Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

156 David B. Burrell CSC
created by God. And when power and motivation are joined, the
action necessarily occurs. Now this requires that God be the Creator
of the creatures’ acts. And if this conclusive rational proof supports
the literal sense, then all problems and ambiguities cease. 39
Or as Gimaret puts it boldly: ‘‘Razı does not hesitate to declare himself a
Jabrite’’, given his insistence that ‘‘because these acts can be done only if
God creates the power and the motivation to do them, the combination
of the two necessarily brings about the emanation of the act from the
creature’’. 40 As for the reward for good deeds, he is consistent in holding
that God is in no way bound to supply this, thereby returning us to
divine generosity and mercy. Evil actions, of course, make the question
yetmoreacute,leadingRazı to qualify his ‘‘Jabrite’’ position severely:
It is as though this question is located in a field of contradiction,
founded on contrary evidence as well as reasoning regarding the
necessity of exalting God in His power as well as His wisdom,
affirming His oneness and his exemption from evil; or one simply
remains grounded on the proofs issuing from revelation. For these
reasons it is a difficult question, at once obscure and deep. Let us ask
God Most High to bring us to the truth of it. 41
late mysticism: suhrawardı, ibn ‘arabı
and mulla s _
adra
If Islamic philosophers point us towards a ‘‘cause of being’’, while
later kalam thinkers, notably Ghazalı, try to rescue that source-of-all
from being enmeshed in causal necessities, what remains to be
expressed is the utter uniqueness of the creator/creature relation. The
Qur’an had insisted upon it; what idiom can help us to articulate its sui
generis character? That will be the task of the thinkers who emerged,
after the decisive accusations of Ghazalı, to restore Islamic philosophy
in the original heartland, the ‘‘East’’, hence its title, ishraqı, picking up
the associations of sunrise with illumination. It fell to Shihab al-Dın
al-Suhrawardı (d.1191) to introduce a new paradigm for the doing of
philosophy. 42 While it is accurate to call that paradigm Platonist rather
than Aristotelian, one must also call attention to the way in which
spiritual exercises came to be seen as integral to the philosophical
inquiry, perhaps under the influence of Ghazalı’s Deliverer yet also
consonant with that dimension of ancient philosophy underscored by
Pierre Hadot. 43 The metaphor of light allowed Suhrawardı to account for
Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008