Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present: Philosophy in the ...

Dimensions of the Islamic Intellectual Tradition 123
God and consent to the truth of religion with the heart. It was also the
avoidance of any grievous sins.
A major problem that confronted the early Islamic community
was the question of who was saved and who was a Muslim. Was the
sole condition faith, or was it necessary also to practice the tenets of
the religion and avoid what was forbidden by the Shar¥‘ah? Amid this
debate, the Mu‘tazilites had to express their position clearly, which
they did in the fourth of their five principles, one that follows directly
from the principle of promise and threat. Their “in-between” position
for sinners, al-manzilah bayn al-manzilatayn, asserts that the Muslim
sinner (fåsiq) occupies a position between the believer and the unbeliever
and is still a member of the Islamic community in this world
although condemned to damnation in the world to come.
Finally, the Mu‘tazilites emphasized the principle of al-amr bi˘lma‘r¶f
wa˘l-nahy ‘an al-munkar. This well-known Islamic principle,
emphasized also by several other schools, asserts that man not only
must exhort others to perform the good but also must forbid people
from committing evil. It implies an active attitude toward the establishment
of a just religious order and a morality that is not simply a
matter of private conscience but involves Islamic society as a whole.
The Mu‘tazilites were the first group of Muslim thinkers to apply
rational arguments systematically to various questions of religion
and also to natural philosophy. They, moreover, knew some of the
tenets of Greek thought, which was being translated into Arabic at the
time of the peak of their intellectual activity in Baghdad in the third/
ninth century and had a share in the introduction of Hellenic and
Hellenistic thought into the Islamic intellectual world. Most of the
Mu‘tazilites devoted themselves to purely theological and politicotheological
questions, and all were concerned with ethics. They in fact
developed a “rational ethics,” for which they became well known in
later Islamic history. 3 A few were also interested in physics or natural
philosophy, chief among them al-Naππåm, who developed the theory
of leap (†afrah) to explain the possibility of motion over a space that is
infinitely divisible. He is known also for the theory of latency and
manifestation (kum¶n wa bur¶z), according to which God created everything
at once in a state of latency and then gradually various forms
from minerals to animals became actualized or manifested. Ab¨˘l-
Hudhayl al-‘Allåf developed the theory of atomism, which later became
central in Ash‘arite theology. It is above all for the development
of a rational theology that the Mu‘tazilites are known in the history of
Islamic thought. In this way, they influenced not only later Sunni