#mutazila

It is very important to determine the contributions of the Mu’tazila in the area of Islamic thought in general and in the area of hadith-sunna in particular. This similarly goes for judging the opinions of the Mu’tazila in light of the present day and taking stock of how the intellectual heritage of the Mu’tazila can contribute to help Muslims in today’s society orient themselves in their own way.

The Mu’tazila scholars are the first to have done research in the area of Islamic epistemology. The Mu’tazila scholars have developed an epistemological basis and methodology with which basic concepts of the Islamic faith could be proven. This methodology was developed because in those days, in part thanks to philosophers, opinions were spread about revelation (wahy): revelation could not be a source of knowledge and could not be proven with empirical methods. Furthermore, Mu’tazila scholars have exerted themselves to defend the fundamentals of Islam against non-Muslims and heretical groups.

The Mu’tazila view on hadith cannot be summarised in a general sense. The reason of this is that, since the existence of the Mu’tazila (at the start of the second century according to the hijra calendar) its leaders have continued to bring forth different opinions. The first scholars belonging to the Mu’tazila group have not written books on the subject of hadith methodology and hadith interpretation. Instead, they have usually recorded their methodological opinions vis-á-vis hadith, hadith interpretation and related areas in books about usul al-fiqh and kalam. It is clear, however, that the position of  ʿaql (rational capabilities) has played a major part in hadith interpretation. According to them, in situations where there is a contradiction between ʿaql and naql (Quran and the hadith-sunna) ʿaql is usually to be preferred over naql, on the condition that this ʿaql conforms to certain conditions.

Based on this description it is not entirely correct to paint the Mu’tazila as a madhhab which rejects the sunna as evidence. It is a given, however, that the Mu’tazila deviates from the ahl as-sunna in certain fundamental aspects, both in terms of acceptance of hadith as understanding of hadith texts.

In today’s parlance, individuals who stick to the past are called “traditionalists” (sunnatī). The word Sunnī which means sunnatī refers to the one who follows the tradition (sunnah) and does not subscribe to thinking (fikr) and intellection (taʿaqqul). However, since the sunnah was associated with the Prophet’s Sunnah, the terms acquired a sense of sanctity. [...]

The Sunnīs as they are called today are not the opposite of the Shīʿah. We think that the Sunnī is he who believes in Abū Bakr as the Prophet’s (S) immediate successor and the Shīʿah is he who does not believe in it. It is not so. In the beginning, the word Sunnī was not in contradistinction to Shīʿah; it was in contradistinction to Muʿtazilah. When it was said, “He is Sunnī ,” it meant that he was not a Muʿtazilite. But today we call both Muʿtazilites and Ashʿarites “Sunnīs.”

At that time which was the time of the Imams, the Shīʿah were with the Muʿtazilites in this respect and not with the Ashʿarites. The word Sunnī was juxtaposed against Muʿtazilah, but since the Shīʿah shared some things with the Muʿtazilites [the] word Shīʿah was later juxtaposed against Sunnī after the Muʿtazilites were persecuted and, among the advocates of intellection, only the Shīʿah remained. Thereafter, a way of thinking emerged which perhaps associated the word Sunnī to the question of caliphate although it has nothing to do with its root. Yet, the word gradually acquired this meaning.

In the millennium congress on Shaykh al-Ṭūsī held in Mashhad, Ᾱqā Ḥajj Mīrzā Khalīl Kamare’ī made an interesting observation on the word Sunnī, a good word applied by the Ahl al-Sunnah to themselves. He said:

“They defrauded us in the dark. They came and chose this beautiful name for themselves, saying, “We are Sunnis which means that we follow the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah (S) and that others do not follow the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah (S).” This is while the contention is not about the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah (S) in that one would say, : The Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah (S) is authoritative” while other would say it is not authoritative. Even the Muʿtazilites would not say, “We do not accept the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah (S).” The contention is on the quality of inference and treating the Qur’an, the Sunnah and the intellect. If we set aside the intellect, we cannot also understand the Qur’an and the Sunnah, and this argument is correct.”

[...]

The Shī ʿah world was immune from this [Ibn Ḥanbal’s] literalism and the reason for this, as I have explained, was that this movement emerged during the time of the Imams (A) who were very close to the Muʿtazilites in this respect such that in history the Shīʿah and the Muʿtazilites are mentioned together and are called ʿadliyyah (justice-advocates). Many people even called the Shīʿah Muʿtazilites and called the Muʿtazilites Shīʿah.

The Theology of the Mu’tazilites - Freedom and Reason

This is not the place to address the political roots of the Mu’tazilites. Mutazilites literally translates to ‘those who separated themselves’ (in all probability this means a certain Wasil and his friends, who separated themselves from the group around Hasan al-Basri in the difference of opinion regarding the judgement of one who had committed a great crime). What interests us more here is the theology, or rather the philosophy of the Mu’tazilites.

Mu’tazilism has probably developed itself as theology among faithful who trusted fully on the promises and also the warnings, which God had announced in the Qur’an. With the unity of God, the unity of the revealed law, with the unity of the community entirely submitted to God (umma) must agree (sura 2, 128). This community is the best which has been brought forth; she commands the good and forbids the evil (sura 3, 106 and 110). There is a close relation between the unity of the Muslim congregation and the cult of worshipping the one Lord (sura 21, 92 and 23, 52). We see here that the Mu’tazilites are strictly keeping to the Qur’an and are inspired by it; one would do them injustice if one terms them as ‘free thinkers’, the ‘liberals’ of Islam.

Early on there started an exchange of polemics between Christians and Mu’tazili Muslims. On the Christian side the ecclesiastical teacher John Damascene took part in particular. This discussion had two consequences for Islam: the obligation to defend the dogma of the absolute unity of God against the Trinity teachings of the Christians, and the necessity of possessing the instruments of logical argument. Unlike the conservative Hanbali school, which simply rejected everything which was not to be found in Islam as inferior, the Mu’tazilites wanted to discuss fiercely and adopt the means for these discussions. The Christians wanted to make the three persons of the Trinity palatable for Muslims by pointing at the divine characteristics, which the Qur’an names when it is said: God is knowing, powerful, living, speaking, and so on. Three of these characteristics were chosen by Christian theologians to characterise the divine Persons. But the Mu’tazilites persisted that the characteristics of God named by the Qur’an are not separated from his Being; because if they were eternal in the same way as God, where would be multiple eternal beings and this would destroy the notion of the absolute unity of the divine being. In reality, the Mu’tazilites said, the characteristics can be traced back to the Being: God is not knowing by virtue of his knowing, not powerful by virtue of his power, but by his Being. Accordingly the Mu’tazilites also reject the eternity of the Qur’an, because this would endanger the dogma of the unity of God.

In this way the Mu’tazilites, through the necessity of argumentative discussion with Christian theology, gained respect for reason, the ratio, which was until then unknown in Islam and generally was not shared by the ‘official’ theology. If the majority of Muslim scholars claims that Islam is reasonable, rational, then it means so in that sense, that unlike in Christianity there is no ‘mystery’. On top of that it is God himself who puts forth arguments in the Qur’an and he demands of people to reflect on this divine argumentation with the faculties at their disposal. The Mu’tazilites go even further here: in their opinion there exist rational truths which are clear to common sense, regularities  which reason can discover in and of itself; there are virtues and vices, which are stuck in reason and which man can recognise without any revelation as well.

Such understanding of reason had as a consequence that Mu’tazilites had to reserve an important place for human freedom: man has an assignment to fulfil (taklif), and he himself is responsible for that (mukallaf). Freedom is a condition for the great and the small jihad (meaning the exertion to conquer the enemies of God both without and within), the ijtihad (the effort of personally going through the assigned Divine Scriptures). If God is just and does naught but good, he cannot create a priori unbelievers. Evil comes from mankind. God would not be able to reward or punish people at the Judgement, if they themselves were not responsible for and causing their deeds. God does not create human acts: he creates the creative, free capability of mankind to act. Several important fundamentals of the Mu’tazilites would be developed further in Shi’ism.

Under the Abbasid caliphs, the principal challenge to orthodoxy was undertaken by a movement of Islamic intellectuals known as the Mu’tazilites. Though their tactics were not always gentle, their message contained the promise of preserving, within the context of the faith, the creativity on which the Islamic civilization had hopefully embarked. The Mu’tazilites were the product of the same invasion of new knowledge that produced great mathematicians and astronomers. They did not cause the surge of creativity among the Arabs during the Baghdad years, but, for a dazzling moment, they foreshadowed the revolution of the mind that the West experienced centuries later in the Renaissance.

The Mu’tazilites, who were Sunni Muslims, were both dedicated theologians and avid readers of the Greeks. Their name, derived from a word meaning “neutralists”, suggests a state of suspension between belief and unbelief. Their origins, in Basra, went back to Umayyad times, even before Greek texts became common. Partisans of an open Islamic vision, they were players in the political and religious disputes that began under the Umayyads and came to an end only under the Abbasids.

The Mu’tazilites introduced Sunni Islam to the principle of rational inquiry into the nature of God and the Qur’an. Such practices had hitherto been linked chiefly to the Shi’ites. The Mu’tazilites also promoted a belief in free will, at odds with the orthodox doctrine of predestination.

Orthodox thinking, moreover, is shaped by an unusual doctrine adopted in the early days of Islam. The doctrine holds that the Quran was “not created” but has existed for all time. It argues that Muhammad, at a time chosen by God, simply transmitted to the Arabs a message that was, like God Himself, eternal. That God spoke in Arabic only underlined the Arabs’ special responsibility to preserve the message in its purity.

In the ninth century, two hundred years after Muhammad’s death, the Mu’tazilites, a body of dissident theologians, challenged this doctrine. Their challenge’s political implications [...] were extremely disturbing to those with a vested interest in orthodoxy.

The Mu’tazilites denied that the Quran had existed for all time and maintained that God, in response to specific circumstances on earth, had “created” it. From this, they concluded that, as circumstances changed, He would have further pronouncements to make. Meanwhile, they argued, man could determine, by the exercise of reason, moral conduct in matters which God had not addressed.The Mu’tazilites thus gave man a measure of free will and control over his future that orthodoxy denied.

Mu‘tazilite theories of ethics naturally varied in detail between one author and another. Nonetheless it is possible to state five main points which were constant in the school, and which provide a manageable starting place for our inquiry.

1. Values are objective. Good and evil, just and unjust are descriptive characters of reality which are no less ‘there’ in things than their other qualities such as shape and size or mental qualities.

2. There is one God, the only divine Creator. He knows all good and evil. he wishes and commands only good for men, but He allows them to do evil and to disobey His commands.

3. The values of many things and acts are known rationally by men. This knowledge does not come through sense perception alone but through the intellect, after we are informed of the relevant facts. A consequence of this rationalism is that people without a revelation are able to make sound ethical judgments to a certain extent.

4. Man has power to act as well as to know values, and so he is responsible for his just and unjust acts.

5. God rewards the just and punishes the unjust in an everlasting afterlife, and He does so justly because of man’s full responsibility as mentioned in points 3 and 4.

The Muʿtazila was the earliest “school” of rationalist Islamic theology, known as kalām, and one of the most important and influential currents of Islamic thought. Muʿtazilites stressed the primacy of reason and free will (as opposed to predestination) and developed an epistemology, ontology and psychology which provided a basis for explaining the nature of the world, God, man and the phenomena of religion such as revelation and divine law. In their ethics, Muʿtazilites maintained that good and evil can be known solely through human reason. With their characteristic epistemology, they were also largely responsible for the development of the highly sophisticated discipline of legal methodology.