Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

The early creed 51
style of argument from evolving Iraqi systematisations of Arabic grammar
and law, the mature Mu‘tazilite school armed itself with the Hellenistic
methodology which became increasingly popular as Abbasid rule
progressed. Thus, while most of them were not themselves philosophers,
or interested in philosophy as such, the Mu‘tazila benefited from the
study of logic and physics, and speculated about perception and language,
as well as philosophical problematics such as the composition of bodies
from atoms, substance versus accident, and the nature of the will.
However, those inclined to philosophy itself, such as the earliest major
Muslim philosopher, al-Kindı (d.866), and the philosophically inclined
theologian al-Naz _
z _
am, upheld many of the key principles of Mu‘tazilism.
The later Mu‘tazila such as Abu ‘Alı al-Jubba’ı (d.915) tempered the
mechanistic understanding of God’s justice by adding that God could
grant unmerited grace (tafad _
d _
ul) to whomever He might. Other Sunnı
concerns were also incorporated into some Mu‘tazilite systems, making
their God more personal, and although the school declined after the
ending of the Abbasid inquisition, it eventually found new followers in
both Twelver and Zaydı Shı‘ism, which frequently adopted it as their
doctrine in place of their own earlier theological views. The only major
Shı‘ite group which did not substantially engage with Mu‘tazilism was
the Isma‘ılıs, increasingly drawn to Neoplatonist formulations.
sunnı traditionist triumph and ash‘arite
synthesis
While Abu H _
anıfa, Malik, al-Shafi‘ı (767–820) and others elaborated
schemes of legal thought that favoured the revealed sources of the
Qur’an and the Sunna but employed reason in varying degrees (the
school of Abu H _
anıfa being at the forefront in this regard), Ah _
mad ibn
H _
anbal was regarded as the champion of a traditionism that sought to
minimise the use of reason and to seek religious unity by applying literalist
explanations. In his confrontation with Mu‘tazilism, however,
Ibn H _
anbal had been obliged to take a clear stand on all the issues at
stake, and hence was publicly associated with a kind of Sunnı traditionist
creed. In general, his teaching simply opposed Mu‘tazilism on
most points. First came the issue of the Qur’an, for which Ibn H _
anbal
had been imprisoned. He insisted that not only was the Qur’an uncreated
and therefore coeternal with God, but that its oral recitation
was likewise uncreated. However, even some traditionists, such as
al-Bukharı (810–70), who assembled the most authoritative of all hadith
collections, found this excessive.
Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008