Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

144 David B. Burrell CSC
who (1) creates ex nihilo; (2) acts definitively in historical time;
(3) guides His people in such time; and (4) can in some way be known
indirectly by His creation’’. 5 It should be clear how many philosophical
conundra lurk in each of these assertions. What is it to create? How does
an eternal God act in time? How can divine guidance be carried out and
received? What are the ways in which created things can entice a created
intellect to some knowledge of their divine source? As we canvas the
usual groupings of Islamic thinkers reflecting on such matters – kalam,
falsafa and ishraq – we shall not lose sight of the fact that those whom
history has put in one camp or another were all concerned to parse the
four compass points of the paradigm.
schools of kalam
Early Islamic reflection on these matters (broadly identified with the
Mu‘tazilites) emanated from Basra. Mu‘tazilism in this period was not
demonstrably the result of Hellenic influence, and was probably an
indigenous Islamic development connected with local grammatical and
linguistic speculation. These Mu‘tazilites starkly contrasted the creator
God with everything else, including the Qur’an itself. Since the being of
the One has neither beginning nor end, existence belongs to God essentially.
6 But how is that existence bestowed on things which come into
existence and depart from it? Put even more finely: how can the existence
of things we encounter be traced to its source in the one creator?
These early thinkers were reluctant to adopt a view of substance which
would have been consonant with Aristotelian thought, whereby things
enjoy a consistency (by virtue of the formal cause inherent in them) and
an internal dynamic (by virtue of their inherent final cause), perhaps
fearing for the resultant consistency of a cosmos which failed to display
its provenance from a unitary source. So they identified substance
with primitive atoms, notwithstanding Aristotle’s trenchant critique of
indivisible physical particles as oxymoronic. Rather in the spirit of
Leucippus, they saw what Aristotle took to be paradigmatically substances,
large-scale living things capable of generating their kind, to be
configurations of primitive ‘‘substances’’, called ‘‘atoms’’, to underscore
their primitive metaphysical status. What the creator created, then,
would be the atoms, while the configurations indicate the various ways
in which that creation is conserved in being. So the actual configuration
of the manifold possibilities of atomic arrangement best displays the
agency proper to the creator, which must be immediate and so cannot be
identified with the causal chains which operate in the created universe.
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