THE MU`TAZILITES
When the Aristotelian philosophy was first made known to the Muslim
world it was received almost as a revelation supplementing the Qur´an.
At that time it was very imperfectly understood and the discrepancies
between it and orthodox theology were not perceived. Thus the Qur´an
and Aristotle were read together and regarded as supplementing one
another in perfect good faith, but inevitably the conclusions, and
still more perhaps the methods, of Greek philosophy began to act as a
powerful solvent on the traditional beliefs.
Maqrizi refers to the Mu`tazilites as seizing with avidity on the
books of the philosophers, and certainly now new difficulties begin to
appear as well as the two great problems which had been prominent at
the beginning of the second century--the eternity of the Qur´an and the
question of free will. The new difficulties were especially concerned
with the qualities of God and, later, with the Qur´anic promise of the
beatific vision. The problem of the qualities of God is very closely
parallel to the earlier difficulty as to the eternity of the Qur´an,
indeed it appears as an enlargement of it. Christian theologians
educated in the methods of Greek philosophy had already debated this
matter, and in their hands it had taken the form of the question, “how
many, and what, attributes are compatible with the unity of God?” If
God’s wisdom, whether expressed in the Qur´an or not expressed, were
eternal there was something which God possessed, and consequently
something other than God which was equal to him in eternity and was not
created by him, so that it could not be said that God was alone and
that all other things proceeded from him as their cause as the eternal
quality always was side by side with God, and so Wasil b. `Ata declared
“he who affirms an eternal quality beside God, affirms two gods.” But
this applies equally to all qualities, justice, mercy, etc., and, as
was suggested by the study of Aristotle, all the categories, all that
could be predicated of God as subject, were either created by God and
so were not essential and eternal attributes, or else were external
things equal with God.
The second generation of Mu`tazilites, of those who begin to show
direct acquaintance with Greek philosophy, begins with _Abu l-Hudayl
al-Allaf_ of Basra (d. 226 A.H.), who lived at the time when Greek
philosophy was beginning to be studied with great ardour and was
received without question. He admits the attributes of God and regards
them as eternal, but treats them on lines very similar to those
employed by the Christians in dealing with the divine hypostases, that
is to say, they are not external things possessed by God but modes or
phases of the divine essence. The will of God for example, he treats
as a mode of knowledge, that is to say that God wills what is good
is equivalent to saying that God knows it to be good. But in dealing
with the will we must distinguish between (a) that which exists in
place, as the moral rules in God’s commandments to men, for there
could be no will against theft until the creation of things which
could be stolen; in such case the will exists in time and is created,
for it depends upon a created thing: and (b) that which exists not
in place and without an object to which the will refers, as when God
willed to create before the thing to be created existed. In man the
inner volition is free, but the outer acts are not free; sometimes
they are controlled by external forces in the body, or even outside
the body, and sometimes they are controlled by the inner volition.
Aristotle speaks of the universe as existing from eternity, but the
Qur´an refers to its creation, yet these are not inconsistent: we
must suppose that it existed eternally, but in perfect quiescence and
stillness, as it were latent and potential rather than actual, and
without those qualities which appear in the categories of logic and
are to us the only known terms of existence. Creation meant that God
brought in movement so that things began to exist in time and space,
and the universe comes to an end when it returns again to the state of
absolute rest in which it was at the beginning. Men can distinguish
between good and evil by the light of reason, for good and evil have
objective characters which can be recognised so that our knowledge of
this difference does not depend only on God’s revelation: but no man
can know anything about God but by the medium of revelation which is
given principally for this purpose.
_Ibrahim b. Sayar an-Nazzam_ (d. 231), the next great Mu`tazilite
leader was a devoted student of the Greek philosophers and an
encyclopædic writer. In this he was typical of the earlier Arabic
philosophers whose endeavour was to apply Greek science to the
interpretation of life and nature generally, an aim which necessarily
tended to produce encyclopædic compilations rather than original
studies in any one field of knowledge. Already the Mu`tazilites had
reached the position that good and evil represent objective realities
and that God, knowing the good, does not will that which is contrary
to it; but an-Nazzam presses this further and asserts that God can do
nothing in the creature save what is for its good and is in itself
just. To this the objection was raised that in such case God’s own
acts are determined and are not free. An-Nazzam replied that he
admitted this determination, not in action but in potentiality as God
is restricted by his own nature. He attempted to reproduce the ancient
doctrine that the soul is the form of the body, as had already been
asserted by Aristotle, but he misunderstood the terminology employed
and represents the soul as of the same shape as the body. This implies
that the soul is a very subtile kind of substance permeating the whole
body in the same way as butter permeates milk, or as oil permeates
the sesame: both soul and body are equal in size and alike in shape.
Freedom of the will is peculiar to God and man, all other created
things are subject to necessity. God created all things at once in
remote eternity, but reserved them in a state of quiescence so that
they may be described as “concealed,” and then projected them into
active existence at successive intervals.
The next great Mu`tazilite leader was _Bishr b. Mu`tamir_ (d. 226
circ.) in whose work we find a more definite attempt to apply
philosophical speculation to the practical needs of Islam. In the case
of free will he enters directly into the question of how far external
influences limit freedom of the will and so diminish responsibility.
Infants cannot be condemned to eternal punishment because they have no
responsibility, having never exercised free will. Unbelievers, however,
are condemned to punishment because, although they have not the help
of revelation, it is possible for them to know that there must be a
God, and only one God, by the light of reason. In dealing with actions
and their moral values we have to consider not only one agent and one
object, but often a series, the act being transmitted from one to the
other so that each of the intervening objects becomes the agent to the
next object. This serial connection he termed “begetting” (_tawullud_).
_Ma`mar b. Abbad as-Sulami_ (d. 220) describes God as creating
substances but not accidents, so that he produced a kind of universal
matter common to all existing things and to this matter or essence the
accidents are added, some produced by a force inherent in the essence
created, others by free will on the part of the creature. Following the
neo-Platonic commentators on Aristotle he treats the attributes of God
as purely negative, so that God is unknowable by man. In the case of
wisdom or knowledge, that which is known must either be identical with
God, or external to him: if God is the agent who knows and that which
is known as object is also himself, there is a distinction between
God the agent and God the object which implies two persons, and this
is subversive of the divine unity: but if God is the agent and knows
something external to himself, that knowledge depends on the external
object, and God therefore is not absolute but in some sense dependent
on something other than himself. Hence the attributes of God cannot
be such as the positive qualities which exist in man, but only the
negation of those which are distinctively human and dependent: we can
only say that he is infinite, meaning unlimited in space, or eternal
as unlimited in time, or other like terms negative of the known things
which can be predicated of man. The general tendency of Ma`mar’s
teaching is distinctly pantheistic: partly this is due to the logical
development of a tendency already inherent in the neo-Platonic doctrine
with which all Arabic thought was now becoming saturated, and partly it
was due to oriental influences which were now beginning to appear in
Islam.
Ma´mar’s pantheism was more fully developed by _Tumameh b. al-Ashras_
(d. 213) who treats the world as indeed created by God, but created
according to a law of nature so that it is the expression of a force
latent in God and not due to an act of volition. Tumameh entirely
deserts al-Allaf’s attempt to reconcile the Aristotelian doctrine of
the eternity of matter with the teaching of the Qur´an, and quite
frankly states that the universe is eternal like God. This is by
no means the last word in Islamic pantheism, but its subsequent
development rather belongs to the doctrines of the extremer Shi`ite
sects and to Sufism.
Reverting to an-Nazzam, the great leader of the middle age of the
Mu`tazilites, we find his teaching continued by his pupils _Ahmad
b. Habit_, _Fadl al-Hudabi_, and _`Amr b. Bahr al-Jahiz_. On the
theological side all the Mu`tazilites admitted the eternal salvation
of good Muslims, and most agreed that unbelievers would receive
eternal punishment: but there were differences of view as to those
who were believers but died unrepentant in sin. For the most part the
Mu`tazilites took the lax view that these would be favourably treated
as against the rigorist opinion which reserved eternal salvation to
good Muslims, an opinion which appeared amongst the stricter believers
during the `Umayyad period. The two first named of an-Nazzam’s pupils,
however, introduced a new theory entirely repugnant to orthodox Islam,
though familiar to the extremer Shi`ite sects, that those neither
decisively good nor absolutely bad, pass by transmigration into other
bodies until they finally deserve either salvation or damnation. With
these two thinkers also we are brought into contact with another
problem which now began to present itself to Islam, the doctrine of the
“beatific vision.” Islam generally had expected the vision of God to be
the chief of the rewards enjoyed in paradise, but the treatment of the
attributes of God had been so definitely against the anthropomorphic
ideas expressed in the Qur´an that it became difficult to explain
what could be meant by “seeing God.” Ahmad and Fadl dealing with this
subject deny that men ever will or can see God; the beatific vision
can at most mean that they are brought face to face with the “Agent
Intellect” which is an emanation from the First Cause, and “seeing” in
such a connection must of course mean something quite different from
what we understand as vision.
_`Amr b. Bahr al-Jahiz_ (d. 255), the third of an-Nazzam’s pupils
mentioned above, may be regarded as the last of the middle period
of the Mu`tazilites. He was an encyclopædic writer according to
the fashion of the time and wrote on literature, theology, logic,
philosophy, geography, natural history, and other subjects (cf. Masudi
viii. 33, etc.) To free will he gives rather a new bearing. The will
he regards as simply a manner of knowing and so as an accident of
knowledge; a voluntary act he defines as one known to its agent. Those
who are condemned to the fire of hell do not suffer eternally by it,
but are changed by its purification. The term “Muslim” must be taken
to include all who believe that God has neither form or body, since
the attribution of a human form to God is the essential mark of the
idolater, that he is just and wills no evil, and that Muhammad is his
prophet. Substance he treats as eternal, accidents are created and
variable.
We have now reached the third stage of the history of the Mu`tazilites,
that which marks their decline. During this latter period they divide
into two schools, that of Basra giving its attention mainly to the
attributes of God, that of Baghdad being chiefly occupied with the more
purely philosophical discussion of what is meant by an existing thing.
The Basrite discussions received their final form in the dispute
between _al-Jubbay_ (d. 303) and his son _Abu Hashim_ (d. 321). The
latter held that the attributes of God are distinct _modes_ of being,
we know the essence under such varying modes or conditions, but they
are not _states_, nor are they thinkable apart from the essence, though
they are distinct from it but do not exist apart from it. Against this
his father objected that these subjective attributes are only names
and convey no concept. The attributes are thus asserted to be neither
qualities nor states so as to imply subject or agent, but they are
inseparably united with the essence.
Against all views of this sort the orthodox adhered, and still adhere
to the opinion that God has real qualities. Those who laid emphasis on
this in opposition to the Mu`tazilite speculations are commonly known
as _Sifatites_ (_sifat_, qualities), but they admit that, as God is
not like a man, the qualities attributed to him in the Qur´an are not
the same as those qualities bearing the same names which are referred
to men, and it is not possible for us to know the real import of the
qualities attributed to God.
A more pronounced recoil against the Mu`tazilite speculations appears
in Abu `Abdullah b. Karram (d. 256) and his followers who were known
as Karramites. These returned to a crude anthropomorphism and held
that God not only has qualities of precisely the same kind as a man
may have, but that he actually sits on a throne, etc., taking in plain
literal sense all the statements made in the Qur´an.
The Mu`tazilite school of Baghdad concerned itself mainly with the
metaphysical question--“what is a thing?” It was admitted that “thing”
denotes a concept which could be known and could serve as subject to a
predicate. It does not necessarily exist, for existence is a quality
added to the essence: with this addition the essence becomes an entity
(_mawjud_), without this addition it is a non-entity (_ma`dum_) but
still has substance and accident, so that God creates by adding the
single attribute of existence.
The whole course of Mu`tazilite speculation shows the influence of
Greek philosophy as applied to Muslim theology, but the influence is
for the most part indirect. The ideas of Aristotle, as the course of
speculation projected to the forefront the problems with which he had
dealt in times past, were received through a Syriac Christian medium,
for the most part imperfectly understood and somewhat modified by the
emphasis which Christian controversy had given to certain particular
aspects. More or less directly prompted by the Mu`tazilite controversy
we have three other lines of development: in the first place we have
the “philosophers” as the name is used by the Arabic writers, meaning
those students and commentators who based their work directly on the
Greek text or at least on the later and better versions. In their hands
philosophical enquiry took a somewhat changed direction as they began
to understand better the real meaning of what Aristotle had taught.
In the second place we have the orthodox theology of al-Ash`ari,
al-Ghazali, and others, which represents Muslim theological science as
modified and partly directed by Aristotelian philosophy, consciously
endeavouring to make a working compromise between that philosophy and
Muslim theology. The older Mu`tazilite tradition came to an end in the
time of al-Ash`ari: men who felt the force of philosophical questions
either adopted the orthodox scholasticism of al-Ash`ari and those
who came after him, or followed the course of the philosophers and
drift away from the traditional beliefs of Islam altogether. In the
third place we have the Sufi movement, in which we find neo-Platonic
elements mingled with others from the east, from India and Persia. The
Mu`tazilites proper come to an end with the fourth century A.H.