Al-ʾAs͟hʿariyyah

Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī teaching on Allāh’s names, attributes, speech, transcendence, and vision
Affirmation without resemblance, transcendence without negation.

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

The divine attributes stand at the centre of formative ʾAs͟hʿarī theology. The school arose in a setting where theologians agreed that Allāh ﷻ is one and unlike creation, but disputed how the revealed names and attributes should be understood. Some Muʿtazilīs feared that affirming eternal attributes in addition to the divine essence would multiply eternal realities and compromise divine unity. Corporealist and anthropomorphic currents, by contrast, could speak as though the scriptural words “hand,” “face,” “descent,” or “establishment” entailed bodily organs, movement, location, or direction. The early ʾAs͟hʿarīs rejected both reductions. They affirmed that Allāh truly knows, wills, lives, hears, sees, speaks, and acts, while denying that His essence or attributes resemble anything created.¹

Their governing maxim is supplied by revelation itself: “There is nothing whatsoever like unto Him, and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing” (Qurʾān 42:11). The first clause excludes likeness; the second prevents transcendence from becoming the denial of what Allāh has affirmed. The same balance appears in Sūrat al-ʾIkhlāṣ: Allāh is uniquely one, eternally self-sufficient, neither begetting nor begotten, and without any equivalent. Early ʾAs͟hʿarī theology therefore proceeds through tanzīh and ithbāt together: the negation of every created imperfection and the affirmation of every perfection established by sound proof and authentic revelation.²

Allāh is not a body, substance, accident, or occupant of place

A foundational rule of the school is that the Creator cannot belong to any category of the created world. Bodies are composite, divisible, spatially extended, and subject to measure. Atoms or substances occupy a location; accidents arise in subjects, change, and pass away. Whatever is composed depends upon its components, whatever is bounded receives a limit, whatever occupies a place bears a relation to that place, and whatever changes passes from one state to another. None of these descriptions can apply to the eternal, self-sufficient Creator.³

For this reason, early ʾAs͟hʿarī manuals deny that Allāh is a body (jism), a substance or atom (jawhar), an accident (ʿaraḍ), a form, a composite, a magnitude, or an object enclosed by the six directions. He is not contained by the Throne, the heavens, the earth, or any other created thing. He existed when no place existed, and the creation of place did not produce a change in Him. Nearness to Allāh is therefore not bodily distance, and elevation does not require spatial altitude. The language of transcendence indicates majesty, supremacy, dominion, exalted rank, or a reality befitting Him; it does not turn the Creator into one object positioned beside or above other objects.⁴

This denial of place is not a denial of Allāh’s existence. Created things are known through dimensions, directions, colours, motions, and other sensible features because they are bodies or properties of bodies. The Creator is known through the signs of His act, through rational demonstration, and through His self-disclosure in revelation. To demand that He be imagined in a shape or location before He can be affirmed is to make the conditions of created perception a measure over the Uncreated.

Real and eternal attributes

Against the Muʿtazilī reduction of the attributes to the essence or to created acts, al-ʾAs͟hʿarī maintained that Allāh possesses real, eternal attributes. He is knowing through knowledge, powerful through power, willing through will, living through life, hearing through hearing, seeing through sight, and speaking through speech. These attributes are not created qualities that arise in Him, for the arising of a new state would imply change and dependence. Nor are they independent beings existing apart from Him. They subsist eternally in the one divine essence.⁵

The formula often used by early theologians is that the attributes are “not He and not other than He.” It is not intended as an evasion. “Not He” means that knowledge, power, and will are not simply interchangeable words with identical meanings: one may rationally distinguish knowing from willing and power from speech. “Not other than He” means that the attributes are not separate entities capable of existing independently of the divine essence. The distinction is conceptual and real without introducing a collection of gods or parts into Allāh.⁶

Later primers would arrange the divine attributes into standard numbered lists, especially the familiar presentation of twenty necessary attributes. That pedagogical scheme should not be projected unchanged upon the formative period. Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, Ibn Fūrak, al-Bāqillānī, al-Juwaynī, and al-Ghazālī did not always classify or count the attributes in precisely the same manner. Some treated subsistence or everlastingness as a distinct attribute, while others regarded it as implied by the divine essence or by the negation of origination. The early school is better represented by its substantive affirmations than by imposing a later mnemonic list upon every author.⁷

Attributes of essence and attributes of act

Early ʾAs͟hʿarīs distinguished attributes that cannot be conceived as absent from Allāh—such as knowledge, power, life, and speech—from descriptions connected to His freely chosen acts, such as creating, providing, forgiving, rewarding, and punishing. Allāh is eternally powerful to create, but the created world is not eternal. The Creator does not acquire a new power when He brings a thing into existence; rather, the eternal power and will relate to the originated object at the time appointed for it.⁸

This distinction allowed the school to speak meaningfully of divine action without positing change in the divine essence. “Creating” may designate the eternal power and will by which the act occurs, the relation of that power to its object, or the created effect itself, depending upon the author and context. On the specific question of takwīn—whether bringing-into-being is an eternal attribute additional to power—the formative ʾAs͟hʿarī position generally differed from the Māturīdī formulation. Yet the disagreement should be stated at its proper technical level: both traditions affirm an eternal Creator and a temporally originated world, and both deny that Allāh becomes perfected by creation.⁹

Knowledge, will, and power

Allāh’s knowledge encompasses every necessary, possible, and impossible object in the manner appropriate to knowledge: what exists, what does not exist, what could exist, and how a possibility would be were it realised. His knowledge is not acquired from things, increased by discovery, or divided into successive thoughts. The changing object of knowledge does not require a change in the eternal knower. All events are known before their occurrence without coercing the voluntary servant merely by being known.¹⁰

His will particularises possibilities. The world could have been created earlier or later, larger or smaller, with different arrangements, or not created at all. Its actual time, measure, order, and properties therefore point to a willing determiner rather than an impersonal necessity. The divine will is not appetite, inclination, deliberation, or the overcoming of hesitation. Those are signs of created need. It is the eternal attribute by which Allāh specifies what shall occur from among what is possible.¹¹

His power extends to every genuinely possible thing. Nothing created escapes His production, preservation, or permission. Human acts are no exception: the servant’s power, intention, movement, and acquired act are all brought into existence by Allāh. This doctrine is not the claim that commands and prohibitions are meaningless. It is the claim that moral responsibility cannot require an island of creative sovereignty outside the dominion of the Creator. Early authorities differed over the precise efficacy assigned to the created human power, but they agreed that it is dependent, originated, and incapable of independently creating an event.¹²

The school also denies that divine omnipotence includes contradictions. “A square circle” or “a created eternal being” is not a difficult object that power fails to produce; it is no possible object at all. Similarly, inability, ignorance, death, injustice understood as violation of another’s superior right, and every defect are impossible for Allāh. Their impossibility is not an external restriction imposed upon Him but follows from the perfection of His reality.

Divine speech and the Qurʾān

The controversy over divine speech was among the most consequential inherited by al-ʾAs͟hʿarī. The formative school affirms that speech is a real, eternal attribute of Allāh and that the Qurʾān is His uncreated speech. Were Allāh to become speaking after not being speaking, a created attribute would arise in Him. Were His speech merely a sound created in a body, that body rather than Allāh would be the immediate subject in which the speech subsisted. The scriptural address, command, prohibition, promise, threat, and report are therefore grounded in an eternal divine attribute.¹³

At the same time, the paper, ink, written shapes, human voices, breaths, movements of the tongue, acts of memorisation, and temporal sequences by which the Qurʾān is recited are created. The written word “Allāh” is not the divine essence, and the created sound that signifies divine speech is not itself an eternal vibration. The Qurʾān may consequently be described with respect to two relations: as the speech of Allāh, it is uncreated; as the servant’s recitation, writing, and physical performance, it is created. Confusion arises when the same word—“Qurʾān,” “recitation,” or “speech”—is used without identifying the relation intended.¹⁴

Later Ashʿarī manuals frequently call the eternal attribute al-kalām an-nafsī, the speech subsisting in the divine essence and not composed of originated letters or sounds. The underlying distinction has precedents in Ibn Kullāb and al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, but the terminology and its exact analysis developed through debate. The formative authors should therefore not be made to speak as though every later scholastic refinement were already fixed in an identical formula. They agreed upon the uncreated divine speech and the createdness of human expression; they could differ over such questions as what is directly heard, how expression signifies the eternal attribute, and how command, report, and other modes are distinguished.¹⁵

Al-Bāqillānī’s Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān also shows that the doctrine of divine speech was not confined to metaphysical classification. The revealed Arabic Qurʾān confronts human beings as a linguistic sign and prophetic miracle. Its recited form is temporally encountered, yet its inimitability, guidance, legal address, and relation to the eternal Speaker belong to the theology of revelation. The doctrine thus connects the divine attribute to prophecy, language, interpretation, and worship.¹⁶

The revealed or report-based attributes

Scripture uses expressions such as the face, hands, eyes, establishment over the Throne, coming, and descent. These are often called the ṣifāt khabariyyah: descriptions known primarily through revealed report rather than through an independent proof that requires that exact wording. Every formative ʾAs͟hʿarī agrees that such texts cannot mean created organs, bodily posture, locomotion, spatial transfer, or any mode that entails resemblance. Beyond that boundary, the early school contains more than one legitimate hermeneutical procedure.¹⁷

One procedure is to affirm the transmitted wording, deny the created sense, and refrain from specifying a single figurative referent without decisive evidence. This is not ignorance about the central doctrine: the theologian knows that the literal bodily implication is impossible and that the text is true. What remains consigned is the exact intended determination among possible non-corporeal meanings. Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī and some reports of al-Bāqillānī are often represented as especially cautious in this manner, although both also employ interpretation where argument or language requires it.¹⁸

A second procedure is controlled taʾwīl: identifying a meaning established in Arabic usage that accords with the context and with decisive transcendence. “Hand” may signify power, favour, possession, or a special act of bestowal; “face” may signify the divine essence or that which is sought for Allāh; “descent” may refer to the descent of mercy, command, or an angel commissioned to act; “coming” may signify the coming of judgment or decree. Ibn Fūrak’s Mushkil al-Ḥadīth and al-Bayhaqī’s al-Asmāʾ wa-ṣ-Ṣifāt preserve extensive examples of this philological and contextual labour.¹⁹

These procedures are not always rival creeds. Both begin by affirming revelation and excluding corporeality. Tafwīḍ can mean consigning the ultimate reality or exact specification while understanding enough Arabic to reject an impossible bodily sense. Taʾwīl can mean selecting a probable non-literal sense rather than claiming access to the full modality of the divine reality. The choice may depend upon the strength of the evidence, the audience, the danger of anthropomorphism, and whether an interpretation can be securely grounded in language. Al-Ghazālī later articulated this graded approach with particular clarity: the common believer is protected from bodily imagination, while the qualified scholar may interpret when demonstration excludes the immediately imagined sense and Arabic permits a sound alternative.²⁰

Establishment, elevation, descent, and direction

The statement that the Most Merciful “established Himself over the Throne” is true because Allāh revealed it. What it cannot mean is sitting, contact, bodily elevation, occupation, or being carried by the Throne. The Throne and every spatial relation are created and dependent upon Him. Some early ʾAs͟hʿarīs retained the term istiwāʾ without selecting a further gloss; others explained it by dominion, mastery, an act relating specifically to the Throne, or another non-corporeal meaning permitted by Arabic. The school’s common doctrine lies in the exclusion of place and modality, not in pretending that every early authority offered one identical lexical paraphrase.²¹

Likewise, the reports of divine “descent” cannot signify movement from a higher location to a lower one. Motion is a succession of spatial states and therefore an originated accident. The report may be affirmed while its precise reality is consigned, or it may be interpreted through the descent of mercy, favour, command, acceptance, or a heralding angel. In either case, the devotional force of the report remains: the last part of the night is a time of extraordinary invitation to repentance, supplication, and forgiveness.

Allāh’s ʿuluww is consequently affirmed as transcendence, supremacy, majesty, irresistible dominion, and exaltation above every imperfection. It is not measured in cubits or degrees of spatial distance. To say that Allāh is not in a direction is not to say that He is beneath creation, everywhere diffused through it, or absent from it. Each of those alternatives remains spatial. He is as He was before the creation of directions, while His knowledge, power, will, and governance encompass all things.

The vision of Allāh in the Hereafter

The early ʾAs͟hʿarīs affirm that the believers will see Allāh in the Hereafter. They cite the promise that faces on that Day will be radiant, “looking toward their Lord” (Qurʾān 75:22–23), the distinction between those veiled from their Lord and those granted nearness, and the rigorously transmitted prophetic reports comparing the certainty and unobstructed character of the vision—not the object seen—to seeing the full moon.²²

This vision does not entail that Allāh becomes a body, occupies a direction, lies opposite the viewer, receives light, or is encompassed by the eye. In ordinary worldly experience, sight occurs under created conditions; but it does not follow that the Creator cannot produce vision without those conditions in the Hereafter. Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī’s argument turns upon possibility: seeing a truly existing object is not in itself contradictory, while the revealed texts establish that this possible event will occur. The modality remains unknown.²³

The school distinguishes vision from comprehension. A person may see a created object without exhausting every reality of it; still more does the vision of Allāh not encompass His essence. “Vision perceives Him” and “vision comprehends Him” are not identical propositions. The Qurʾānic statement that sights do not comprehend Him (6:103) therefore negates encompassing perception, not the promised vision itself.

Divine wisdom, freedom, and the refusal to impose obligation upon Allāh

The formative school affirms that Allāh is wise and that His acts are free of frivolity, ignorance, need, and injustice. It nevertheless rejects the claim that a standard external to Allāh obliges Him to create what creatures judge best, to reward obedience by necessity, or to act for a benefit He lacks. Every created benefit is already His gift, every right possessed by a servant is established by His promise or command, and He cannot be indebted to what He creates.²⁴

This does not make revelation an arbitrary sequence of meaningless commands. The Law discloses real purposes, benefits, trials, and paths of purification. Allāh does not break His truthful promise, not because another authority compels Him, but because falsehood is impossible for the perfectly knowing Lord whose speech is true. Al-Ghazālī would develop the language of wisdom and benefit with greater ethical and spiritual detail, while retaining the early principle that divine freedom cannot be measured by an obligation imposed from outside the Creator.²⁵

The early school’s balance

The formative ʾAs͟hʿarī doctrine of the attributes is therefore neither anthropomorphic affirmation nor empty negation. It refuses to make the Creator one body among bodies; it also refuses to make the divine names metaphors for an unknowable absence. Allāh is truly living, knowing, willing, powerful, hearing, seeing, and speaking. His speech is uncreated; His acts occur by wisdom and choice; His transcendence excludes place, direction, composition, and likeness; and the believers will see Him in the Hereafter without encompassing Him or knowing how.

Within this shared framework, the early authorities exercised real scholarly judgment. Ibn Fūrak’s interpretive practice is not identical to every formulation attributed to al-Bāqillānī; al-Juwaynī revised positions across his career; al-Ghazālī distinguished the needs of specialists from those of the general community. Recognising those differences does not dissolve the school. It shows how a living tradition preserved its foundations while refining the language by which those foundations were defended.

Central focus: Whatever Allāh and His Messenger ﷺ have affirmed is true; every created implication is denied; and no human image, direction, organ, movement, or modality is permitted to define the Lord of the worlds.

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Footnotes

1. Michel Allard, Le problème des attributs divins dans la doctrine d’al-Ašʿarī et de ses premiers grands disciples (Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1965); Daniel Gimaret, La doctrine d’al-Ashʿarī (Paris: Cerf, 1990). ↩

2. Qurʾān 42:11, 112:1–4, and 16:74; al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, Kitāb al-Lumaʿ; al-Bāqillānī, Kitāb at-Tamhīd. ↩

3. Al-Bāqillānī, at-Tamhīd; al-Juwaynī, al-Irshād ilā Qawāṭiʿ al-Adillah fī Uṣūl al-Iʿtiqād; al-Ghazālī, al-Iqtiṣād fī-l-Iʿtiqād. ↩

4. Ibn Fūrak, Mujarrad Maqālāt ash-Shaykh Abī-l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī, ed. Daniel Gimaret (Beirut: Dār al-Mashriq, 1987); al-Bayhaqī, al-Asmāʾ wa-ṣ-Ṣifāt; al-Qushayrī, ar-Risālah ash-Shikāyah li-Ahl as-Sunnah. ↩

5. Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, al-Lumaʿ; Ibn Fūrak, Mujarrad; Allard, Le problème des attributs divins. ↩

6. Al-Bāqillānī, at-Tamhīd and al-Inṣāf; al-Juwaynī, ash-Shāmil fī Uṣūl ad-Dīn. ↩

7. 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 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Gimaret, La doctrine d’al-Ashʿarī. ↩

8. Ibn Fūrak, Mujarrad; al-Bāqillānī, at-Tamhīd; al-Juwaynī, al-Irshād. ↩

9. Al-Bāqillānī, at-Tamhīd; al-Juwaynī, ash-Shāmil; for the Ashʿarī–Māturīdī distinction, see Ulrich Rudolph, Al-Māturīdī and the Development of Sunnī Theology in Samarqand. ↩

10. Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, al-Lumaʿ; Ibn Fūrak, Mujarrad; al-Ghazālī, al-Iqtiṣād. ↩

11. Al-Juwaynī, al-Irshād and Lumaʿ al-Adillah; Thiele, “Between Cordoba and Nīsābūr,” on the argument from particularisation. ↩

12. Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, al-Lumaʿ; Daniel Gimaret, Théories de l’acte humain en théologie musulmane (Paris: Vrin, 1980); Thiele, “Between Cordoba and Nīsābūr.” ↩

13. Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, al-Lumaʿ; Ibn Fūrak, Mujarrad; Allard, Le problème des attributs divins. ↩

14. Richard J. McCarthy, ed. and trans., The Theology of al-Ashʿarī (Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1953); al-Bāqillānī, al-Inṣāf. ↩

15. Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalām (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), used with caution alongside Allard and Gimaret; Thiele, “Between Cordoba and Nīsābūr.” ↩

16. Al-Bāqillānī, Iʿjāz al-Qurʾān; Gustave E. von Grunebaum, trans., A Tenth-Century Document of Arabic Literary Theory and Criticism. ↩

17. 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. ↩

18. Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, al-ʾIbānah ʿan Uṣūl ad-Diyānah, read alongside the doctrinal reconstruction in Ibn Fūrak’s Mujarrad and the textual cautions recorded in the source register below; al-Bāqillānī, al-Inṣāf. ↩

19. Ibn Fūrak, Mushkil al-Ḥadīth; al-Bayhaqī, al-Asmāʾ wa-ṣ-Ṣifāt. ↩

20. Al-Ghazālī, Qānūn at-Taʾwīl, Fayṣal at-Tafriqah, al-Iqtiṣād, and Iljām al-ʿAwāmm ʿan ʿIlm al-Kalām; “Arabic and Islamic Philosophy of Religion,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ↩

21. Ibn Fūrak, Mujarrad and Mushkil al-Ḥadīth; al-Juwaynī, al-ʿAqīdah an-Niẓāmiyyah; al-Ghazālī, al-Iqtiṣād. ↩

22. Qurʾān 75:22–23 and 83:15; the reports gathered in the books of faith and monotheism in the canonical ḥadīth collections; al-Bayhaqī, al-Asmāʾ wa-ṣ-Ṣifāt. ↩

23. Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, al-Lumaʿ; Ibn Fūrak, Mujarrad; al-Bāqillānī, at-Tamhīd. ↩

24. Al-ʾAs͟hʿarī, al-Lumaʿ; Richard M. Frank, “Moral Obligation in Classical Muslim Theology,” Journal of Religious Ethics 11, no. 2 (1983). ↩

25. Al-Ghazālī, al-Iqtiṣād, Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm ad-Dīn, and Mishkāt al-Anwār; Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). ↩