The Second Period: Sunni kaictm

It was the heavily moralistic outlook of Mu'tazilite kalam evident in this short account that made it vulnerable to the attacks of Sunni theologians, mostly of the Ash'arite school, who argued that human conceptions of justice were inapplicable to God and, more generally, that human beings could have no full understanding of the divine attributes. At the beginning of the tenth century, al-Ash‘arite (d. 935-936), a renegade Mu'tazilite theologian from Basra, pointed to what he saw as a fundamental incoherence at the heart of the Mu'tazilite attempt to give a systematic rationalization of God’s justice, and the futility of efforts to reconcile God’s justice with His foreknowledge: for assuming that God knows whether a given human will go on to make the right or wrong moral choices within his or her lifetime and assuming also that God determines a person’s time of death, how could the Mu'tazilites explain why an infant who dies without having performed any actions, whether good or evil, has been deprived of the chance to earn rewards in the afterlife, while numerous wretched people are allowed to live long lives in which they thoughtlessly waste their chances to obey God - chances that the infant craved in vain? Prompted by this objection, al-Ash‘arite developed an alternative to Mu'tazilite kalam that would preserve the

Mu'tazilites’ technique of rational argumentation yet criticize their extension of human rational principles into the divine realm. He insisted, for instance, that when God describes Himself in the Qur’an as ‘‘knowing’’ (alim) this would imply - according to the rules of the Arabic language - the existence of an entity (ma'na) of ‘‘knowledge’’ that God has. Such knowledge is different from human knowledge and humans cannot gain a full understanding of divine attributes. With regard to the entitative quality of the divine attributes (sifat) and the way they are grounded in God’s unity - as well as other subjects of theology that would apparently defy human reason - the Ash'arites applied the principle of acknowledging what they understood to be the teachings of revelation ‘‘without asking how’’ (bi-la kayf). Al-Ash‘arite’s aim was to practice kalam in a way that would preserve the outward wording of the text of revelation as much as possible (Gimaret 1990). Unlike the Mu'tazilites, he saw himself as part of the broader movement of traditionalist Sunni Islam that grew out of the opposition to al-Ma’mun’s Inquisition.

The Ash'arites’ refusal of extending human rational principles into the divine led in their ethics to the rejection of the Mu'tazilite view that God’s justice follows a moral code that is innately known to humans. Ash'arites acknowledged that humans have an innate understanding of ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad,’’ but this does not reflect objective ethical characteristics but is determined to be a mere consideration of their innerworldly benefits. These innate judgments, however, are ultimately fallacious and cannot be the basis of ethics or jurisprudence (fiqh). Ash'arites have a voluntarist understanding of ethical values, where ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ are determined by God’s will. Good actions are those that are rewarded by God (in this world as well as in the afterlife) and bad actions are those that are punished. The kind of connection between human actions and divine reward or punishment can only be learned from revelation (Hourani 1985:124-166).

While the Ash'arites were the first group of Sunni mutakallimUn they were soon joined by a second group that established itself in the border region between Iran and Central Asia and took its inspiration from the work of al-Maturldl (d. c. 944), a contemporary of al-Ash‘arite from Samarkand. Whereas Ash'arite kalam adopted certain positions in a conscious effort to oppose Mu'tazilism, Maturldite kalam was less driven by such an opposition and is thus in general more rationalist than Ash'arite kalam in its approach and in this respect closer to Mu'tazilism (Rudolph 1996).

Ash'arite kalam developed in Basra and Baghdad, where al-Ash‘arite taught, but moved to Khorasan in northwest Iran at the beginning of the eleventh century. Its main proponents al-Baqillanl (d. 1013), Ibn FUrak (d. 1015), al-Isfara’yn! (d. 1027), and al-Juwaynl (d. 1085), whose Guide to Conclusive Proofs (Kitab al-Irshad) remains a point of reference for this period, developed systematic positions in many fields of the sciences. Initially only a small movement, Ash'arite kalam benefited from the patronage of rulers from the second half of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries and became the most influential branch of kalam in Islam. During this period, Ash'arite kalam also became institutionalized in the newly formed madrasa, a seminary-type school or college - often financially independent - where kalam was part of the curriculum (pace Makdisi 1981, 302f).

Central to early (or also: classical) Ash'arite kalam was a concern with the preservation of God’s omnipotence, which provided the context for their systematic denial of the Aristotelian concept of‘‘natures’’ (Arab. tabai). Classical Ash'arites denied that beings contained inherent potentialities capable of determining their future states and development and emphatically rejected the existence of any true potentiality outside of God. Out of that position grew an independent attempt to explain physical change in this world and the performance of human actions. Ash'arites adopted their understanding of physical processes from earlier theories developed in Mu'tazilite kalam. The Mu'tazilite movement was particularly rich in attempts to explain physical processes (Dhanani 1994). Some Mu'tazilites speculated that movements are not continuous processes but consist of smaller leaps (singl. ttafra) that our senses cannot detect and whose sum we perceive as a continuously flowing movement. This theory, in turn, led other Mu'tazilite thinkers to suggest that time itself is not a continuous flow but is rather a fast procession of ‘‘moments’’ (singl. waqt), which again is concealed from our senses. Al-Ash'arite adopted these notions and created an explanation of physical change known as occasionalism. Occasionalism assumes that no element in the created world has any causal efficacy over any other. God is the only cause in this world and He does not employ secondary agents or intermediaries to mediate His creative activity. God creates each event immediately, or rather, He creates this world anew at every moment and arranges the relationship between the elements therein anew without causal connection to a prior moment. What we consider causal natural laws is merely God’s custom fadat Allah) in creating certain sequences of events. God, however, can break His custom and He does so when He creates a miracle in order to confirm the claim of one of His prophets (Perler and Rudolph 2000:23-62).

Moses Maimonides (d. 1204) gives a faithful yet critical report of the occasionalist teachings in classical Ash'arite kalam at the end of the first part, in chapters 71-76, of his Guide of the Perplexed (Dalalat al-hairtn, 121-162; English trans. 1:175-231). He presents 12 premises (muqaddimat) of Ash'arite occasionalism and explains their implications. While written in Arabic, Maimonides’ Guide became known in Europe first through its Hebrew translation (Moreh nevukhtm, translated c. 1200 by Samuel ibn Tibbon) and through a Latin translation (Dux neutrorum or Dux perplexorum, translated c. 1240) of the Hebrew version, which renders the Hebrew word medabbertm (for Arab. mutakallimun) as loquentes (Niewohner 1974). Maimonides thus introduced medieval European thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) to the occasionalist ontology of Ash'arite kalam. Aquinas discusses and refutes a number of their assumptions in his Summa contra gentiles and in other works (Perler and Rudolph 2000:131-153).