An Early Islamic Debate on Faith and Reason

Today, if you ask any faithful Muslim what tradition within Islam they follow, the answer
will mostly likely be Sunni or Shiite. Those who identify as Sunni may also follow one
of the four schools of jurisprudence: Hanafi, Shafi, Maliki or Hanbali. Other Sunnis
dismiss these established schools and claim to follow the way of the “salaf” — the first
three generations of Islam — often with an emphasis on strict literalism.

There is, however, something ironic about the times of the salaf that both their
purported revivalists as well as many other contemporary Muslims seem to ignore: It
was a time of richer diversity within Islam. For a start, there were more schools of
jurisprudence than those that are well‐known today — initiated by such scholars as al‐
Awzai (d. 774), al‐Thawri (d. 778) and al‐Zahiri (d. 883), all of which either died out
naturally or merged with other schools. Others, such as the school initiated by Ibn
Karram (d. 868), ended up on the losing side in violent inter‐sectarian struggles.
Moreover, both Sunni and Shiite traditions were less strictly defined, with more
theological fluidity between them and what they would later reject as “heresies.”

This is most evident with regard to the Mutazila, the first school to develop “kalam”
(Islamic theology). Today, most Sunni sources count this among the early “heresies”
within the faith, rejected by the followers of their one and only true path. Little do they
realize that many of the earliest Hanafis — the largest Sunni school to date — were in
fact Mutazilites, and the latter’s thinking left important traces on mainstream Sunni
thought, such as an uneasiness with anthropomorphism (the attribution of human
traits) with respect to God.

The key aspect of Mutazila thought is well‐known, though, both among Muslims and
in Western sources: their “rationalism.” But there are misunderstandings about what
this means. Conservative Sunni Muslims, in particular, are often scandalized by the
idea that fallible human reason could be valued much beside infallible divine
revelation: “as if revelation is from God,” as the Turkish theologian Hüseyin Kansu puts
it, “and reason is from the infidels.”

Past attempts to reconcile logic and belief tend to be dismissed today not because
they lack merit but because they were politically defeated.

For the Mutazila, however, both revelation and reason were from God — as
independent paths to the same ethical truths. And the exact meaning of this duality
needs to be better grasped, for it is relevant to some of the heated debates about
religion, law and ethics that take place in the Muslim world today.

Let us begin with who the Mutazila were. Their curious name, “those who withdraw,”
may come from the story that their founder, Wasil ibn Ata (d. 748), had “withdrawn”
from the circle of his teacher, Hasan al‐Basri (d. 728). An alternative explanation,
preferred by the Mutazila themselves, is that, as pious ascetics, they “withdrew” from
the sinful temptations of the world and from fanatic partisanship in the civil wars that
tore Muslims apart — evoking the positive iterations of the term in the Quran (as in
18:16, for example, where pious youths “withdraw” from polytheists; or 19:48, where
Abraham “withdraws” from idolaters).

Pious, but also rationalist? Yes, that is exactly how the Mutazila were. To understand
why, one must look at their context. The early Islamic empire had grown remarkably
in just a century from Spain to Persia. In much of these newly conquered territories,
Muslims had triumphed by religious zeal and military might, but in the cosmopolitan
centers of Iraq, such as Baghdad and Basra, they faced the intellectual challenges of
ancient traditions: Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and, somewhat
later, Greek philosophy. Against them, the more parochial scholars who took pride in
believing “bila kayfa,” or “without asking how,” could not offer any rationale. Instead,
Islam needed rational theologians who could “make sense” of the faith. And these
were none other than the Mutazila.
This effort for a rationally consistent “dawa” (call) explains all the doctrines of the
Mutazila that more dogmatic Muslims found unnecessarily complicated, if not
outrageously heretical.

For example, the Mutazila opposed the popular belief in predestination, or “qadar,”
instead arguing that God had given human beings complete freedom and power in
their acts. For otherwise, they realized, they could not defend God’s justice — a pivotal
principle in their system — in rewarding or punishing people for their deeds. (They had
also seen how the doctrine of predestination was used by the despotic rulers of the
Umayyad dynasty, which dominated the Islamic Empire from 661 to 750, to instill
unquestioning obedience to themselves.)

Another doctrine of the Mutazila which many Muslims have found baffling was that the
Quran was God’s “created” word — instead of preexisting with God Himself since
eternity. The reason was their realization that an “uncreated Quran” would vindicate
the Christian doctrine of “uncreated Christ” — as the Christian theologian John of
Damascus (d. 749) had intelligently argued. (Because Christ, too, was “word of God,”
according to none other than the Quran.)

In other words, by defining the Quran as “created,” the Mutazila were not devaluing
the Quran. Instead, they were trying to guard the core teaching of the Quran, which is
God’s absolute unity.

Yet perhaps the most significant idea of the Mutazila was their conceptualization of
divine law — sharia. It came from their answer to what is known to moral philosophers
as the Euthyphro dilemma: Is something “good” or “bad” because God commands or
bans it? Or does God command or ban things because they are inherently “good” or
“bad”?

With arguments based on the Quran — which commands “maaruf” (known good),
referring to humans’ ethical knowledge — the Mutazila defended the second view
above, often called “ethical objectivism.” In this view, divine commands, revealed as
sharia, educated Muslims about objective ethical values that were already in the
nature of things and knowable to human reason. Murder was inherently evil, in this
view, and sharia only indicated this truth, which would be still valid otherwise.

The opposite view — which later dominated Sunni Islam — was what philosophers
call “divine command theory.” In this view, God’s commands, revealed as sharia, did
not indicate but constitute moral truths. So, murder was wrong only because God
banned it. If God had commanded it, then it would be perfectly right, because there
was no measure of “good” and “bad” other than sharia.

These two opposite theologies about sharia had serious implications for its
interpretation.

One was the thorny issue of hadith, the reported words and deeds of the Prophet
Muhammad. Unlike the Quran, on whose authority all Muslims agreed, the authenticity
of these orally transmitted reports, mixed with hearsays and forgeries, were doubtful.
That is why most jurists in Iraq — early Hanafis, including the Mutazila — accepted
only a limited number of frequently transmitted hadiths, paying most of their attention
to the Quran and human reason. As such, they were called “Ahl al‐Ray” (“People of
Reason”).

The opposite camp was “Ahl al‐Hadith” (“People of Hadith”). They held that hadiths
should guide Muslims on every possible question — thus leaving minimum need for
reason — and that their authenticity could be confirmed by establishing an unbroken
chain of narrators (A heard from B, who heard from C, who heard from Muhammad,
without a missed link in the chain). Spearheaded by the Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, the
staunchest adversary of the Mutazila, this movement ultimately produced the major
“six books” of hadith, which continue to be revered today.
A key difference between the two camps was whether the content of hadiths could be
questioned using reason. For the Ahl al‐Hadith, once the chain of narrators was
established and the hadith was confirmed as “sahih” (authentic), there was little left to
discuss. It became a canonical text that simply had to be accepted and obeyed. For
the Mutazila, however, any hadith, regardless of its chain of narrators, could be
questioned by judging its content — in light of both the Quran and human reason,
including moral intuition.

Here is an example. Ibn Hanbal’s hadith collection, “Musnad,” included a narration

from Muhammad which read: “The believers and their children will be in Paradise, and
the polytheists and their children will be in Hell.” The latter part reportedly “upset”
Muhammad’s wife Khadija, as it would offend the conscience of most of us. But did
conscience count as a yardstick in religion?

The Mutazila emphatically said yes. “God would not punish children,” wrote Ibrahim
al‐Nazzam (d. 845), “because that would make Him an oppressor, which He is not.”
Two centuries later, the last great Mutazila scholar and judge Abd al‐Jabbar (d. 1025)
also commented on such hadiths that are morally unacceptable, writing: “It is not
permissible to abandon the rational faculties that God the Exalted has ingrained in us
in favor of such reports.”

Luckily, the children‐in‐hell hadith had a flaw in its chain, so it was ultimately classified
as “weak.” Yet many Muslims today read other narrations that disturb their conscience:
“sahih” reports that command obedience to corrupt tyrants; servitude to capricious
husbands; or killing people, merely for their beliefs, as “apostates.”

In the face of such religious teachings that are ethically unjustifiable, Muslims today
may find it helpful to remember the Mutazila perspective: that God cannot command
injustice — the definition of which may vary and evolve over time and context — and
we have the right to question those who tell us that He did.
In other words, as the contemporary Islamic scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl put it
recently, Muslims can use more “conscientious thinking” in religion. When they are
called on to obey religious rulings that are absurd or unconscionable, they can
legitimately say, “I do not buy this; it does not make sense to me.”

However, this perspective has been emphatically curbed in mainstream Islamic

thinking, because of the dominance of divine command theory. In this view, an
independent sense of justice cannot question religious texts, because justice has no
basis outside of those texts.

Ironically, the scholar who championed this view was a defector from the ranks of the
Mutazila: Abu al‐Hasan al‐Ashari (d. 936), who, at the age of 40, made a U‐turn in his
beliefs, rejecting all Mutazili ideas and instead began “professing what Ibn Hanbal
professed.” Having once been a rational theologian, however, he was more
sophisticated than Ibn Hanbal himself, who rejected all theology as a useless
innovation. Ashari defended Hanbali doctrines with rational argumentation, initiating
the theological school known as Asharism (which is distinct from, but influential on, the
aforementioned four jurisprudential schools), which increasingly dominated the Sunni
world, especially after becoming the state‐sponsored doctrine in the late 11th century.

Another important episode from this century was the official condemnation of the
Mutazila by the Hanbali caliph al‐Qadir. In 1017, he proclaimed the “Qadiri Creed,”
which explicitly targeted the Mutazila view of scripture: “He who says the Quran is
created is an infidel, whose blood may legitimately be shed.” Soon, Mutazila scholars
were forced to retract their beliefs. Those who resisted were jailed, while their
“heresies” were condemned from mosque pulpits.

To be fair, some of the Mutazila had also resorted to state coercion, much earlier,
when their “created Quran” doctrine was imposed by the caliph al-Mamun’s infamous
“mihna” (literally, “ordeal”), a kind of inquisition, from 833 to 851. This was an
unforgivable mistake on their part, which is told and retold in Sunni sources. However,
the same sources never speak about the Qadiri Creed, the very existence of which we
learned only thanks to modern Western scholarship.

What really happened, in a nutshell, was that People of Hadith won over People of
Reason — in part thanks to the dictates of the rulers, for whom they preached
“obedience,” even if they were “unjust and corrupt,” as they explicitly put it. Meanwhile,
as the winners of this long war of ideas, the People of Hadith also wrote the very
history of it, to their own advantage.

Condemned and purged, the Mutazila faded away in the Sunni world, finding some
niches only among Shiites, especially the Zaydis of Yemen. Its earlier jurisprudence,
Hanafism — whose very founder Abu Hanifa (d.767) had drawn much ire from the
People of Hadith — had to conform, minimizing the scope of its rational law‐making
tool called “istihsan,” which means “considering something good” without any textual
basis, like “equity” in Western law. Ultimately, in the words of Wael Hallaq, a
contemporary expert on Islamic law, the Ashari doctrine became “the most
fundamental principle of Sunni jurisprudence” — that “God decides on all matters and
that the human mind is utterly incompetent to function as a judge of any human act.”

Was this a wrong turn in the Islamic tradition? Or was it exactly as it should be?

One of those who seems to think it was a wrong turn is Ahmad al‐Raysuni, a prominent
Islamic scholar from Morocco who served as president of the International Union of
Muslim Scholars until recently, after replacing the late Yusuf al‐Qaradawi in 2018. In
his 2005 book, “Imam al-Shatibi’s Theory of the Higher Objectives and Intents of
Islamic Law,” published by the International Institute of Islamic Thought, he tackles the
issue and concludes:
“If the truth be told, the Ash’arites who have denied ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ as
rationally discernible properties which inhere in things and actions have been carried
along by the force of the longstanding, contentious debate between them and their
Mu’tazilite opponents … . As the days, years and indeed centuries passed, this
struggle only grew fiercer and more intractable, while ‘reaction’ against the Mu’tazilites
was such a dominant feature of Ash’arite thought that opposition to the Mu’tazilites
became a kind of ‘personal obligation’ for every Ash’arite thinker!”

Also relevant was that, at a later stage in the Asharite tradition, great scholars such as
Abu Hamid al‐Ghazali (d. 1111) partly accepted the rationality of law, allowing them to
develop the important doctrine of “maqasid al‐sharia” — the “higher objectives and
intents of Islamic law.” Nevertheless, as Raysuni shows, these late Asharites were still
held back by “the fear of being besmirched by an abandoned doctrine,” meaning the
Mutazila. However, Raysuni adds:

“We need to apologize on behalf of those who denied self‐evident truths and defended
illusions and fantasies simply in order to vex and contradict the Mu’tazilites.”

So, apparently, the Mutazilites were not wrong in everything. This does not mean they
were right in everything, either. But they represented an important intellectual effort in
early Islam in reconciling Islamic faith and law with universal human reason and ethics.
At a time when such a reconciliation is even more urgently needed, some of their ideas
may be worth reconsidering.

This may also be true for some other vanished sects or intellectual movements in the
history of Islam. After all, this history, even from the eyes of the most pious in faith, is
human‐made. It is shaped not just by the religious tenets of Islam but also the
accidents of history, the effect of ancient cultures and the dictates of arbitrary rulers.
Today’s Muslims have the right, therefore, to look at this complex Islamic tradition not
only with respect but also critical reason, in order to find the best inspirations they can,
to rearticulate Islam for a radically different millennium.