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

126 Part 3: Islamic Philosophy in History
responsible for their actions. In emphasizing the doctrine of
voluntarism, al-Ash‘ar¥ in a sense reduced the Divine Nature to the
Divine Will and conceived of God as an All-Powerful Will rather than
the Supreme Reality, which is and also wills. 6
Ash‘arism is concerned not only with specifically religious issues
but also with epistemology and the philosophy of nature. The most
salient feature of Ash‘arism in this domain is the justly famous atomism,
which has also come to be known as occasionalism, a doctrine
that was refuted explicitly by St. Thomas Aquinas. 7 Developed mostly
by his student Ab¨ Bakr al-Båqillån¥, who was the most important of
the early Ash‘arites after the founder of the school, this thoroughgoing
atomism takes away from the created world and all things in it their
specific nature. All things are composed of atoms (juz˘ lå yatajazzå,
literally, the “part that cannot be further divided”), which are themselves
without extension. Space is likewise composed of discontinuous
points, and time of discontinuous moments. There is no horizontal
causality. Fire does not burn because it is in its nature to do so but
because God has willed it. Tomorrow He could will otherwise, and as
a result fire would cease to burn. There is no such thing as the nature
of fire. What in fact appears to us as cause and effect—for example,
fire causing a piece of cotton to burn—is nothing but a habit of the
mind (‘ådah), because we have seen fire being brought near a piece of
cotton and the cotton then burning in flames. 8 God is in reality the
only cause; it is His Will that makes fire burn the cotton. Miracles are
in fact nothing other than the breaking of this habit of mind (literally,
“khåriq al-‘ådah,” which is one of the Arabic terms for miracles).
Ash‘arism dissolves all horizontal causes into the vertical cause,
which is God’s Will. It thereby reduces the whole universe to a number
of atoms moving in a discontinuous time and space in a world
where nothing possesses any specific nature. No wonder then that
Ash‘arism was strongly opposed to Islamic philosophy, which sought
to know the cause of things leading finally to the Ultimate Cause.
Ash‘arism did not contribute to the flowering of Islamic science, because
most Islamic scientists were also philosophers, and very few
were mutakallim or Ash‘arite theologians. Moreover, as we have seen,
Ash‘arism remained an opponent of falsafah over the centuries.
MĀTURĪDISM AND appleAH • ĀWISM
Several other contemporaries of al-Ash‘ar¥ sought, like him, to formulate
a theology that would be acceptable to the majority of Muslims,