A literary history of Persia

THE MWTAZILA 281Uraayyad period perished altogether, and the oldest writingspreserved to us arose in ' Abbasid times. We are therefore drivenback for information as to the Murjiya to the scattered noticeswhich we find in later Arabic writers."Of much greater interest and importance was the sect ofthe ^adariyya (" Partisans of Free Will ") or Mu'tazila(" Seceders,") whose leading; idea, to quote Dr.' 'The Mu'tazila. \."Sterner, 1 is best characterised as the enduringprotest of sound human understanding against the tyrannicaldemands which the orthodox teaching imposed upon it."They called themselves Ahlul- l Adl wa t-Tawhid^ or " Partisans"of the Divine Justice and Divine Unity of the;DivineJustice, because the orthodox doctrine of Predestination, whichrepresented God as punishing man for sins forced upon him,as itwere, by a Fate which he had no power to resist, madeGod in effect a pitiless Tyrant ;of the Divine Unity, because,said they, the orthodox party,who make the Qur'an coeternaland coexistent with God, and who regard the DivineAttributes as separate or separable from the Divine Essence,are really Polytheists or Mushrikun (associaters of other godswith the One God). The account generally given of theirorigin and name is that Wasil b. 4 Ata al-Ghazzal, a PersianSdB awasfib 'AtaHasan ofdisciple of the celebrated theologianBasra >differed from his master as to the questionwhether a believer, after he had committed agrievous sin, still deserved to be called by that appellation.Wasil held that such an one could neither be called a believernor an unbeliever, but must be regarded as occupying a middleposition between the two, and withdrew to a different part ofthe mosque to expound this view to those of his fellow-studentswho followed him ; whereupon Hasan of Basra observed toHe haththose who stood round him," Ptazalalan-n& " ("seceded from us "), in consequence of which saying Wasil'sparty were called by their opponents " al- Mu'tazila " (" the1Mu'tasiliten, p. 4.