Please read through the Highlights in the history
of Islamic theology below; then
read very carefully the following three texts from your Coursepack, and answer the
question
on D2L. Note
that these texts are written for insiders to a certain theological tradition,
so
you,
as an
outsider, may find them very dense or even meaningless at points. Read
slowly, and reread several times any portion that you decide to focus
on.
The Testament of Abu Hanifa (in Coursepack, pages
57-61). This is a brief creed or statement of doctrinal position;
it deals especially with questions raised early in the development of
Islamic theology.
Your only D2L assignment
for this class is to choose one topic dealt with in this creed,
and submit on D2L a brief one-paragraph commentary
on the way the creed addresses that topic,
drawing on at least one idea that has come up previously in
this class. How does something we have already studied help to illumine or problematize what this creed says? (This is our first trial run at writing commentaries;
we will continue to work on this throughout the term, in homework and on exams.)
For example, you might compare the way this creed seems
to define what it means to be a Muslim or a believer, with the various
ideas on that subject that we found in al-Nawawi's Forty Hadith (see the orange online notes from that week). Or
you could say how the creed's position on predestination vs. free will
does or does not fit with what we found in al-Nawawi's Forty
Hadith or in Cornell's chapter in the OHI. Or you could explain why the creed discusses who the
best Muslims after Muhammad were, referring to the biography of Muhammad
that we read. Or you could comment on the creed as a whole, stating
how its overall content and approach fits into the various currents of
Islam we have identified so far (moral path, relational, and mystical models, ...).
"Discussion of the Qur'an and the Divine Will," from al-Ash`ari's Kitab al-Luma` (next in Coursepack, pages 20-32).
Note that the text is written in the form of a debate between al-Ash`ari
and an imagined adversary. Paragraphs introduced by "Q." are
questions posed by the adversary; "A." introduces al-Ash`ari's
answers to the questions; and "O." introduces the adversary's
objections to those answers.
Focus on the main argument
of each of al-Ash`ari's three proofs that the Qur'an
is eternal (beginning in paragraphs 27, 33, and 45); try to be prepared to
paraphrase each
argument in
class.
Selections from Sharh al-Usul al-Khamsa by `Abd
al-Jabbar (next in Coursepack, 6 pages, also available online). Look for
a
refutation
of
al-Ash`ari's
second
proof
of
the
eternity of the Qur'an.
Notes from class
We examined in detail several issues in the Testament of Abu Hanifa (TAH), trying to determine precisely what the creed's position is on each one. (I think we did a great job of getting down to the meat of these theological arguments.)
The relationship between faith and works:
To define faith, for these theologians, is to define salvation, because believers go to Paradise and unbelievers go to hell.
TAH 1-5 excludes works from its definition of faith, and presents faith as essential to salvation, whereas works are required but can be omitted for certain reasons.
This conflicts with al-Nawawi's hadith, many of which gave lists of works essential to salvation.
TAH 16 says that believing in the law (e.g. in the duty of wiping one's leather socks before prayer) is essential for salvation, but actually obeying the law is not.
One reason TAH takes such a view of salvation is probably political: by making works distinct from faith, it implies grave sins do not affect faith, which means that even unjust rulers (allegedly including `Uthman and the Umayyads) are still believers and legitimate rulers who may not be killed. (TAH thus takes a Murji'ite position.) (We also noted some anti-Shi`ite statements in TAH 10 and 26, which illustrates how much politics affected this creed.)
Another of our explanations for why TAH might exclude works from its definition of faith is that TAH also says pretty clearly that works are created and predetermined by God - so how could works be the reason for going to heaven or hell? But we found that this explanation didn't work, because TAH seems to assert that faith itself is created and predetermined by God, yet it is the reason for going to heaven or hell.
TAH 11 says the elements of faith are created, which means created by God, since TAH 12 emphasizes the human inability to create. (Even the writing of the Qur'an, which is a human act, is apparently created by God.)
But does that mean faith is actually predetermined? To find out, we examined TAH's view of God's creation of human acts, and considered whether it could be interpreted as compatible with some degree of human choice. We found that:
God creates not only humans' physical ability to act, but also the "acting-power" to perform specific acts, which must exist in a being at the time it performs the act.
TAH argues (against the Mu`tazilites) that God does not give humans in advance the acting-power do either do or not do an act, and them let them choose whether to act; instead TAH says God gives humans only the acting-power to do what they actually do, and only at the moment they actually do it.
So God's creating human acts does not entail real choice. So apparently his creating faith (or unbelief) likewise leaves no choice. Faith is entirely predetermined.
God also wills all human actions - both those he really wants and commands, and those he does not want or command. His will must be distinguished from his wanting something. What he wills necessarily happens, since he is omnipotent.
The Preserved Table likewise contains a prior written statement of all human actions, just as we saw in al-Nawawi's Hadith.
We thought of reading TAH as just a warning not to be too confident of one's powers, and a reminder that one's powers depend on God and could be taken away at any time. This sounds like the way the Qur'an might use a theological statement; but this creed is not like a pious sermon, it is making precise theological statements as part of a technical debate.
At the end of class, one of you also brought up the possibility of various Sufi interpretations of predetermination:
Good and evil (and faith an unbelief?) have to exist in a cosmic moral balance, and will ultimately all be reunited with God. This recalls our earlier idea that at the level of the "truth of certainty," predermination can be understood as union with God. (TAH 27 rejects the idea that all will eventually return to God, because it says hell is eternal.)
Faith and unbelief do not denote separate groups of people, some of whom are punished and some of whom are saved; instead they denote different aspects of each individual, some of which will be purged and others preserved. (TAH does not seem to have this outlook, but it's an interesting way to explain how God could predetermine without condemning any one individual to hell.)
So TAH, just like some al-Nawawi's hadith, really does seem to be saying that salvation is completely determined by God, without any room for human choice.
In passing we noted that TAH carefully distinguishes between God's speech and its created expression:
God's attribute of speech is eternal, and it consists of the true Torah and the true Gospel as well as the Qur'an, although Muslims generally do not recognize the Bible of Jews and Christians as the authentic Torah and Gospel. We saw in Q 5 that the Torah and Gospel were regarded as law books that are largely compatible with the Qur'an.
The written and recited words and letters of the Qur'an are created. They express the eternal meaning that is God's speech.
(This represents an Ash`arite doctrine of God's speech.)
Next time we will examine the argument over God's speech in more detail, and ponder why it was so important to Muslims.
Thursday
Assignment
Read Chapter
Six (by Majid Fakhry) of the Oxford
History of Islam. No D2L questions.
In class we will continue to discuss the texts from the Coursepack, so please bring the Coursepack with you; you do not need to bring the OHI.
Notes from class
We used `Abd al-Jabbar's text, and our recollection of the Neoplatonic philosophers, to map out four different theories of the Qur'an, and the reasons people might have held these views or objected to them:
God, and subsisting eternally in him, attributes (life, knowledge, power, will, speech, etc.)
The attribute of speech consists of Torah, Gospel, Psalms, and the Qur'an.
The attribute (ma`na) of speech is also the "meaning" - the idea that God wants to convey.
In the created, temporal realm:
A heavenly tablet, created long ago, containing words that express God's eternal speech-meaning.
Those words were sent down bit by bit to different prophets to form the Qur'an, etc.
Issues
Making God's speech his attribute allows it to be eternal without being a completely second eternal being distinct from God.
This could be taken to mean that only the big ideas (like universal moral principles) are eternal, whereas the particular words of the Qur'an (e.g. specific Qur'anic rules) are specific to certain historical settings. Cornell and Kamali might say this supports the idea that the details of law can change, while its basic principles remain the same. Perhaps God eternally knows that laws must change over time, and so expresses his eternal Meaning in different ways for different peoples.
This makes the Qur'an both divine and created at the same time - just as orthodox Christians insisted Christ is both divine and human. Christians found this essential for Christ's ability to save people (it made him able to pay the penalty of sin for humans, and to reconcile human and divine natures...). Perhaps Ash`arite theologians likewise wanted something that would bridge the divine-human gap and thus save humans - by bringing divine guidance within human reach.
`Abd al-Jabbar objected that an attribute of the ma`na type is not directly knowable, but can only be inferred from some other quality to which it gives rise, such as "being speaking;" but one only knows that a person is speaking if one hears his speech, which we have just said is not directly knowable if it is a ma`na. This means there is no way to know God's speech if it is an eternal attribute of God. `Abd al-Jabbar does not think a temporal "expression" can reliably give knowledge of an eternal attribute.
God, with eternal attributes such as knowledge (but not speech).
In the created, temporal realm:
God's acts (i.e. his creations), which include his speech.
God's speech is a sequence of letters, created in a Heavenly realm inhabited by angels, on a Tablet, including Torah and Gospel and Psalms and Qur'an.
One angel (Gabriel) brought down various parts of those words to various prophets on earth, where the prophets repeated them, and where humans still repeat them.
Issues
The Mu`tazilites said God's speech is created partly to avoid agreeing with the Christian doctrine of God's eternal word, Christ.
This doctrine was imposed briefly as state doctrine by the Abbasid caliphs.
Making God's speech one of his acts makes it subject to God's justice, which guarantees that it must convey true guidance, and must communicate it clearly. `Abd al-Jabbar's theory of God's speech thus preserves the authority of God's speech, and its salvific value, as a source of law.
This view makes God's speech part of history, which could suggest the law is historically relative and less absolute than in the other theories; but `Abd al-Jabbar can still regard the law as eternal and unchanging because it stems from God's eternal knowledge, and because God's justice means he must state the law clearly, which implies literal interpretation.
Forms, such as Justice, that encompass all Truth at an abstract level.
In the created, temporal realm:
Prophets' intellects reach the level of grasping the Truth, and then their imaginative faculties help them express that Truth in words and stories and laws that their people can understand.
This means that the words of revealed books are determined by Prophets, not by God, as in all the other theories.
Issues
This means law is a human construct, and different for each society.
The issues that drove the debate between these views seem to have been (details are in the outline above):
Preserving God's oneness against Christian doctrines.
Politics (imposition of Mu`tazili doctrine by caliphs).
The absolute and unchanging nature of God's commands, versus flexibility for eternal principles to be implemented in changing laws as historical circumstances change.
The need for a saving connection between God and humans.
The Earliest Theological Problem: Community
Leadership.
The question of who should lead the Muslim community raised several theological
questions:
The basis of authority
The Shi`ites located
authority in an infallible imam, who should always be a descendant
of the Prophet, designated by the previous imam.
The Kharijites held
that the most pious and most qualified Muslim should be the Caliph,
and he should judge by the Qur'an alone.
The Murji'ites eventually
accepted the government that was in power (the Umayyads),
despite its faults,
for the sake of stability. This
became the majority Muslim attitude
toward government.
The boundaries of the community
Does a grave sin affects one's faith, and thus exclude a person
from the community of believers? The answer would determine
whether one thought `Uthman's
murderers had killed a believer and therefore should
have
been punished; it would also determine whether the purported sins
of the Umayyads disqualified them from leadership. Opposing
views on a set of related questions were taken by Kharijites (who
actively opposed both `Ali and the Umayyads), Mu`tazilites (who
held views implying opposition to the Umayyads), and Murji'ites (who
eventually accepted the Umayyads).
Eventually the mainstream Traditionalist and Ash`arite view
came to be that faith includes belief, profession with the
tongue,
and
action with
the body; this implies that grave sin affects belief, but since they
also held can increase
or decrease, it did not imply that grave sin makes one an unbeliever. They
adopted the Murji'ite acceptance of imperfect rulers.
Whether humans have free will
The Qadarites insisted that humans have free will, implicitly
opposing the Umayyads, who were said to be justifying their evil deeds
by claiming that
they were
foreordained by
God. The doctrine of free will later was associated with the Mu`tazilites. Traditionalists
held that God foreordains and creates everything - not only a person's
lifespan and fortunes, but
also a person's acts, whether good or bad. Once kalam theology
got started, the Ash`arites justified
the traditionalist view with the theory of acquisition (kasb), according
to which God creates
in a
person the power to perform a certain act at precisely the moment
when the person performs the act. Although the person never has
the power to perform any other act, the person 'acquires' the act as
his or
her own,
and becomes responsible for it.
With the translation of Greek philosophical texts into Arabic, theology took
on a new dimension. A formal philosophical vocabulary was developed (e.g.
the concepts of essence and attribute and atom and accident). Henceforth
the exponents of kalam used (and modified) this vocabulary, while Traditionalists
such as Ibn Hanbal refused to enter into such discussions, limiting themselves
to theological statements formulated in the Qur'an and Hadith.
The major classical schools of Islamic theology formed around
a set of questions relating to the relationship between God and human reason:
Whether theology should be based on reason or solely on revelation.
The Mu`tazilites held
that reason is prior to revelation. Without reason, we cannot know that God
is truthful, and that he would not deceive us by allowing non-Prophets to perform
miracles. If we do not know these things by reason first, then we can never
recognize and trust revelation. Therefore, basic facts about God are known
by reason alone; revelation only confirms them. Revelation does give us additional
knowledge, especially about God's will, but its interpretation is always subject
to reason.
Traditionalists such as Ibn
Hanbal maintained that our knowledge of God comes through revelation
alone. Ibn Hanbal coined the phrase "without [asking] how" (bi-la kayf) in
the context of a particular theological problem (divine attributes), but
it reflects well the overall traditionalist position: if the Qur'an or a
hadith says something, we accept it at face value, without speculating about
how it might be understood so as to accord with reason. For example, when
the Qur'an speaks of God's arm, we do not question this, or interpret it
metaphorically as power; we just accept it.
The Ash`arites,
following the lead of their founder al-Ash`ari,
took a middle of the road position, basing their doctrines on a traditionalist
understanding of revelation, but using the rational methods of kalam to
defend these doctrines. A famous later Ash`arite, al-Ghazali,
compared kalam to medicine: it should be used only to cure doubt, not by those
with a healthy faith.
Whether
the Qur'an was created or eternal.
The Mu`tazilites held
that the Qur'an, which is God's speech, cannot be eternal but must be created.
Otherwise, there would be two eternal beings, God and the Qur'an, and this
would violate the fundamental Muslim doctrine of God's oneness (tawhid). The
Mu`tazilite view was made official state doctrine by the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma'mun,
and religious scholars were required to endorse it.
Traditionalist theologians, out of reverence for the Qur'an, insisted
that it was God's eternal speech. One traditionalist who refused to go along
with the state's endorsement of the doctrine of the created nature of the Qur'an, Ibn
Hanbal, was imprisoned. Popular opinion was so strongly in his favor, however,
that riots forced the Caliph to have him released, and eventually the official
requirement to endorse the created nature of the Qur'an was rescinded. The
eternal nature of the Qur'an became the standard Sunni view. The great Mu`tazilite `Abd
al-Jabbar argued that this position was nonsensical: how could something
eternal consist of a series of sounds pronounced in sequence?
In response to such criticisms, the Ash`arites adopted
a middle position, claiming that God's speech is eternal, but the actual words
of the Qur'an are only a created expression of it. `Abd al-Jabbar retorted
that this made it impossible for created humans to have any knowledge of God's
actual speech.
Whether God is bound to act justly.
The Mu`tazilites made
God's justice one of their cardinal tenets. For them, God operates in the same
conceptual world as humans; our concept of justice applies to God as it does
to us. It follows that God cannot punish humans for acts that he has foreordained,
therefore humans must have free will. Also, God must make his requirements
known to us; from this there follows a host of principles for interpreting
the Qur'an, which are based on the premise that God must express himself clearly.
The Traditionalists refused to bind God to a human notion of justice.
Rather, God defines justice by his acts. God does not do things because they
are just; they are just because he does them. Thus if he punishes people for
acts he has foreordained them to do, we may not question his justice; it is
he who questions our justice.
The Ash`arites again
tried to find a middle ground, defending traditionalist positions with rational kalam arguments.
They held that God foreordains and creates all human acts, but humans "acquire" those
acts, and thus become responsible for them, so that God is just in punishing
their sin.
The Mu`tazilite school of theology eventually virtually disappeared, while
the Ash`arites became associated with the Shafi`ite school
of law, and gradually gained wide acceptance as orthodox Sunni doctrine. The
Maturidites, a theological
school founded by al-Maturidi (ca. 873 - ca. 944) that became widespread in
the East, was close to Ash`arism in doctrine, but was strongly associated with
the Hanafite school
of law. Around the end of 11th century C.E., Ash`arite theology began to gain
acceptance as orthodoxy, and theological questions were consequently
less debated. Speculative theologians began to teach in schools where law dominated
the curriculum, and therefore turned their attention more toward legal theory
(usul
al-fiqh).
Later Developments.
Sophisticated philosophical theology continued in some groups, particularly
among mystically inclined Persian scholars; but kalam theology eventually dropped
out of the curriculum of study in most places. Many Sunni Muslims
still recognize Ash`arite and Maturidite theology as acceptable, but the whole
discipline of kalam is often viewed with suspicion, and in modern times it
has been largely neglected despite a few attempts by modernists
to revive it. See
the Chart
of Philosophical
and Theological Currents in Islam.
The opinions or statements
expressed herein should not be taken as a position of or endorsement by the
University of Oklahoma.
Theology