JOURNAL OF ARABIC AND ISLAMIC STUDIES

Felicitas Opwis
free will with that of the Ashʿarī school of theology 113 and, at the same
time, distinguishes them from the extreme traditionalist position of
preordination.
The uncreatedness of the Qurʾān
To further situate the school in its theological doctrines, al-ʿAbbādī also
emphasizes that the early adherents of the school professed the
uncreatedness of the Qurʾān. While publicly pronouncing the Qurʾān
created was not yet an issue for al-Shāfiʿī as it came to be official policy
only after his death, 114 we find his immediate disciples suffering
persecution during the inquisition, the miḥna (which lasted from 218/833
JAIS
to 235/850), when many scholars were asked to proclaim the government
doctrine that the Qurʾān is the created word of God. 115 We are told that
al-Shāfiʿī’s close companion al-Buwayṭī, about whom al-Shāfiʿī is said
to have predicted that he will die in ‘iron,’ was made to appear before the
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authorities in fetters and asked to profess the createdness of the Qurʾān,
but refused and was incarcerated. 116 Al-Buwayṭī is further credited with
stating that he who says that the Qurʾān is created is an infidel (kāfir),
which, as al-ʿAbbādī asserts, was also the view of al-Muzanī and al-
Rabīʿ, both of whom transmit it from al-Shāfiʿī. 117 Of another Shāfiʿī
jurist, Yūsuf b. ʿAbd al-Aʿlā, who is described as a contemporary of al-
113 In contrast to al-ʿAbbādī, other Shāfiʿīs with Ashʿarī leanings (for example,
Ibn Fūrak, Abū Isḥāq al-Isfarāʾīnī, Abū Muḥammad al-Juwaynī, and al-Subkī)
insist that al-Ashʿarī himself belonged to the Shāfiʿī school. See Makdisi, ‘Ashʿarī
and the Ashʿarites I,’ 68.
114 While discussions over the nature of the Qurʾān were common prior to and
during al-Shāfiʿī’s lifetime, pronouncing it to be created did not become official
government doctrine until 218/833. For the origins of the debate, see Wilferd
Madelung, ‘The Origins of the Controversy Concerning the Creation of the Koran,’
in Orientalia Hispanica sive studia F. M. Pareja octogenario dicata, ed. J. M.
Barral (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 504–25.
115 Nawas points out that the main target of the caliphal inquisition were judges,
jurists, and ḥadīth transmitters, i.e. men of intellectual quality and social influence
(John A. Nawas, ‘The Miḥna of 218 A.H./833 A.D. Revisited: An Empirical
Study,’ Journal of the American Oriental Society 116 (1996), 698–708 (pp. 704–5
and 708).
116 Al-Buwayṭī died in prison holding firm that the Qurʾān is not created. See
Martin Hinds, ‘Miḥna,’ EI 2 , vol. 7, 2–6 (p. 4).
117 Al-ʿAbbādī, Kitāb Ṭabaqāt, 8.
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