Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

Creation 147
designed to meet the Mu‘tazilite concern to remove all trace of the
perpetration of evil from the creator of all: the action created by God
cannot, however, be predicated of God (by saying that God did it), but
must be imputed to the one performing it. What sounds like double-talk
can be explained as an attempt to formulate the relation between creating
agent and created agent, using the crude instrument of a created
power to perform this act (qudra). A comprehensive study of the work of
the Egyptian reformer Muh _
ammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905) and his disciple,
Rashıd Rid _
a(1865–1935), in their modernist qur’anic commentary The
Beacon (al-Manar) (itself intended as a continuing elaboration of the
Sunnı position on these matters), pinpoints the key issue as the relation
between created and uncreated agents: ‘‘By their acquisition [kasb],
human beings are indeed autonomous agents, yet hardly independent;
they are only agents because God wills it and creates them as free
agents.’’ Rid _
a underscores the non-concurrence of these two concepts:
creation and the created free act. 12 So a coherent presentation of the
intent of the Ash‘arite analysis will require a semantics able to account
for the inherently analogous sense of ‘‘act’’, ‘‘action’’, and ‘‘acting’’. Yet
such a presentation might also applaud one implication of that analysis
for ethics: actions as properly described are what they are, and so retain
(as the actions they are) their orientation towards or away from the
properly human good. In this sense the actions we perform can indeed
be said to be ‘‘created by God’’ in the sense that we are unable to
change them into something else by evasive descriptions which seek to
accommodate our wishes at the moment of performing them. Indeed,
one might well discern these ethical echoes in the overtly theological
overtones of continuing Islamic discussions of human life and action.
Another strain of kalam reasoning can be identified as Maturıdism,
being traceable to Abu Mans _
ur al-Maturıdı’s Book of Affirming God’s
Oneness (Kitab al-Tawh _
ıd). 13 Originating in the region of Samarkand,
this school was continued by others, and offered itself as the doctrine of
Abu H _
anıfa, thus imbibing the spirit of one of the four schools of
Muslim law. In essence, this school tended to reaffirm the twin assertions
that ‘‘human beings are truly the agents of their actions, while
these actions are at the same time created by God’’. 14 Their insistence
that the divine act of takwın, or bringing into existence, is eternal, and
so to be distinguished from existing things, became a point of controversy
with Ash‘arism, as did their understandable avoidance of the
ambiguous language of kasb/iktisab to account for free created actions
of human beings. Yet for our purposes they cannot be said to have
contributed much further clarification regarding the analogous uses of
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