Al-ʾAs͟hʿariyyah

Al-ʾAs͟hʿariyyah
Revelation as decisive, reason as a disciplined instrument of knowledge and defence.

In the Name of Allāh, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

The formative ʾAs͟hʿarī method begins by refusing a false choice. It does not ask the believer to choose between authentic revelation and sound reason, because truth cannot contradict truth. Nor does it place the two on one level, as though each were an independent lawgiver. Revelation is the divine address: it establishes religious obligation, discloses the unseen, identifies the messengers, and teaches what Allāh ﷻ commands His servants to affirm. Reason is a created faculty by which the human being recognises signs, distinguishes necessary from impossible claims, demonstrates the created world’s dependence upon its Creator, and answers objections raised against revelation. Its authority is real, but it is neither self-sufficient nor unrestricted.¹

This ordering is more exact than the slogan that “reason is subordinate to revelation” when that slogan is left unexplained. Early ʾAs͟hʿarīs did not use reason merely after the fact to decorate conclusions accepted without understanding. They held that rational reflection (naẓar) yields genuine knowledge. At the same time, they denied that unaided reason legislates for Allāh, determines what He is religiously obliged to do, or independently discovers every truth of the unseen. Reason establishes that revelation is possible and that a truthful messenger must be obeyed; revelation then conveys realities that reason could not have reached by itself.²

Necessary knowledge and acquired knowledge

Early manuals commonly distinguish knowledge that arises immediately from knowledge acquired through reflection and inference. A person knows without argument that pain is not pleasure, that one body cannot occupy two separate locations in the same respect, and that a thing cannot simultaneously exist and not exist. Other conclusions require an ordered consideration of evidence. The existence of an originator for the world, the impossibility of corporeality in the Creator, or the truthfulness of a claimant to prophecy are not treated as arbitrary intuitions. They are established through premises and conclusions whose soundness can be examined.³

Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī held that reflection concerning knowledge of Allāh is a religious obligation. The crucial qualification is that the obligation itself is known through revelation. This separates his position from the Muʿtazilī claim that reason independently imposes moral and religious duties before the arrival of a messenger. The intellect can perform the act of reflection and reach knowledge; it does not become a legislator standing above the divine command. Later authorities debated the status of the unreflective believer and the minimum degree of evidence required, but the formative school consistently valued informed assent over inherited words emptied of understanding.⁴

This principle also explains why taqlīd in creed was discussed with greater nuance than the claim that every ordinary Muslim must master a full theologian’s curriculum. The school did not require the farmer, artisan, or child to reproduce a technical proof from atoms and accidents. It sought a faith joined to recognition rather than mere social imitation. Al-Ghazālī later made the pastoral distinction explicit: detailed kalām is a medicine for particular intellectual diseases, not the daily food of every believer. A simple creed, securely taught and nourished by worship, may be more beneficial to the public than exposure to disputes for which they have neither need nor preparation.⁵

Establishing the createdness and dependence of the world

A central early proof begins from the changing character of the world. Created bodies bear accidents such as motion, rest, combination, separation, colour, heat, and cold. These states arise after not existing and pass away after existing. A body cannot be found without some such state, and what cannot be free of originated properties cannot itself be beginningless. The world is therefore originated and requires an originator who is not Himself a member of the originated order.⁶

Many early theologians expressed this proof through an atomist account of bodies. Bodies were analysed into indivisible parts, while the qualities and motions found in them were treated as temporally renewed accidents. Atomism supplied a powerful conceptual grammar: it denied self-subsisting natural powers, made change intelligible as continuous divine creation, and prevented the created order from being treated as an independent eternal system. Yet atomism was an instrument of demonstration, not an additional verse of the Qurʾān. Its premises, formulations, and explanatory reach were disputed and revised within the school.⁷

Al-Juwaynī’s career illustrates this freedom of revision. The older proof could be challenged by asking why an endless succession of temporal accidents could not inhere in an eternal body. Al-Juwaynī strengthened the argument against an infinite regress of originated events and increasingly emphasised the contingency of the world: the world could have been absent, could have existed at another time, or could have possessed other specifications. Its actual existence in one determinate form therefore requires a chooser who particularised one possibility over alternatives. The proof preserved the early school’s conclusion while sharpening its account of dependence and divine will.⁸

The method is significant. A school faithful to its founder did not preserve every inherited proof merely because it was old. It asked whether the proof actually demonstrated its conclusion. When a premise was vulnerable, the proper response was refinement or replacement, not the declaration that criticism itself was disloyal.

Definition, division, and dialectical testing

Formative kalām proceeds through careful definition. Before asking whether Allāh is “knowing,” the theologian distinguishes the act of knowing, the entity or attribute of knowledge, and the predication “being knowing.” Before discussing human action, he distinguishes necessary movement from voluntary acquisition, power from will, creation from attribution, and the existence of an act from the moral description attached to it. Ibn Fūrak’s al-Ḥudūd fī-l-Uṣūl is especially valuable because it records the technical boundaries by which theology and legal theory made disputes precise.⁹

A typical argument divides the conceivable alternatives, eliminates what is impossible, and establishes what remains. It may use ilzām, obliging an opponent to accept the consequence of his own premises; muʿāraḍah, answering a proof with a counter-proof; or naqḍ, showing that a principle fails in a parallel case. Analogy is used cautiously, not to make the unseen identical to the visible, but to test whether a term is being applied coherently. The method also distinguishes a proof that merely persuades from one that compels assent when its premises are granted.

Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī’s defence of kalām, transmitted as al-Ḥathth ʿalā al-Baḥth or Risālat Istiḥsān al-Khawḍ fī ʿIlm al-Kalām, argues in substance that new questions may be answered through principles rooted in revelation just as jurists derive rulings for new cases. Scripture does not list every technical objection later raised by a dualist, materialist, Muʿtazilī, or anthropomorphist. It supplies the truths and governing principles by which those objections are judged. The mere absence of later terminology from the first generation does not make every disciplined use of that terminology an innovation.¹⁰

Reading revelation: language, context, and transcendence

The early school’s scriptural method rests upon Arabic usage and the conviction that revelation does not assert an impossibility. Words may possess primary, extended, figurative, relational, or contextually specified meanings. A term used of Allāh and creation does not require a shared created modality. Knowledge, power, will, hearing, and sight are affirmed for Allāh without supposing organs, passivity, acquisition, or limitation. Expressions such as face, hand, coming, descent, and establishment require the interpreter first to uphold what the Qurʾān itself makes decisive: “There is nothing like Him,” and nothing in creation encompasses Him.¹¹

Within that boundary, early authorities did not apply one identical procedure to every revealed attribute. Some passages were affirmed while their modality and full reality were consigned to Allāh. Some were clarified through established Arabic meanings when a corporeal reading would contradict decisive transcendence. Ibn Fūrak developed extensive interpretive treatments of difficult prophetic reports. Al-Bāqillānī was generally more reticent in a number of such cases. Al-Bayhaqī arranged transmitted evidence while explaining why bodily implications could not be intended. Al-Juwaynī and al-Ghazālī adjusted their discussions according to the strength of the proof, the clarity of the language, and the intellectual condition of the audience.¹²

Principled taʾwīl therefore differs from arbitrary allegory. It is not permission to replace revelation with whatever meaning a reader prefers. A valid interpretation requires an established linguistic possibility, a reason the immediately imagined bodily sense cannot be intended, and harmony with the wider foundations of revelation. Where no decisive need for specification exists, restraint may be superior. Where silence would leave a listener affirming composition, motion, location, or other created properties of Allāh, clarification becomes a defence of the text rather than an escape from it.

Revelation, reports, and degrees of certainty

The Qurʾān, mass-transmitted Sunnah, and established consensus furnish decisive religious knowledge. Individual reports are not thereby discarded. Early ʾAs͟hʿarī scholars transmitted ḥadīth, wrote works on its difficult expressions, and used it in creed. They did, however, pay attention to authenticity, transmission, linguistic possibility, and the relation between an individual report and an already demonstrated principle. A report whose wording appears to imply bodily form is not answered by accusing the Messenger of Allāh ﷺ of impossible speech. Its chain and language are examined, and its meaning is understood in a manner worthy of the One about whom it speaks.¹³

Ibn Fūrak’s Mushkil al-Ḥadīth and al-Bayhaqī’s al-Asmāʾ wa-ṣ-Ṣifāt exemplify this union of transmission and theology. Their authors did not treat ḥadīth as material to be accepted only after being stripped of authority, nor did they treat every first sensory image prompted by a word as the report’s necessary meaning. The transmitted text and the doctrine of transcendence were read together.

Moral knowledge and divine command

The formative school rejected the claim that actions possess an intrinsic moral status that binds Allāh independently of His will and command. Reward, punishment, religious obligation, and the judgment that a person deserves praise or blame are fixed by the divine address. Allāh is not subject to a law above Him, and no creature can infer that He owes a benefit, must choose an alleged optimum, or would be unjust merely because an act fails to satisfy a humanly constructed standard.¹⁴

This position should not be caricatured as the denial that reason can recognise any difference between mercy and cruelty, benefit and harm, agreement and betrayal, or wisdom and foolishness in created life. Early discussions distinguish descriptive features and worldly consequences from binding religious value and deserved recompense before Allāh. Reason may recognise that an act produces benefit, accords with a purpose, or is conventionally praised. What it cannot do independently is transform that recognition into a law imposed upon the Creator or into certain knowledge of reward and punishment in the Hereafter.¹⁵

The distinction preserves two truths: moral religion is not arbitrary human convention, because it rests upon the command of the perfectly knowing and willing Lord; and divine sovereignty is not confined by a moral order external to Him. The school’s critics have long debated whether this account sufficiently explains divine wisdom, but its actual claim must be stated before it is assessed.

Human acquisition and divine creation

The same concern for divine sovereignty governs the theory of human acts. Allāh creates the servant, the servant’s power, the circumstances of action, and the act itself. The human being nevertheless distinguishes involuntary trembling from deliberate walking. In a voluntary act, a created power, intention, and awareness accompany the act, and the servant “acquires” it. Command, prohibition, praise, and blame attach to the servant through this acquisition.¹⁶

The theory was not static. Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī emphasised conjunction between the created power and the acquired act. Al-Bāqillānī sought a more exact account of the human power’s taʾthīr: not the independent creation of the act’s existence, but a real relation or determination by which the act is attributable to the servant and bears a morally assessed description. In his late al-ʿAqīdah an-Niẓāmiyyah, al-Juwaynī went further and described created power as an intermediate cause, itself created and sustained by Allāh. He thereby preserved Allāh as the all-encompassing Creator while giving human power a more explicit role in voluntary action.¹⁷

These revisions demonstrate why “occasionalism” is useful only when carefully defined. The early school consistently denied a created cause that operates independently of Allāh. It did not always describe every created relation in one technical way. Al-Ghazālī’s later discussion of causal necessity likewise allows more than the crude claim that created things have no stable relations whatsoever. His decisive target is the assertion that the connection between created cause and effect is self-sufficient, necessary in itself, and beyond the possibility of divine interruption.¹⁸

Logic, philosophy, and the transition under al-Ghazālī

Before al-Ghazālī, ʾAs͟hʿarī theologians were already borrowing, testing, and revising concepts found among Muʿtazilīs and philosophers. Al-Bāqillānī experimented with the theory of aḥwāl and used the expression “necessary existent.” Al-Juwaynī reformulated the proof from contingency and particularisation. These borrowings did not amount to passive submission to a rival system. A concept could be detached from its original metaphysical setting and judged according to whether it served a true demonstration.¹⁹

Al-Ghazālī made this selectivity more explicit. He accepted formal logic as an instrument for testing inference and criticised theologians who disputed without mastering demonstration. He studied the philosophers closely enough to present their doctrines accurately before challenging them in Tahāfut al-Falāsifah. His purpose was not to condemn every conclusion reached by philosophy or every science cultivated by philosophers. It was to distinguish what is demonstrative from what is asserted without proof and to reject metaphysical teachings he judged incompatible with decisive revelation.²⁰

His rule for apparent conflict is exacting: a valid demonstration and a certain revelation cannot truly contradict. When a demonstrative conclusion excludes the immediately imagined sense of a text, the language is interpreted within recognised Arabic possibilities. When no demonstration exists, speculative preference does not authorise departure from the revealed wording. This approach helped define the transition from early kalām to the more philosophically equipped theology of later centuries, but al-Ghazālī remains anchored in the formative school’s fundamental conviction that intellect and revelation have one truthful source.²¹

Restraint, audience, and scholarly purpose

The early ʾAs͟hʿarī method is not fulfilled by winning disputes. Kalām is justified by a religious purpose: removing confusion, defending the believer, answering a challenger, or securing the foundations needed by another science. Its technical language can become harmful when pursued for prestige, exposed indiscriminately to the unprepared, or allowed to produce endless doubt after its purpose has been achieved. Al-Ghazālī’s criticism of excessive disputation belongs within, not outside, this tradition. A physician may defend medicine while condemning reckless dosing.²²

The proper theologian therefore combines proof with adab. He represents an opponent accurately, distinguishes a demonstrable error from a merely verbal dispute, and does not make every theological mistake equivalent to unbelief. He knows where rational inquiry yields certainty, where it yields probability, and where revelation commands humble assent. The aim is not an intellect intoxicated by its own instruments, but an intellect disciplined by truth.

Central focus: Authentic revelation establishes the faith and its obligations; sound reason recognises, demonstrates, interprets, and defends without becoming an independent authority over Allāh or His speech.

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Footnotes

1. Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, Kitāb al-Lumaʿ and al-Ḥathth ʿalā al-Baḥth, in Richard J. McCarthy, ed. and trans., The Theology of al-Ashʿarī (Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1953); Richard M. Frank, “Al-Ashʿarī’s Conception of the Nature and Role of Speculative Reasoning in Theology.” ↩

2. Frank, “Knowledge and Taqlīd”; Gimaret, La doctrine d’al-Ashʿarī, especially the treatment of knowledge, reflection, and religious obligation. ↩

3. 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: Kitāb al-Ḥudūd fī ’l-Uṣūl, by Ibn Fūrak,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 54, no. 1 (1991). ↩

4. Thiele, “Between Cordoba and Nīsābūr”; Frank, “Knowledge and Taqlīd.” ↩

5. Al-Ghazālī, Iljām al-ʿAwāmm ʿan ʿIlm al-Kalām; Qawāʿid al-ʿAqāʾid in Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm ad-Dīn; and Fayṣal at-Tafriqah bayna-l-Islām wa-z-Zandaqah. ↩

6. Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, al-Lumaʿ; al-Bāqillānī, Kitāb at-Tamhīd; al-Juwaynī, al-Irshād ilā Qawāṭiʿ al-Adillah fī Uṣūl al-Iʿtiqād. ↩

7. Alnoor Dhanani, The Physical Theory of Kalām: Atoms, Space, and Void in Basrian Muʿtazilī Cosmology (Leiden: Brill, 1994), for the earlier intellectual setting; Richard M. Frank, “The Science of Kalām,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 2, no. 1 (1992), for the structure of classical theological systems. ↩

8. Al-Juwaynī, ash-Shāmil fī Uṣūl ad-Dīn, al-Irshād, and Lumaʿ al-Adillah; Thiele, “Between Cordoba and Nīsābūr,” on the particularisation argument and the revisions to the proof from originated accidents. ↩

9. Ibn Fūrak, al-Ḥudūd; Abdel Haleem, “Early Islamic Theological and Juristic Terminology.” ↩

10. Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, al-Ḥathth ʿalā al-Baḥth. On its authenticity and relationship to al-ʾIbānah, see Richard M. Frank, “Al-Ashʿarī’s Kitāb al-Ḥathth ʿalā-l-Baḥth,” Mélanges de l’Institut Dominicain d’Études Orientales 18 (1988), and his later studies. ↩

11. Qurʾān 42:11 and 112:4 supply decisive scriptural foundations for transcendence. For early ʾAs͟hʿarī predication and attributes, see Allard, Le problème des attributs divins; Gimaret, La doctrine d’al-Ashʿarī. ↩

12. Ibn Fūrak, Kitāb Mushkil al-Ḥadīth aw Taʾwīl al-Akhbār al-Mutashābihah, ed. Daniel Gimaret (Damascus: Institut Français d’Études Arabes de Damas, 2003); al-Bayhaqī, al-Asmāʾ wa-ṣ-Ṣifāt; al-Juwaynī, al-ʿAqīdah an-Niẓāmiyyah; al-Ghazālī, Fayṣal at-Tafriqah. ↩

13. Jonathan A. C. Brown, The Canonization of al-Bukhārī and Muslim (Leiden: Brill, 2007), especially on the interaction of ḥadīth authority and theology; Ibn Fūrak, Mushkil al-Ḥadīth; al-Bayhaqī, al-Asmāʾ wa-ṣ-Ṣifāt. ↩

14. Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī’s position is reconstructed from al-Lumaʿ, Ibn Fūrak’s Mujarrad, and later early manuals. See Richard M. Frank, “Moral Obligation in Classical Muslim Theology,” Journal of Religious Ethics 11, no. 2 (1983). ↩

15. Ayman Shihadeh, “Theories of Ethical Value in Kalām,” in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology; Frank, “Moral Obligation in Classical Muslim Theology.” ↩

16. Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, al-Lumaʿ; Ibn Fūrak, Mujarrad; Daniel Gimaret, Théories de l’acte humain en théologie musulmane (Paris: Vrin, 1980). ↩

17. Al-Bāqillānī, Hidāyat al-Mustarshidīn fragments; al-Juwaynī, al-ʿAqīdah an-Niẓāmiyyah; Thiele, “Between Cordoba and Nīsābūr.” ↩

18. “Causation in Arabic and Islamic Thought,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; “Occasionalism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). ↩

19. Thiele, “Between Cordoba and Nīsābūr”; Schmidtke, “Early Ašʿarite Theology.” ↩

20. Al-Ghazālī, Maqāṣid al-Falāsifah, Miʿyār al-ʿIlm, and Tahāfut al-Falāsifah; Griffel, “al-Ghazālī,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ↩

21. Al-Ghazālī, Qānūn at-Taʾwīl and Fayṣal at-Tafriqah; Griffel, “al-Ghazālī.” ↩

22. Al-Ghazālī, al-Iqtiṣād fī-l-Iʿtiqād, Iljām al-ʿAwāmm, and the Book of Knowledge in Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm ad-Dīn. ↩