Ashari School

The Ashari school inherited a problem rather than invented one. If God creates everything, including what a person does, then blaming or rewarding that person looks unjust. If a person creates their own acts, then something in the world has been made by someone other than God. The Mutazila took the second horn and argued that human beings genuinely originate their acts, which is what makes the final reckoning fair. Abu al-Hasan al-Ashari, who had studied in that school under al-Jubbai before breaking with it, took neither.

His answer is kasb, usually translated as acquisition. God creates the act at the moment it occurs, and the human being acquires it, meaning that the act is genuinely theirs in the sense that matters for praise and blame without their having brought it into existence. The power exercised in the act is itself created by God alongside the act, so nothing is added to the world by a creature. What the person contributes is not creation but the fact that the act attaches to them and to nobody else.

Critics inside and outside the school have said for a thousand years that acquisition names the problem rather than solves it, since it is hard to say what acquiring adds if the power to act is created too. Later Ashari writers worked on exactly that objection, and al-Baqillani and al-Juwayni did not agree with each other about the answer. The doctrine has survived not because it satisfied everyone but because it holds together the two commitments the school would not surrender: that God is the only creator, and that a person is answerable.

The other question the school was formed to answer is what to do with the language scripture uses about God. The Quran speaks of the hand of God, the face of God, God seated on the throne, and of God hearing and seeing. Read one way this gives God a body. Read the other way, the way the Mutazila took it, the attributes dissolve into the essence and the words become figures of speech.

The Ashari formula is bila kayfa, without asking how. The attributes are affirmed as real and as distinct from the essence, and the manner is left alone: the texts are accepted as they stand, and what they mean in detail is not something a human mind is equipped to specify. The point is a boundary rather than an evasion. Affirming the words keeps revelation from being explained away, and refusing the how keeps God from being made into a large man.

The same instinct governs the school position that the Quran is uncreated. The generation of scholars before al-Ashari had lived through the mihna, the inquisition in which the Abbasid state tried to compel judges and scholars to profess that the Quran was created, so the question carried more than metaphysics with it. The school held that the Quran as the speech of God is an eternal attribute, while the ink, the paper and a particular recitation are created things.

The position travelled through institutions as much as through argument. It became the theology taught alongside Shafii and Maliki law in the madrasa system, and the endorsement of al-Ghazali carried it further than any polemic could.