School
Mu'tazila
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What exactly is kasb (acquisition), and is it just compatibilism with God in it?
I am eighteen and taking a gap year, and I have been reading about free will because it is the question that will not leave me alone. In Indonesia the answer I grew up with is that God creates everything, including my…
Started by Fajar Nugroho5 replies131 views -
Why did al-Jahiz insist on mixing jest with earnest in serious books?
My shop is off Mutanabbi Street and the most stolen book on my shelves, I'm sorry to say, is al-Jāḥiẓ's Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ, the Book of Misers. People pick it up, start laughing, and somehow forget to pay. It is a collection of…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies222 views -
Calling al-Jahiz a forerunner of Darwin does him no favours
Every few months someone sends me a graphic headed "Evolution, 1,000 years before Darwin", with a portrait of al-Jahiz (c. 776–869) that nobody painted from life. I work on classical Arabic texts, and I want to argue that the "forerunner" label shrinks…
Started by Layla Haddad5 replies245 views -
Mu’tazilis, al-Māturīdī and Aquinas: three ways of saying reason can see part of the moral law
I started reading kalām to understand my own faith better. The question that keeps pulling me back is whether moral knowledge needs revelation. The classical positions, as I understand them: Muʿtazila: good and bad (ḥusn and qubḥ) are knowable by reason. That…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani4 replies208 views -
The Mu’tazila were right: reason can know that injustice is wrong before any revelation
I want to defend the losing side of one of the great arguments in kalām. The Mu'tazilī theologians held that acts have moral qualities that reason can recognise: that injustice and lying are bad, that gratitude to a benefactor is owed, and…
Started by Layla Haddad6 replies126 views -
Kasb is a real distinction, not a verbal escape: the Ash’ari answer deserves a hearing
Within Islamic theology the free will question produced two sharply opposed answers, and I think one of them gets a worse press than it deserves. The Mu'tazila said that human beings genuinely create their own acts. God is just; he would not…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani5 replies206 views -
Can reason tell right from wrong on its own, or does it need revelation?
I spent thirty-one years on the bench in Lahore. I applied statutes, precedent and, where the law allowed, the principles of Islamic law. Many times a case was decided correctly by every rule and I went home feeling it had been decided…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan6 replies240 views -
Al-Jahiz
Al-Jahiz was a prose writer and Mu'tazili thinker from Basra, one of the great stylists of Arabic literature. His Book of Animals gathers observation…