Tariq Jaffer - Oriens 2021-The Mu Tazila On Covenantal Theology

Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171
brill.com/orie
The Muʿtazila on Covenantal Theology: A Study

of Individualist Approaches
Tariq Jaffer
Associate Professor, Department of Religion, Amherst College,
Amherst MA, United States
tjaffer@amherst.edu
Abstract
This article examines how three leading exegetes of the Muʿtazilite school tradition –
ʿAbd al-Jabbār (d. 415/1025), Jishumī (d. 494/1101), and Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144) –
conceptualized the Qurʾānic idea of covenant in divergent ways. It also illustrates how
they related the idea of covenant to their broader thought world to forge an inter-
pretation of the meaning of human history and salvation. It argues that these three
commentators, although they are linked to one another by a loose form of teacher-
student discipleship, share only basic ideas and applied hermeneutical devices and
interpretive principles in considerably different ways. It is unlikely that they relied on
one another when they composed their commentaries.
Keywords
ʿAbd al-Jabbār – Jishumī – Zamakhsharī – covenant – predestination – salvation
1 Covenant in the Qurʾān: Contractual Relations and the Promise

of Salvation
A myth, in the simplest sense, is a traditional story that imparts meaning in the
form of rules and provides a mode of ordering the universe. Such narratives
reflect the human tendency – or even the human mind’s fundamental need –
to order and find meaning in the universe.1 The Qurʾān’s covenant verse (7:172)
1 I adopt Kirk’s rough-and-ready definition of myth as simply a traditional story in Geoffrey

Stephen Kirk, Myth: Its Meanings & Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Cambridge:
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/18778372-12340002

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via communal account
132 Jaffer
is no exception to these principles of myth, which can be most easily observed

when one examines the verse in isolation from the authority of Muslim
commentaries on the Qurʾān.2 A.J. Arberry’s translation of Qurʾān 7:172 runs
as follows:
And when your Lord took from the Children of Adam, from their loins,
their seed, and made them testify touching themselves, “Am I not your
Lord?” They said, “Yes, we testify” – lest you should say on the Day of
Resurrection, “As for us, we were heedless of this,” or lest you say, “Our
fathers were idolaters aforetime, and we were seed after them. What, wilt
Thou then destroy us for the deeds of the vain-doers?”3
The covenant verse imposes a conception of how the world is ordered by allud-
ing to a chronology of cosmic events that begins with the creation of human
Cambridge University Press, 1973), 1–41. My understanding of myth is also influenced by the
following works: Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, transl. by Claire Jacobson
and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963); Claude Levi-Strauss Myth and
Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978); Bruce
Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999); Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture (Cambridge: University of Cambridge
Press, 1871). In my analysis, I do not assume that myth has any particular characteristics, e.g.
that it concerns the gods. Nor do I assume that it implies ritual, i.e. that it necessarily gives
rise to a practice. The question of whether the notion of covenant implies any form of ritual
within the thought world of the Muʿtazila is beyond the scope of this study.
2 The observation that Qurʾān 7:172 instances the human addiction to order and symmetry
is suggested in Todd Lawson, “Coherent Chaos and Chaotic Cosmos: The Qurʾān and the
Symmetry of Truth,” in Weltkonstruktionen: Religiöse Weltdeutung zwischen Chaos und Kosmos
vom Alten Orient bis zum Islam, ed. by Peter Gemeinhardt and Annette Zgoll, Orientalische
Religionen in der Antike, vol. 5 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 177–93.
3 Arthur John Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (London: Oxford University Press, 1955). The
term mīthāq is not mentioned in this Qurʾanic verse, but it is mentioned in Q. 57:8. On other
occasions (33:7 and 3:81) the Qurʾān speaks of God enjoining a covenant with Muḥammad
and other prophets such as Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus – all of whom have symbols
of their covenantal relationship with God in the Qurʾān. The Qurʾān also mentions a cov-
enant that God took with Abraham (2:125), a verse that deserves its own study. See Gerhard
Böwering, “Covenant,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, ed. by Jane Dammen McAuliffe
(Leiden: Brill, 2001), 1:464–7; Gerhard Böwering, “Qurʾan,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of
Islamic Political Thought, ed. by Gerhard Böwering (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2013), 451–3; Clifford E. Bosworth, “Mīthāḳ,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam: New Edition, ed. by
Peri J. Bearman et. al (Leiden: Brill, 1993) (retrieved March 13, 2021, via https://reference-
works.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/mithak-SIM_5240?s.num=0&s.
rows=20&s.f.s2_parent=s.f.book.encyclopaedia-of-islam-2&s.q=mithak).
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

The Mu ʿ tazila on Covenantal Theology 133
beings and ends with final salvation.4 As an aetiological myth that describes a
primordial event in human history, the covenant verse relates how and when
human beings came into existence. It further imposes a conception of how the
world is ordered by alluding portentously to the final end of human beings in
its final lines (“lest you should say on the Day of Resurrection …”).
The verse also imparts meaning in the form of rules by outlining an agree-
ment of a set of terms between God and human beings. The divinely initiated
covenant offers human beings the promise of salvation, but this promise is
conditional and has a formulaic quality: only if human beings enter a contrac-
tual relation with God by testifying to His sovereignty is the reward of salvation
attainable. In the process of imposing an obligation on human beings – to tes-
tify to God’s sovereignty and live in conformity with that ideal – God too places
Himself under an obligation, which is to deliver on his promise of salvation
at the end times.5 I will return to this theme in my final section of this arti-
cle, when I will describe how the covenant verse serves as an opportunity for
Zamakhsharī to forge a doctrine of salvation.
4 The most comprehensive study of the theme of covenant in Islamic exegesis remains
Richard Gramlich, “Der Urvertrag in der Koranauslegung (zu Sure 7, 172–173),” Der Islam
60 (1983): 205–30. A detailed analysis of covenant vocabulary and themes can be found in
Robert Carter Darnell, Jr., The Idea of Divine Covenant in the Qurʾān (Ph.D. diss., University of
Michigan, 1970), although this study pays little attention to Q. 7:172. More recently, inroads
have been made into the covenant theme in the Qurʾān and its commentarial literature. See
Joseph Lumbard, “Covenant and Covenants in the Qurʾān,” Journal of Qurʾānic Studies 17,
no. 2 (2015): 1–23; Böwering, “Covenant,” 1:464–7; Louis Massignon, “Le ‘jour du covenant’
(yawm al-mīthāq),” Oriens 15 (1962): 86–92; Annabel Keeler, Sufi Hermeneutics: The Qurʾan
Commentary of Rashid al-Din Maybudi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 139–49. On
the covenant theme within Shiism and later elaborations within the Bahai tradition, see
Todd Lawson, “Seeing Double: The Covenant and the Tablet of Ahmad,” in Baháʾí Faith and
the World’s Religions, ed. by Moojan Momen (Welwyn: George Ronald, 2005), 39–87; Hussein
Abdulsater, “The Interpretation of the Covenant Verse in Classical Imami Theology,” in Light
upon Light: Essays in Islamic Thought and History in Honor of Gerhard Bowering, ed. by Jamal
Elias and Bilal Orfali (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 70–90. The relationship between covenant and
hadith literature is discussed by Meir J. Kister in “Ādam: A Study of Some Legends in Tafsīr
and Ḥadīth Literature,” Israel Oriental Studies 13 (1993): 113–74. On the ways in which the idea
of covenant forms part of the Qurʾān’s basic worldview and ethos, see Rosalind Gwynne,
Logic, Rhetoric, and Legal Reasoning in the Qurʾān (London: Routledge, 2009). For a brief dis-
cussion of the Qurʾānic vocabulary of covenant, see Arthur Jeffery, The Qurʾan as Scripture
(New York: R.F. Moore, 1952), 31–33.
5 On the reciprocal nature of the covenant and its formulaic qualities in Ancient Near
Eastern cultures, see George Mendenhall and Gary Herion, “Covenant,” in The Anchor Bible
Dictionary, ed. by David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday Press, 1992), 1:1179–1202. For
further discussion on covenant theology, see William Adams Brown, “Covenant Theology,”
in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. by James Hastings (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1981).
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134 Jaffer
Izutsu proposed that the formulaic quality of the covenant reflects the
nomadic ideals and ethos of ancient Arabia. He had referenced the poetry
of Zuhayr to argue that the pre-Islamic virtue of loyalty was a strong moral
force in “primitive nomadic religion.”6 And he suggested that the prophet
transcended this moral force by configuring covenant as the basic form of rela-
tionship between God and man and by reconceptualizing the nature of tribal
bonds. This basic form of relationship places these two parties under obliga-
tions; and Qurʾānic verses such as 48:10 (“The hand of God is over their hands”)
suggest a ritual of covenant-making that reconfigured the pre-Islamic virtue of
loyalty into a Biblical form of covenant, a form that considered loyalty to both
God and the prophet as a virtue that would be rewarded at the end times.7
A number of scholars have made inroads into the covenant motif in the
Qurʾān and into the divergent directions of interpretation that developed
within schools of exegesis. In a rich article, Richard Gramlich mapped the con-
tours of discussions on the covenant verse (7:172) by examining a wide range
of tafsīr literature.8 He brought to light the ways that Sunnī and Shīʿī lines of
exegesis intersected, and he highlighted the dynamic exchange of ḥadīths
between schools of interpretation and traced the ways that certain theological
ideas migrated between Sunnī and Shīʿī schools of exegesis.
Although Gramlich discussed the principal direction that Muʿtazilite inter-
pretation took, he did not deal with the idea of covenant as it is expressed in
the major Muʿtazilite commentaries that are extant and published. Nor did he
give any attention to the vital role that the covenant verse plays in synthesizing
Muʿtazilite anthropological and metaphysical ideas concerning the origins of
man and his final salvation.
In a more recent essay devoted to primordial covenant in the Qurʾān, Wadad
Kadi dismissed the Muʿtazilite mode of interpretation as not warranting
investigation.9 Her anti-Muʿtazilite prejudice was evident in several bold and
unusual claims: that the “rational scrutiny” of the Muʿtazilites handicapped
them from grasping the implications of the covenant verse for understand-
ing the Qurʾān’s vision of human history; and that by applying “rational
scrutiny” to the verse, the Muʿtazila applied to the covenant an irrelevant
6 Toshihiko Izutsu, Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qurʾān (Montreal: McGill Queen’s

University Press, 2002), 74–104.
7 On the nature of contracts in Islamic law, see Aaron Zysow, “The Problem of Offer and
Acceptance: A Study of Implied-in-Fact Contracts in Islamic Law and the Common Law,”
Cleveland State Law Review 34 (1985–86): 69–77.
8 Gramlich, “Der Urvertrag,” 205–30.
9 Wadad Kadi, “The Primordial Covenant and Human History in the Qurʾān,” Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society 147, no. 4 (2003): 337.
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

criterion, taking away the awe that the dramatic encounter was meant to
impart.10 What Kadi intended by saying that the verse means to impart is
unclear, but absent from this kind of partisan research is the possibility that
the Muʿtazilites developed a profound covenant theology on their own terms,
one that is intelligible and meaningful in terms of Islamic institutions, con-
cepts, principles, values, and ideas.
My fundamental aim in what follows is to describe how the Muʿtazilites
invoked their ideals and called on their principles and methods to develop
their own covenant theology; and to describe how the Muʿtazila related the
idea of covenant to the social, anthropological, and juridical dimensions of
their thought world as a means of interpreting the meaning of human history
and salvation.
The three illustrious Muʿtazilite authors who are the focus of this study – ʿAbd
al-Jabbār, (d. 415/1025), Jishumī (d. 494/1101), and Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144) –
are linked to one another by a loose form of teacher-student discipleship.11
Jishumī was a student of al-Najjār (d. 220/835), who had studied under ʿAbd
al-Jabbār, and Zamakhsharī studied theology under Aḥmad b. Muḥammad
b. Isḥaq al-Khwārazmī, who may have been Jishumī’s student.12 These three
10 Addressing the Muʿtazilites and other groups that subjected the covenant verse to rational
scrutiny, Kadi writes that such “scrutiny can be a handicap when it is applied to literary
texts that are meant to be mysterious and strange, for therein lies their power to inspire,
and their appeal is not only to reason but to the imagination. When the rationalists object
to the event of the Covenant on the grounds of physical impossibility, they apply to the
event an irrelevant criterion; and when they reduce the momentous and unique dramatic
encounter between the divine and human to a mundane, mediated, ordinary, historical
series of encounters, they deflate the pregnant image of that encounter of the awe it is
meant to impart”; Kadi, “The Primordial Covenant and Human History in the Qurʾān,” 337.
11 An even more comprehensive evaluation of the interpretations of Muʿtazilite exegesis
would examine Rummānī’s commentary as well as its impact on Shīʿī tafsīr, since the for-
mer was the basis for Ṭūsī’s Tibyān. For a study of his role in the tafsīr tradition, see Alena
Kulinich, “Beyond theology: Muʿtazilite scholars and their authority in al-Rummānī’s
tafsīr,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 78, no. 1 (2015): 135–48. For
an introduction to Muʿtazilite commentary and the relationship of tafsīr works to one
another, see Chapter 5 of Bruce Fudge, Qurʾānic Hermeneutics: al-Tabrisi and the Craft
of Commentary (New York: Routledge, 2011). On the Muʿtazilites’ influence on Sunnī
and Shīʿī tafsīrs, see Suleiman A. Mourad, “The Survival of the Muʿtazila Tradition of
Qurʾānic Exegesis in Shīʿī and Sunnī tafāsīr,” Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 12 (2010): 83–108;
Suleiman A. Mourad, “The Muʿtazila and Their Tafsīr Tradition: A Comparative Study of
Five Exegetical Glosses on Qurʾān 3.178,” in Tafsir: Interpreting the Qurʾān, ed. by Mustafa
Shah (London: Routledge, 2013), 3:267–82; Suleiman A. Mourad, “Why Do We Need Tafsīr?
The Muʿtazila Perspective,” Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph 66 (2015–16): 121–33.
12 There is no information about al-Khwārazmī in the known sources. Nor is it certain that
this selfsame person was both Jishumī’s student and Zamakhsharī’s teacher. I thank
Suleiman Mourad for this point.

136 Jaffer
authors share exegetical principles, interpretive methods, and rhetorical

devices that were transmitted through the aforementioned lines of transmis-
sion, exchanged within the Muʿtazilite scholarly network, and subsequently
adopted by Sunnī commentators. A third aim of this study is to describe the
nature and role of these principles, methods, and devices within Muʿtazilite
covenant theology. I will chart the ways that later Sunnī theologians, including
Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) and Bayḍāwī (d. 685/1286), adopted those
elements within their Qurʾānic commentaries and further adapted them to
render them normative Sunnī ideals.
Although ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Jishumī and Zamakhsharī share certain procedures
and principles of exegesis that are characteristic of the Muʿtazilite school tradi-
tion, they differ profoundly in the concepts, institutions, interpretive methods
and rhetorical devices they use to interpret the covenant verse. A fourth aim
of this article is to illustrate how the individual approaches of these authors
open a window into the different dimensions of the covenant – theological,
juridical-ethical, metaphysical, anthropological, and social. The differences
between these approaches suggest that the three authors were motivated by
disparate issues, that they worked quite independently of each other, and that
they forged contrasting conceptualizations of the covenant.
2 ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s Covenantal Discourse: The Purposiveness

of the Divine Act
ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s Mutashābih al-Qurʾān marks the beginning of covenantal dis-

course within the extant tradition of Muʿtazilite commentaries on the Qurʾān.
This work, which takes up the task of interpreting the ambiguous verses of the
Qurʾān in accordance with the demands of the intellect, sets out basic proce-
dures and principles of exegesis that were transmitted through the Muʿtazilite
school tradition. The most important of these is suggested by ʿAbd al-Jabbār in
the introduction to Mutashābih al- Qurʾān: If the Qurʾān is to retain its validity,
it is necessary to interpret it in accordance with the demands of the intellect.
But despite these shared procedures and principles, ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Jishumī
and Zamakhsharī develop their interpretations of the covenant verse in quite
different directions and have quite different motivations and concerns.
Exegesis of the covenant within Muʿtazilism is juridical-ethical discourse, and
such discourse is circumscribed by theological parameters and has theological
aims.13 ʿAbd al-Jabbār assumes an ethical-juridical dimension to the covenant,
13 On moral obligation in Muʿtazilism, see Sophia Vasalou, Moral Agents and Their Deserts:
The Character of Muʿtazilite Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008);
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

and the emphasis he places on this dimension is evident in the salient prin-
ciples that provide the foundation of his interpretation. The divine initiative
entails the imposition of responsibility on human beings (taklīf), making them
responsible agents with the capacity to carry out the duties that God charges
them with. ʿAbd al-Jabbār aims to ground this principle in Muʿtazilite anthro-
pological principles and concepts. So, the task before us is to describe how
ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s line of exegesis is shaped by ethical-juridical concerns and
how those juridical-ethical concerns are shaped by Muʿtazilite anthropological
discussions of the definition of a person.14 Only by carrying out this task will
we be able to understand the role, place, and significance of the covenant idea
within the broader thought world of the Muʿtazilites.
How is ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s exegesis of the covenant idea driven by ethical-
juridical concerns?
ʿAbd al-Jabbār is motivated by the urge to bind the divine initiative (“Am I
not your Lord?”) to the Muʿtazilite ideal of human agency and responsibility.
He intends to argue that a person becomes a responsible agent at the begin-
ning of his existence by way of the covenant, which he considers a divine act
that imposes taklīf on human beings.
The focus of ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s exegesis is on the way that the divine initiative
to establish a covenant with human beings is oriented towards human agents
in their bodily conditions. The reason he stresses such conditions is that they
serve as the defining attributes of a person; these defining attributes make it
possible for an individual to receive divine commands and prohibitions and
hence be praised or blamed for his acts. In the following passage from the
Mughnī, ʿAbd al-Jabbār makes explicit that because a person has certain defi-
nitional attributes, God’s commands and prohibitions can be directed toward
him and that he can be praised and blamed for acts.
The living, capable being (al-ḥayy al-qādir) is this corporeal body which
is structured in this particular way by which it is distinguished from other
Richard M. Frank, “The autonomy of the human agent in the teaching of ʿAbd al-Jabbar,”
Le Muséon 95 (1982): 323–55; Richard M. Frank, “Moral obligation in Classical Muslim
Theology,” Journal of Religious Ethics 11, no. 2 (1983): 204–23. See also now Ayman Shihadeh,
“Theories of Ethical Value in Kalām: A New Interpretation,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Islamic Theology, ed. by Sabine Schmidtke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
14 On Muʿtazilite anthropology, see Sophia Vasalou, “Subject and Body in Baṣran Muʿtazilism,
Or: Muʿtazilite Kalām and the Fear of Triviality,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 17 (2007):
267–98; Majid Fakhry, “The Muʿtazilite View of Man,” in Recherches d’Islamologie: Recueil
d’articles offert a Georges C. Anawati et Louis Gardet par leurs collegues et amis (Louvain:
Peeters, 1977), 107–21.

138 Jaffer
animals, and is the one to whom commands and prohibitions, and blame
and praise are directed.15
ʿAbd al-Jabbār underscores that attributes which define a person, including

being alive and capable, serve as the pre-conditions for blame and praise.
The importance of this idea will become clearer when I discuss Jishumī and
Zamakhsharī, but for the moment, let me suggest that what our three authors
wish to argue is that the divine initiative which imposes covenantal obliga-
tions on an individual can take place only against the ground of attributes that
define him. Indeed, they wish to stress that nothing less than the full materi-
alization of a human being – an extended body endowed with the attributes
that define a person (i.e. sensing, perceiving, living, and knowing) will do for
the realization of a covenant, which entails the divine imposition of human
responsibility on an individual. In ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s exegesis, the aforemen-
tioned conjunction of attributes grounds the moral responsibility of human
beings. In doing so, it ensures that the imposition of duties (taklīf) on God’s
part is just.16
ʿAbd al-Jabbār is also motivated by the urge to uphold a foundational
principle of the Muʿtazilites’ ethical system, namely the human intellect’s
autonomous capacity to apprehend moral truths. His covenantal discourse
draws on Muʿtazilite anthropology – notably the idea that “knowing” is one of
the defining attributes of a person – to give the juridical-ethical aspect of the
covenant a theoretical basis. Human responsibility, he suggests, can be real-
ized only because an individual is endowed with intellect/capacity to know,
as well as the other attributes that enable him to perform acts that he charged
with: sensing, perceiving, and living. In the final part of this article, we will
see how Zamakhsharī will later explicitly argue that intellect, the source that
“distinguishes between guidance and error,” is divinely created and a natu-
ral source of knowledge.17 He will also institutionalize this principle into
Muʿtazilism, establishing it as the conventional reading of the school tradition.
The argument here parallels the Muʿtazilite principle that human intellect is a
precondition for the acceptance of revelation.
The excerpt above constitutes an occasion when ʿAbd al-Jabbār calls on an
elemental principle of Muʿtazilite anthropology – namely that intellect is a
15 ʿAbd al-Jabbār, al-Mughnī fī abwāb al-tawḥīd wa-l-ʿadl, ed. by Amīn al-Khūlī (Cairo:
Maṭbaʿat dār al-kutub, 1960), 11:311. Here I follow the translation of this passage in Vasalou,
“Subject and Body,” 278.
16 Vasalou, Moral Agents and Their Deserts, 145.
17 Maḥmūd ibn ʿUmar al-Zamakhsharī, al-Kashshāf ʿan ḥaqāʾiq al-tanzīl, ed. by Muḥammad
al-Ṣādiq Qamḥāwī (Cairo: Muṣṭafā al-bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1392/1972), 2:129.
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

defining attribute of man – in order to underscore the juridical-ethical aspect

of the covenant, i.e., the divine imposition of human agency and responsibility
(taklīf). Within his exegesis, the covenant synthesizes Muʿtazilite anthropo-
logical and juridical-ethical ideas, and it explains how the act by which God
endows man with intellectual capacity implies that man is obligated (mukal-
laf) to observe the duties of the divine law and hence a moral agent.18
3 Whence Human Beings? ʿAbd al-Jabbār Contra Traditionalism
When ʿAbd al-Jabbār and Jishumī (whom I will discuss below) elicit the mean-
ing and work out the implications of the covenant verse, they were motivated
by the urge to undermine the traditionalist mythology surrounding Adam and
its predestinarian ideas, all of which were guided by prophetic traditions. Thus,
to understand the Muʿtazilite approaches to the covenant verse, we must first
grasp how the mythology of prophetic traditions surrounding Adam guided
traditionalists to a predestinarian and universalist understanding of the cov-
enant notion – the idea that God established a contractual bond with human
beings as a totality.
The famous cluster of ḥadīths of predestination spread widely in tradition-
alist circles – both Sunnī and Shīʿī – and they dictated the ways that both Sunnī
and Shīʿī traditionalists conceptualized the covenant verse. I say “traditional-
ists” since other leading Sunnī commentators, including most importantly
Māturīdī (d. 333/944), did not invoke the authority of traditions. Indeed,
Māturīdī does not cite a single ḥadīth in his discussion of the covenant verse.
The interpretations he advances suggest that he and Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) were
drawing on different sources and suggest that they were thinking about the
covenantal relationship between God and man in radically different ways.19
The variant of the ḥadīth of predestination which circulated widely in Sunnī
tafsīr links the narrative to Muḥammad through ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, and it
runs as follows:
18 The Muʿtazilite principle that man is defined by his attributes and not his essence is an
important question which I cannot take up here. For a discussion of how the definition of
man is “developed functionally” and how we know the totality of the human being when
have knowledge of an attribute, see Vasalou, “Subject and Body,” 267–98.
19 That Ṭabarī cannot be taken as the normative expression of Sunnism is pointed out by
Walid Saleh in “Rereading al-Ṭabarī through al-Māturīdī: New Light on the Third Century
Hijrī,” Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 18, no. 2 (2016): 180–209.

140 Jaffer
ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb said: I heard God’s messenger say: God created
Adam, then he rubbed his back with his right hand and took offspring
from him. Then he said: I created these for the Hell fire; and the people
of the Hell fire will do their work. Then he rubbed his back and took from
him offspring. And he said: I created this group for Paradise, and they will
do their work.20
Now, although the covenant verse itself does not speak of predestination, tra-
ditionalists invoked the aforementioned ḥadīth to explain its meaning and
implications. Indeed, when the majority of both Sunnī and Shīʿī exegetes
appealed to the ḥadīth of predestination to interpret the covenant verse, they
considered the latter clarion evidence that human beings were genealogically
tied to Adam – pulled out of his loins – and that their lots were foreordained
before their earthly existence.
When Sunnī traditionalists elaborated on the covenant verse, they inter-
preted its content in a factual way. In their view, the covenant myth described
real events, and it reported facts about the origins of human beings and their
ends. That this mode of interpretation took as its starting point the famous
ḥadīth of predestination is evident most conspicuously in the wealth of tradi-
tions and their variants that Ṭabarī enumerates in his Jāmiʿ al-bayān. Ṭabarī’s
exegesis opens a window into the ways that the narratives of Adamic mythology,
which relied on the authority of prophetic traditions, were invoked to formu-
late a conception of the meaning of the beginning and end of human history.
When Ṭabarī interprets the covenant verse, he is guided by the cluster of
variants of the ḥadīth of predestination which (he thinks) imply that Adam
pre-existed creation. He proposes that human life began when God took off-
spring from Adam’s back in pre-creation. Further, he suggests that the lots of
human beings were determined at that act of divine creation. What is signifi-
cant here is that although the ḥadīth of predestination speaks of the creation
of human beings from Adam and the Qurʾān speaks of the Children of Adam,
the ḥadīth was powerful enough to guide the early traditionists’ understanding
of the covenant verse. It did so in such a way that many early Muslim authori-
ties passed over this discrepancy, considering the verse a confirmation that
20 Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya,
1997), 6:110. The ḥadīth cited by Ṭabarī is attested to in the collection of Mālik b. Anas
‌
(Muwaṭṭa ʾ, 2:898–9). See Gramlich, “Der Urvertrag,” 206 on how the ḥadīth also appears
in the collections of Abū Dāwūd, Tirmidhī, and Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal. For a comprehen-
sive discussion of the ḥadīth of predestination, see Josef van Ess, Zwischen Hadīṯ und
Theologie: Zum Entstehen prädestinatianischer Überlieferung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975).
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

Adam pre-existed the creation of human beings and a confirmation of a pre-

destinarian conception of history.21
Several further elements and themes are worth noting here. Ṭabarī takes the
covenant verse to mean that God established a contractual bond with human
beings as a totality – and not with a single individual (Adam). This in itself is
interesting, for covenant theologies within Christianity – notably the Reformed
tradition – spoke of a covenant with Adam, and this covenant of grace became
the basis of Puritanism.22 While the odd prophetic tradition does speak of a
covenant that God took with Adam himself, and while the Qurʾān does men-
tion a covenant with Adam alone at 20:115, the traditionalist mode of exegesis
emphasized the covenant as the principle of a collective identity of human
beings, and it anchored that principle in God’s foreordainment.23
The tendency to universalize the covenant – that is, to see it as a contrac-
tual bond with human beings as a totality – is given prominence in a number
of traditions ascribed to Ibn ʿAbbās (d. 68/687), the most important author-
ity within Ṭabarī’s traditionalist Sunnī exegesis.24 Among these traditions are
the following:
21 Gramlich, “Der Urvertrag,” 207–8 has already documented some of the ways that tradi-
tionalists reconciled the disparate ideas of predestination and covenant, and I do not
wish to rehearse these interpretive difficulties or enter into the ways that traditionalists
attempted to harmonize the basic principles of predestinarianism with the idea of cov-
enant. See Kister, “Ādam,” especially 155 for how qiṣaṣ literature – both Sunnī and Shīʿī
– binds the covenant notion to the idea that the lots of human beings are foreordained.
On Adam, see Cornelia Schöck, Adam im Islam: Ein Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte der Sunna
(Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1993), 164–5; Cornelia Schöck, “Adam and Eve,” in Encyclopaedia
of the Qurʾān, ed. by Jane Dammen McAuliffe (consulted online on 28 April 2021 http://
dx.doi.org/10.1163/1875-3922_q3_EQCOM_00003); Leigh Chipman, “Mythic Aspects of
the Process of Adam’s Creation in Judaism and Islam,” Studia Islamica 93 (2001): 5–25;
Marianna O. Klar, “Through the Lens of the Adam Narrative: A Re-reading of Sūrat
al-Baqara,” Journal of Qurʾānic Studies 17, no. 2 (2015): 24–46; Michael Fishbane, “Adam,”
in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. by Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 1987).
22 For further discussion, see the rich work of Perry Miller, The New England Mind in the
Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).
23 Several traditionalists (including Ibn al-Jawzī and Qurṭubī) reasoned that there was no
need for God to mention Adam’s back, since it is well known that this idea is presup-
posed by the verse; see Gramlich, “Der Urvertrag,” 211. The theme that covenant can
serve as a principle of collective identity is discussed in Jan Assman, Invention of Religion
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 186.
24 See Cornelia Schöck, Adam im Islam, 164–5.

142 Jaffer
Ibn ʿAbbās said: Your Lord rubbed Adam’s back, then every creature who
came out of him was created until the Day of Resurrection. This took
place at Naʿmān, which is behind ʿArafa.25
Ibn ʿAbbās said: When God first sent Adam down He did so at Dahnā,
which is in India. Then God rubbed his back, and then every creature
who came out of him was created until the time of the Hour. Then God
initiated a covenant with them.26
Ibn ʿAbbās said: When God created Adam, He initiated His covenant
that He is his Lord and He wrote His appointed time of death […] and
He extracted his offspring like microbeings (dharr) and He initiated their
covenant, and He wrote their appointed times of death, their boons and
their misfortunes.27
The traditions cited above locate the beginning of human life in pre-existence
by affirming that all human beings were pulled out of Adam’s back in a divine
act of creation (“when God first sent Adam down”) and then made to testify as
a collective entity to God’s sovereignty.28 Other universalizing traditions, when
they describe the state of human beings in pre-existence, typically depict man-
kind as microbeings. This position, which insists that such microbeings could
enter a contractual relationship with God before being endowed with life in
bodily form, was contested by Muʿtazilites from the time of ʿAbd al-Jabbār
onward as well as the Sunnī commentator Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī.
4 Covenant and the Remembrance of Sin
In ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s discussion, the principle that the divinely initiated cove-
nant imposes human responsibility is fastened to another principle: that the
fullness of the human intellect is a requisite for entering a covenant with God.
From the remarks below, we can determine how ʿAbd al-Jabbār reasoned about
the relationship between intellect and human responsibility, and we can dis-
cern how the covenant idea synthesizes these principles of his thought. ʿAbd
al-Jabbār writes:
25 Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān, 6:110 nr. 15351.

28 On the time and place of the covenant see Schöck, Adam im Islam, 166–9.
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

When the verse is interpreted in this way – that is, in agreement with its
apparent sense and in accordance with the demands of human intellect –
the purpose of entering the contract and undertaking the covenant is to
make the person who has entered the contract remember it, so that the
covenant became a remonstration against him when he is punished or
when he begins to sin. This only befits a person endowed with intellect
who is capable of discerning and remembering the divine address. Were
the matter as they [the ḥashwiyya]29 have claimed – namely that God ini-
tiated a contract with all the Children of Adam when they were in Adam’s
back, then it would be necessary that they remember that contract in
some ways. This is because a person endowed with intellect remembers
his past states when he has the fullness of intellect, even if a long time has
passed between such states. In spite of this, they [the ḥashwiyya] claim
that God initiated a covenant and contract with them when he had not
yet given them life, and we have clarified that that is absurd.30
ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s line of exegesis in the passage above suggests that he viewed
the covenant as an institution that stabilizes human beings within the
domain of responsibility. He argues that the covenant is designed to serve as
a reminder of the initial address when God established a contractual bond
with human beings. He argues, moreover, that given the human propensity
to sin – and to forget such sins – the covenant fulfills its role in human life
by functioning as a remonstration against a person when he begins to sin or
after he commits a sinful act for which he will be punished. Now, to elaborate
on ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s reasoning: if we understand that the covenant is a stabiliz-
ing principle that deters human beings from sin, and that such an institution
relies on our ability to remember the initial divine address, then not just the
endowment of intellect but the fullness of intellect provides the ground for
the possibility of covenant.31
29 From this context, it is plain that ʿAbd al-Jabbār simply uses the term ḥashwiyya – those
who “stuff” God with problematic attributes – pejoratively to refer to traditionalists
who adhere to the apparent sense of the verse in question. For a study of this term, see
Abraham S. Halkin, “The Hashwiyya,” Journal of American Oriental Society 54 (1934): 1–28.
30 ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Mutashābih al-Qurʾān, ed. by ʿAdnān Zarzūr (Cairo: Dār al-turāth, 1969),
303–4.
31 Kister finds a similar passage in ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s Tanzīh al-Qurʾān ʿan al-maṭāʿin (Beirut,
1966). Here ʿAbd al-Jabbār asserts that the meaning of God’s extraction of progeny is that
He perfected intellects of human beings and then took compact with them; see Kister,
“Ādam,” 157.

144 Jaffer
I argued above, on the basis of Ṭabarī’s exegesis, that the traditionalist

mode of interpretation postulated that all persons – even future generations –
originated as microbeings when they were pulled out of Adam’s back before
their creation on earth, and that that act of origination marks the beginning of
human history. In what follows, I elaborate on the strategies that ʿAbd al-Jabbār
devises to counter the traditionalist account of man’s beginnings. These are
indispensable to understanding how, in his view, the covenantal formula
provides a key to understanding man’s provenance and human history and sal-
vation. This direction of ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s interpretation of the covenant verse is
given in the following two passages, which are directed at traditionalists – here
referred to by the label Ḥashwiyya. ʿAbd al-Jabbār writes:
The response to this is that the plain sense of the wording is at odds with
the view to which the Ḥashwiyya cling, because they claim that God estab-
lished the covenant with all of the progeny of Adam and that they occupy
the place of microbeings in his back, and this contradicts the plain sense
of the Qurʾān, for God states: And when your Lord took from the Children
of Adam – from their backs – His progeny (7:172). That implies that “their”
[backs] means the backs of the Children of Adam. This term cannot be
applied to the composed parts in Adam’s back (al-ajzāʾ al-murakkaba fī
ẓahri Ādam), and it implies that what is meant here is their backs – that
is, the backs of the Children of Adam from which He extracted their prog-
eny. This doctrine is at odds with what they claim. Because if all Adam’s
progeny were in his back, then it would follow that the magnitude of his
back would reach a degree that is opposite to what we have taught. And
because God has made it clear that He created man from a sperm-drop
(nuṭfa), and what this term can be applied to is the smallest of what God
created of man.
As for the microbeings [in Adam’s back], if they are not living, then
establishing a covenant with them is impossible, and the same goes
for testifying, so how is it possible for [the Hashwiyya] to cling to what
he mentioned?32
ʿAbd al-Jabbār argues in these passages that the traditionalist reading goes
against the apparent sense of the Qurʾānic wording. His aim to undermine
traditionalist mythology surrounding Adam and to expunge the covenant
notion of its anthropomorphic implications invokes the authority of grammar.
His interest here is in the traditionalist idea that human beings pre-existed
32 ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Mutashābih al-Qurʾān, 303.
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

their bodies as living entities – as microbeings in Adam’s back. Focusing his

attention on the Qurʾānic wording, “from the Children of Adam – from their
backs – His progeny,” he draws attention to the Qurʾānic wording, “from the
Children of Adam – from their backs – His progeny,” and on the discrepancy
between such wording and the phrase Adam’s back, which traditionalists had
taken from the widely circulated ḥadīth of predestination. ʿAbd al-Jabbār is
quick to point out that the Qurʾān makes no mention of Adam’s back here.
He reads the phrases, “from the Children of Adam,” and “from their backs,” in
apposition so that the referent “their” refers to the backs of the Children of
Adam and not to Adam’s back.
Later Sunnī commentators, too, argue that the Qurʾān’s covenantal formula
runs contrary to the grammar of the Qurʾānic phrasing at 7:172. Fakhr al-Dīn
al-Rāzī, who amplifies ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s argument, draws attention to this dis-
crepancy. Although he sides with the Muʿtazilites on this issue against Sunnī
traditionalists, he argues that the verse speaks neither for nor against the idea
that human beings emerged from Adam’s loins.33 Traditionalist commentators
like Ṭabarī were evidently not bothered by the incongruity described above.
And it was likely the overpowering social force of prophetic tradition that led
Ṭabarī to pass over the discrepancies between Qurʾānic wording and the ḥadīth
of pre-destination.
A second strategy ʿAbd al-Jabbār devises to combat the traditionalist mode
of interpretation is evinced in the second paragraph translated above. Here
he proceeds on a methodological postulate already established in the intro-
duction to Mutashābih al-Qurʾān and which he applies throughout the work:
If the Qurʾān is to retain its validity, it needs to be interpreted in accordance
with the demands of intellect and the implications of human reasoning.
Furthermore, if one fails to abide by the rules of grammar, then one will fail to
discern the congruities between the covenant verse – especially its anthropo-
morphic elements – and the demands and implications of human reasoning.34
As I argued above, when ʿAbd al-Jabbār defines man he proceeds by identi-
fying the attributes necessary for a person to receive taklīf. The attribute “life,”
he reasons, is a bodily pre-condition which a person requires to enter a con-
tractual bond with God. In the second passage translated above, ʿAbd al-Jabbār
argues that if one accepts that the definitional attribute “living” can be predi-
cated of man only in his bodily form – after he originates in the womb – then
33 Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Mafātīḥ al-ghayb, ed. by Muḥammad Muḥyī al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd
(Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-bahiyya al-miṣriyya, 1933), 15:51.
34 ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Mutashābih al-Qurʾān, 303. For further background on ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s
methodology applied in this work, see his introduction (1–39) to Mutashābih al-Qurʾān.

146 Jaffer
the idea that microbeings not yet endowed with life could receive a covenant
in pre-existence is impossible. This is because, in his view, such a contrac-
tual relationship can take place only when human beings become agents,
and this requires the presence of the attribute life – not to mention the other
definitional attributes which are essential to human agency or to the divine
imposition of human responsibility.35
The force of this argument relies on Muʿtazilite anthropological principles
concerning smallest parts. ʿAbd al-Jabbār argues that the Qurʾānic locution,
“Children of Adam” cannot refer to parts or beings assembled in Adam’s loins.
For if we understand Adam’s progeny to include all future generations of human
beings (pulled out as a collective from Adam’s loins in pre-existence), then his
back would not have the magnitude to encompass such beings. Adam’s back,
ʿAbd al-Jabbār emphasizes, is finite, meaning that it is composed of a part or
parts that cannot be further subdivided. Therefore, it lacks the capacity to hold
the totality of all the generations of human beings in the form of microbeings –
a totality that is infinite.36
ʿAbd al-Jabbār wants to underscore the rational impossibilities that resulted
when traditionalists failed to see the congruity between the implications of
intellect or human reasoning on one hand and the ideas conveyed by the cov-
enant verse on the other. After ʿAbd al-Jabbār, this argument became standard
within the Muʿtazilite tradition, and Rāzī, recognized it as one of ten principal
arguments advanced by Muʿtazilites. He writes:
The sum total of created beings whom God created from Adam’s offspring
are a great number. Indeed, the total among those living entities amount
to a great degree in magnitude and extent, but it is impossible for Adam’s
loins due to their smallness to encompass that sum total.37
ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s argument, which is rehearsed here by Rāzī, is designed to rule

out the possibility that the human collective existed in Adam’s loins. ʿAbd
al-Jabbār asks: even if the sperm-drops of human beings from all generations
were gathered in Adam’s loins, how could such a finite entity encompass the
sperm-drops of all human beings from the beginning of time until the end of
time? He continues: Adam’s loins are of limited extent, and as such cannot

36 ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Mutashābih al-Qurʾān, 303. On the role of atomism in Muʿtazilite cosmol-
ogy, see Alnoor Dhanani, The Physical Theory of Kalām: Atoms, Space, and Void in Basrian
Muʿtazilī Cosmology (Leiden: Brill, 1994); Richard M. Frank, Beings and Their Attributes
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978).
37 Rāzī, Mafātīḥ al-ghayb, 15:48 (al-ḥujja al-khāmisa/fifth argument).
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

possibly accommodate the totality of all human generations at the beginning.

For this reason, ʿAbd al-Jabbār rhetorically asks how such entities can receive a
covenant and testify to God’s lordliness and unity when they exist only in the
form of non-living microbeings?
Yet a third strategy to combat the universalizing mode of exegesis that pre-
vailed among traditionalists can be gleaned from ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s exegesis.
ʿAbd al-Jabbār presses into service Muʿtazilite anthropological principles and
concepts – notably the definitional attributes of man which are pre-conditions
for a contractual relationship between God and man – and he sets them within
a Qurʾānic physiological framework. His aim here is to argue that the Qurʾān
supports the Muʿtazilite conception of a person – since it refers to the smallest
part of man necessary for a person to be qualified as “living.” By giving a more
complete explanation of the anthropological dimension of covenant, ʿAbd
al-Jabbār also provides a theoretical basis for the Muʿtazilite juridical-ethical
ideal of taklīf.
Of central importance to ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s argument is the key term, sperm-
drop (nuṭfa), which the Qurʾān uses on a number of occasions to describe
man’s origins and physiological development.38 ʿAbd al-Jabbār argues that
when the Qurʾān describes man’s physiological development from sperm-drop
to blood-clot to embryo to an upright being, it names the sperm-drop as the
smallest part of man: “And because God has made it clear that He created man
from a sperm-drop (nuṭfa), and what this term can be applied to is the smallest
of what God created of man.”39 ʿAbd al-Jabbār infers from this verse that the
sperm-drop – the smallest part of man named by the Qurʾān – qualifies man
with his defining attribute “living.” This principle, ʿAbd al-Jabbār proposes,
serves as a pre-condition for the realization of the covenant, for the divine
initiative that imposes human responsibility can take place only when that
principle which renders man a living and unified entity is present.40
An additional passage from Mutashābih al-Qurʾān casts light on the ways
that ʿAbd al-Jabbār conceptualized the covenant verse precisely. The follow-
ing terse but important remarks provide major clues to understanding how
ʿAbd al-Jabbār draws on his anthropological principles to interpret the cov-
enant verse and how he situates his interpretation of the covenant verse in
relation to the Qurʾānic conception of history as well. Like the comments I
analyzed above, ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s remarks disclose yet another aspect of the
38 Qurʾān: 16:4, 18:37; 22:5; 23:13; 35:11; 36:88; 40:6753:36; 75:37; 66:2; 75:37: 66:2; 86:19; 76:2.
40 For a discussion of how life unifies the individual substrates in which it inheres, see
Vasalou, “Subject and Body,” 288.

148 Jaffer
countervailing narrative he developed to combat the traditionalist mode of

understanding the beginnings of human history, and they point to the ways
that he formulated a conception of history and theory of salvation. He writes:
The intended meaning of this verse is that God the exalted established a
covenant in fact with a group of Adam’s offspring who are extracted from
the backs of the Children of Adam and created from their loins, for God
sent them messengers and made them aware of that before them with
proofs (bi-l-ḥujaj). Then He made it clear that they refused to abide by it,
and that they on the Day of Resurrection will plead heedlessness.41
It is apparent from this excerpt that there was a lot at stake in how one inter-
preted the Qurʾānic locution, “And when your Lord took from the Children
of Adam – from their backs, their progeny.” The clue to understanding ʿAbd
al-Jabbār’s exegesis of this verse lies in the referent of their “backs.” In the
passages cited above, he underscores that the pronominal suffix of the third
person plural in the clause – their progeny – refers to the Children of Adam.
ʿAbd al-Jabbār proposes that to say that the Children of Adam – the Qurʾānic
term for all human beings – are descended from their own seed is to say that
human beings are created from the loins of their fathers and descended from
their own offspring. He intends to underscore with this line of exegesis that
the covenant verse implies that human beings propagate themselves from
one generation to the next, each person having his origin in the loins of his or
her father.42
In the passage above, ʿAbd al-Jabbār also develops his exegesis by particular-
izing the covenant verse, stating that “God the exalted established a covenant in
fact with a group of Adam’s offspring.” To understand the significance and role
of this claim – how it relates to ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s interpretation of the Qurʾān’s
conception of history and salvation – is the aim of the following discussion.
5 ʿAbd al-Jabbār on Past Covenants, Broken Promises,

and the Possibility of Salvation
Since the covenant verse referred not only to man’s provenance but also to the
Day of Resurrection, it became a site where the meaning of man’s salvation

42 For a similar argument see ʿAlī ibn ʿĪsā al-Rummānī, Al-Jāmiʿ li-ʿilm al-Qurʾān (Beirut: Dār
al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 2009), 109.
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

was discussed and contested. The certainties that human history would end
and that the promised salvation comes with entering a covenant with God
are suggested by the Qurʾānic locution: “lest you should say on the Day of
Resurrection – ‘As for us, we were heedless of this,’ or lest you say, ‘Our fathers
were idolators aforetime, and we were seed after them. What wilt Thou then
destroy us for the deeds of vain-doers?’”
To understand how ʿAbd al-Jabbār develops an initial theory of salvation in
his covenant discourse, it is necessary to grasp how he relates the parts of the
covenant verse to one another, since this syntagmatic approach to the cove-
nant verse is absent in the traditionalist mode of exegesis. Equally importantly,
it is crucial to grasp how the Qurʾānic motif of past covenants and broken
promises, which is central to Qurʾānic view of human history but played no
role in the ways that traditionalists conceptualized the covenant idea, shapes
the way that ʿAbd al-Jabbār interprets the covenantal formula outlined by the
Qurʾān at 7:172.
Let us first consider again the passage discussed in the previous section.
ʿAbd al-Jabbār interprets the covenant verse within the Qurʾān’s narrative of
history, which speaks of the covenants that God made with past prophets and
with the communities that failed to keep their promises. The important inter-
pretive claim he makes here is that the covenantal formula refers to a contract
which God established with “a group of Adam’s offspring who are extracted
from the backs of the Children of Adam and are created from their loins.”
When ʿAbd al-Jabbār made this claim, he particularized the covenant. By doing
so, he placed himself in direct opposition to traditionalist universalism, which
insisted that the covenant idea served as a principle of collective identity of
human beings, since it bound them all together at a moment in pre-creation.
We can understand the motivation for ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s line of reasoning if
we consider how his exegesis is shaped by the Qurʾānic motif of past cove-
nants and broken promises. ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s conceptualization of the covenant
encompasses communities in the past that the Qurʾān recognizes as belonging
to the Children of Adam. These ideas are grounded in the Qurʾān’s conception
of human history. Adam’s progeny were promised messengers (Q. 7:35), and
past communities entered into covenantal relationships with God by means of
prophets. Covenant in the strict sense is with the prophets whom God sends to
those communities: “And when We took compact from the Prophets, and from
thee, and from Noah, and Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, Mary’s son; We took
from them a solemn compact, that He might question the truthful concerning
their truthfulness; and He has prepared for the unbelievers a painful chastise-
ment” (Q. 33:7).

150 Jaffer
ʿAbd al-Jabbār also relates that people of scripture or “those who had been
given the Book” (Q. 3:187) broke their covenants in the past (Q. 4:154). When he
particularizes the covenant, he intends that a group among the offspring of the
Children of Adam entered a contractual relationship with God after being sent
prophets, but they broke their covenantal bond by refusing to cling to it. It is
that group among the Children of Adam whom ʿAbd al-Jabbār means to single
out as unbelievers on the grounds that they broke their promise to fulfill the
covenantal obligation. He writes:
God the exalted mentioned at the end of the verse that the intended
meaning of the verse is the unbelievers, for it is not fitting that believers
would say, “As for us, we were heedless of this,” because anyone who is
neglectful that God is his lord and master is not a believer, and all of this
renders impossible the folly that they [sc. the Ḥashwiyya] stated.43
If we consider what ʿAbd al-Jabbār has to say in the above passage, we can see
how he elicits meaning from the covenant verse by relating its parts to one
another. He places the Qurʾānic locution, “As for us, we were heedless of this,”
in the mouth of unbelievers from earlier communities that went astray by fail-
ing to abide by covenants which God had established with the prophets of
their communities. He further proposes that this final plea (“As for us, we were
heedless of this”) will be articulated at the end times by communities that
broke the promises of their covenants. This suggests the following line of exe-
gesis and explanation for the plea: it is unbelievers among Children of Adam
who entreat God for salvation after breaking a promise to adhere to covenant.
I shall have occasion to return to the significance of this plea when I dis-
cuss the interpretation of Zamakhsharī, whose focus on intellect leads him to
develop the theme of salvation in a different direction. I shall also have occa-
sion to show that Zamakhsharī binds the fate of communities ultimately to
natural reason – specifically to the human intellect’s naturally endowed capac-
ity to grasp empirical evidence for God’s unity and sovereignty.
6 Jishumī and the Covenant as Natural Obligation in the Womb
Jishumī studied with al-Najjār, who in turn had been ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s student.
It may be tempting to assume that Jishumī’s Qurʾān commentary, the Tahdhīb,
greatly influenced Zamakhsharī’s monumental Kashshāf, but this case study
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

indicates that these two illustrious Muʿtazilite commentators shared only the
most basic approach to the covenant notion and that the two applied herme-
neutical tools in divergent ways to the covenant verse.44
Recent scholarship by Mourad has given the field an entry into Jishumī’s
methodology of tafsīr. And now a published edition of Jishumī’s Tahdhīb is
available and will make it possible to say more about how Muʿtazilite com-
mentaries relate to one another and in what sense the commentaries that they
wrote belong to a school tradition.45
Like his predecessor ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Jishumī aimed to counter the tradi-
tionalist Adamic mythology that located the provenance of human beings
altogether in Adam’s back in pre-existence. He also stressed the juridical-
ethical dimension of the covenant by arguing that the divine initiative imposes
human responsibility, and he lodged this idea in Muʿtazilite anthropological
principles.46
Whether Jishumī relied on ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s Mutashābih al-Qurʾān when
he composed his commentary on this verse remains an open question. It is
certainly possible that Jishumī developed his line of exegesis without having
recourse to his predecessor’s work. His individualist approach, however, sug-
gests that he did not invoke the exegetical principles of his school tradition
or appeal to earlier patterns of exegesis, but that he developed his own line of
44 The idea that Zamakhsharī relied on Jishumī’s Qurʾān commentary has recently been
questioned. See ʿAdnān Zarzūr, al-Ḥakīm al-Jishumī wa-manhajuh fī tafsīr al-Qurʾān
(Beirut: Muʾassasat al-risāla, 1972), 13.
45 Jishumī, al-Tahdhīb fī l-tafsīr, ed. by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Sulaymān al-Sālimī (Cairo: Dār
al-kitāb al-miṣrī; Beirut: Dār al-kitāb al-lubnānī, 2018–9). The terminology of “school tra-
ditions” to evaluate trends or directions of thought within tafsīr has been critiqued by a
number of scholars, including Saleh, Elias, and Kulinich. In this article, I use the expres-
sion “school traditions” to mean that scholars working within the Muʿtazilite tradition are
linked to one another by a social institution, namely that of teacher-student discipleship.
I do not mean to suggest that they had a monopoly on the interpretive principles, patterns
of exegesis or hermeneutical devices that I lay bare in this article. Indeed, what I stress
in this article is that the interpretive principles and hermeneutical devices associated
with the Muʿtazilite school are expressed differently and put to different uses by ʿAbd
al-Jabbār, Jishumī and Zamakhsharī. For a discussion of the expression “school traditions”
as applied to the Muʿtazilite tradition and whether the term adequately reflects the com-
plex reality of Muʿtazilite exegesis, see Alena Kulinich, “Rethinking Muʿtazilite tafsīr from
essence to history,” Religion and Culture, Seoul National University 29 (2015): 234–41.
46 On Jishumī’s method of Qurʾānic interpretation, see Suleiman A. Mourad, “The Revealed
Text and the Intended Subtext: Notes on the Hermeneutics of the Qurʾān in Muʿtazila
Discourse As Reflected in the Tahd̠ īb of al-Ḥākim al-Ǧišumī (d. 494/1101),” in Islamic
Philosophy, Science, Culture, and Religion: Studies in Honor of Dimitri Gutas, ed. by
Felicitas Opwis and David Reisman (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 367–95; and Zarzūr, al-Jishumī
wa-manhajuh.

152 Jaffer
exegesis by relating the covenant idea in different ways to the broader thought
world of Muʿtazilism.
That Jishumī, like ʿAbd al-Jabbār before him, intended to combat the
traditionalist understanding of the covenant is evident from his introduc-
tory remarks:
Interpreters differed about the meaning of this verse, the meaning of

extraction and bearing witness. Some of them transmitted an unsound
ḥadīth from God’s messenger – prayers and peace be upon him – which
does not conform to the apparent sense of scripture, such that the peo-
ple of metempsychosis and a group among the atheists (mulḥida) cling
to it.47
Given that the ḥadīth of predestination had circulated widely and had become
the dominant direction of interpretation for traditionalists, it is quite certain
that Jishumī has the well-known prophetic tradition in mind when he refers to
an unsound ḥadīth that runs contrary to apparent sense of the Qurʾān.48 At the
outset of his exegesis of Q. 7:172, Jishumī labels the traditionalist interpretation
heretical on the grounds that it implies a belief in metempsychosis. His line of
reasoning here is amplified and clarified by Rāzī: the claim that human souls
existed as living entities in Adam’s back is tantamount to metempsychosis,
since it implies that such souls pre-existed their bodies.49
ʿAbd al-Jabbār had already underscored that bodily conditions must be real-
ized in order for a person to enter a contractual relationship with God. As I
illustrated above, he insisted that the divine act which makes human beings
responsible agents presupposes the existence of attributes that define man:
sensing, perceiving, living, and knowing. Jishumī, too, underscores the juridical-
ethical dimension of the covenant, confirming that the purpose of the divine
act is to endow human beings with the responsibility to obey divine com-
mands and prohibitions. His approach, however, grounds this juridical-ethical
ideal – the conviction that man is mukallaf – within the Qurʾān’s teaching on
man’s origin and physiological development in the womb. He writes:
47 Jishumī, al-Tahdhīb fī l-tafsīr, 4:2773.

48 On the problem of transmission, see van Ess, Zwischen Hadīṯ und Theologie, 32–39. On
Muʿtazilite attitudes towards prophetic authority, see Josef van Ess, “L’autorité de la tra-
dition prophétique dans la théologie muʿtazilite,” in La notion d’autorité au Moyen Age:
Islam, Byzance, Occident, ed. by George Makdisi et al. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1982), 211–26. See also Racha El-Omari, “Accommodation and Resistance: Classical
Muʿtazilites on Ḥadīth,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 71, no. 2 (2012): 231–56.
49 Rāzī, Mafātīḥ al-ghayb, 15:47–48 (al-ḥujja al-rābiʿa/fourth argument).
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

A group of commentators claimed that God the exalted extracted off-

spring, and they are the children from the loins of their fathers. And the
meaning of that extraction is that they were a sperm drop; then extracted
to the womb of their mothers, then He made them a blood-clot, then an
embryo such that He created them living upright/straightened human
beings obligated to the law (mukallafan). For He made His creation
the effects of that extraction from their loins, because their origina-
tion emerges from it, then He made them testify to the evidences of His
unity, the wonders of His creation, and the marvels of His creation from
among the members of the body that he fashioned and sense perception,
external and internal limbs, and nerves and veins and other such things,
as anyone who reflects upon the body will learn.50
By Jishumī’s time, it was customary for Muʿtazilites to read the Qurʾānic phrase,
“And when your Lord took from the Children of Adam – from their backs – His
progeny,” to refer to the natural propagation of children from the loins of their
fathers. Jishumī evidently did not see the need to argue for this conventional
Muʿtazilite interpretation, and he instead focused his attention on establish-
ing a theoretical basis for Muʿtazilites’ juridical-ethical ideals in Qurʾānic
physiological descriptions. For Jishumī, the bodily pre-conditions that ʿAbd
al-Jabbār had considered indispensable to the divine imposition of taklīf which
makes human beings responsible agents – and to the human reception of the
covenant – are already here modeled in the physiological process described by
the Qurʾān.
In the excerpt cited above, Jishumī underscores that the binding contract
between God and human beings which makes man mukallaf is realized when
man reaches his final stage of development in the womb. Appealing to Qurʾānic
anthropology, especially verses that describe man’s physiological progression
from sperm-drop to blood-clot to embryo, he infers that when man is endowed
with the definitional attribute “living” (which makes man capable of sense per-
ception) so that man becomes a “perfect creation,” the divine imposition of
taklīf is realized and human beings become agents with responsibility for the
divine commands and prohibitions.
The excerpt above also casts light on the ways that Jishumī relates the act
of attesting to the covenant to the broader thought world of Muʿtazilism.
He emphasizes that the evidences of God’s unity are present in the wonders
and marvels of the created world, and he underscores that the ways that the
human organism functions, including a physiological process through which
50 Jishumī, Tahdhīb, 4: 2773–4.

154 Jaffer
God extracts offspring and propagates the human race (which is suggested by
the covenant verse) are among the wonders and marvels of God’s creation.
Jishumī’s understanding of what it means for human beings to testify to
God’s unity and sovereignty is intelligible only in light of his conviction that
the world is endued with visible evidences of God’s unity and that the Qurʾān
exhorts its audience to reflect upon such evidences, including man’s physiol-
ogy. When he further elaborates on the covenant verse, Jishumī underlines
that human beings attest to God’s unity and sovereignty and enter a contrac-
tual relationship with God by reflecting on wonders and marvels of the created
world. Jishumī writes:
Since God arranged man in such a way, whenever one apprehends

Him, His attributes and His unity, then the bearing witness of such evi-
dences becomes as though He made them attest to His speech/words.
And He said, “Am I not your Lord?” and they, with respect to the effects
of his creation that God made manifest, it became as though they said
“indeed,” even though there was no any speech or statement with the
tongue there.51
This passage casts further light on the ways in which Jishumī calls on standard
Muʿtazilite rhetorical devices to expunge the covenant verse of its anthropo-
morphic elements. These devices will later be retooled by Zamakhsharī to
resolve interpretive difficulties inherent in the covenant verse. Jishumī inter-
prets both the divine address (“Am I not your Lord?”) and the human reply to
it (“indeed”) using the simile (tamthīl), interpreting these expressions figura-
tively. To paraphrase Jishumī, when human beings apprehend the evidences
of God’s unity and attributes, which God arranged in their created being, and
when they apprehend the wonders and marvels of His creation, it is as though
He made them attest to Him. Furthermore, when human beings witness the
effects of God’s creation that He made manifest, it is as though human beings
replied with an affirmation by saying “indeed.” Finally, to impress on his reader
that he wishes to have nothing to do with any interpretation that smacks of
anthropomorphism, Jishumī states that there is no actual speech here – i.e.,
that the divine initiative entails no articulation of letters or sounds.
51 Jishumī, Tahdhīb, 4:2774. See also Rāzī’s paraphrase of this passage in Rāzī, Mafātīḥ
al-ghayb, 15:50 which I have used to make sense of Jishumī’s comments.
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

7 The Figurative, the Real, and the Imaginary in Zamakhsharī’s

Covenant Theology
Zamakhsharī cannot be counted as a direct disciple of Jishumī in tafsīr, but

these two illustrious commentators are nonetheless linked to one another by
the social institution of teacher-student discipleship. Jishumī’s student, Aḥmad
b. Muḥammad b. Isḥāq al-Khwārazmī, was Zamakhsharī’s teacher in theology.
Zamakhsharī studied with al-Khwārazmī in Jishumī’s hometown after he died.
He also transmitted a work of Jishumī’s through al-Khwārazmī. There is no
evidence, however, that Zamakhsharī relied on Jishumī’s commentary when
he composed his own commentary, the Kashshāf. The relationship between
these two commentaries needs further investigation, but for the moment, it is
doubtful that Zamakhsharī had Jishumī’s Tahdhīb in front of him when he com-
posed the Kashshāf. It is also unlikely that he had ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s Mutashābih
al-Qurʾān, with which he became familiar through the literary transmission of
Jishumī’s teachings, in front of him when he composed the Kashshāf.52
To be sure, Zamakhsharī appeals to the theological ideals and exegeti-
cal principles of the Muʿtazilite school tradition, and there are fairly obvious
parallels between his line of exegesis and the arguments developed by ʿAbd
al-Jabbār and Jishumī. For instance, Zamakhsharī takes the verse, “And when
your Lord took from the Children of Adam – from their backs – His progeny,”
as a description of the natural propagation of human beings one from another.
Unlike his Muʿtazilite predecessors, he does not cite other Qurʾānic verses to
support his position, nor does he mention the conventional anthropological
and physiological Muʿtazilite principles that both ʿAbd al-Jabbār and Jishumī
considered keys to understanding the meaning and implications of the cove-
nant. Such an absence suggests that Zamakhsharī did not rely closely on either
52 Zamakhsharī also studied with Maḥmūd b. al-Malāḥimī, a prominent theologian of

Khwārazm; for more information, see Wilferd Madelung, “The Theology of al-Zamakhsharī,”
in Studies in Medieval Muslim Thought and History, ed. by Sabine Schmidtke (Farnham:
Ashgate Variorum, 2013), 485–96. See the discussions of Zamakhsharī’s life and educa-
tion in Wilferd Madelung, “al-Zamakhshari,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam: Supplement:
Fascicules 1–2, ed. by Clifford E. Bosworth et. al. (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 840–1; Fudge, Qurʾānic
Hermeneutics, 121; Andrew Lane, A Traditional Muʿtazilite Qurʾān Commentary: The
Kashshāf of Jār Allāh al-Zamakhsharī (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 35; Kifayat Ullah, Al-Kashshaf:
Al-Zamakhshari’s Muʿtazilite Exegesis of the Qurʾan (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 17; Fazlur
Rahman, Zamak̲h̲sharī kī tafsīr-i al-Kashshāf: ek taḥlīlī jāʾizah (Aligaṛh: Dīniyyāt Faikalṭī,
ʿAlīgaṛh Muslim Yūnīvarsiṭī, 1982); Zarzūr, al-Jishumi wa-manhajuh, 13. On Zamakhsharī’s
methodology in tafsīr, see Ullah, Al-Kashshaf, 124–59. For an English translation of one of
his creeds, see A Muʿtazilite Creed of az-Zamaḫsharî (d. 538/1144) al-Minhâǧ fî uṣûl ad-dîn
[Arabic-English], ed. and transl. by Sabine Schmidtke (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1997).

156 Jaffer
of his predecessors when he developed his exegesis of the Qurʾān’s covenantal

formula and that he thought quite independently of his school tradition.
That Zamakhsharī interpreted the aforementioned verse along lines already
traced by his Muʿtazilite predecessors is apparent in the following passage.
He writes:
“From their backs” is in apposition to “the Children of Adam” in the way

of the part for the whole, and the meaning of God’s taking their progeny
from their backs refers to their extraction from their loins as offspring.53
Zamakhsharī understands the Qurʾānic phrase, “And when your Lord took
from the Children of Adam – from their backs – His progeny,” to refer to the
natural process by which human beings produce their offspring. He appeals to
the grammatical analysis that had already served as the basis for Muʿtazilite
interpretation, reading “from their backs” in apposition to “the Children of
Adam.” He further specifies “backs” of the “Children of Adam” as a relation
of the part for the whole or an extraction in which a part, namely “backs,”
stands in for the whole, that is, humans. Zamakhsharī’s grammatical analy-
sis guides him to an interpretation that takes the verse to refer to the natural
propagation of human beings one from another and from one generation to
the next. When God extracts the progeny of the Children of Adam from their
backs, He extracts their offspring from themselves.54
But the parallels between Zamakhsharī and his predecessors in the
Muʿtazilite school tradition stop there. Zamakhsharī applies altogether dif-
ferent hermeneutical tools in his exegesis, and he works with unconventional
Muʿtazilite principles. Principally interested in using the hermeneutic tool of
takhyīl (imaginary or make-believe interpretation, to use Heinrichs’s terminol-
ogy) to explain the Qurʾānic covenantal formula’s visual imagery, Zamakhsharī
took the final steps to demythologize the anthropomorphic elements of the
covenant verse. By doing so, he fundamentally altered the elemental principle
of covenantal relationship between God and human beings was conceptual-
ized for the Muʿtazilites.
Heinrichs has already given us an understanding of how Zamakhsharī
applied the hermeneutical device of takhyīl to Qurʾānic verses in a way that
was unprecedented in Islamic exegesis. He suggested that Zamakhsharī
offered “a program for the use of the notion of takhyīl as a hermeneutical
53 Zamakhsharī, Kashshāf, 2:129.

54 Zamakhsharī, Kashshāf, 2:129. See also Bayḍāwī, Anwār al-tanzīl wa-asrār al-ta‌ʾwīl (Beirut:
Dār al-jīl, 1911), 178.
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

tool.”55 Heinrichs also observed that Zamakhsharī introduced this hermeneu-

tical device into the discipline of Qurʾānic commentary to expunge the stark
anthropomorphism from interpretation of the Qurʾān and to dissuade his
reader from assuming metaphors in the Qurʾān.56
To understand how Zamakhsharī presses takhyīl into service in his exegesis
of the covenant verse, we need first to discuss the factors that motivate him
to apply this device; and we need to grasp how takhyīl as an instrument of
interpretation relates to elemental principles of exegesis (including metaphor-
ical exegesis) and to the concepts and categories Zamakhsharī works with in
the Kashshāf.
Of central importance to Zamakhsharī’s basic hermeneutical program is the
distinction between figurative interpretation (majāz) and imaginary interpre-
tation (takhyīl) as well as the distinction between different kinds of the latter
type of interpretation. Zamakhsharī stresses the importance of takhyīl as a
hermeneutical tool in his commentary on Q. 39:67, a starkly anthropomorphic
verse which he considers an opportunity to distinguish between figurative
interpretation and imaginary interpretation: “The earth altogether shall be
His handful on the Day of Resurrection, and the heavens shall be rolled up
in His right hand.” When Zamakhsharī treats this anthropomorphic verse and
discusses its depictions and the abstract notions that stand behind them, he
stresses that the verse needs to be understood without taking its anthropo-
morphic images into the realm of either the literal or the figurative: “This is a
depiction (taṣwīr) of His majesty and putting before our eyes the essences of
His majestic nature and nothing else, without taking the ‘handful’ or the ‘right
hand’ into the realm of the literal or that of the figurative.”57
55 Wolfhart Heinrichs, “Takhyīl: Make-Believe and Image Creation in Arabic Literary Theory,”
in Takhyīl: The Imaginary in Classical Arabic Poetics, ed. by Geert Jan van Gelder and Marlé
Hammond (Cambridge: Oxbow, 2008), 13–14.
56 Heinrichs, “Takhyīl,” 13. More recently, Daud examined how Zamakhsharī employs the
technical terms taṣwīr, tamthīl, and takhyīl, and how he departs from the ways that
earlier Muʿtazilites, especially Rummānī, used these terms; and how these terms were
placed in service of iʿjāz al-Qurʾān. See Nadwa Daud, “Muṣṭalaḥāt al-taṣwīr wa-l-tamthīl
wa-l-takhyīl ʿinda l-Zamakhsharī fī l-Kashshāf,” Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 10, no. 2
(2008): 142–77. For further discussions on takhyīl, see Lara Harb, Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic
Experience in Classical Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020),
75–132; Alexander Key, Language between God and the Poets: Maʿnā in the Eleventh Century
(Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 226–8.
57 Translation from Heinrichs, “Takhyīl and its Traditions,” in Gott ist schön und Er liebt die
Schönheit, ed. by Alma Giese and J. Christoph Bürgel (Bern: Peter Lang, 1994), 227–47. See
also the paraphrase in Rāzī, Mafātīḥ al-ghayb, 27:14–16.

158 Jaffer
Zamakhsharī thus warns his reader against assuming a figurative or met-

aphorical sense, for here there is no single-term topical equivalent for the
figurative expression. Contrast this with the following example: to describe a
person who never sticks to one opinion, one says that he puts one foot for-
ward and the other back. In this case, one establishes an analogy between the
person’s “swaying and vacillating between two opinions and failing to proceed
according to one of them with another person’s hesitating in his walking and
not getting his feet together to move forward.”58 In this instance, Zamakhsharī
insists that for an analogy to take place, the subject and the object of the
analogy must belong to the categories “correct” and “well-known.” Because
such a tamthīl is carried out with verifiable (real) things, it is classified as a
tamthīl taḥqīqī.
Now, Zamakhsharī also teaches that a tamthīl may be carried out with hypo-
thetically imagined things that can also be the objects of an analogy. In his
commentary on the Qurʾān’s “trust” verse (Q. 33:72) Zamakhsharī establishes
an analogy to illustrate how the hermeneutical device of tamthīl takhyīlī can be
applied. According to this verse, “God offered the trust to the heavens and the
earth and the mountains, but they refused to carry it and were afraid of it; and
man carried it.” Zamakhsharī points out that in this instance, “offering the trust
to an inanimate being and its refusal and fear are absurd in themselves and
not straightforward.”59 Given that there is an absence of topical equivalents
for figurative expressions, and because hypothetically posited things can be
imagined just as verified things can, it is appropriate to apply the hermeneuti-
cal tool of tamthīl takhyīlī.
In this instance, Zamakhsharī proposes that man’s state of being burdened
by obedience to the law (subject) is analogically compared to the hypotheti-
cal state of such a burdening (object): if the trust were offered to the heavens,
the earth and the mountains, they would refuse to carry it and be afraid of
it.60 As Heinrichs notes, Zamakhsharī sees the trust episode as hypothetical
(if it were …). Zamakhsharī also recognizes that this hypothetical thing can be
used in the analogy because it can be imagined. Later, Jurjānī, in his gloss on
the Kashshāf, classifies this method of interpretation as non-figurative, since
it involves the hypothetical positing of real meaning that is neither figurative
nor false.61
58 Zamakhsharī, Kashshāf, 3:277; translation from Heinrichs, “Takhyīl and its Traditions,” 233.
59 Idem. See also a brief exposition on Zamakhsharī’s hermeneutics in Ignác Goldziher,
Richtungen der Islamischen Koranauslegung (Leiden: Brill, 1920), 131ff.
60 Zamakhsharī, Kashshāf, 3:277; translation from Heinrichs, “Takhyīl and its Traditions,”
233–4.
61 Heinrichs, “Takhyīl and its Traditions,” 241.
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

We can clarify how Zamakhsharī interprets the covenant verse by consid-

ering his remarks in the following excerpt against the backdrop of the above
principles that dictate how to interpret the Qurʾān’s visual images using the
hermeneutical device of tamthīl takhyīlī. He writes:
God’s words, “Am I not your Lord? They said, indeed we testify” falls in
the class of simile (tamthīl) and imaginary representation (takhyīl). The
meaning of this is that God showed them evidences (al-adilla) for His
sovereignty and unity, and their intellects and faculties of discernment
attested to those evidences which He erected. He created those intel-
lects and faculties of discernment as capable of distinguishing between
error and guidance. Thus, it was as though God made them testify and
made them acknowledge Him. When He said to them, “Am I not your
Lord?” it was as though they said “Indeed, you are our Lord, we testify
to your unicity.”62 The field of simile is employed extensively in God’s
speech, and in the words of His messenger and in the language of the
Arabs. The words of God the exalted are similar to this: “If We wish it then
we say to it, Be and it is” and “He lifted Himself to heaven when it was
smoke, and said to it and the earth, ‘Come willingly, or unwillingly!’” They
said, “We come willingly.”
In this passage, Zamakhsharī refers to two Qurʾānic verses which he classifies

as instances of tamthīl takhyīlī. When he glosses these verses, he explains that
their anthropomorphic elements need to be interpreted using the hermeneu-
tical device of takhyīl. Q. 41:11 refers to an occasion when heaven and earth
together reply “We come willingly” to God’s command that they come willingly
or unwillingly.
To understand the mode of exegetical reasoning which Zamakhsharī uses
in the covenant verse, we need to turn to his commentary on the above verses,
for these contexts elucidate a rule for how to apply tamthīl takhyīlī. When
Zamakhsharī glosses Q. 41:11, he states that obedience can be used correctly
with reference to cosmic bodies. Further, in his commentary on the Qurʾān’s
“trust” verse mentioned above, Zamakhsharī argues that the obedience of the
cosmic bodies (inanimate heavens, earth and mountains) to God are visu-
alizations. Because these are hypothetically supposed by the Qurʾān (“if the
trust were offered to the heavens …”), they belong in the category of the imagi-
nary. The interpretive principle Zamakhsharī designs and underscores here is
that when one interprets the visualizations as imaginary (but not as false) by

160 Jaffer
applying the hermeneutic device of tamthīl takhyīlī, one escapes positing a lit-
eral understanding that anthropomorphizes God. Moreover, one steers clear of
reducing such visualizations to a figurative sense.63
Now consider Zamakhsharī’s remark that the visualizations expressed by the
covenant verse are imaginary representations. It is plausible that Zamakhsharī
intends his reader to understand that one cannot be certain that there
is a single-term topical equivalent for such visualizations. The imaginary
representations – testifying to and acknowledging God, for instance – cannot
be analogized to things that are well known or verifiable. Consequently, he
would argue, it is not permissible to reduce the visualizations to a figurative
sense, even though they are depictions.
It is certainly plausible that when Zamakhsharī establishes the exegetical
principles which we have described above – principles that direct the reader
to avoid taking the visualizations within the domain of either the literal or
the figurative – that he intends to retain the true sense of the images evoked.
And that consequently, he intends his reader to understand them as imagined
but also truthful in such a way that the imaginary do not imply falsity, as they
would for Fārābī (more on this below).
This interpretation is corroborated by Ibn al-Munayyir, whose authorita-
tive glosses on the Kashshāf amplify what Zamakhsharī means to say about
images evoked in the Qurʾān.64 In the context of explaining that Zamakhsharī
intends the starkly anthropomorphic verse (Q. 39:67) to be taken into neither
the figurative nor the literal realm, he writes, “By the expression al-takhyīl here,
he [Zamakhsharī] only means to convey that this word refers to an analogy
(tamthīl), but the expression on this occasion is not proper in any way what-
soever to it as something make-believe to be disowned.”65 Ibn al-Munayyir’s
gloss suggests that when Zamakhsharī describes takhyīl as a kind of analogy
(tamthīl) in the Kashshāf, he means to convey that the images evoked by the
Qurʾān are imagined but also true (unlike a metaphor), since to say that God’s
word evokes images that are untrue is repugnant.66

64 Published in the margins of the edition by Muḥammad al-Ṣādiq Qamḥāwī cited above.
On Ibn al-Munayyir and Zamakhshari, see Walid Saleh, “The Ḥāshiya of Ibn al-Munayyir
(d. 683/1284) on al-Kashshāf of al-Zamakhsharī,” in Books and Written Culture of the
Islamic World, ed. by Andrew Rippin and Roberto Tottoli (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 86–90;
Walid Saleh, “The Gloss as Intellectual History: The Ḥāshiyahs on al-Kashshāf,” Oriens 41
(2013): 217–59.
65 Zamakhsharī, Kashshāf, 3:408; Daud, “Muṣṭalaḥāt al-taṣwīr,” p. 146, 68n.
66 Zamakhsharī, Kashshāf, 2:129 (gloss).
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

We can further clarify how Zamakhsharī applies the hermeneutical device

of tamthīl takhyīlī to unlock the meaning of the covenant verse if we consider
his exegesis against the backdrop of the above principles of interpretation. In
addition to claiming that the images evoked by the Qurʾān are imagined but
also true, Zamakhsharī also insists that such images hide abstract notions.67
The task before us is thus to grasp the analogues of the visualizations by dis-
cerning the attributes shared by the images and abstract notions, i.e., the
intellectual principles and concepts which are their subjects.
There are two principal visualizations in the above excerpts. In the first
depiction, the meaning of the divine initiative is that God makes his unity
and sovereignty known by the address, “Am I not your Lord?” This depiction,
which personifies God by giving Him the human attribute, speech, is analo-
gized to the act whereby God “shows [human beings] evidences (al-adilla) for
His sovereignty and unity.” This analogical interpretation already presupposes
Zamakhsharī’s principle described earlier in his exegesis of the covenant verse –
namely that intellect (here also called discernment and insight) is the instru-
ment through which human beings can attain knowledge of God’s unity and
attributes.
The second depiction is the affirmative response uttered by human beings,
which is suggested by the Qurʾānic word, “Indeed, you are our Lord, we tes-
tify to and we affirm your unicity.” Here the affirmative response (“Indeed”)
is analogized to the human act that attests to those divinely constructed
evidences with their intellects and faculties of discernment – an idea that
is enforced when he asserts that God “set up observable evidences” in such
a way that “their veracity conforms to the intellects.”68 This analogical inter-
pretation already presupposes a further Zamakhsharian principle described
earlier – namely, that the human intellect is originated in such a way that it can
grasp the divinely constructed evidential proofs of God’s sovereignty and unity.
The above line of exegesis, which relies on the principle that Qurʾānic
images evoked in the covenant verse have analogues in conceptual and
abstract notions, suggests that when Zamakhsharī applies the hermeneutical
device of tamthīl takhyīlī to the visualizations of the covenant verse, he intends
that the contractual bond between God and human beings is cemented within
the domain of the intellect. Indeed, what the analogues identified in his com-
mentary indicate is that Zamakhsharī considers the events described in the
covenant verse as intellectual processes that take place within the intellect.
67 Zamakhsharī emphasizes that abstract notions lie behind the images evoked by the
Qurʾān. See Kashshāf, 3:408.
68 Zamakhshari, Kashshāf, 2:129–30.

162 Jaffer
Zamakhsharī’s efforts to ground his exegesis of the covenant verse in the

intellect left a lasting imprint on Sunnī tafsīr and fundamentally altered
the way that Sunnī commentators understood and explained the origins of
human beings. It was Bayḍāwī, Zamakhsharī’s excellent expositor, who took
steps to naturalize Zamakhsharī’s conceptualization of the covenant into the
Sunnī worldview.69 In his work, Anwār al-tanzīl wa-asrār al-ta‌ʾwīl, Bayḍāwī
takes the Qurʾānic phrase, “And when your Lord took from the Children of
Adam – from their backs – His progeny,” to mean that God extracted offspring
from the Children of Adam such that they propagate from one generation
to the next – that is, he understands the verse to refer to the natural process
through which human beings produce their offspring from one generation to
the next. Like Zamakhsharī, Bayḍāwī reads the Qurʾānic phrase in this way
on the grounds that the Qurʾānic term backs in this instance is a part that
stands in for Children of Adam as a whole.
Bayḍāwī also adopts a second major aspect of Zamakhsharī’s exegesis, which
is that the human act of attestation takes place as an intellectual operation so
that the covenantal bond is cemented within the domain of the intellect. When
he comments on the covenant verse in his Anwār al-tanzīl, Bayḍāwī writes:
God constructed evidential proofs of His sovereignty for human beings.

And he arranged in their intellects what He summoned them to recognize
by their intellects so that they reached a status of one who says to them,
“Am I not your Lord? They said, indeed.” God made it possible for them to
have knowledge of those evidential proofs. He also made possible their
mastery of that knowledge to the status of witnessing and acknowledg-
ment in an analogical way (ʿalā ṭarīqat al-tamthīl).70
In this passage, Bayḍāwī tersely paraphrases and endorses Zamakhsharī’s use

of tamthīl takhyīlī in his commentary on the covenant verse. He proposes that
God formed human intellects in such a way that they have the capacity to rec-
ognize and to confirm the evidential proofs he constructed for them. Moreover,
he proposes that when the Qurʾān depicts human attestation of God’s unity,
such an attestation is accomplished in this manner when the intellect affirms
divinely constructed evidential proofs.
69 Bayḍāwī’s exegesis, like Zamakhsharī’s commentary, also engendered a long tradi-

tion of glosses. See now Shahab Ahmed and Nenad Filipovic, “The Sultan’s Syllabus: A
Curriculum for the Ottoman Imperial medreses,” Studia Islamica 98/99 (2004): 183–218.
On Bayḍāwī’s exegesis, see the recent work by Robert Morrison, “Natural Theology in the
Qurʾān,” Journal of Qurʾānic Studies 15, no. 1 (2013): 1–22.
70 Bayḍāwī, Anwār al-tanzīl, 178.
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

I mentioned earlier that Bayḍāwī – under Zamakhsharī’s influence –

embraced the idea that the covenant verse communicated the propagation of
human beings one from another (and from one generation to the next). And I
mentioned that this adoption led him to reject the universalist and predes-
tinarian conceptualization of the covenant that guided traditionalist – both
Sunnī and Shiʿī – lines of exegesis.
Under Zamakhsharī’s influence, Bayḍāwī also regarded the visualizations of
the covenant verse as an instance of tamthīl, and he proposed that the cov-
enantal bond is cemented within the domain of the intellect, although he does
not raise the important question whether the images evoked by the verse are
true or have only the veneer of truth. And although it is not possible to deter-
mine his stance on this issue, his motivation to interpret the visualizations
along Zamakhsharian lines suggests that the Muʿtazilite method of symboliz-
ing mythic events of the covenant to intellectual processes – and perhaps also
the underlying Muʿtazilite cosmology and anthropology – had gained control
of traditionalist conceptualizations of the contractual bond between God and
human beings.
8 Intellect as the Vehicle to Salvation
Zamakhsharī developed a theory of salvation for the Muʿtazilite tradition,

establishing conviction in salvation as a Muʿtazilite ideal within his discourse
on the covenant. Adopting an individualist approach that departed con-
siderably from those taken by ʿAbd al-Jabbār and Jishumī, he anchored his
interpretation of this dimension of the covenant in his conception of intellect.
My aim in the following discussion is to explain how Zamakhsharī, who was
refining Muʿtazilite doctrine – not combating traditionalist universalism like
his predecessors – particularized the notion of a contractual bond between
God and human beings by arguing that salvation is attainable for only a group
among the Children of Adam.
When Zamakhsharī formulated this theory and established intellect as the
means to attaining salvation, he intended to find a criterion that would dis-
tinguish believers from unbelievers: the human intellect’s capacity to comply
with the covenantal contract by fulfilling the natural purpose of the intellect –
a purpose which God made known to human beings by way of the covenant at
natural conception – filled precisely this role. It was by assuming these prin-
ciples and embracing this interpretive method that Zamakhsharī explained
a central aspect of the Qurʾān’s conception of history, namely the failures of
past communities to abide by the covenants that God established with their

164 Jaffer
respective prophets. And it was by this method that he specified the factions
within Islam that warrant the label unbelievers. I will return to this implication
of his theory later, but for the moment, I will focus on situating this aspect of
Zamakhsharī’s interpretive method with respect to the Qurʾānic conception
of history.
To understand how Zamakhsharī particularizes the covenant and how
he argues that human reason serves as a means to salvation, we need first to
understand how he interpreted the Qurʾānic motif of past covenants and bro-
ken promises. The theological principle that a community’s salvation depends
upon the act of fulfilling a covenant is instanced several times in the Qurʾān.
The Qurʾān speaks of a covenant (mīthāq) that God established with the
Children of Israel to whom messengers were sent (Q. 5:70). On another occa-
sion, it goes so far as to list demands of the covenant which are requisites for
that community’s salvation: “perform the prayer, and pay the alms, and believe
in My messengers and succour them, and lend to God a good loan, I will acquit
you of your evil deeds, and I will admit you to gardens underneath which riv-
ers flow” (Q. 5:12). Here the Qurʾān outlines an agreement of a set of terms,
implying that if the Children of Israel enter a contractual relation with God,
then He will deliver on his promise of salvation at the end times. Qurʾān 5:12
also stresses that when this past community (the Children of Israel) broke its
covenant, by “kill[ing] the prophets” and by “disbelieving in the signs of God”
(Q. 4:154).
For our purposes, what is important here is the Qurʾānic principle that
salvation was foreclosed to the Children of Israel because they broke their cov-
enant. This is crucial to understanding what Zamakhsharī means to say: that
the purpose of the divine initiative mentioned in the covenant verse is to pre-
empt such a foreclosure for the Children of Adam and to insist that salvation
is still a realizable possibility. The Qurʾānic verse which guides Zamakhsharī’s
argument is the following:
They said, “Yes, we testify” – lest you should say on the Day of Resurrection –
“As for us, we were heedless of this,” or lest you say, “Our fathers were
idolators aforetime, and we were seed after them. What wilt Thou then
destroy us for the deeds of vain-doers?”
Zamakhsharī holds that this verse is intended to avert the Children of Adam
from having to confess on the Day of Resurrection that they were “heedless” of
God’s sovereignty and unity (“As for us, we were heedless of this”); and to avert
the Children of Adam from having to confess that by associating partners with
God, they were simply following their ancestors (“we were seed after them”).
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

In the context of the discussion mentioned above, Zamakhsharī introduces

the theme of intellect as the pivot of his covenantal theology. He writes:
What we mean to imply by saying lest you should say on the Day of
Resurrection – “As for us, we were heedless of this” is that: the meaning
of our saying that is that we set up observable evidences whose veracity
is attested to by the intellects. We did that in order to turn you away from
saying “As for us, we were heedless of this.”71
In the terse statement cited above, Zamakhsharī anchors his interpretation of

this verse in his conception of intellect. He argues that the intellect’s attest-
ing to divinely constructed observable evidences can lead to the attainment
of salvation; and he means to imply that that operation serves as the means
by which the Children of Adam can escape the fate of earlier communities.
Crucial to Zamakhsharī’s argument is the Qurʾānic phrase, “lest you should say
on the Day of Resurrection,” which he takes as evidence that God preempted
the Children of Adam from salvation’s foreclosure and made salvation attain-
able for them.
To draw out the implications of the interpretation of the covenant verse
just presented, Zamakhsharī proposes that God averted the Children of Adam
from salvation’s foreclosure by lodging intellects in them and by causing those
intellects to attest to the observable evidences – evidences which serve as
proof of God’s unity and sovereignty. On the basis of these principles, he then
draws a fundamental distinction between believers and unbelievers: it is only
this group among the Children of Adam that deserves the label believers, for
only they fulfilled the natural purpose of the intellect that God made known to
them by way of a “natural” covenant in the womb.
To develop further the principles described above, Zamakhsharī focuses
his attention on the Qurʾānic verse, “As for us, we were heedless of this.” For
Zamakhsharī, this verse implies that unbelievers are those who broke their
covenants by rejecting intellect’s divinely sanctioned role, which is to call on
their intellects to attest to the observable evidences that serve as proof of God’s
unity and sovereignty. In his view, the remainder of the Children of Adam
failed to live up to the demand which the covenant places on human reason,
and for this reason they warrant the label unbelievers.
Zamakhsharī thus gives the final lines of the covenant verse (begin-
ning with “As for us, we were heedless of this”) a vital role in explaining the
Qurʾānic motif of past communities who broke their covenants. He builds on
71 Zamakhsharī, Kashshāf, 2:129–30.

166 Jaffer
an interpretation already advanced by ʿAbd al-Jabbār, who took the Qurʾānic

term “heedlessness” as evidence that this line is expressed by unbelievers on
the Day of Resurrection.72 Zamakhsharī too projects the final lines of this
Qurʾānic verse into the future, proposing that it is voiced by the unbelievers
facing the divine judgment. Importantly, however, his interpretation of these
lines underscores the role of intellect in the attainment of salvation. What he
proposes is that those communities among the Children of Adam that failed
to live up to the demand that the covenant places on their intellect will find
themselves on the Day of Resurrection entreating God for salvation. Moreover,
what the Qurʾānic text means is that it is that group which offers excuses for
having associated partners with God, saying that they were simply imitating
their ancestors (“we were seed after them”).
9 Conclusions
What do the various attempts to interpret the covenant verse disclose about
Muʿtazilite approaches to Qurʾānic interpretation?
The three commentators who are the focus of this study – ʿAbd al-Jabbār,
Jishumī, and Zamakhsharī – applied procedures and principles of interpreta-
tion as well as rhetorical devices to elicit meaning from the covenant verse. Yet
the approaches we have examined betray individualist attitudes and indepen-
dent motivations. Each author called on his intellectual and anthropological
concepts as a means of developing his own multi-dimensional conceptualiza-
tion of the covenant – conceptualizations which shaped and gave meaning to
the Muʿtazilite understanding of human history.
It is Zamakhsharī, however, who should be credited with developing a full-
fledged comprehensive exegesis of the covenant verse that finally resolved
the difficulty of how to understand its mythic nature and significance. As sug-
gested above, he pressed his conception of human intellect into service and
applied the device of takhyīl – a device he institutionalized into the genre of
tafsīr – as a means of interpreting the anthropomorphic elements of the cov-
enant verse and resolving the difficulty of how to interpret its visual imagery.
Rather than rejecting the truth of the myth by deploying the conventional
Muʿtazilite device of figurative interpretation, Zamakhsharī employed the
device of tamthīl takhyīlī to retain the true nature of images evoked by the cov-
enant without falling into the trap of anthropomorphism.
Zamakhsharī regrettably does not elaborate on the relationship between
visual images and truth, but a brief comparison with Fārābī’s philosophical
72 Zamakhsharī, Kashshāf, 2:129–30.
Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

theory of images will clarify one important aspect of his approach to Qurʾānic
interpretation. Heinrichs pointed out that Zamakhsharī’s discussion of images
and truth seems to come close to Fārābī’s philosophical theory, which also
holds that images are visualizations of abstract notions. Such images, Fārābī
held, are invented by the prophet’s exceptionally powerful faculty of imagina-
tion; and they have only the veneer of veracity, since the philosopher-prophet
clothes philosophical essences in the garments of images. Zamakhsharī holds
that Qurʾānic images are conceived by God’s word – not the prophet’s imagina-
tion (as Heinrichs points out). And if we follow Ibn al-Munayyir, Zamakhsharī’s
commentator who has outstanding credentials, it is plausible that Zamakhsharī
intends to advocate for the truth of the imaginary while not taking such images
into the realm of the figurative or the literal. Zamakhsharī’s Kashshāf played
the pivotal role of institutionalizing these ideas about the truth of the imagi-
nary into the genre of Qurʾānic commentary, and future research in this area
will examine the wealth of glosses on Zamakhsharī’s Kashshāf and disclose
more about this process of institutionalization.73
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Bruce Fudge, Walid Saleh, and Devin Stewart for commenting
on earlier drafts of this study, Suleiman Mourad for our discussions about the
Muʿtazila, the anonymous reviewer for helpful feedback, and Teo Ruskov for
their meticulous work with the bibliography.
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Oriens 49 (2021) 131–171

The Muʿtazila on Covenantal Theology: A Study

ʿAbd al-Jabbār – Jishumī – Zamakhsharī – covenant – predestination – salvation

1 Covenant in the Qurʾān: Contractual Relations and the Promise

1 I adopt Kirk’s rough-and-ready definition of myth as simply a traditional story in Geoffrey

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/18778372-12340002

is no exception to these principles of myth, which can be most easily observed

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6 Toshihiko Izutsu, Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qurʾān (Montreal: McGill Queen’s

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authors share exegetical principles, interpretive methods, and rhetorical

2 ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s Covenantal Discourse: The Purposiveness

ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s Mutashābih al-Qurʾān marks the beginning of covenantal dis-

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ʿAbd al-Jabbār underscores that attributes which define a person, including

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defining attribute of man – in order to underscore the juridical-ethical aspect

3 Whence Human Beings? ʿAbd al-Jabbār Contra Traditionalism

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Adam pre-existed the creation of human beings and a confirmation of a pre-

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4 Covenant and the Remembrance of Sin

25 Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān, 6:110 nr. 15351.

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I argued above, on the basis of Ṭabarī’s exegesis, that the traditionalist

32 ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Mutashābih al-Qurʾān, 303.

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their bodies as living entities – as microbeings in Adam’s back. Focusing his

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ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s argument, which is rehearsed here by Rāzī, is designed to rule

35 ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Mutashābih al-Qurʾān, 303.

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possibly accommodate the totality of all human generations at the beginning.

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countervailing narrative he developed to combat the traditionalist mode of

5 ʿAbd al-Jabbār on Past Covenants, Broken Promises,

41 ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Mutashābih al-Qurʾān, 303.

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6 Jishumī and the Covenant as Natural Obligation in the Womb

43 ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Mutashābih al-Qurʾān, 303.

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Interpreters differed about the meaning of this verse, the meaning of

47 Jishumī, al-Tahdhīb fī l-tafsīr, 4:2773.

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A group of commentators claimed that God the exalted extracted off-

50 Jishumī, Tahdhīb, 4: 2773–4.

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Since God arranged man in such a way, whenever one apprehends

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7 The Figurative, the Real, and the Imaginary in Zamakhsharī’s