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Three Creeds / ʿAqīdah
One of the recognised theological methodologies of ʾAhlu-s-Sunnah wa l-Jamāʿah, articulated and systematised by ʾAbū-l-Ḥasan al-ʾAs͟hʿarī رحمه الله in defence of the creed of the Salaf and the transmitted foundations of ʾIslām.
Founder
ʾAbū-l-Ḥasan al-ʾAs͟hʿarī (d. 324 AH)
Historical Setting
Baṣrah and the wider debates of the 3rd-4th century AH
Historic Reach
ʿIrāq, Persia, the Levant, North Africa, and al-Andalus
Madhhab Affiliation
Primarily Shāfiʿī and Mālikī, with adoption among many Ḥanafīs and some Ḥanbalīs
Entry sections
Choose an area: overview, methodology, attributes, texts, history, or legacy.
Al-ʾAs͟hʿariyyah
Core texts and the later scholars who carried the school.
The formative corpus and the scholars who carried it
From al-ʾAs͟hʿarī’s surviving treatises to the syntheses of al-Juwaynī and al-Ghazālī.
In the Name of Allāh, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.
The history of early ʾAs͟hʿarism cannot be reconstructed from one authorised textbook. Its founder reportedly wrote well over one hundred works, most of which have disappeared. Several major works of Ibn Fūrak, al-Isfarāʾīnī, and al-Bāqillānī are also lost or survive only in fragments. What later generations called “the school of al-ʾAs͟hʿarī” was therefore transmitted through a layered archive: the founder’s extant books, reports preserved by pupils, systematic reconstructions by early disciples, independent manuals that revised the inherited doctrine, polemical quotations, ḥadīth compilations, legal-theological teaching networks, and commentaries written far from the school’s original centres.1
This source situation requires two forms of fidelity. The first is doctrinal fidelity: an early authority should not be made to teach a formulation that belongs only to a later period. The second is textual fidelity: a title attributed to a scholar does not guarantee that every printed recension represents the author’s text without alteration. The safest reconstruction compares independent witnesses, dates works within an author’s career where possible, distinguishes direct quotation from later paraphrase, and allows a scholar to revise his own conclusions.
Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī’s Maqālāt al-Islāmiyyīn is among the most important surviving maps of early Muslim theological disagreement. It records the positions and subdivisions of the Khawārij, Shīʿah, Muʿtazilah, Murjiʾah, traditionalists, and many smaller currents. Its value lies not only in the quantity of information preserved but in the author’s effort—imperfect yet unusually disciplined for a polemical age—to report what groups claimed before judging them. The work reflects al-ʾAs͟hʿarī’s training inside Basran kalām and preserves doctrines otherwise known only through hostile fragments.2
The Maqālāt is not a polished Ashʿarī creed arranged according to the later school’s chapters. Some portions appear to derive from different stages or documentary layers, and the relationship between its descriptive and explicitly doctrinal passages remains a subject of study. It is nevertheless indispensable for understanding the questions to which al-ʾAs͟hʿarī responded: the meaning of unity and justice, the reality of the attributes, divine speech, human acts, faith, prophecy, the imamate, and the constitution of the created world.
The most important surviving compact presentation of al-ʾAs͟hʿarī’s constructive theology is Kitāb al-Lumaʿ fī-r-Radd ʿalā Ahl az-Zaygh wa-l-Bidaʿ. It argues for the existence and unity of Allāh, the divine attributes, the uncreated speech, the vision of Allāh, divine creation of human acts, acquisition, and related doctrines through objection and reply. Its form reveals the founder as a practising theologian rather than merely the symbol of a later school: scriptural proof and rational demonstration are interwoven, rival premises are tested, and consequences are drawn with technical precision.3
The Lumaʿ became an anchor of transmission. Ibn Fūrak wrote a commentary on it that is no longer extant. Al-Bāqillānī also produced a commentary, likewise lost. Al-Juwaynī’s vast ash-Shāmil was composed as a supercommentary drawing upon this inherited exegetical tradition. The chain is historically important even where the intermediate books are missing, because later works preserve arguments and divisions that probably originated in those teaching layers.
The brief treatise commonly known as al-Ḥathth ʿalā al-Baḥth or Risālah fī Istiḥsān al-Khawḍ fī ʿIlm al-Kalām answers those who condemn every use of theological reasoning as an innovation. Its argument is not that every Muslim must master technical disputation. It is that the Qurʾān itself reasons from creation, exposes contradiction, asks opponents for proof, and teaches principles from which new questions may be answered. The absence of later technical vocabulary from the first generation does not make the realities signified by that vocabulary unlawful.4
Richard M. Frank’s close study defended the treatise’s relationship to al-ʾAs͟hʿarī’s thought and showed why it matters for understanding his programme. It prevents a reconstruction in which the founder supposedly abandoned rational theology altogether. Whatever his increasing proximity to the transmitted Sunnī creed, al-ʾAs͟hʿarī continued to regard disciplined reasoning as a legitimate instrument of its defence.
Al-ʾIbānah presents a confession aligned with the transmitted doctrines associated with ʾAḥmad ibn Ḥanbal رحمه الله: the Qurʾān is uncreated, the believers will see Allāh, divine decree encompasses all events, and the revealed reports are not to be emptied of truth. It has consequently occupied a prominent place in debates over al-ʾAs͟hʿarī’s final position.5
The work should be used with textual and historical care. Its manuscript and printed transmission contains variation; isolated phrases cannot safely bear an entire theory of three successive doctrinal conversions; and its concise confessional genre does not cancel the analytic teaching found in the Lumaʿ or preserved by Ibn Fūrak. The sound method is comparative: doctrines shared across independent early witnesses deserve greater confidence, while disputed wording is identified as such rather than weaponised as an effortless solution to complex chronology.
The Risālah ilā Ahl ath-Thaghr bi-Bāb al-Abwāb offers a broad account of Sunnī principles and the obligation of reflection, though its attribution and textual history have received critical discussion. Works on faith, predestination, the divine attributes, the created world, prophecy, the imamate, and rebuttals of particular sects are known from catalogues and quotations even when the books themselves are lost. The founder’s corpus was therefore far broader than the handful of titles that modern readers most often encounter.6
The generation immediately after al-ʾAs͟hʿarī is less visible than the celebrated consolidators who followed it. Among the important transmitters were ʾAbū-l-Ḥasan al-Bāhilī and ʾAbū ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Mujāhid. Al-Bāhilī taught Ibn Fūrak, ʾAbū ʾIsḥāq al-Isfarāʾīnī, and al-Bāqillānī, thereby linking three of the school’s most influential systematisers to the founder’s circle. Pupils from Nīsābūr also carried al-ʾAs͟hʿarī’s teaching eastward, laying foundations for a Khurāsānian community before that region became the school’s most fertile centre.7
Oral instruction mattered as much as possession of a book. A teacher supplied definitions, explained compressed arguments, transmitted an author’s later preference, distinguished an illustrative proof from a binding doctrine, and answered objections not preserved in the original text. The early school’s “books” must therefore be understood as components of study circles rather than self-interpreting objects.
ʾAbū Bakr Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan Ibn Fūrak رحمه الله (d. 406 AH) is the single most important mediator between al-ʾAs͟hʿarī and later scholarship. Trained in Iraq and associated with al-Bāhilī, he later taught in Rayy and Nīsābūr, where a madrasa was established for him. His significance lies not merely in repeating the founder’s conclusions but in organising them into a teachable system and applying their principles to new textual and polemical problems.8
The Mujarrad is the principal second-hand source for al-ʾAs͟hʿarī’s theology. Ibn Fūrak drew upon roughly thirty works available to him, extracting explicit statements and, at times, deriving answers that he judged to follow from the founder’s principles. This makes the book extraordinarily valuable but not identical to a verbatim anthology. A modern reader must distinguish direct attribution, synthesis, and principled inference. The text often permits reconstruction of doctrines contained in lost works, while also revealing how a major disciple understood the internal coherence of the school.9
The Mujarrad ranges across epistemology, the created world, divine unity and attributes, speech, will, power, prophecy, human action, faith, and eschatology. It preserves subtleties that disappear in short creeds, including variant answers and technical distinctions. Because most of al-ʾAs͟hʿarī’s corpus is lost, no serious account of the founder can dispense with it.
Ibn Fūrak’s al-Ḥudūd is a lexicon of technical definitions in theology and legal theory. Definitions are not decorative in kalām. A dispute over whether knowledge is “a meaning by which the knower knows” or over what counts as a body, accident, power, proof, command, or acquisition changes the structure of an argument. By stabilising terminology, Ibn Fūrak helped transform a body of positions into a disciplined curriculum.10
The work commonly called Mushkil al-Ḥadīth addresses reports whose surface wording could be misconstrued as corporeal or otherwise contradictory. Ibn Fūrak gathers Arabic usages, parallel texts, theological principles, and possible interpretations. The immediate setting included controversy with the Karrāmiyyah of Khurāsān, who were accused by opponents of locating change or bodily reality in Allāh. The book is therefore simultaneously a defence of ḥadīth, a rejection of anthropomorphism, and a manual of controlled interpretation.11
Ibn Fūrak also wrote a now-lost commentary on the Lumaʿ, Qurʾānic exegesis, works on the names and attributes, legal theory, and spiritual instruction. His students and intellectual descendants included figures associated with al-Qushayrī and al-Bayhaqī, enabling his theological method to enter both Sufi and ḥadīth-oriented scholarship.
ʾAbū ʾIsḥāq al-Isfarāʾīnī رحمه الله (d. 411 AH) studied in Baghdad and later taught in Isfarāʾīn and Nīsābūr, where a school was built for him. He was counted with Ibn Fūrak and al-Bāqillānī among the three principal consolidators after the first generation. Yet his surviving corpus is meagre. A short creed remains, while later books quote positions from lost works bearing titles such as al-Jāmiʿ fī Uṣūl ad-Dīn, Kitāb al-Asmāʾ wa-ṣ-Ṣifāt, and a refutation of the Muʿtazilah and advocates of autonomous human creation.12
His case demonstrates the danger of equating survival with historical importance. Later theologians repeatedly contrast his views with those of al-Bāqillānī on knowledge, prophecy, the Qurʾān, and human acts. These fragments show a distinctive authority whose teaching was not simply interchangeable with that of his contemporaries. ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Baghdādī رحمه الله, author of Uṣūl ad-Dīn and al-Farq bayna-l-Firaq, studied in this eastern environment and transmitted a comparatively conservative synthesis drawing upon al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, Ibn Kullāb, and al-Isfarāʾīnī.13
Qāḍī ʾAbū Bakr Muḥammad ibn aṭ-Ṭayyib al-Bāqillānī رحمه الله (d. 403 AH) gave the school a breadth, organisation, and public intellectual presence that few early theologians matched. A Mālikī jurist based primarily in Baghdad, he moved in the courtly world of the Būyid period, served as a judge, engaged rival theologians, and was reportedly sent on a diplomatic mission to the Byzantine court. His writings cover systematic theology, sectarian refutation, legal theory, prophecy, the inimitability of the Qurʾān, and the imamate.14
At-Tamhīd is a large manual of foundations and refutations. It treats knowledge, the originated world, the Creator, attributes, prophecy, revealed doctrines, and disputes with dualists, philosophers, Christians, Shīʿah, Khawārij, and Muʿtazilah. Modern research has shown that it is likely an early work rather than the final statement of al-Bāqillānī’s theology. This chronology matters because he later revised positions that at-Tamhīd defends.15
Al-Inṣāf fī-mā Yajibu Iʿtiqāduhu wa-lā Yajūzu al-Jahl bihi is shorter and more confessional. It identifies doctrines considered obligatory for the believer and directly addresses disputed questions, especially the attributes, divine speech, vision, decree, and prophetic reports. It became one of the accessible entrances to al-Bāqillānī’s thought, although its compressed form should be supplemented by the more extensive works.
Al-Bāqillānī’s theological culmination was Hidāyat al-Mustarshidīn, reportedly extending to at least sixteen volumes. Only portions have been recovered in manuscripts, including witnesses preserved in North Africa and the Middle East. The surviving material is enough to show a scholar willing to revise the inherited system: he adopted the theory of aḥwāl after rejecting it earlier, refined proofs for the entitative attributes, experimented with the language of necessary existence, and gave created human power a more explicit effect or relation in acquired action.16
This work is a warning against treating an author’s earliest extant manual as his unchanging creed. The lost bulk of the Hidāyah may have contained further developments now known only through quotations. A reliable history therefore marks al-Bāqillānī’s views by work and period rather than constructing a synthetic position that conceals contradiction.
In Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān, al-Bāqillānī defended the Qurʾān as a prophetic miracle and analysed the inadequacy of human attempts to rival its discourse. His works in uṣūl al-fiqh, including at-Taqrīb wa-l-Irshād, helped carry theological precision into legal theory: questions of command, report, general and particular language, consensus, and proof all depend upon an account of knowledge and signification. Through students of law as well as theology, his influence travelled into Mālikī and Shāfiʿī circles.17
ʾAbū Bakr ʾAḥmad al-Bayhaqī رحمه الله (d. 458 AH) demonstrates that formative ʾAs͟hʿarism was not transmitted only by professional dialecticians. He was one of the great Shāfiʿī ḥadīth masters of Khurāsān, and his theological works are built through extensive citation of the Qurʾān, prophetic reports, Companion statements, early authorities, Arabic usage, and reasoned explanation.18
Al-Asmāʾ wa-ṣ-Ṣifāt gathers material concerning the names and attributes of Allāh, affirms the authentic reports, rejects corporeal implications, and supplies interpretation where required. al-Iʿtiqād wa-l-Hidāyah ilā Sabīl ar-Rashād offers a more concise creed. Dalāʾil an-Nubuwwah situates the defence of prophecy within the transmitted historical record, while his great legal-ḥadīth compilations helped bind Shāfiʿī law to a broad evidentiary archive. Al-Bayhaqī frequently draws upon al-ʾAs͟hʿarī and Ibn Fūrak, but his mode of presentation allowed the school’s theology to reach readers who approached doctrine through ḥadīth rather than through a formal kalām summa.
ʾAbū-l-Qāsim ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Qushayrī رحمه الله (d. 465 AH) joined Ashʿarī theology, Shāfiʿī learning, Qurʾānic interpretation, and Sufi discipline. His short Lumaʿ fī-l-Iʿtiqād and al-Fuṣūl fī-l-Uṣūl state the school’s fundamental doctrines in compact form. His famous ar-Risālah al-Qushayriyyah defends sober, law-governed Sufism by transmitting the sayings and conduct of earlier masters. His Qurʾānic commentary Laṭāʾif al-Ishārāt combines attention to the revealed wording with spiritual allusion.19
During the anti-Ashʿarī campaign associated with al-Kundurī, al-Qushayrī composed a complaint and defence on behalf of the persecuted Sunnī theologians. His life therefore illustrates transmission under pressure: doctrine was not merely copied from manuscripts but defended through public teaching, petitions, travel, and solidarity among jurists, theologians, and spiritual authorities.
ʾImām al-Ḥaramayn ʾAbū-l-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī رحمه الله (d. 478 AH) inherited the Khurāsānian school and subjected its arguments to exacting revision. His corpus is particularly valuable because it preserves multiple stages of his thought rather than a single finished system.
Ash-Shāmil was an enormous supercommentary connected to the commentarial tradition on al-ʾAs͟hʿarī’s Lumaʿ, especially the lost work of al-Bāqillānī. Only portions survive. The extant sections display exhaustive objections, subdivisions, physical theory, epistemology, and analysis of attributes. It is the work of a specialist addressing specialists and represents the density of the inherited kalām curriculum.20
Al-Irshād ilā Qawāṭiʿ al-Adillah fī Uṣūl al-Iʿtiqād is complete, shorter, and more widely teachable. It became one of the most influential pre-Rāzian Ashʿarī manuals. Its order moves from knowledge and the created world to the divine essence and attributes, prophecy, transmitted doctrines, human action, and the imamate. Numerous commentaries, especially in the Maghrib and al-Andalus, testify to its long afterlife.21
Lumaʿ al-Adillah condenses the system further and reflects revisions absent from some earlier works. Al-ʿAqīdah an-Niẓāmiyyah, usually placed late in his career, is especially important for his movement away from certain earlier positions: it does not rely upon the theory of aḥwāl, adopts greater restraint in some report-based attributes, and gives human created power the role of an intermediate cause under Allāh’s universal creation.22
The sequence forbids the common practice of quoting one Juwaynian book as though it settled every stage of his thought. His development is itself part of the school’s transmission: later pupils inherited both arguments and the example of revising them.
ʾAbū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī رحمه الله (d. 505 AH) studied with al-Juwaynī and carried the formative school into a new intellectual environment. He did not simply reproduce his teacher. He retained the fundamental Ashʿarī doctrines while integrating formal logic, engaging Avicennan philosophy at a deeper level, and connecting creed to spiritual purification and the gradations of religious understanding.23
Al-Iqtiṣād fī-l-Iʿtiqād is his principal moderate theological manual. Qawāʿid al-ʿAqāʾid, incorporated into the Iḥyāʾ, presents creed within a programme of worship and ethical formation. Tahāfut al-Falāsifah examines specific philosophical doctrines rather than issuing a blanket condemnation of every rational science. Fayṣal at-Tafriqah develops rules for interpretation and cautions against reckless declarations of unbelief. Iljām al-ʿAwāmm addresses the protection of non-specialists from anthropomorphic imagination and uncontrolled speculation. al-Munqidh min aḍ-Ḍalāl narrates, in a crafted autobiographical form, his evaluation of theologians, philosophers, esotericists, and Sufis.24
Al-Ghazālī belongs to this page as the culmination of the formative tradition, but he also marks its boundary. After him, Ashʿarī theology increasingly absorbed the conceptual architecture of philosophy and, in the works of Fakhr ad-Dīn ar-Rāzī and later authors, entered a substantially different scholastic phase. Reading al-Ghazālī only through those later systems conceals how deeply his theological vocabulary remains tied to al-Juwaynī, al-Bāqillānī, and the earlier school.
The formative school spread through several overlapping channels:
Transmission was consequently an act of interpretation. Every compiler chose an order; every commentator decided which objection mattered; every teacher explained what was foundational and what could be revised. The early ʾAs͟hʿarī archive is coherent enough to reveal a tradition and diverse enough to forbid the fiction of a single unchanged text passing untouched through two centuries.
Central focus: The school survived not because every early book was preserved, but because scholars transmitted principles, arguments, texts, and disciplines across generations—preserving the founder’s project while openly refining its formulation.
Jan Thiele, “Between Cordoba and Nīsābūr: The Emergence and Consolidation of Ashʿarism (Fourth–Fifth/Tenth–Eleventh Century),” in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology, ed. Sabine Schmidtke; Daniel Gimaret, La doctrine d’al-Ashʿarī. ↩
Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, Maqālāt al-Islāmiyyīn wa-khtilāf al-Muṣallīn, ed. Hellmut Ritter; Josef van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra. ↩
Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, Kitāb al-Lumaʿ, in Richard J. McCarthy, ed. and trans., The Theology of al-Ashʿarī (Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1953). ↩
Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, al-Ḥathth ʿalā al-Baḥth; Richard M. Frank, “Al-Ashʿarī’s Kitāb al-Ḥathth ʿalā-l-Baḥth,” Mélanges de l’Institut Dominicain d’Études Orientales 18 (1988). ↩
Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, al-ʾIbānah ʿan Uṣūl ad-Diyānah; Michel Allard, Le problème des attributs divins; Frank, studies on the authenticity and doctrinal context of al-ʾAs͟hʿarī’s works. ↩
Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, Risālah ilā Ahl ath-Thaghr; Richard M. Frank, “Al-Ashʿarī’s Conception of the Nature and Role of Speculative Reasoning in Theology”; Ibn ʿAsākir, Tabyīn Kadhib al-Muftarī, for the later catalogue and biographical tradition. ↩
Thiele, “Between Cordoba and Nīsābūr”; Allard, Le problème des attributs divins. ↩
“Ibn Fūrak,” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi; Thiele, “Between Cordoba and Nīsābūr.” ↩
Ibn Fūrak, Mujarrad Maqālāt ash-Shaykh Abī-l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī, ed. Daniel Gimaret (Beirut: Dār al-Mashriq, 1987); Daniel Gimaret, “Les sources de la doctrine d’al-Ashʿarī d’après Ibn Fūrak.” ↩
Ibn Fūrak, Kitāb al-Ḥudūd fī-l-Uṣūl, ed. Muḥammad as-Sulaymānī (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1999); M. A. S. Abdel Haleem, “Early Islamic Theological and Juristic Terminology,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 54, no. 1 (1991). ↩
Ibn Fūrak, Kitāb Mushkil al-Ḥadīth aw Taʾwīl al-Akhbār al-Mutashābihah, ed. Daniel Gimaret (Damascus: Institut Français d’Études Arabes de Damas, 2003); Jonathan A. C. Brown, The Canonization of al-Bukhārī and Muslim. ↩
Wilferd Madelung, “al-Isfarāyīnī,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.; Angelika Brodersen, “Abū Isḥāq al-Isfarāyīnī,” Encyclopaedia of Islam THREE; Richard M. Frank, studies on early Ashʿarī theology. ↩
ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Baghdādī, Kitāb Uṣūl ad-Dīn and al-Farq bayna-l-Firaq; Thiele, “Between Cordoba and Nīsābūr.” ↩
“Bâkıllânî,” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi; Michel Allard, Le problème des attributs divins. ↩
Al-Bāqillānī, Kitāb at-Tamhīd, ed. Richard J. McCarthy; Thiele, “Between Cordoba and Nīsābūr,” on its relative chronology. ↩
Al-Bāqillānī, fragments of Hidāyat al-Mustarshidīn; Daniel Gimaret, “Un extrait de la Hidāya d’Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī”; Sabine Schmidtke, “Early Ašʿarite Theology: Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī and His Hidāyat al-Mustarshidīn.” ↩
Al-Bāqillānī, Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān and at-Taqrīb wa-l-Irshād; Wael B. Hallaq, studies on the formation of Sunnī legal theory. ↩
Al-Bayhaqī, al-Asmāʾ wa-ṣ-Ṣifāt, al-Iʿtiqād wa-l-Hidāyah ilā Sabīl ar-Rashād, and Dalāʾil an-Nubuwwah; Jonathan A. C. Brown, The Canonization of al-Bukhārī and Muslim. ↩
Richard M. Frank, “Two Short Dogmatic Works of Abū l-Qāsim al-Qushayrī,” parts 1–2, Mélanges de l’Institut Dominicain d’Études Orientales 15–16; Martin Nguyen, Sufi Master and Qurʾan Scholar: Abū’l-Qāsim al-Qushayrī and the Laṭāʾif al-Ishārāt. ↩
Al-Juwaynī, ash-Shāmil fī Uṣūl ad-Dīn; Richard M. Frank, editions and studies of surviving portions; Thiele, “Between Cordoba and Nīsābūr.” ↩
Al-Juwaynī, al-Irshād ilā Qawāṭiʿ al-Adillah fī Uṣūl al-Iʿtiqād; Claude Gilliot, studies on Abū-l-Qāsim al-Anṣārī’s commentary; Ayman Shihadeh, studies on classical Ashʿarism. ↩
Al-Juwaynī, Lumaʿ al-Adillah and al-ʿAqīdah an-Niẓāmiyyah; Michel Allard, Textes apologétiques de Ǧuwaynī; Thiele, “Between Cordoba and Nīsābūr.” ↩
Frank Griffel, “al-Ghazālī,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Richard M. Frank, Al-Ghazālī and the Ashʿarite School. ↩
Al-Ghazālī, al-Iqtiṣād fī-l-Iʿtiqād, Qawāʿid al-ʿAqāʾid, Tahāfut al-Falāsifah, Fayṣal at-Tafriqah, Iljām al-ʿAwāmm, and al-Munqidh min aḍ-Ḍalāl; Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology. ↩