Islamic Philosophies

Among the most important participants in kalam or Islamic theological dialectics were the Mu'tazilis whose name came from their reasoned disassociation from extremist views of moral purists (Kharijis), who would exclude sinners from the community and from those more accepting of transgressors (Murji'is). The name came to be associated with theologians asserting the value of human reason in the judging of religious issues, famously insisting on rational coherence in regard to divine attributes by denying scriptural literalism in favor of allegorical interpretation and the denial of attributes to divine unity, on the rational necessity of the restraint of divine justice by human freedom, and on the created nature of the Koran. Abu'l-Hasan al-Ash'ari (873–935), breaking away from his Mu'tazili teacher, al-Juba'i (d. 915), argued for the literal understanding of divine attributes recounted in God's revelation, for what is now characterized as divine command moral theory (that Justice is itself defined as whatever God decrees), and for the eternal speech of God and the uncreated Koran. This was so, he asserted, because on such matters the statements of the Koran must be accepted bi-la kayf, "without asking how." Insofar as all power belongs to God, all actions are dependent upon God and are merely "acquisitions" (aksab) by humans of states and actions created by God. This led to the development of an occasionalist atomism in which transitory atoms having no persisting natures are renewed in existence only by divine power and apparent regularity of nature is fully dependent on divine will. The Ash'ari analysis receives its most powerful expression in the later thought of al-Ghazali, who attacked Aristotelian accounts of natural causality by famously arguing that there is no metaphysically necessary connection between what purport to be cause and effect.