Commonly taught Muslim creed differs from the highly technical scholarship found in theological works composed under the religious discipline of kaldm (lit., “the speech”), which also includes philosophical and mystical theology. The common creed includes the sources of authority, the minimal and essential articles of faith, and the prominent differences among the major Muslim schools of thought.
Formal authority in Islam lies in the Qur’an and the sunnah. In practice, religious leaders, imams, and jurists (fuqaha’) guide the faithful to live in conformity with the divinely ordained Islamic law (shari`ah).
All Muslims affirm in speech and in their hearts the Islamic principles (usul al-din) of the unity of God (tawhid), the necessity of prophets (nubuwah), and the day of resurrection (qiyamah), to which the Shi`is add the necessity of the imamate and the justice of God. The secondary or derivative doctrines held by all Muslims, and known in the West as the “pillars of Islam,” are: (1) testimony in being a witness to an absolute monotheistic God, to Muhammad as his prophet (and for the Shi is, `All as the friend or wali of God); (2) performance of the daily prayers (Qur’an, 9.114); (3) fasting during the month of Ramadan (2.185); (4) pilgrimage to Mecca (11.158, 196-203); (5) paying the zakdt or alms (2.43)-and for the ShMs, financial support of the descendants of the Prophet through donation of khums (one-fifth); and (6) being in a state of “struggle” (jihad) to spread Islam (9.20).
The majority of Muslims, 85 percent, belong to the Sunni tradition, which adheres to the consensus (ijma`) of the community as an important source of authority. On the basis of this consensus the Sunnis uphold the succession of the first four caliphs-Abu Bakr (r. 632-634), `Umar (634-644), `Uthman (644-656), and `All (656-661). The Shi`is (the “partisans” of ‘Ali), who constitute 15 percent of Muslims, believe that ‘Ali was explicitly designated by the Prophet to succeed him at a site named Ghadir Khumm, when he was returning to Medina from his farewell pilgrimage. The Shi`is assert that a special class of “infallible” individuals such as the prophet Muhammad, his daughter Fatimah (d. 632), his cousin and son-in-law ‘Ali, and their direct descendants (including the Mahdi, the last hidden imam) are the ultimate religious-moral authorities in Islam.
Contents of Theology Proper. Theological controversies in Islam, focus on seven major issues: (1) the analysis of the concept of God; (2) the ontological and the cosmological proofs of God’s existence; (3) the cosmology of the relationship between God and the world; (4) the ethics of the theodicy of God’s order with respect to free will, determinism, fate, good, evil, punishment, and reward; (5) the pragmatics of the language of religions, and the peculiar function of the faculty of imagination special to prophets, mystics, and prophetstatesmen; (6) the relationship between reason and revelation; and finally, (7) the politics of the application of divine rule to the community.
History. Islamic theology begins during the reign of the last two “rightly guided” (rashidun) caliphs, `Uthman and ‘Ali (644-661). Salient features of the tradition as developed in various schools of thought are outlined in this section.
Khawarij (the secessionists). Initially this group followed `All, but when he allowed an arbitration following the battle between him and Mu`awiyah in 657 at Siffin, they protested and “seceded” from the party of `All. The Khawarij rejected the Sunni view that the ruler must belong to the tribe of Quraysh as well as the Shi`i claim that he must be a descendant of the Prophet. Instead, they held that right action and faith are the only essential attributes of a true Muslim, including a leader among them. Thus they viewed the caliph as a virtuous authority of Islam, who called for jihad and tried to kill whoever they regarded as being outside their egalitarian community.
Murji’ah. This school was developed by Jahm ibn Safwan (d. 745), Abu Hanifah (d. 767), and others as a reaction and even corrective to the extreme puritanism of the Khawarij. Their views were shared by many other Muslims, such as Ibn Karram (d. 973), the founder of the Karramiyah school (see below). The salient doctrine of the Murji’ah was to postpone judgment on believers who committed a grave sin; moreover, they emphasized the promise (al-wa’d), hope (irja’), and respite granted by God rather than threat and punishment. They also opposed the doctrine of eternal punishment of sinners and emphasized the goodness of God and his love for human beings. Politically their position opposed the Khariji view that advocated punishment of believers who committed sins and supported rebellion against Muslim rulers whom the Khawarij considered corrupt or deviating from true Islam. In contrast, the Murji’ah held that one should obey a Muslim ruler even if one disagreed with his policies or questioned his character. The controversy was a politically sensitive one: some Muslims disagreed strongly with the perceived sinful deviation of the third caliph `Uthman and the Umayyad rulers; others criticized the fourth caliph ‘Ali for his submission to arbitration with Mu’awiyah. The practical side of the theoretical controversy was translated into the practical question of whether or not a Muslim should obey a ruler with whom he disagrees.
Pointing to the Qur’an (9.106), the Murji’i doctrines evolved into three important theological theses. First was the primary authoritative and epistemic status given to the intention of faith (iman). Here they rejected the utilitarian formula that ethical imports are ultimately derivable from consequences of an action. Instead, in accord with the ethical views held by the jurists, they maintained that the intention of the agent-specifically, the state of his or her belief-is the sole criterion for instituting punishment on him or her. Faith became closely associated with both gnosis (ma’rifah) and the open proclamation (iqrar) of God, with the tendency to equate being a Muslim with having faith. Second, the adherents of this group achieved a pragmatically convenient political posture; it followed from their views that caliphs like `Uthman and ‘Ali should be obeyed even if they had committed a sin; consequently this perspective justified and rationalized the moral status of early Islamic history. In addition, their principles justified their obedience to rulers of the Umayyad dynasty with whose policies they disagreed. Third, unlike the Khawarij, they preached tolerance toward other Muslims and supported the spirit of unity within the community of the faithful. In this tenor, followers of Abfi Hanifah-for example, Abfi Muti` al-Balkhi, as indicated in his Alfiqh al-absat-held views sympathetic to non-Arabs who embraced the faith of Islam and held no descent or only indirect descent from the original Quraysh family. This perspective was very favorable to the Umayyads, who made extensive use of Christians and non-Arabs in their administration.
Qadariyah. The major doctrines of this school are discussed in the works of Ma`bad al-Juhani (d. 699), Abfi Marwan Ghaylan ibn Marwan al-Dimashqi alQubti (d. 730), and others listed by Hasan al-Basri (d. 728) in his Risalah. The Qadariyah recognize a power (qudrah) in the human agent that makes her/him responsible for acts performed; in this sense human action is different from all other events. They held that only by asserting human freedom can one justify God’s power to blame or to punish man. They also agreed with the later Mu’tazili position of Wasil ibn `Ata’ that persons intuitively are self-conscious of their capacity to make choices and that this conscious awareness and intention will make persons responsible for the outcome of their acts. The assertion of human free will is a standard argument to absolve God from responsibility for evil in the world. The doctrine of free will is compatible with two distinct views. First was the position that no act can be an effect of two different powers. Therefore if God empowers persons, he cannot exert any subsequent power over their resulting acts; otherwise, he will and will not empower persons, which implies an impossibility and a contradiction. The other alternative was formulated by making the following distinction: God’s powers are necessary due to himself, while human powers are derived by acquisition (kasb) from God. Eventually the latter position gained more support among the Sunni theologians, who did not wish to deny that God is a remote cause of all events or that he wills order in the cosmos. Another doctrine accepted by the Qadari-yah was the principle of continuous creation. The practical import of the Qadari position on human responsibility was politically significant; it held each Umayyad caliph responsible for his acts. Being suspected of having brought secularism into the Islamic state, the Umayyad caliphs were challenged by the Qadariyah. As a result, al-Juhani and al-Dimashqi were executed by the Umayyad rulers `Abd al-Malik (d. 705) and Hisham (d. 743) respectively. This inquisition (mihnah) was officially in support of the Mu’tazili position that the Qur’an is created. The persecutions ended in 848 when Caliph Mutawakkil (r. 847-861) came to power. Many of the positive doctrines of the Qadariyah were utilized later by the Mu’tazilah, who adapted them to their own system. For example, al `Allaf advocated the Qadari position in this world, whereas they happen by necessity in the other world.
Mu’tazilah. This group of theologians chose a middle position on the question of whether or not those who are Muslim by faith but commit sin are still Muslims. In addition, this group, supposedly initiated by Wasil ibn `Ata’ (d. 748), held that in spite of some Qur’anic passages that speak about God’s omnipotence at the expense of God’s justice (7.178, 32.13, 3:154, for example), God is basically just. More importantly, God’s uniqueness and unity is absolute: the so-called divine “attributes” are all dimensions of the divine essence. They refused to apply anthropomorphic attributions to God, hence their belief that the Qur’an, as part of divine speech, is created in time and is not eternal. The promises for both rewards and punishments are fulfilled on the judgment Day. For them good and evil are not irrational or blind byproducts of fate as part of a deterministic theodicy applied to humans. On the contrary, a person has free will, can construe a rational depiction for both good and evil, and is thus responsible for his or her acts. Human reason harmonizes with revelation.
Major Mu’tazili theologians include Abu al-Hudhayl al-`Allaf (d. 849/850), his nephew al-Nazzam (d. c.435/ 445), and the celebrated jurist `Abd al-Jabbar (d. 1204/ 1205). In addition to upholding standard Mu’tazili doctrines, al-`Allaf proposed that there were bodies something like atoms, that were mathematical points created by God, who combined them into different substances and objects, some inert and some alive. Thus life becomes an “accident (al property)” that God adds to the aggregate of atoms that constitute the human body; God can of course destroy a person at will. Later Nasir alDin Tusi (d. 1274) criticized this doctrine by pointing out that a mathematical point and a physical body are ontologically two different types of entities; thus embedded in this Mu’tazili theory is a categorical mistake.
Al-Nazzam held that God’s acts-including creation-are necessary. God makes the world of infinitely divisible atoms, including human souls, which are a subtle type of body. A body is characterized by qualities such as coldness and sound. The living body, the soulspirit, permeates aggregates of atoms and is endowed with free will. Several later thinkers, such as Shaykh alMufid (d. 1022) and Nasir al-Din Tusi, singled out alNazzam’s crude materialism in order to ridicule Mu`tazilili doctrines.
Another major Mu’tazili was `Abd al-Jabbar, the celebrated jurist. Recent studies by George F. Hourani (Islamic Rationalism: The Ethics of `Abd al-Jabbar, Oxford, 1971) have thrown much light on his theology. `Abd alJabbar held that God’s acts are not necessary; if they were necessary, they could not be classified as “acts” but would be called compulsive responses. One cannot claim, he points out, that God’s words are truthful only on the basis of revelation, for that would beg the question and constitute circular reasoning. That must be deduced from rationalistic theology by appeal to God’s wisdom. His rationalistic epistemology distinguishes between the semantics of the correspondence of a thought to its designatum, which is an external object, and the pragmatics of the intentional state of satisfaction and tranquility in the subject. He held that ultimately the subjective dimension is affected by the objective correspondence ground. A paradigm of a noncognitive and subjective judgment is an aesthetic judgment, being based primarily on the approval and disapproval of the agent. By contrast, while not innate, ethical judgments are objective because they are received by direct comprehension in the context of empirical experiences. In this sense ethics is analogous to geometry, where instances are used to illustrate principles. `Abd al-Jabbar strongly criticized the theistic subjectivism of the Ash`ariyah, which asserts that God’s command is the sole criterion for determining the correctness of an act. A command as a “command-qua-command” cannot be the sole source obligating an agent to act; instead, there must be additional factors such as the nature of the agent issuing the command and the consequences of the act for the receiver of the command. Moreover, there could be a plurality of commanders, which implies that the receiver of the command must use at least one criterion different from the mere fact of “having been commanded” to carry out one command and refuse another. The goodness of God is similar to the goodness of persons. But while persons because of the limits of their knowledge may do evil, God is never in a state in which he can make a mistake, and thus all his acts are good by his own free will. The use of logical arguments by Mu`tazilis, their materialism, and their rationalistic ethics contributed extensively to the development of philosophical methodology in Islamic theology.
Zdhiriyah and Ibn Hazm. A central conflict in Islamic theology lies in the interpretation of sacred texts. On one extreme there are the so-called Batinlyah, who claim that in many cases the observable exoteric or apparent (zdhir) signifies an internal (batin) meaning often associated with an esoteric, mystic, iconic significance of the outward expression. The doctrines of the Batiniyah school became an important element of Islamic mysticism and central tenets of the Isma’ilis. A group of theologians reacted against this trend by advocating the literal interpretation of texts. The Zahiri school was founded by Dawfid ibn `All al-Zahiri (d. 817), a jurist who objected to the views of Shafi’i school of jurisprudence, and occupies the other extreme. Dawfid ibn `Ali took the Qur’an, the hadith, and the consensus of Muhammad’s companions to be the only acceptable sources of authority. Although Ibn al-Nadim (d. 995) lists more than 150 books attributed to Dawfid ibn `Ali, he does not mention the Zahiri movement. The Zahiri school was popularized by `Ali ibn Hazm (d. 1064), who more than other theologians emphasized syntactic analyses to support his theological position. For example, he distinguishes between two senses of modal “necessity” (wajib), which means either a syntactical necessity implied by the rules of grammar or a moral obligation rooted in revelation. In the context of his critique of both the Mu’tazili and Ash`ari theologians, as well as of non-Muslim philosophers, Ibn Hazm made some original contributions to Islamic epistemology. For example, he granted cognitive legitimacy only to revelation and sensation, because revelation is based on religious authority and sensation is immutable. Since a pattern of deductive reason used in a proof (burhdn) by itself, according to his analysis, is an abstract schema without content, it cannot provide any content for theology or ethics without an essential normative content acquired from revelation. Another misuse of reasoning is to extend legal knowledge by certain illegitimate techniques that had been adopted by Muslim legal experts.
Ibn Hazm’s theory of observation includes the notion of a “sixth” sense, a primary type of intelligence (awwal al-`aql) similar to categories of understanding, from which derive such intuitive principles as those that a part is less than the whole, or that no two bodies can simultaneously occupy the same space. Hourani labels Ibn Hazm a “subjective theist” who-against the rationalistic ethics of the Mu’tazilah-argues that all values depend on the will of God, who is totally free from any moral code. Space and time are limited and are created by God, who is himself unlimited; God can even perform infinite division of bodies, and thus for him there are no atoms. Following Dawud ibn `AR, he held that the consensus of the community was restricted to the community of the companions of the Prophet; in doing so, he denied legitimacy to the essential thought of the contemporary progressive vehicles of Islamic legal reasoning. Following a literal (zahir) reading of the sacred texts, Ibn Hazm advocated a return to reliance on tradition (hadith), opposing also the principles of imitative following (taghd), analogy (qiyas), good judgment (istihsan), and giving reason (ta’aqqul). For example, in case of analogy, Ibn Hazm argues that there is no textual support for this method. Following the Zahiri literal interpretation of texts, he strongly opposed the Shi`i view of allegorical interpretation (ta’wil) in the same spirit that he rejected the analogical reasoning used by many Sunni schools. He advocated a grammatical and syntactic interpretation of the Qur’anic account of God. God’s names in the Qur’an are to be taken literally as names applied to him by himself; they are not adjectives attributed to a substance. We have no right to infer ontological attributes from these names-neither anthropomorphic attributes nor attributes implying duality-because these expressions are merely signs by which we name God. God is an incorporeal, eternal unity unlike any other entity. Psychologically, human happiness lies in a desire for pleasure and a repulsion from care; this state of bliss can be achieved only through salvation. The help of the Prophet and revelation play a key role in human salvation, but the means to achieve salvation is through a proper use of reason, philology, and observational evidence. Ibn Hazm’s school of thought influenced future theologians as well as mystics, as indicated by the works of Ibn `Arabi, who investigates the divine names and makes a distinction between God as he is revealed to us and God as absolute reality.
Karramiyah. This school is named after its founder, Abu `Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Karram (d. 973). Its creeds gained popularity in Khorasan province in Iran and had the patronage of Sultan Mahmud Ghaznawi, whose court welcomed mystics such as Rumi, scientists such as Biruni, and philosophers such as Ibn Sina. More linked to the Murji’is and Hanbalis, the Karramiyah were accused of anthropomorphism because they advocated the most literal interpretation of the Qur’an on passages such as surahs 7.55 and 10.3, where physical references are made in the context of the nature of God. According to some of the Karramiyah, spatiotemporal dimensions are applicable to God, who literally sits on a throne. Several original and nonstandard doctrines of the Karramiyah set them apart from most Muslim thinkers. For example, unlike most Muslim philosophers, this school advocates that God is in fact a substance (jawhar); some went so far as to identify God as a body. Most other Muslim theologians take mental intentional belief and/or correct moral behavior to be a criterion for being a faithful believer. The Karrami emphasis on verbal expression extended to God and his creation. Supposedly entities are created when God commands with the word “be” (kun ). In their cosmogony they attempted a synthesis between monotheistic creationism and the doctrine of the eternity of the world by assigning to God a temporal dimension different from that of created existents. When hundreds of thousands of people were massacred by Chinggis Khan in the province of Khorasan, many Karramis were among them. Like the Qadarlyah and the Murji’ah, the Karramiyah died as a living movement, and some of its doctrines were integrated by the later Zahiris and other schools.
Ash’ariyah. This school of classical Sunni thought led by Abu al-Hasan al-Ash’ari (d. 935) was one of the pioneers of “occasionalism,” which depicts the world as a series of occasions that are effects of God’s will. This view has several important theological implications. First, against the Mu’tazilah, al-Ash’ari rejects rationalist ethics and holds that man is incapable of understanding the logic of good and evil because these are derived from God. God relates to the world owing to his generosity. Al-Ash’ari’s system attempts to solve the problem of a need to epistemically justify, for example, the existence of unobserved contingent causal laws between events. Concerning the proof of God’s existence, alAsh’ari held that God is the necessary existent, because a series of contingent existents for their actualization need one member to be necessary; otherwise, a vicious infinite regress is implied. God as a creature of temporal entity must be atemporal and unchanging; otherwise he would have been temporally produced and thus not be God. God must be a unity, for if there were multiple gods, there would be a possibility of conflict of will among gods, and one god among many could not be the cause of the set of contingents dependent on a single will. God is alive (2.255), omnipotent (2.284), and omniscient (3.5). His willing an entity implies creating the entity in question. Against the Mu`tazilah, al-Ash’ari argues that God also sees and hears without an implication of either temporality, anthropomorphism, or injustice to God. The Qur’an as God’s speech is eternal. When God asserts for X, “Be!” then X is created (16.40). If the Qur’an were created-as the Mu’tazilis argue-then God would need to have spoken to his own speech, which is absurd. God has eternal speech and eternal will and cannot do evil for the following reasons: God who produces the good is better than the good itself, in the same manner that if there were positive agents of evil, they would have been better than evil; but the evil that is created by God is for another entity and not for himself.
Maturidiyah. Another key figure in Sunni theology was Abu Mansur Muhammad al-Maturidi (d. 956). He presented new methodological schemes to test theological disputes. In terms of content he took a middle position between the Mu’tazilah and the Ash`ariyah on the question of free will as well as on divine justice. With regard to the divine attributes he held that divine justice and grace are interconnected with divine wisdom. For him the notion of an unjust God is meaningless. Consequently, divine justice follows syntactically and ontologically from the nature and the essence of God without limiting God’s freedom. With respect to human freedom, he holds that unlike other animals, the human being is endowed with an intellect, a moral sense, and an awareness of freedom. This conscious awareness of freedom is an essential mental constituent of being a living human being. Evidently God, the creator, treats human beings differently from purely physical substances because He has sent them a prophet, a guide. Since the Qur’an has dictated moral responsibility to persons, persons are necessarily free. Persons intend actions, and God freely realizes these intended actions. This formula preserves both God’s omniscience and human freedom.
Maturidi’s method of Qur’anic interpretation is based on two presuppositions: first, the Qur’an cannot be tested by any other source; and second, a problem does not lie in the text but in our own confused reading of the text. Consequently, when we do not understand a passage, we should attempt to decipher it by comparing it with passages that are clearer to us. It follows from Maturidi’s view that our reactions to the Qur’anic passages are pragmatic icons to their intended meaning. For example, some passages that do not correlate with a large body of other passages should not be taken in their literal sense, while the meaning of others should be left to God’s knowledge. This ingenious method allows Maturidis to apply a method analogous to contemporary statistical dimensions of inductive logic to give different “weights of interpretation” to each set of interrelated passages in the entire field of Qur’anic texts, with the clearer passages being used to comprehend other passages. These problems with understanding the Qur’an signify the inner complexity of the texts in question. They signal the presence of allegorical, literal, iconic, and other types of intended meanings. They also reveal our capacity, and the transcendental categories by which a finite being attempts to know God.
In the same manner, the problem of divine attributes and the question of their eternity must be solved in the context of religious worship. To begin with, Maturidi argues, it would be impossible to talk about God without mentioning some attributes. Moreover, if these attributes were not eternal, then God would have been ephemeral, and that contradicts our notion of his omniscience. Consequently we make a distinction between our use of attributes to approach God as we can know Him and the actual nature of God in himself. For example, if we assert that God is wise, we mean that he is aware of all events in the world; we do not mean that the sense of wisdom attributed to God is like the wisdom of human beings. With respect to God, we hold the principles of unity, the denial of similarity (tanzih), and the absolute difference between him and created entities. This solution permits discourse about God without losing the principle of unity.
Maturidi preserves the primacy and incorrigibility of the Qur’an without accepting its literal interpretation. Against the Zahiris he succeeded in preserving the unity of the concept of God as well as the primal authority of the Qur’an, while rejecting anthropomorphism. He holds that both morality and reality are open to reason-however, to a limit. The existence of the limit is proven by the contradictions, antinomies, and paradoxes of reason. Because reason has limits, it needs a spiritual guide, a prophet, who by revelation can help us in all secular and religious problems.
Maturidi’s epistemology is directed against skepticism. It takes reports (al-akhbdr) to be a legitimate source of knowledge in addition to sensation and theoretical thinking. Maturidi’s attribution of cognitive value to reports is in line with ordinary-language analysts in Anglo-American philosophy, who emphasize the ordinary use of language as a significant basis and criterion for a theory of meaning. If we ask, how do we in fact know certain facts, the answer often lies in historical reports and in the accounts we receive from previous generations. To deny this source is to misuse the very meaning of experience and knowledge. Among these reports, some claim, are the sayings of the prophets. Special attention should be paid to these by examining the evidence, such as the chain of narrators and the texts in question.
Maturidi’s clever use of philosophical arguments and new perspectives on Sunni Sunni theological tradition. such as Muhammad `Abduh reinterpret the tradition.
Ibn Taymiyah. Ahmad ibn Taymiyah (1262-132’7), another creative Sunni theologian, focused on criticism not only of Jews and Christians but also of other Muslims, including al-Ghazali’s criticisms of fellow theologians. He criticized the Ash’aris for their denial of free will because such a view, Ibn Taymiyah claimed, negates the usefulness of religious prescriptions and dismisses religion as the foundation of ethics; man for him is a genuine agent with free will. He objected to the Mu’tazilah’s identification of God with his essence; this maxim negates the most significant dimension of reli theology invigorated the Later, modern thinkers were able to go back and gious experience, which is the personal aspiration to the relation of love between God and persons. Islam for him is primarily a prophetic religion with an emphasis on revelation to guide mankind; the method of natural religion or natural theology, which sets human reason as the source of truth, is totally mistaken in religious contexts. Ibn Taymiyah held that God is absolutely eternal and self-caused, as he is the efficient cause of the world and the only source of moral command for persons. There is no knowledge of God as he is revealed to us except God’s revelations; at most, we should focus on textual exegesis of God’s revelation. The Peripatetic philosophers, using logical and causal analyses, mistakenly treat God as an impersonal principle, who has not created the world and has no knowledge of its particulars. These doctrines flatly contradict the only source of truth we have, the revelations. In addition, philosophical methodology, restricted to logic-that is, to clarification of concepts and valid construction of arguments-is inapplicable to theology for the following reasons. Conceptual analyses and definitions at best are merely formal and syntactic constructions of the belief of the logicians, and as definitions qua definitions they have no informative or factual content; in the same manner, deductions are useless for establishing facts. Valid deductive schemata are of logical forms; they indulge in the game of manipulation of universal and abstract concepts without any specific existential import.
Ibn Taymiyah extends his criticism to the theoreticians of Sufism, such as Ibn `Arab!, who advocated monistic mysticism. For Ibn Taymiyah Sufis are especially guilty because they write against the absolute transcendence of God. For example, Ibn `Arab! places universals in God, which implies that God’s perfection needs the concretion of the universals. Thus he, and other theoreticians of mysticism emphasizing similarity, mistakenly identify God-who is perfect, transcendent, and totally dissimilar-with the created, either in the realm of total nature or with the mind-dependent phenomena of humans’ existential intentional experiences. This spiritualization of a psychological phenomenon is wrong both logically and morally. The depiction of unity of being violates the total independence of God from the universe, sacrificing God’s transcendence at the expense of his immanence.
Ibn Taymiyah proceeds to criticize the ShMs; he considers them to be like the Jews in claiming special status for themselves, because the Shi is indulge in the myth of the uniqueness of the imam, his infallibility, and his special tie with God, a position Ibn Taymiyah grants only to the prophet Muhammad (5.20, 9.30-31). Christians are accused of the same folly in their belief in the Trinity, their modification of the Bible, and their antimonotheistic practices.
Philosophical Theology. Islamic theology extends beyond the traditional theological schools to more independent Islamic philosophers and mystics. It is often difficult, indeed, to distinguish the theologian from the philosopher. Many Muslim philosophical writers, such as Abfi ‘Ali ibn Sina, known to the West as Avicenna (980-1035), Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201-1274), and Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi (d. 1191), also wrote on many other disciplines including mathematics, music, linguistics, medicine, and theology. Moreover, the standard Muslim philosophical texts began with a definition of philosophy, an analysis of concepts, the proposal of contingent existents (bodies, souls, and intelligence), and finally the necessary existent, which is God. Islamic metaphysics (ilahiyat) is equivalent to theology, much as Aristotle’s theology is found in book Lambda of his Metaphysics, the prototype of all monotheistic metaphysics and theologies.
The most influential and original philosophical theology is found in the works of Ibn Sina, who wrote about 250 works that have been translated into dozens of languages; St. Thomas Aquinas used many of his central themes and quoted him more than five hundred times. Ibn Sina’s major contribution to medieval theology is that as the philosopher of “being,” he places the study of being logically prior to the study of God. Instead of “God,” Ibn Sina initiates his metaphysics on “being” as the primary notion in the soul, and on the set of logical modalities (necessity, impossibility, and contingency) as the primary structures of being. Thus the realm of entities consists of impossible beings (which have no existence), contingent beings (which exist if they are caused), and finally the necessary being (which is the unique necessary existent, God). This deduction of necessary existent from necessary being is the second version of the ontological argument repeated later by St. Anselm (1033-1109), Rene Descartes, and others. Ibn Sina’s careful cosmological depiction of God, outside Aristotle’s categorical schema, provided a theoretical model for later monistic Sufis. If God were a substance, and the only substantial changes are generation and destruction, then mystics could not depict a union or a connection between human and God. In this tenor Ibn Sina, unlike Aristotle, holds that God is not an individual substance because a substance is a composite of a substratum and an essence; the constituents of the composite are the material causes of the composite; thus, if God were a composite, then it would not be self-caused and thus not a necessary existent. It is, instead, the beholder of the world and the ground of other existents, which are contingent owing to the following account: since the necessary being is absolutely perfect (fawq altamm), it is not only the source of itself, but the source of all other entities; thus the world is emanated from it.
In addition to the analytic features of the necessary existent, Ibn Sina reflects on the moral and pragmatic dimensions of God. He explains why a union (payvand) with the necessary existent is the highest happiness and the greatest pleasure. Physical pleasures like food and lust have their limits, whereas a person encounters unlimited pleasure in his spiritual search. It is in this relation that a finite being encounters not only the unlimited but also her/his own remote final cause, and in a sense the essence of himself/herself. This desire for imitation of a higher being is an inborn cosmic love; thus the love of the absolute good is embedded by nature in the human being in her/his search for perfection. In examining Ibn Sina’s cryptic Treatise on Destiny, Hourani shows that Ibn Sina implies that hell and heaven are in fact intentional states experienced in this life based on one’s own spiritual and moral perspectives. In an attempt to solve the problem of evil, he differentiates between a primary function of an entity-for example, sunshine as the source of energy-and the secondary side effects-for example, the sun burning the head of a bald man. God’s will applies to the good received in the primary function of entities; their secondary effects are necessary accidents of their own nature. Owing to its nature as the absolute good (al-khayr al-mahd), the necessary existent is not even “free” to create the world. He is the only existent that is categorically necessary; all others are conditionally necessary-that is, the necessary existent is the ultimate cause of realization of all other existents.
Another major Muslim philosophic theologian is Nasir al-Din Tusi, also known as Khvajah, who developed the refinements of Ibn Sina’s theology in the context of Shi’i thought. Without doubt Tusi is the most versatile of all Muslim thinkers. He is the author of approximately one hundred works, including commentaries on Euclid, comprehensive texts on logic, astronomy, mathematics, practical ethics, philosophy, theology, mysticism, and extensive commentaries on Ibn Sina’s theodicy. He was also an official in the court of Hulegu Khan (1217-1265) and used his influence to oust the last Sunni caliph in Baghdad. Tusi advocated an early if not the first version of so-called “soft determinism” in accordance with the Shl’! hadith that there is neither an absolute determinism (as maintained by the Ash’aris) nor pure free will (as held by the Mu’tazills). Accordingly, the universe is the best of all possible worlds, which could not have been otherwise. Every entity has an assigned “rule” in it as its “destiny.” For persons, the self-conscious belief in free will means that the will of the human agent is used as a factor when we explain a set of causes that collectively determine its proper effect. Persons are often ignorant of the mechanism that determines their own will and other causes; psychologically, they feel that they are free or that there are accidents. In principle, however, there are always laws that could have been employed to predict future events. Tusi follows Ibn Sina in avoiding controversial topics. For example, he notes that if God knows future events, then these events are determined and man is not free; Tusi remarks that God, if omniscient, would also know what he wills and does not will in the future. Thus whatever answer one gives to this puzzle applies to God as well as to men.
As a mathematician, Tusi adds refinements to the problem of infinite regress used in standard forms of cosmological arguments and arguments about the possible division of matter into atoms. He makes a distinction between syntactic series (for example natural numbers) in which members are defined recursively, and series applied to concrete entities, which could be called “ontic” series. In a manner similar to Aristotle’s acceptance of “potential” but not “actual” infinity, he labels syntactic infinity permissible and ontic infinity vicious. He uses the argument against vicious infinite regress of ontic series to prove God’s existence, while he upholds the infinity of syntactic series to reject the doctrine of atomic substance. Like Ibn Sina he notes that “matter as experienced” is open to a series of divisions that terminate owing to our finite ability to divide indefinitely; however, a mathematical mapping of matter, which is only a syntactic entity, can be divided indefinitely. There is no actual infinite (vicious) regress in either of these divisions. Thus the position of the atomistic theologians is totally mistaken. Tusi holds that an absolute syntactic existence is a mental notion, not a reality external to mind. God in itself as the necessary existent is for him an absolute unity from any perspective, to which no attribute can be added. A remarkable similarity exists between his views and the theodicy of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) on both the topic of free will and the impossibility of material substances.
Another philosophical theologian is Suhrawardi, who modified Ibn Sina’s system by expressing it in illuminationistic terms, where the divine is the “light of lights.” He rejected the Aristotelian substance-event language and proposed a new non-Aristotelian terminology. The final destruction of Aristotelian types of philosophy in Islam, however, came with the existent philosophy of Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi, also known as Mulla Sadra (d. 1641). He finally broke the influence of the Peripatetics on Shi`i theology and established a philosophy that gives primacy to actual existents.
The systems of Mulla Sadra and the Iranian philosopher Had! ibn Mahdi Sabzavari (1797/98-1878) have been the subject of commentaries by recent Shi’i scholars in Iran, notably Ruhollah Khomeini and Jalal al-Din Ashtiyani. Here Islamic philosophical theology finds no conflict with either the aims of those who study mysticism or of those who focus on the study of Qur’an, hadith, and Islamic law. All these disciplines are taught as required curriculum in the training of Shi’i jurists, who often employ them for an interdisciplinary perspective on Islamic studies. In recent Shi`i orthodoxy philosophy has been accepted as the major core of theological analyses.
Mystical Theology. An original dimension of the Islamic contribution to theology is constituted by the mystical writings of philosophers and poets, among them al-Husayn ibn al-Mansur al-Hallaj (d. 922) Abu Yazid Bistami (d. 874), Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111), Muhyi al-Din ibn al-`Arab! (1165-1240), Farld al-Din `Attar (d. 1229), and Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273). The salient features of Islamic mystical theology include the epistemic priority placed on the immediate experience of a sense of unity of being (al-wahdat alwujud), emphasis on allegorical and iconic language to express mystical themes, and often an advocacy of the ethics of the incarnation of the divine.
Sufis appeal to the mystical passages in the Qur’an to support their theology. God is held to be thoroughly immanent in all the world (4.132), including in human beings, to whom God is described as being closer than the jugular vein (50.16). All entities return to God as their source (96.9); human beings were created by the very breath of God (1-5.29). The Qur’anic texts are used to justify the Sufi claim that an intimacy with God can be reached in the state of mystical union. Some, such as Ibn al-`Arabs, depict the world in different stages or layers of divine presence. For them there is no possibility of experiencing the noumenal God, God as he is in himself. God in this sense is the primary ontological entity, a reality-truth (al-haqq). He is not a personal God, but is rather analogous to Ibn Sina’s concept of “being-quabeing” (hash), a primordial reality in himself. This is different from God as he is manifested to persons. For some mystics nature is a theophany, signaling God as he can be experienced in our monadic perspective: by knowing herself/himself and receiving nature, a person can have a gnosis of God as manifested. Worship is a reception of immanent presence and is the mystical interpretation of “testimony,” a major pillar of Islam. Because the world exists by the grace of God (7.57), each entity, whether a substance like a leaf, an event like the blossoming of flowers, or a light like that of the sun, is an icon of divine grace. God in himself, from the perspective of a noumenon, is not knowable, but God reveals himself in the world relative to the perspective of each mystic. Texts in Islamic mystical theology have been written by some of its most systematic thinkers, such as Ibn Sina, and such acute mathematicians as Nasir al-Din Tusi. Far from being on the fringe of the theological arena, Islamic mystical theology belongs to its very center.
As a prime example of this tradition one notes Abu Hamid al-Ghazaf, a prominent figure in Islamic theology. The core of his original philosophy has until recently been ignored in the West; most literature on alGhazali focuses on his criticism of what he took to be the Islamic Aristotelian school of al-Farabi and Ibn Sins. Let us begin with a brief sketch of his doctrines. Al-Ghazali’s system may be introduced by a Cartesian skeptical search for certainty, which begins by showing that sense perception and conceptual analyses can be doubted. He rejects the former on the basis of standard arguments from illusion, and the latter by proving that the criteria of self-evidence are psychological and can change with experience. His argument is analogous to the views of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who points out the fallacy of self-reference and notes that one cannot see one’s eyes directly or measure a ruler by itself. In the same manner, al-Ghazall argues that one’s own private notion of certainty cannot be the criterion of the correctness of analytical judgments such as mathematical statements or deductive logic schemata. His ultimate epistemological choice is based on an existential phenomenology of voluntarism in the following sense. The primary marks of God and the soul as ultimate realities are not static attributes. Both God and the soul are without any quality or any quantity. Their main mark is dynamic will, such as God’s will to create the world or the intentional urge of the soul seeking personal salvation. In his mystical theism al-Ghazali equates ethical insights with nonanalytical types of knowledge. Accordingly, the noblest states of mind are not the contemplation of atemporal concepts but rather immediate experiences such as exuberance (dhawq), urgency (shawq), and intimacy (uns). Like contemporary existentialists and phenomenologists, he takes only authentic experiences that dynamically transform persons to be paradigmatic cases of cognitive states; his system adopts a normative epistemology in a voluntaristic phenomenology.
For his criticism of other thinkers, al-Ghazali classified four types of approaches to Islam: the theologians, the philosophers, the so-called Batiniyah (the Isma`ili sects), and the Sufis (Islamic mystics). His criticisms of the theologians and the Batiniyah are not so intensive as his objections to the philosophers. He accepts the Sufis and reserves his uncompromising criticisms for the theology of philosophers.
Al-Ghazali claims that theologians do not begin with a truly open attitude in their inquiry; instead, they are apologists and defenders of orthodoxy instead of being concerned with the existential reality of religious experience. Often they assume a variation of the premises they wish to prove; many of them naively followed the premises of their opponents. Some follow their own mistaken methods so blindly that they end up with the absurd conclusion that God is a body. His attack on the Batiniyah’s views of the imam had two major arguments. Al-Ghazali held that only the Prophet was the true mediator figure, and that the essence of religious experience was the immediate phenomenological will for an intimacy with God, rather than a transference of learned (ta’lim) tradition as taught by the Batiniyah.
In his criticism of the philosophers’ theological findings, al-Ghazali begins by rejecting the materialists and the naturalists, who are obviously irreligious and cannot offer a theology. Ultimately he focuses on the works of philosophers who consider themselves to be theists. AlGhazali finds no problem when these philosophers attend to mathematics, logic, or natural sciences; he finds little problem with their ethics and political philosophy; his main concern is with their theology. Here he shows that some of their theses are contrary to religion; these include the denial of the resurrection of bodies, the denial of God’s knowledge of particular events, and the belief in the eternity of the world. Next al-Ghazali attacks the logic of philosophers’ arguments on many theological topics, showing the invalidity of their deductions as well as the weakness of their premises. These include theses such as the denial of God’s attributes, God’s knowledge through his essence, our claim to the legitimacy of cause-and-effect relationships, and the substantiality of the human soul.
An important topic in the scholarship of Islamic theology is the assessment of al-Ghazali’s influence and importance. We note that Islamic philosophy flourished with vigor after al-Ghazali in the West in the works of Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), who rebutted him on every issue. In the East there was a strong renaissance of philosophy in the works of Suhrawardi, Mulls Sadra, Sabzavari, and others. The only possible influence that al-Ghazali might have had on the development of Islamic philosophy was to show the weakness of the Aristotelian system: none of the later systems were Aristotelian. Ibn Rushd commented on Aristotelian philosophy, but his system includes topics such as the pragmatics of religious language that were totally absent from Aristotle’s work.
Nonetheless, Muslim philosophers continued to write on theological topics. In fact, philosophical theology became part of the curriculum of both Sunni schools, such as al-Azhar in Egypt, and Shi’i I madrasahs such as those in Mashhad and Qom. Al-Ghazali’s major influence was to provide a legitimate bond between Sunni orthodoxy and Sufism that strengthened both traditions. In addition, al-Ghazali stands as a giant, a major master of both the theory and praxis of Islam; he is the creative thinker who embodied the best of what is universal in Islam and in being a Muslim. After al-Ghazali mysticism continued to develop both in philosophy and in metaphysical poetry. Mystics’ attention to and analyses of the intentional and experiential dimensions of religious experience have been among the most original contributions of Islam to civilization.
Recent Theological Movements. Islam is a communitarian religion with a political agenda. Consequently, far from having a fossilized theology, it contains many mechanisms for reform, innovation, and adaptation. Recent theological movements reflect the nature of Islam in the light of modern events. These include the confrontation of classical Islam with Western colonial powers (a parallel to the time of the Crusaders), modern technology (especially military hardware), and fundamental challenges to the core of religious law expressed in changes in family structure, dress codes, and antimonotheistic literature and movements. Important among these modern thinkers are Jamal al-Din alAsadabadi (also known as al-Afghani, 1839-1897), Muhammad `Abduh (1849-1905), Muhammad Iqbal (1878-1938), and Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i (1903-1989). The first three thinkers were Muslims with European education who had firsthand experience of the Western world with its science, technology, and social problems. Their attitude depicts a politicotheological confrontation with the West on the basis of Islamic rationalism.
In its true classical Islamic spirit, al-Afghani’s theology is integrated with his political response to the challenge of European Christian civilization. Analyzing European development in its historical setting, he offers on theological grounds a Pan-Islamic movement that revives the caliphate and establishes the Islamic force as a world power. Coming from a political realist, this grand plan in practice is transformed into a call for an Islamic nationalism capable of standing independent of Western economic domination. He supports this program by three appeals: first, to realize the urgency of immediate political and economic independence; second, to recognize the ultimate superiority of Islam over other religions-which as the Mu’tazilah assert, lies in its rationality; and third, to believe in the pragmatic result, a religious life that includes not only the spiritual dimension and the special status of the religious community, but also special inner qualities necessary for achieving bliss. The latter include modesty, honesty, and truthfulness, which free man from the consequences of hedonism and materialism. Like many other modern reformers, al-Afghani was a major organizer of a group of reform movements represented by Egypt’s Salafiyah and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Al-Afghani had many followers, among them his protege Muhammad `Abduh, a philosopher, scholar (`alim), professor at al-Azhar University, journalist, and mufti (chief judge); he proposed large-scale social programs for long-term social reform. He taught theology, the science of unity, and wrote a number of works, including legal opinions, on matters such as permitting the consumption of animals slaughtered by Jews and Christians, legalizing loans for interest, and introducing reforms granting rights to women. His theology focused on a close connection between reason and revelation. The latter, according to him, was intuitive knowledge given by God to the prophet primarily to educate the masses rather than to enlighten the elite through exegesis. Following the Mu`tazilah, `Abduh believed that the Qur’an was created in time, and that theology is a rational science. Also, like al-Afghani, he objected to passive mysticism and invited Muslims to hold fast to the principles of their religion while focusing on reform; he supported the innovation of practices open to learned reexamination and modernization.
Muhammad Iqbal considered Islam as an intellectual, moral, and experiential phenomenon that draws man as a dynamic instrument of God into the realization of the open, infinite possibilities of the world. Iqbal held that the Islamic intellectual tradition transforms Greek models of abstract knowledge into an empirical investigation of concrete facts, as is illustrated by the Qur’an’s attention to actual specifics. True worship implies an awareness of the factual reality of concrete existents using the empiricist inductive mode of knowledge. Thus the natural knowledge of how God reveals himself in the world is compatible with the idea of a transcendent God.
The next thinker, Tabataba’i, representative of the Iranian Sh!’! religious class, was trained and remained in Iran. During this century, the theological schools of Qom and Mashhad have been the most active centers educating analytic Shi`i theologians grounded especially in the philosophy of Mulla Sadra as well as in Western classical and contemporary thought. Tabataba’! distinguishes three Shi’i perspectives: the formal (the extensional and the intentional study), the intellectual (logical arguments on theology and cosmology), and the mystical aspects (for example, gnosis and the method of unveiling). People should realize that even though objects giving them nonspiritual pleasure are made for them, they as humans are not made for the objects. A person’s uniqueness as a human person is to reflect on the true meaning of Islam, which means a gnostic submission to one God by imitating the model of the paradigmatic sage, who is the Shi`i imam, and the perfect human of all time (al-insan al-kamil). Because this unique feature is the essence of a person differentiating her/him from other creatures, submission to one God-that is, being a Muslim-is the essence of a person. The word “essence” is used here to signify “the cause of completion (Greek, telos) of an entity.” The knowledge of Islam, for Tabataba’i, in accordance with Shi’i theology, begins with the knowledge of God (for example , his essence and theodicy), proceeds to knowledge of the Prophet, moves from these to the eschatological return of a person, and finally to the knowledge of the imam. In spite of its status as a minority creed and its concentration in Iran, Pakistan, and Iraq, the present schools of Shit theology possess spiritual and political influence beyond its minority status.
[See also Philosophy; Sufism, article on Sufi Thought and Practice; and the biographies of `Abduh, Afghani, Ghazali, Ibn al-`Arabs, Ibn Taymiyah, Igbal, and Tabataba’i. ]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Excellent summaries of the subject may be found in the following: Anawati, Georges C. “Kalam.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 8, pp. 231-242. New York, 1987.
Esposito, John L. Islam: The Straight Path. Exp. ed. New York, 1991.
Fakhry, Majid. A History of Islamic Philosophy. New York, 1970. Mahdi, Muhsin. “Islam. The New Wisdom: Synthesis of Philosophy and Mysticism.” In The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., vol. 22, pp. 28-31. Chicago, 1992.
Rahman, Fazlur. Islam. London, 1966.
Sharif, M. M., ed. A History of Muslim Philosophy. 2 vols. Wiesbaden, 1963-1966.
PARVIZ MOREWEDGE
