The question of divine reward and punishment was discussed avidly in connection to beliefs about the Hereafter. Sunnīs held that God is at liberty to forgive any unrepented sin short of associating partners with Him (shirk) (al-Taftazānī, Sharḥ aqīdat al-Nasafiyya, pp. 89-90). Shīʿa theologians differed on this question depending on the closeness of their adherence to Muʿtazilism. Many Imāmīs held a position close to the Sunnīs in rejecting the unconditional punishment of the unrepented grave sinner (al-Ṭūṣī, Tajrīd al-aqāʾid, p. 155), while Zaydīs tended to follow the contrary Muʿtazilī view, shared with the Ibāḍīs, that such a person was to be eternally punished (al-Raṣṣāṣ, Al-Khulāṣat al-nāfiʿa, p. 177; Hoffman, 2015, p. 301). The position taken on this question would also impact whether the intercession (shafāʿa) of the Prophet Muḥammad, or others, was accepted for the grave sinner. Positive eschatological doctrines were generally affirmed on the basis of tradition, as the details of the Hereafter were considered beyond rational human understanding, though sometimes enquiry was used to negate the literal meaning of scriptural statements. A good example of this is the question of the Beautific Vision (al-ruʾya), which recalls the debates over the divine attributes. The Muʿtazila and those from the Shīʿa and Ibāḍīs who followed their position on divine transcendence interpreted it in a figurative manner (al-Raṣṣāṣ, AlKhulāṣat al-nāfiʿa, p. 99; Hoffman, 2015, 301), while Ashʿarīs and Māturīdīs stressed that it PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT was a real sight, but without the corporeal characteristics of place, direction or distance (alTaftazānī, Sharḥ aqīdat al-Nasafiyya, pp. 60-63). Bibliography and further reading ʿAbd al-Jabbār b. Aḥmad. (1998). Al-Uṣūl al-khamsa, ed. Fayṣal Badīr ʿAwn. Kuwait: AlJāmiʿat al-Kuwayt. Abdel Haleem, M. A. S. 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