The rise of orthodox _kalam_; al-Ash‘ari; decline of the
Mu‘tazilites; passing of heresy into unbelief; development of
scholastic theology by Ash‘arites; rise of Zahirite _kalam_;
Ibn Hazm; persecution of Ash‘arites; final assimilation of
_kalam_.
As we have already seen, the traditionalist party at first refused to
enter upon any discussion of sacred things. Malik ibn Anas used to say,
“God’s _istiwa_ (settling Himself firmly upon His throne) is known;
how it is done is unknown; it must be believed; questions about it are
an innovation (_bid‘a_).” But such a position could not be held for
any length of time. The world cannot be cut in two and half assigned
to faith and half to reason. So, as time went on, there arose on the
orthodox side men who, little by little, were prepared to give a reason
for the faith that was in them. They thus came to use _kalam_ in order
to meet the _kalam_ of the Mu‘tazilites; they became _mutakallims_, and
the scholastic theology of Islam was founded. It is the history of this
transfer of method which we have now to consider.
[Sidenote: RISE OF ORTHODOX KALAM]
Its beginnings are wrapped in a natural obscurity. It was at first a
gradual, unconscious drift, and people did not recognize its existence.
Afterward, when they looked back upon it, the tendency of the human
mind to ascribe broad movements to single men asserted itself and the
whole was put under the name of al-Ash‘ari. It is true that with him,
in a sense, the change suddenly leaped to self-consciousness, but it
had already been long in progress. As we have seen, al-Junayd discussed
the unity of God, but it was behind closed doors. Ash-Shafi‘i held that
there should be a certain number of men trained thus to defend and purify
the faith, but that it would be a great evil if their arguments should
become known to the mass of the people. Al-Muhasibi, a contemporary of
Ahmad ibn Hanbal, was suspected, and rightly, of defending his faith with
argument, and thereby incurred Ahmad’s displeasure. Another contemporary
of Ahmad’s, al-Karabisi (d. 345), incurred the same displeasure, and the
list might easily be extended. But the most significant fact of all is
that the movement came to the surface and showed itself openly at the
same time in the most widely separated lands of Islam. In Mesopotamia
there was al-Ash‘ari, who died after 320; in Egypt there was at-Tahawi,
who died in 331; in Samarqand there was al-Mataridi, who died in 333. Of
these at-Tahawi is now little more than a name; al-Mataridi’s star has
paled before that of al-Ash‘ari; al-Ash‘ari has come in popular view to
be the solitary hero before whom the Mu‘tazilite system went down. It
will perhaps be sufficient if we take his life and experiences as our
guide in this period of change; the others must have followed very much
in the same path.
He was born at al-Basra in 260, the year in which al-Kindi died and
Muhammad al-Muntazar vanished from the sight of men. He came into a
world full of intellectual ferment; Alids of different camps were
active in their claim to be possessors of an infallible Imam; Zaydites
and Qarmatians were in revolt; the decree of 234 that the Qur’an was
uncreated had had little effect, so far, in silencing the Mu‘tazilites;
in 261 the Sufi pantheist, Abu Yazid, died. Al-Ash‘ari himself was of the
best blood of the desert and of a highly orthodox family which had borne
a distinguished part in Muslim history. Through some accident he came in
early youth into the care of al-Jubba‘i, the Mu‘tazilite, who, according
to one story, had married al-Ash‘ari’s mother; was brought up by him and
remained a stanch Mu‘tazilite, writing and speaking on that side, till he
was forty years old.
[Sidenote: RETURN OF AL-ASH‘ARI]
Then a strange thing happened. One day he mounted the pulpit of the
mosque in al-Basra and cried aloud, “He who knows me, knows me; and
he who knows me not, let him know that I am so and so, the son of so
and so. I have maintained the creation of the Qur’an and that God will
not be seen in the world to come with the eyes, and that the creatures
create their actions. Lo, I repent that I have been a Mu‘tazilite and
turn to opposition to them.” It was a voice full of omen. It told that
the intellectual supremacy of the Mu‘tazilites had publicly passed and
that, hereafter, they would be met with their own weapons. What led to
this change of mind is strictly unknown; only legends have reached us.
One, full of psychological truth, runs that one Ramadan, the fasting
month, when he was worn with prayer and hunger, the Prophet appeared to
him three times in his sleep, and commanded him to turn from his vain
_kalam_ and seek certainty in the traditions and the Qur’an. If he would
but give himself to that study, God would make clear the difficulties and
enable him to solve all the puzzles. He did so, and his mind seemed to be
opened; the old contradictions and absurdities had fled, and he cursed
the Mu‘tazilites and all their works.
It can easily be seen that in some such way as this the blood of the race
may have led him back to the God of his fathers, the God of the desert,
whose word must be accepted as its own proof. The gossips of the time
told strange tales of rich relatives and family pressure; we can leave
these aside. When he had changed he was terribly in earnest. He met his
old teacher, al-Jubba‘i, in public discussions again and again till the
old man withdrew. One of these discussions legend has handed down in
varying forms. None of them may be exactly true, but they are significant
of the change of attitude. He came to al-Jubba‘i and said, “Suppose the
case of three brothers; one being God-fearing, another godless and a
third dies as a child. What of them in the world to come?” Al-Jubba‘i
replied, “The first will be rewarded in Paradise; the second punished in
Hell, and the third will be neither rewarded nor punished.” Al-Ash‘ari
continued, “But if the third said, ‘Lord, Thou mightest have granted
me life, and then I would have been pious and entered Paradise like my
brother,’ what then?” Al-Jubba‘i replied, “God would say, ‘I knew that if
thou wert granted life thou wouldst be godless and unbelieving and enter
Hell.’” Then al-Ash‘ari drew his noose, “But what if the second said,
‘Lord, why didst Thou not make me die as a child? Then had I escaped
Hell.’” Al-Jubba‘i was silenced, and Al-Ash‘ari went away in triumph.
Three years after his pupil had left him the old man died. The tellers
of this story regard it as disproving the Mu‘tazilite doctrine of “the
best”—_al-aslah_—namely, that God is constrained to do that which may be
best and happiest for His creatures. Orthodox Islam, as we have seen,
holds that God is under no such constraint, and is free to do good or
evil as He chooses.
But the story has also another and somewhat broader significance. It is a
protest against the religious rationalism of the Mu‘tazilites, which held
that the mysteries of the universe could be expressed and met in terms
of human thought. In this way it represents the essence of al-Ash‘ari’s
position, a recoil from the impossible task of raising a system of
purely rationalistic theology to reliance upon the Word of God, and the
tradition (_hadith_) and usage (_sunna_) of the Prophet and the pattern
of the early church (_salaf_).
The stories told above represent the change as sudden. According to the
evidence of his books that was not so. In his return there were two
stages. In the first of these he upheld the seven rational Qualities
(_sifat aqliya_) of God, Life, Knowledge, Power, Will, Hearing, Seeing,
Speech: but explained away the Qur’anic anthropomorphisms of God’s
face, hands, feet, etc. In the second stage, which fell, apparently,
after he had moved to Baghdad and come under the strong Hanbalite
influences there, he explained away nothing, but contented himself with
the position that the anthropomorphisms were to be taken, _bila kayfa
wala tashbih_, without asking how and without drawing any comparison.
The first phrase is directed against the Mu‘tazilites, who inquired
persistently into the nature and possibility of such things in God;
the second, against the anthropomorphists (_mushabbihs_, comparers;
_mujassims_, corporealizers), mostly ultra Hanbalites and Karramites, who
said that these things in God were like the corresponding things in men.
At all stages, however, he was prepared to defend his conclusions and
assail those of his adversaries by dint of argument.
[Sidenote: SYSTEM OF AL-ASH‘ARI]
The details of his system will be best understood by reading his creed
and the creed of al-Fudali, which is essentially Ash‘arite. Both are
in the Appendix of Translated Creeds. Here, it is necessary to draw
attention to two, only, of the obscurer points. On the vexed question,
“What is a thing?” he anticipated Kant. The early theologians, orthodox
and theoretical, and those later ones also who did not follow him,
regarded, as we have seen, existence (_wujud_) as only one of the
qualities belonging to an existing thing (_mawjud_). It was there all the
time, but it lacked the quality of “existence”; then that quality was
added to its other qualities and it became existent. But al-Ash‘ari and
his followers held that existence was the “self” (_ayn_) of the entity
and not a quality or state, however personal or necessary. See, on the
whole, Appendix of Creeds.
On the other vexed question of free-will, or, rather, as the Muslims
chose to express it, on the ability of men to produce actions, he took
up a mediating position. The old orthodox position was absolutely
fatalistic; the Mu‘tazilites, following their principle of Justice, gave
to man an initiative power. Al-Ash‘ari struck a middle path. Man cannot
create anything; God is the only creator. Nor does man’s power produce
any effect on his actions at all. God creates in His creature power
(_qudra_) and choice (_ikhtiyar_). Then He creates in him his action
corresponding to the power and choice thus created. So the action of the
creature is created by God as to initiative and as to production; but
it is _acquired_ by the creature. By acquisition (_kasb_) is meant that
it corresponds to the creature’s power and choice, previously created
in him, without his having had the slightest effect on the action. He
was only the _locus_ or subject of the action. In this way al-Ash‘ari
is supposed to have accounted for free-will and entailed responsibility
upon men. It may be doubted whether the second point occupied him much.
It was open to his God to do good or evil as He chose; the Justice of the
Mu‘tazilites was left behind. He may have intended only to explain the
consciousness of freedom, as some have done more recently. The closeness
with which al-Ash‘ari in this comes to the pre-established harmony of
Leibnitz and to the Kantian conception of existence shows how high a rank
he must take as an original thinker. His abandoning of the Mu‘tazilites
was due to no mere wave of sentiment but to a perception that their
speculations were on too narrow a basis and of a too barren scholastic
type. He died after 320 with a curse on them and their methods as his
last words.
[Sidenote: AL-MATARIDI]
A few words only need be given to al-Mataridi. The creed of an-Nasafi
in the Appendix of Creeds, pp. 308-315 belongs to his school. He and
at-Tahawi were followers of the broad-minded Abu Hanifa, who was more
than suspected of Mu‘tazilite and Murji’ite leanings. Muslim theologians
usually reckon up some thirteen points of difference between al-Mataridi
and al-Ash‘ari and admit that seven of these are not much more than
combats of words. Those which occur in an-Nasafi’s creed are marked with
a star.
We are now in a position to finish shortly with the Mu‘tazilites. Their
work, as a constructive force, is done. From this time on there is
_kalam_ among the orthodox, and the term _mutakallim_ denotes nothing but
a scholastic theologian, whether of one wing or another. And so, like
any other organ which has done its part and for the existence of which
there is no longer any object, they gradually and quietly dropped into
the background. They had still, sometimes, to suffer persecution, and
for hundreds of years there were men who continued to call themselves
Mu‘tazilites; but their heresies came to be heresies of the schools
and not burning questions in the eyes of the masses. We need now draw
attention to only a few incidents and figures in this dying movement.
The Muslim historians lay much stress on the orthodox zeal of the
Khalifa al-Qadir, who reigned 381-422, and narrate how he persecuted the
Mu‘tazilites, Shi‘ites and other heretics and compelled them, under oath,
to conform.
But there are several difficulties in the way of this persecution, which
make it probable that it was more nominal than otherwise. Al-Qadir was
bitterly orthodox; he had written a treatise on theology and compelled
his unhappy courtiers to listen to a public reading of it every week.
But he enjoyed, outside of his palace, next to no power. He was in the
control of the Shi‘ite Buwayhids, who, as we have seen, ruled Baghdad and
the Khalifate from 320 to 447. These dubious persecutions are said to
have fallen in 408 and 420. Again, a Muslim pilgrim from Spain visited
Baghdad about 390 and has left us a record of the state of religious
things there. He found in session what may perhaps best be described as
a Parliament of Religions. It seems to have been a free debate between
Muslims of all sects, orthodox and heretical, Parsees and atheists, Jews
and Christians—unbelievers of every kind. Each party had a spokesman,
and at the beginning of the proceedings the rule was rehearsed that
no one might appeal to the sacred books of his creed but might only
adduce arguments founded upon reason. The pious Spanish Muslim went to
two meetings but did not peril his soul by any further visits. In his
narrative we recognize the horror with which the orthodox of Spain viewed
such proceedings—Spain, Muslim and Christian, has always favored the
straitest sect; but when such a thing was permitted in Baghdad, religious
liberty there at least must have been tolerably broad. Possibly it was
sittings of the _Ikhwan as-safa_ upon which this scandalized Spaniard
stumbled. He himself speaks of them as meetings of mutakallims.
[Sidenote: MAHMUD OF GHAZNA]
But if the mixture of Sunnite and Shi‘ite authority in Baghdad gave
all the miscellaneous heretics a chance for life, it was different in
the growing dominions of Mahmud of Ghazna. That iconoclastic monarch
had embraced the anthropomorphic faith of the Karramites, the most
literal-minded of all the Muslim sects. In consequence, all forms of
Mu‘tazilism and all kinds of mutakallims were an abomination to him,
and it was a very real persecution which they met at his hands. That
al-Qadir, his spiritual suzerain, urged him on is very probable; it is
also possible that respect for the growing power of Mahmud may have
protected al-Qadir to some extent from the Buwayhids. In 420 Mahmud took
from them Ispahan and held there a grand inquisition on Shi‘ites and
heretics of all kinds.
To proceed with the Mu‘tazilites; when we come to al-Ghazzali and his
times we shall find that they have ceased to be a crying danger to the
faith. Though their views might, that doctor held, be erroneous in some
respects, they were not to be considered as damnable. Again, in 538,
there died az-Zamakhshari, the great grammarian, who is often called
the last of the Mu‘tazilites. He was not that by any means, but his
heresies were either mild or were regarded mildly. A single point will
show this. His commentary on the Qur’an, the _Kashshaf_, was revised
and expurgated in the orthodox interest by al-Baydawi (d. 688) and in
that form is now the most popular and respected of all expositions. The
_Kashshaf_ itself, in its original, unmodified form, has been printed
several times at Cairo. Again, Ibn Rushd, the Aristotelian, who died in
595, when he is combating the arguments of the mutakallims, makes little
difference between the Mu‘tazilites and the others. They are only, to
him, another variety of scholastic theologian, with a rather better idea,
perhaps, of logic and argument. He considered, as we shall find later,
all the mutakallims as sadly to seek in such matters. Since then, and
into quite modern times, there have been sporadic cases of theologians
called Mu‘tazilites by themselves or others. Practically, they have
been scholastics of eccentric views. Finally, the use of this name for
themselves by the present-day broad school Muslims of India is absolutely
unhistorical and highly misleading.
We turn now to suggest, rather than to trace, some of the non-theological
consequences of the preceding theology.
[Sidenote: AL-BERUNI; IBN SINA]
Increasingly, from this time on, it is not heresy which has to be met
so much as simple unbelief, more or less frank. It is evident that the
heretics of the earlier period are now dividing in two directions,
one part inclining toward milder forms of heresy and the other toward
doubt in the largest sense, passing over to Aristotelian + neo-Platonic
philosophy, and thence dividing into materialists, deists, and theists.
Thus we have seen earlier the workings of al-Farabi and of the Ikhwan
as-safa. The teachings of the latter pass on to the Isma‘ilians who
developed them in the mountain fortresses, the centres of their power,
scattered from Persia to Syria. These were otherwise called Assassins;
otherwise Batinites in the narrower sense—in the broader that term
meant only those who found under the letter of the Qur’an a hidden,
esoteric meaning; otherwise Ta‘limites or claimers of a _ta‘lim_, a
secret teaching by a divinely instructed Imam, and with them we shall
have much to do later. It is sufficient here to notice how the peaceful
and rather watery philosophy of the “Sincere Brethren” was transmuted
through ambition and fanaticism into belligerent politics at the hands
and daggers of these fierce sectaries. Into this period, too, fall some
well-known names of dubious and more than dubious orthodoxy. Al-Beruni
(d. 440) even at the court of Mahmud of Ghazna managed to keep his
footing and his head. Yet it may be doubted how far he was a Karramite
or even a Muslim. He was certainly the first scientific student of India
and _Indica_ and of chronology and calendars, a man whose attainments
and results show that our so-called modern methods are as old as genius.
On religion, he maintained a prudent silence, but earned the favor of
Mahmud by an unsparing exposure of the weakness in the Fatimid genealogy.
In this sketch he has a place as a man of science who went his own way
without treading on the religious toes of other people.
His contemporary Ibn Sina (d. 428), for us Avicenna, was of a different
nature, and his lines were cast in different places. He was a wanderer
through the courts of northern Persia. The orthodox and stringent Mahmud
he carefully avoided; the Buwayhids and those of their ilk took such
heresies as his more easily. Endowed with a gigantic memory and an
insatiable intellectual appetite, he was the encyclopædist of his age,
and his scientific work, and especially that in medicine, went further
than anything else to put the Muslim East and mediæval Europe in the
strait waistcoat from which the first has not yet emerged and the second
only shook itself free in the seventeenth century. He was a student
of Aristotle and a mystic, as all Muslim students of Aristotle have
been. How far his mysticism enabled him to square the Qur’an with his
philosophy is not clear; such men seldom said exactly what they meant
and all that they thought. He was also a diligent student and reader of
the Qur’an and faithful in his public religious duties. Yet the Muslim
world asserts that he left behind him a testamentary tractate (_wasiya_)
defending dissimulation as to the religion of the country in which
we might be; that it was not wrong for the philosopher to go through
religious rites which for him had no meaning. He, too, is significant for
his time, and, if our interest were philosophy, would call for lengthened
treatment. As it is, he marks for us the accomplished separation between
students of theology and students of philosophy.
An equally well known and by us much better loved name is that of Umar
al-Khayyam, who died later, about 515, but who may fitly be grouped with
Ibn Sina. He, too, was a _bon vivant_, but of a deeper, more melancholy
strain. His wine meant more than friendly cups; it was a way of escape
from the world and its burden. His science, too, went deeper. He was not
a gatherer and arranger of the wisdom of the past; his reformed calendar
is more perfect than that which we even now use. His faith is a riddle to
us, as it was to his comrades. But it was because he had no certain truth
to proclaim that Umar did not speak out clearly. His last words were
almost those of Rabelais, “I go to meet the great Perhaps.” Anecdotage
connects his name with that of al-Ghazzali. Neither had escaped the pall
of universal scepticism which must have descended upon their time. But
al-Ghazzali, by God’s grace, as he himself reverently says, was enabled
to escape. Umar died under it.
[Sidenote: ABU-L-ALA AL-MA‘ARRI]
A very different man was Abu-l-Ala al-Ma‘arri, the blind poet and singer
of intellectual freedom. In Arabic literature there is no other voice
like his, clear and confident. He was a man of letters; no philosopher
nor theologian nor scientist, though at one time he seems to have come
in contact with a circle like that of Ikhwan as-safa, perhaps the same;
and his spirit was like that of one of the heroic poets of the old desert
life, whose hand was taught to keep his head, whose tongue spared nothing
from heaven to earth, and who lived his own life out in his own way,
undaunted. In his darkness he nourished great thoughts and flung out a
_sæva indignatio_ on hypocrisy and subservience which reminds of Lessing.
But Abu-l-Ala was a great poet, and his scorn of priests and courtiers
and their lies, his pity for suffering humanity and his confidence in
the light of reason are thrown into scraps of burning, echoing verse
without their like in Arabic. He died at the town of his birth, Ma‘arrat
an-Nu‘man, in northern Syria, in 449. The problem is how he was suffered
to live out his long life of eighty-six years.
We can now return to the development of scholastic theology in the
orthodox church at the hands of the followers of al-Ash‘ari. They
had to fight their way against many and most differing opponents. At
the one extreme were the dwindling Mu‘tazilites, passing slowly into
comparatively innocuous heretics, and the growing party of unbelievers,
philosophical and otherwise, open and secret. At the other extreme was
the mob of Hanbalites, belonging to the only legal school which laid
theological burdens on its adherents. The theologians, in this case,
certainly varied as to the weight of their own anathemas against all
kalam, but were at one in that they carried the bulk of the multitude
with them and could enforce their conclusions with the cudgels of
rioters. In the midst were the rival orthodox (_pace_ the Hanbalites)
developers of kalam, among whom the Mataridites probably held the most
important place. Thus, the Ash‘arite school was the nursling as well as
the child of controversy.
It was, then, fitting that the name joined, at least in tradition, with
the final form of that system, should be that of a controversialist.
But this man, Abu Bakr al-Baqilani the Qadi, was more than a mere
controversialist. It is his glory to have contributed most important
elements to and put into fixed form what is, perhaps, the most fantastic
and daring metaphysical scheme, and almost certainly the most thorough
theological scheme, ever thought out. On the one hand, the Lucretian
atoms raining down through the empty void, the self-developing monads
of Leibnitz, pre-established harmony and all, the Kantian “things in
themselves” are lame and impotent in their consistency beside the
parallel Ash‘arite doctrines; and, on the other, not even the rigors
of Calvin, as developed in the Dutch confessions, can compete with the
unflinching exactitude of the Muslim conclusions.
[Sidenote: ASH‘ARITE METAPHYSICS]
First, as to ontology. The object of the Ash‘arites was that of Kant, to
fix the relation of knowledge to the thing in itself. Thus, al-Baqilani
defined knowledge (_ilm_) as cognition (_ma‘rifa_) of a thing as it is
in itself. But in reaching that “thing in itself” they were much more
thorough than Kant. Only two of the Aristotelian categories survived
their attack, substance and quality. The others, quantity, place, time
and the rest, were only relationships (_i‘tibars_) existing subjectively
in the mind of the knower, and not things. But a relationship, they
argued, if real, must exist in something, and a quality cannot exist in
another quality, only in a substance. Yet it could not exist in either
of the two things which it brought together; for example, in the cause
or the effect. It must be in a third thing. But to bring this third
thing and the first two together, other relationships would be needed
and other things for these relationships to exist in. Thus we would be
led back in an infinite sequence, and they had taken over from Aristotle
the position that such an infinite series backward (_tasalsul_) is
inadmissible. Relationships, then, had no real existence but were mere
phantoms, subjective non-entities. Further, the Aristotelian view of
matter was now impossible for them. All the categories had gone except
substance and quality; and among them, passion. Matter, then, could not
have the possibility of suffering the impress of form. A possibility
is neither an entity nor a non-entity, but a subjectivity purely. But
with the suffering matter, the active form and all causes must also go.
They, too, are mere subjectivities. Again, qualities, for these thinkers,
became mere accidents. The fleeting character of appearances drove them
to the conclusion that there was no such thing as a quality planted
in the nature of a thing; that the idea “nature” did not exist. Then
this drove them further. Substances exist only with qualities, _i.e._,
accidents. These qualities may be positive or they may be negative;
the ascription to things of negative qualities is one of their most
fruitful conceptions. When, then, the qualities fall out of existence,
the substances themselves must also cease to exist. Substance as well as
quality is fleeting, has only a moment’s duration.
But when they rejected the Aristotelian view of matter as the possibility
of receiving form, their path of necessity led them straight to the
atomists. So atomists they became, and, as always, after their own
fashion. Their atoms are not of space only, but also of time. The basis
of all the manifestation, mental and physical, of the world in place
and time, is a multitude of monads. Each has certain qualities but has
extension neither in space nor time. They have simply position, not bulk,
and do not touch one another. Between them is absolute void. Similarly as
to time. The time-atoms, if the expression may be permitted, are equally
unextended and have also absolute void—of time—between them. Just as
space is only in a series of atoms, so time is only in a succession of
untouching moments and leaps across the void from one to the other with
the jerk of the hand of a clock. Time, in this view, is in grains and can
exist only in connection with change. The monads differ from those of
Leibnitz in having no nature in themselves, no possibility of development
along certain lines. The Muslim monads are, and again are not, all change
and action in the world are produced by their entering into existence and
dropping out again, not by any change in themselves.
But this most simple view of the world left its holders in precisely the
same difficulty, only in a far higher degree, as that of Leibnitz. He was
compelled to fall back on a pre-established harmony to bring his monads
into orderly relations with one another; the Muslim theologians, on their
side, fell back upon God and found in His will the ground of all things.
[Sidenote: ASH‘ARITE THEOLOGY]
We here pass from their ontology to their theology, and as they
were thorough-going metaphysicians, so now they are thorough-going
theologians. Being was all in the one case; now it is God that is all.
In truth, their philosophy is in its essence a scepticism which destroys
the possibility of a philosophy in order to drive men back to God and
His revelations and compel them to see in Him the one grand fact of the
universe. So, when a darwish shouts in his ecstasy, “_Huwa-l-haqq_,” he
does not mean, “He is the Truth,” in our Western sense of Verity, or our
New Testament sense of “The Way, the Truth, and the Life,” but simply,
“He is the Fact”—the one Reality.
To return: from their ontology they derived an argument for the
necessity of a God. That their monads came so and not otherwise must have
a cause; without it there could be no harmony or connection between them.
And this cause must be one with no cause behind it; otherwise we would
have the endless chain. This cause, then, they found in the absolutely
free will of God, working without any matter beside it and unaffected by
any laws or necessities. It creates and annihilates the atoms and their
qualities and, by that means, brings to pass all the motion and change of
the world. These, in our sense, do not exist. When a thing seems to us to
be moved, that really means that God has annihilated—or permitted to drop
out of existence, by not continuing to uphold, as another view held—the
atoms making up that thing in its original position, and has created them
again and again along the line over which it moves. Similarly of what
we regard as cause and effect. A man writes with a pen and a piece of
paper. God creates in his mind the will to write; at the same moment he
gives him the power to write and brings about the apparent motion of the
hand, of the pen and the appearance on the paper. No one of these is the
cause of the other. God has brought about by creation and annihilation
of atoms the requisite combination to produce these appearances. Thus we
see that free-will for the Muslim scholastics is simply the presence, in
the mind of the man, of this choice created there by God. This may not
seem to us to be very real, but it has, certainly, as much reality as
anything else in their world. Further, it will be observed how completely
this annihilates the machinery of the universe. There is no such thing
as law, and the world is sustained by a constant, ever-repeated miracle.
Miracles and what we regard as the ordinary operations of nature are on
the same level. The world and the things in it could have been quite
different. The only limitation upon God is that He cannot produce a
contradiction. A thing cannot be and not be at the same time. There is
no such thing as a secondary cause; when there is the appearance of
such, it is only illusional. God is producing it as well as the ultimate
appearance of effect. There is no nature belonging to things. Fire does
not burn and a knife does not cut. God creates in a substance a being
burned when the fire touches it and a being cut when the knife approaches
it.
[Sidenote: ETHICAL CONSEQUENCES]
In this scheme there are certainly grave difficulties, philosophical
and ethical. It establishes a relationship between God and the atoms;
but we have already seen that relationships are subjective illusions.
That, however, was in the case of the things of the world, perceived
by the senses—contingent being, as they would put it. It does not hold
of necessary being. God possesses a quality called Difference from
originated things (_al-mukhalafa lil-hawadith_). He is not a natural
cause, but a free cause; and the existence of a free cause they were
compelled by their principles to admit. The ethical difficulty is perhaps
greater. If there is no order of nature and no certainty, or nexus,
as to causes and effects; if there is no regular development in the
life, mental, moral, and physical of a man—only a series of isolated
moments; how can there be any responsibility, any moral claim or duty?
This difficulty seems to have been recognized more clearly than the
philosophical one. It was met formally by the assertion of a certain
order and regularity in the will of God. He sees to it that a man’s
life is a unity, and, for details, that the will to eat and the action
always coincide. But such an answer must have been felt to be inadequate
and to involve grave moral dangers for the common mind. Therefore, as
we have seen, the study of kalam was hedged about with difficulties and
restrictions. Theologians recognized its trap-falls and doubts, even for
themselves, and lamented that they were compelled by their profession
to study it. The public discussion of its questions was regarded as a
breach of professional etiquette. Theologians and philosophers alike
strove to keep these deeper mysteries hidden from the multitude. The gap
between the highly educated and the great mass—that fundamental error and
greatest danger in Muslim society—comes here again to view. Further, even
among theologians, there was some difference in degree of insight, and
books and phrases could be read by different men in very different ways.
To one, they would suggest ordinary, Qur’anic doctrines; another would
see under and behind them a trail of metaphysical consequences bristling
with blasphemous possibilities. Thus, Muslim science has been always of
the school; it has never learned the vitalizing and disinfecting value
of the fresh air of the market-place. This applies to philosophers even
more than to theologians. The crowning accusation which Ibn Rushd, the
great Aristotelian commentator, brought against al-Ghazzali was that he
discussed such subtilties in popular books.
[Sidenote: SPREAD OF ASH‘ARISM]
This, then, was the system which seems to have reached tolerably
complete form at the hands of al-Baqilani, who died in 403. But with the
completion of the system there went by no means its universal or even
wide-spread acceptance in the Muslim world. That of al-Mataridi held its
own for long, and, even yet, the Mataridite creed of an-Nasafi is used
largely in the Turkish schools. In the fifth century it was considered
remarkable that Abu Dharr (d. 434), a theologian of Herat, should be
an Ash‘arite rather than, apparently, a Mataridite. It was not till
al-Ghazzali (d. 505) that the Ash‘arite system came to the orthodox
hegemony in the East, and it was only as the result of the work of Ibn
Tumart, the Mahdi of the Muwahhids (d. 524), that it conquered the West.
For long its path was darkened by suspicion and persecution. This came
almost entirely from the Hanbalites. The Mu‘tazilites had no force behind
them, and while the views of deists and materialists were steadily making
way in secret, their public efforts appeared only in very occasional
disputes between theologians and philosophers. As we have seen, Muslim
philosophy has always practised an economy of teaching.
The Hanbalite crisis seems to have come to a head toward the close of the
reign of Tughril Beg, the first Great Saljuq. In 429, as we have seen,
the Saljuqs had taken Merv and Samarqand, and in 447 Tughril Beg had
entered Baghdad and freed the Khalifa from the Shi‘ite domination of the
Buwayhids who had so long enforced toleration. It was natural that he, a
theologically unschooled Turk, should be captured by the simplicity and
concreteness of the Hanbalite doctrines.
Added to this political factor there was a theological movement at work
which was deeply hostile to the Ash‘arites as they had developed. An
important point in the method of al-Ash‘ari himself, and, after him, of
his followers, was to put forth a creed, expressed in the old-fashioned
terms and containing the old-fashioned doctrines as nearly as was at
all possible, and to accompany it with a spiritualizing interpretation
which was, naturally, accessible to the professional student only.
Accordingly what had at first seemed a weapon against the Mu‘tazilites
came to be viewed with more and more suspicion by the holders to the old,
unquestioning orthodoxy. The duty also of religious investigation and
speculation (_nazr_) came to have more and more stress laid upon it. The
_bila kayfa_ dropped into the background. A Muslim must have a reason for
the faith that was in him, they said; otherwise, he was no true Muslim,
was in fact an unbeliever. Of course, they limited carefully the extent
to which he should go. For the ordinary man a series of very simple
proofs would be prepared; the student, on the other hand, when carefully
led, could work his way through the system sketched above. All this,
naturally, was anathema to the party of tradition.
[Sidenote: IBN HAZM]
It is significant that at this time the Zahirite school of law (_fiqh_)
developed into a school of kalam and applied its literal principles
unflinchingly to its new victim. The leader in this was Ibn Hazm, a
theologian of Spain. He died in 456, after a stormy life filled with
controversy. The remorseless sting of his vituperative style coupled
him, in popular proverb, with al-Hajjaj, the blood-thirsty lieutenant
of the Umayyads in al-Iraq. “The sword of al-Hajjaj and the tongue of
Ibn Hazm,” they said. But for all his violence of language and real
weight of character and brain, he made little way for his views in his
lifetime. It was almost one hundred years after his death before they
came into any prominence. The theologians and lawyers around him in
the West were devoted to the study of _fiqh_ in the narrowest and most
technical sense. They labored over the systems and treatises of their
predecessors and neglected the great original sources of the Qur’an and
the traditions. The immediate study of tradition (_hadith_) had died out.
Ibn Hazm, on the other hand, went straight back to _hadith_. _Taqlid_ he
absolutely rejected, each man must draw from the sacred texts his own
views. So the whole system of the canon lawyers came down with a crash
and they, naturally, did not like it. Analogy (_qiyas_), their principal
instrument, he swept away. It had no place either in law or theology.
Even on the principle of agreement (_ijma_) he threw a shadow of doubt.
But it was in theology rather than in law that Ibn Hazm’s originality
lay. Strictly, his Zahirite principles when applied there should have led
him to anthropomorphism (_tajsim_). The literal meaning of the Qur’an, as
we have seen, assigns to God hands and feet, sitting on and descending
from His throne. But to Ibn Hazm, anthropomorphism was an abomination
only less than the speculative arguments with which the Ash‘arites tried
to avoid it. His own method was purely grammatical and lexicographical.
He hunted in his dictionary until he found some other meaning for “hand”
or “foot,” or whatever the stumbling-block might be.
But the most original point in his system is his doctrine of the
names of God, and his basing of that doctrine upon God’s qualities.
The Ash‘arites, he contended with justice, had been guilty of a grave
inconsistency in saying that God was different in nature, qualities,
and actions from all created things, and yet that the human qualities
could be predicated of God, and that men could reason about God’s
nature. He accepted the doctrine of God’s difference (_mukhalafa_)
on highly logical, but, for us, rather startling grounds. The Qur’an
applies to Him the words, “The Most Merciful of those that show mercy,”
but God, evidently, is not merciful. He tortures children with all
manner of painful diseases, with hunger and terror. Mercy, in our human
sense, which is high praise applied to a man, cannot be predicated
of God. What then does the Qur’an mean by those words? Simply that
they—_arhamu-r-rahimin_—are one of God’s names, applied to Him by
Himself and that we have no right to take them as descriptive of a
quality, mercy, and to use them to throw light on God’s nature. They
form one of the Ninety-nine Most Beautiful Names (_al-asma al-husna_)
of which the Prophet has spoken in a tradition. Similarly, we may call
God the Living One (_al hayy_), because He has given us that as one
of His names, not because of any reasoning on our part. Do we not say
that His life is different from that of all other living beings? These
names then, are limited to ninety-nine and no more should be formed,
however full of praise such might be for God, or however directly based
on His actions. He has called Himself _al-Wahib_, the Giver, and so we
may use that term of Him. But He has not called Himself _al-Wahhab_ the
Bountiful Giver, so we may not use that term of Him, though it is one of
praise. Of course, you may describe His action and say that He is the
guider of His saints. But you must not make from that a name, and call
Him simply the Guider. Further, if we regard these names as expressing
qualities in God, we involve multiplicity in God’s nature; there is the
quality and the thing qualified. Here we are back at the old Mu‘tazilite
difficulty and it is intelligible that Ibn Hazm dealt more gently with
the Mu‘tazilites than with the Ash‘arites. The one party were Muslims and
sinned in ignorance—invincible ignorance, a Roman Catholic would call it;
the others were unbelievers. They had turned wilfully from the way. The
Mu‘tazilites had tried to limit the qualities as much as possible. At the
best they had said that they _were_ God’s essence and not in His essence.
Al-Ash‘ari and his school had fairly revelled in qualities and had mapped
out the nature of God with the detail—and daring—of a phrenological chart.
Naturally, Ibn Hazm made his ethical basis the will of God only. God
has willed that this should be a sin and that a good deed. Lying, he
concedes, is always saying what does not agree with the truth. But,
still, God may pronounce that one lie is a sin, and one not. Muslim
ethics, it is true, have never branded lying as sinful in itself.
For the Shi‘ites and their doctrine of an infallible Imam, Ibn Hazm
cannot find strong enough expressions of contempt.
In Ibn Hazm’s time, and he praises God for it, there were but few
Ash‘arites in the West. Theology generally did not find many students. So
things went on till long after his death. To this fiery controversialist
the worst blow of all would have been if he could have known that the
men who were at last to bring his system, in part and for a time, into
public acceptance and repute, were also to complete the conquest of Islam
for the Ash‘arite school. That was still far in the future, and we must
return to the persecution.
The accounts of the persecution which set in are singularly conflicting.
Some assign it to Hanbalite influence; others tell of a Mu‘tazilite wazir
of Tughril Beg. That the traditionalist party was the main force in it
seems certain. In all probability, however, all the other anti-Ash‘arite
sects, from the Mu‘tazilites on, took their own parts. The Ash‘arite
party represented a _via media_ and would be set upon with zest by all
the extremes. They were solemnly cursed from the pulpits and, what
added peculiar insult to it, the Rafidites, an extreme Kharijite sect,
were joined in the same anathema. Al-Juwayni, the greatest theologian
of the time, fled to the Hijaz and gained the title of Imam of the two
Harams (_Imam al-Haramayn_), by living for four years between Mecca and
al-Madina. Al-Qushayri, the author of a celebrated treatise on Sufiism,
was thrown into prison. The Ash‘arite doctors generally were scattered to
the winds. Only with the death of Tughril Beg in 455 did the cloud pass.
His successor, Alp-Arslan, and especially the great wazir, Nizam al-Mulk,
favored the Ash‘arites. In 459 the latter founded the Nizamite Academy
at Baghdad to be a defence of Ash‘arite doctrines. This may fairly be
regarded as the turning-point of the whole controversy. The Hanbalite mob
of Baghdad still continued to make itself felt, but its excesses were
promptly suppressed. In 510 ash-Shahrastani was well received there by
the people, and in 516 the Khalifa himself attended Ash‘arite lectures.
[Sidenote: TRIUMPH OF ASH‘ARISM]
It is needless to spend more time over the other theologians who were
links in the chain between al-Ash‘ari and the Imam al-Haramayn. Their
views wavered, this way and that, only the rationalizing tendency became
stronger and stronger. There was danger that the orthodox system would
fossilize and lose touch with life as that of the Mu‘tazilites had
done. It is true that Sufiism still held its ground. All theologians
practically were touched by it in its simpler form; and the cause of the
higher Sufiism of ecstasy, wonders by saints (_karamat_) and communion of
the individual soul with God had been eloquently and effectively urged
by al-Qushayri (d. 465) in his _Risala_. But in spite of the labors of
so many men of high ability, the religious outlook was growing ever
darker. Keen observers recognized that some change was bound to come.
That it might be an inflowing of new life by a new al-Ash‘ari was their
prayer. It is more than dubious whether even the keenest mind of the
time could have recognized what form the new life must take. They had
not the perspective and could only feel a vague need. But from what has
gone before it will be plain that Islam had again to assimilate to itself
something from without or perish. Such had been its manner of progress
up till now. New opinions had arisen; had become heresies; conflict had
followed; part of the new thought had been absorbed into the orthodox
church; part had been rejected; through it all the life of the church
had gone on in fuller and richer measure, being always, in spite of
everything, the main stream; the heresy itself had slowly dwindled out
of sight. So it had been with Murji’ism; so with Mu‘tazilism. With the
orthodox, tradition (_naql_) still stood fast, but reason (_aql_) had
taken a place beside it. Kalam, in spite of Hanbalite clamors, had become
fairly a part of their system. What was to be the new element, and who
was to be its champion?