Human Beings Author Their Own Acts and God Judges Them Justly

Divine justice, adl, stands as one of the five formal principles of Mutazili theology and remains a live article of faith in Zaydi, Twelver and Ismaili thought after the Mutazilah itself declined as an organised school. The doctrine holds that God is just by a standard human reason is capable of recognising on its own, prior to and independent of revelation. From that premise two further claims follow directly. God cannot command what is impossible to perform, and God cannot justly punish a person for an act God himself caused that person to commit. Taken together, these commitments require that human beings genuinely originate their own acts rather than merely serving as the occasion for acts God alone brings about, since a God who single handedly authored an act and then punished the human agent for it would be violating the very standard of justice the doctrine ascribes to him. The position therefore ties a theory of divine justice directly to a theory of human free will, treating the two as inseparable rather than as separate questions that happen to be discussed together. The five principles are named in Mutazili sources as tawhid, the unity of God, adl, divine justice, the promise and the threat of reward and punishment, the intermediate position for a grave sinner, and commanding good and forbidding evil, and adl is regularly treated as the principle that gives the school its own preferred name, the People of Justice.

The Mutazili account of adl was never uncontested, and the opposing position became, in time, the dominant one in Sunni theology. Traditionist and later Ashari thinkers argued that justice has no standard external to God by which his acts could be measured in the first place. On this view, an act is just simply because God performs or commands it, not because it conforms to some independent rational criterion; to say otherwise, the objection ran, is to place a rule above God rather than treating him as the source of all rules. This reversal has direct consequences for human agency. If justice is defined by divine will rather than measured against it, there is no logical requirement that a person genuinely originate their own acts before God can justly judge them, which left more room within Sunni theology for doctrines of divine determination of human action than Mutazili, Zaydi, Twelver and Ismaili thought could accept. The dispute over adl is, in this sense, the theological root of a wider and older argument within Islam over how much human freedom divine justice actually requires. Ashari theologians gave their own account of human responsibility a name, kasb, acquisition: God alone originates every act, but a person acquires it through a created power God places in them at the moment of acting, a formula intended to preserve both divine sovereignty and a workable sense of moral accountability.