Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

God: essence and attributes 123
at multiplicity, the Mu‘tazilites concluded that the Qur’an had been
created (makhluq). The argument may be reconstructed as follows: if the
Qur’an is God’s speech, then it is either coeternal with God, and thus
uncreated, or it is not coeternal with God. To maintain pure monotheism
one must concede that it is created. On this inference, if the Qur’an
is coeternal with God, then in order to eschew plurality in the divine
oneness, one has to say that the scripture, as God’s speech, is one with
God. To avoid affirming contraries (unity and multiplicity), a Mu‘tazilite
would assert that it is not coeternal with God and must therefore be
created. This argument is seconded by qur’anic proof-texts that point to
the descent of revelation in the Arabic tongue that is constrained by
place and time, as to its accessibility to finite human apprehension.
This reasoning, however, is problematic, since it begs a further
question: if the Qur’an is created, does this then entail that it is no
longer God’s Word? The Sunnıs radically opposed this controversial
thesis. Yet if they refuted it on the basis of arguing that the Qur’an was
not created, would this not entail that the Qur’an is coeternal with God?
And, hence, would it not compromise the all-important principles of
unity and transcendence?
The Mu‘tazilite thesis regarding the creation of the Qur’an appears
as ill founded on the same grounds that it presupposes, namely, the
radical observance of God’s transcendence. By stressing transcendence,
the belief in the scripture’s created status implies that the divine attributes
are not real, but are rather revealed in a worldly language for the
convenience of human comprehension. The reality of divinity seems to
be determinable by the judgements of human reason, which see fit to
reject multiplicity even to the point of refuting the attributes and
affirming that God’s Word was created. The Mu‘tazilites censored,
through rational directives, the classes of meaningful propositions that
could be uttered about the divine. However, by believing that ‘‘human
reason’’ sufficiently measures what is applicable to God, transcendence
became paradoxically delimited by a negation of the attributes. Furthermore,
the unfolding of this rationalist impetus resulted in picturing
the Qur’an as a creature.
In an archetypal Mu‘tazilite move, Was _
il ibn ‘At _
a’ (d. 748) is believed
to have rejected the affirmation of the attributes of knowledge (‘ilm),
power (qudra), will (irada), and life (h _
ayat), in order to negate a ‘‘plurality
of eternals’’. Some later Mu‘tazilites restricted the totality of the
attributes to knowledge and power, while others reduced them to unity.
According to the sources, Abu’l-Hudhayl al-‘Allaf considered the attributes
and the essence to be identical, al-Naz _
z _
am denied that God has
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