Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

318 Marcia Hermansen
witnesses (43:86), or those who have made a covenant with God (19:87)
may avail. A set of hadith regarded as sound by the traditional canons
presented the Prophet as interceding for sinners of his community, both
at the judgement day, and following the condemnation of some sinners
to hell. 18 As this tension was debated, one source of particular difficulty
was whether the Prophet will play an intercessory role for his community
and whether additional sources of mediating spiritual aid (wasıla)
such as the ‘‘friends of God’’ (awliya’), might be efficacious. Sunnı Islam
gave an affirmative answer here, reacting against the Mu‘tazilite
insistence that any form of intercession must compromise God’s unity
and justice. Sufi circles with a particular devotion to the Prophet as ‘‘the
perfect human being’’ (al-insan al-kamil) were particularly likely to
uphold the intercessory possibility. Certain more recent positions such
as those espoused by Wahhabism that emerged in the eighteenth century
building on Ibn Taymiyya’s hostility to intermediaries, or certain
strands in twentieth-century rationalising Islamic modernism, have
sought to reduce or eliminate any connection between this world and
that of the departed, leading to a denial of intercessory powers and an
aversion to practices and symbols of any sort of veneration. 19
Controversies over intercession were inevitable in the context of a
religion which set such store by the sole omnipotence of God, and which
had emerged in prophetic tension with a polytheistic system. Yet it was
clear to almost every Muslim that unless prayer on behalf of others is to
be abandoned, some kind of intercessory devotional life must be part of
Islam; and the hadith which affirmed the Prophet’s intercession for his
community clearly confirmed this. The Mu’tazilite alternative here, as
on some other issues, seemed to reduce God to a calculating, merciless
automaton, unresponsive to human prayer.
promise and threat
Symptomatic of this Ash‘arite-Mu‘tazilite divide was the largely
Mu‘tazilite topic known as the promise and threat (al-wa‘d wa’l-wa‘ıd),
which asserted that an individual’s eternal fate may be at least to some
extent rationally ascertained on the basis of God’s promise to reward the
good person and punish the evildoer. Ash‘arites and H _
anbalites contested
this, asserting that it privileged human judgement based on
reason over God’s sovereign will. Fearful of vainglorious overconfidence
in God’s favour, Islamic piety has in general eschewed any concept of
‘‘being saved’’ or a sense of security about one’s posthumous destiny.
Significant reports of the Prophet caution about the possibility that even
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