kalam & islam

8/14/2019 Kalam & Islam

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Kalam and IslamChapter - 1

By Shaykh Nuh Ha Mim Keller

Few would deny today that the millions of dollars spent worldwide on religious books,

teachers, and schools in the last thirty years by oil-rich governments have brought about a

sea change in the way Muslims view Islam. In whole regions of the Islamic world and

Western countries where Muslims live, what was called Wahhabism in earlier times and

termed Salafism in our own has supplanted much of traditional Islamic faith and practice.The very nameAhl al-Sunnawa al-Jamaa or Sunni orthodoxy and consensus has been so

completely derailed in our times that few Muslims even know it is rolling down another track.

In most countries, Salafism is the new default Islam, defining all religious discourse, past

and present, by the understanding of a few Hanbali scholars of the Middle Ages whose works

historically affected the tribes and lands where the most oil has been found. Among the more

prominent casualties of this reform are the Hanbalis ancient foes, the Ashari and

Maturidi schools of Sunni theology whom I have been asked to speak about tonight.

For over a thousand years Ashari-Maturidi theology has defined Sunni orthodoxy. When I

visited al-Azhar in Cairo in 1990 and requested for my library the entire syllabus of religious

textbooks taught by Azhar High Schools in Egypt, one of the books I was given was a manualon Islamic sects, whose final section definedAhl al-Sunna as the Asharis, followers of Abul

Hasan al-Ashari, and the Maturidis, followers of Abu Mansur al-Maturidi (Mudhakkara al-

firaq (c00), 14).

This is not an isolated assessment. When the Imam of the late Shafii school Ibn Hajr al-

Haytami was asked for a fatwa identifying as-hab al-bidaor heretics, he answered that they

were those who contravene Muslim orthodoxy and consensus (Ahl al-Sunna wa al-Jamaa):

the followers of Sheikh Abul Hasan al-Ashari and Abu Mansur al-Maturidi, the two Imams

of Ahl al-Sunna (al-Fatawa al-hadithiyya (c00), 280).

Few Muslims today know anything about the Ashari and Maturidi schools or their relation

to Islam. So I shall discuss their theology not as history, but as orthodoxy, answering the most

basic questions about them such as: What are the beliefs of Sunni Islam? Who needs rational


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theology anyway? And what relevance does it have today? We mention only enough history to

understand what brought it into being, what it said, what it developed into, what its critics

said of it, and what the future may hold for it.

I

Islamic theology is based on an ethical rather than speculative imperative. Many Quranicverses and hadiths show that iman or true faith is obligatory and rewarded by paradise,

and that kufror unbelief is wrong and punished by hell. Every Muslim must know certain

matters of faith, be convinced of them himself, and not merely imitate others who believe in

them. The faith God requires of man is expressed in the words

The Messenger believes in what has been revealed to him from his Lord, as do the believers.

Each believes in Allah, His angels, His books, and His messengers. We do not differentiate

between any of His messengers, and they say: We hear and obey, O Lord grant us Your

forgiveness, and unto You is the final becoming (Quran 2:285).

This verse defines the believer as someone who believes in the Prophets revelation (Allah

bless him and give him peace) in general and in detail. The details have to be known to be

believed, for as Allah says,

Allah does not tax any soul except in its capacity (Quran 2:286),

and it is not in ones capacity to believe something unless it is both known to one and not

unbelievable, meaning not absurd or self-contradictory.

Moreover, belief means holding something to be true, not merely believing what ones

forefathers or group believe, such that if they handed down something else, one would believethat instead. That is, belief by blind imitation without reference to truth or falsity is not

belief at all. Allah specifically condemns those who reject the message of Islam for this reason,

by saying:

When they are told: Come to what Allah has revealed, and to the Messenger, they say, It

suffices us what we found our forefathers uponBut what if their forefathers knew nothing,

and were not guided? Quran 5:104).

In short, Islamic kalam theology exists because belief in Islam demands three things:

(1) to define the contents of faith;

(2) to show that it is possible for the mind to accept, not absurd or inconsistent;

(3) and to give reasons to be personally convinced of it.

Very well, one may say, these are valid aims, but what proof is there that rational

argument, the specific means adopted by traditional theology, is valid or acceptable in matters

of faith? to which the first answer is that the Quran itself uses rational argument; while

the second is that nothing else would have met the historical threat to Islam of Jahm and the

Mutazila, the aberrant schools who were obligatory for Ashari and Maturidi to defeat.

The Quranic proof is the verse


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Allah has not begotten a son, nor is there any god besides Him, for otherwise, each would

have taken what they created and overcome the otherhow exalted is Allah above what they

describe! (Quran 23:91),

whose premises and conclusion are: (a) a god means a being with an omnipotent will; (b)

the omnipotent will of more than one such being would impose a limit on the omnipotence of

the other, which is absurd; (c) God is therefore one, and has not begotten a son, nor is thereany god besides Him.

A second proof is in the Quranic verse

Were there other gods in [the heavens and earth] besides Allah, [the heavens and earth]

would have come to ruin (Quran 21:22),

whose argument may be summarized as: (a) a god means a being with an omnipotent will,

to whom everything in the universe is thus subject; (b) if the universe were subject to a

number of omnipotent gods, its fabric would be disrupted by the exercise of their several

wills, while no such disruption is evident in the universe; (c) God is therefore one, and there

are no other gods.

The historical proof for rational argumentunmentioned in kalam literature but perhaps

even more cogent than either of the Quranic proofs just mentionedis that nothing else

could meet the crisis that Ashari and Maturidi faced; namely, the heretical mistakes of the

two early proto-schools of aqida, the Jahmiyya and the Mutazila. We say nothing else

because a chess player cannot be defeated by playing checkers, and the only way to refute the

arguments of the Jahmiyya and of the Mutazila was by intellectual means. Mere political

suppression would have but hardened their party spirit into sectarian obstinacy, so it was

necessary to defeat them with rational argument.

II

The challenge facing Abul Hasan al-Ashari and Abu Mansur al-Maturidi was thus threefold:

(1) to define the tenets of faith of Islam and refute innovation; (2) to show that this faith was

acceptable to the mind and not absurd or inconsistent; and (3) to give proofs that personally

convinced the believer of it. Though not originally obligatory itself, kalam became so when

these aims could not be accomplished for the Muslim polity without it, in view of the Islamic

legal principle that whatever the obligatory cannot be accomplished without is itself

obligatory. As we have seen, the specific form of the response, rational argument, was used

by the Quran, mandated by human reason, and necessitated by history. We now turn to theconcrete form of the response, which was the traditional tenets of faith (aqida) of the two

schools, after which we will look at how the response was conditioned by their historical

predecessors, the Jahmiyya and Mutazila schools.

III

The heart of traditional kalam theology is thatafter theshahada there is no god but Allah

and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and after acknowledging Allahs infinite

perfections and transcendence above any imperfectionit is obligatory for every Muslim to

know what is (a) necessarily true, (b) impossible, or (c) possible to affirm of both Allah and

the prophets (upon whom be peace). These three categories traditionally subsume some fiftytenets of faith.


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(a) The twenty attributes necessarily true of Allah are His (1) existence; (2) not beginning; (3)

not ending; (4) self-subsistence, meaning not needing any place or determinant to exist; (5)

dissimilarity to created things; (6) uniqueness, meaning having no partner (sharik) in His

entity, attributes, or actions; (7) omnipotent power; (8) will; (9) knowledge; (10) life; (11)

hearing; (12) sight; (13) speech; such that He is (14) almighty; (15) all-willing; (16) all-

knowing; (17) living; (18) all-hearing; (19) all-seeing; (20) and speakingthrough His

attributes of power, will, knowledge, life, hearing, sight, and speech, not merely through Hisbeing.

(b) The twenty attributes necessarily impossible of Allah (2140) are the opposites of the

previous twenty, such as nonexistence, beginning, ending, and so on.

(c) The one attribute merely possible of Allah (41) is that He may create or destroy any

possible thing.

The attributes of the prophets (upon whom be peace) similarly fall under the three headings:

(a) The four attributes necessarily true of the prophets (4245) are telling the truth, keeping

their trust, conveying to mankind everything they were ordered to, and intelligence.

(b) The four attributes necessarily impossible of them (4649) are the opposites of the

previous four, namely lying, treachery, concealing what they were ordered to reveal, and

feeblemindedness .

(c) The one attribute possible of them (50) is any human state that does not detract from their

rank, such as eating, sleeping, marrying, and illnesses not repellant to others; although Allah

protected them from every offensive physical trait and everything unbecoming them, keeping

them from both lesser sins and enormities, before their prophethood and thereafter.

When one reflects on these fifty fundamental tenets of faith, which students memorized over

the centuries, it is not difficult to understand why Ashari-Maturidi kalam was identified with

Islamic orthodoxy for over a millennium; namely, they are the tenets of the Quran and

sunna.

IV

We find however in the history of kalam that authors sometimes urged the distinctive

doctrines of their school, particularly against opponents, as if they were basic principles of

Islam. Now, basic principles are what every Muslim must know and believe as a Muslim,while distinctive doctrines may include virtually any point that controversy has brought

into prominence. The two are not necessarily the same.

A number of points of aqida were not originally central to the faith of Islam, but entered the

canon of orthodoxy by celebrity acquired through debate among schools. To take but one

point for example: the question of whether man is obligated to know God by revelation or

whether by human reason alone has been treated by Ahl al-Sunna, Mutazila, and Jahmiyya

theologians as a point of aqida, though it does not personally concern one single Muslimfor

all Muslims know Allah through the revelation of the Quranbut rather concerns Allahs

own judgement of human beings who have never been reached by the Islamic revelation, a

judgement Allah is unlikely to consult anyone else about, whether believer or unbeliever.Something so devoid of practical consequences for Muslims could not have become

prominent except through faction and debate.


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Treating distinctive doctrines as basic tenets of faith, however, was not always the result of

mere controversy, but because Sunni theologians had to distinguish truth from falsehood, the

latter including the many mistakes of the Mutazila and Jahmiyya. All falsehoods are rejected

by Islam, and in matters of faith most are serious sins, but some are more crucial than others.

In other words, in the spectrum from right to wrong beliefs, there are four main categories:

(1) central beliefs that one must hold or one is not a Muslim;

(2) beliefs that are obligatory to hold, but denying them does not make one a non-Muslim;

(3) beliefs that are unlawful to hold, but affirming them does not make one a non-Muslim;

(4) and beliefs that no one can hold and remain a Muslim.

For many Muslims today, greater knowledge of these four necessary distinctions would bring

about greater tolerance, and teachers of Islamic theology must explain that while

orthodoxy reflects what Sunnis believe, only some of their issues spell the difference

between faith and unbelief, while others are things that Muslims may disagree about and still

remain Muslim.

To say it again, a particular point of aqida could be contrary to another, even heretical school

of thought and hotly debated, yet not directly concern kufror iman, faith or unfaith. Indeed,

the longer and harder the historical debate, the less likely the point under discussion is a

matter of salvation or damnation, for it is inconsistent with Allahs mercy and justice to

create men of widely varying intelligence and then make their salvation depend on something

that even the most brilliant of them cannot agree upon. Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 606/1210)

acknowledges this by writing:

One should know that theologians have had considerable difficulty defining kufr(unbelief). . .

Kufr consists in denying the truth of anything the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him

peace) is necessarily known to have said. Examples include denying the Creators existence,

His knowledge, power, choice, oneness, or perfection above all deficiencies and infirmities. Or

denying the prophethood of Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace), the truth of

the Quran, or denying any law necessarily known to be of the religion of Muhammad (Allah

bless him and give him peace), such as the obligatoriness of prayer, of zakat, fasting, or

pilgrimage, or the unlawfulness of usury or wine. Whoever does so is an unbeliever because

he has disbelieved the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) about something

necessarily known to be of his religion.

As for what is only known by inference from proof to be his religion, such as whether God

knows by virtue of His attribute of knowledge or rather by virtue of His entity, or whether

or not He may be seen [in the next life], or whether or not He creates the actions of His

servants; we do not know by incontestably numerous chains of transmission (tawatur) that

any of these alternatives has been affirmed by the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him

peace) instead of the other. For each, the truth of one and falsity of the other is known only

through inference, so neither denial nor affirmation of it can enter into actual faith, and

hence cannot entail unbelief.

The proof of this is that if such points were part of faith, the Prophet (Allah bless him and

give him peace) would not have judged anyone a believer until he was sure that the personknew the question. Had he done such a thing, his position on the question would have been

known to everyone in Islam and conveyed by many chains of transmission. Because it has


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not, it is clear that he did not make it a condition of faith, so knowing it is not a point of belief,

nor denying it unbelief.

In light of which, no one of this Umma is an unbeliever, and we do not consider anyone an

unbeliever whose words are interpretable as meaning anything besides. As for beliefs not

known except through hadiths related by a single narrator, it seems plain that they cannot be

a decisive criterion for belief or unbelief. That is our view about the reality of unbelief(Mafatih al-ghayb (c00), 2.42).

Such breadth of perspective was not unique to Razi, the lifelong defender of Ahl al-Sunna

aqida and implacable foe of its opponents, but was also the view of Imam Ashari himself.

Dhahabi says:

Bayhaqi relates that he heard Abu Hazim al-Abdawi say that he heard Zahir ibn Ahmad al-

Sarkhasi say, When death came to Abul Hasan al-Ashari in my home in Baghdad, he called

me to him and I came, and he said, Be my witness: I do not declare anyone an unbeliever

who prays towards the qibla, for all direct themselves to the One whom alone is worshipped,

while all this [controversy] is but different ways of speaking(1) (Siyar al-alam (c00), 15.88).

These passages show that both Ashari and Razi, the early and late Imams of their school,

implicitly distinguished between the central aqida of Islam, and the logical elaboration upon

it by traditional theology. Clearly, their life work brought them to the understanding that

kalam theology had produced a body of knowledge that was, if important and true,

nevertheless distinct from the aqida that is obligatory for every Muslim to believe in order to

be Muslim. The difference however, between aqida or personal theology, and kalam or

discursive theology was perhaps most strikingly delineated by Imam Ghazali (d. 505/1111).

V

According to Ghazali, kalam theology could not be identified with the aqida of Islam itself,

but rather was what protected it from heresy and change. He wrote about his long experience

in studying kalam in a number of places in his Ihya ulum al-din, one of them just after his

beautiful Aqida al-Qudsiyya or Jerusalem Creed. After mentioning the words of Imam

Shafii, Malik, Ahmad, and Sufyan al-Thawri that kalam theology is unlawfulby which

they meant the Mutazilite school of their times, the only example they knew ofGhazali

gives his own opinion on discursive theology, saying:

There is benefit and harm in it. As to its benefit, it is lawful or recommended or obligatory

whenever it is beneficial, according to the circumstances. As to its harm, it is unlawfulwhenever and for whomever it is harmful.

Its harm is that it raises doubts in minds and shakes a students tenets of faith from certitude

and conviction at the outset, while there is no guarantee that he will ever get it back again

through proofs, individuals varying in this. That is its harm to faith.

It has another bad effect, namely that it hardens heretics attachment to their heresy and

makes it firmer in their hearts by stirring them up and increasing their resolve to persist.

This harm, however, comes about through bigotry born of argument, which is why you see

the ordinary unlearned heretic fairly easy to dissuade from his mistakes through affability;

though not if he has grown up in a locale where there is arguing and bigotry, in which case ifall mankind from beginning to end were to join together, they would be unable to rid his

heart of wrong ideas. Rather, his prejudice, his heatedness, and his loathing for his opponents


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and their group has such a grip over his heart and so blinds him to the truth that if he were

asked, Would you like Allah Most High Himself to raise the veil so you can see with your

own eyes that your opponent is right? he would refuse, lest it please his opponent. This is the

incurable disease that plagues cities and people: the sort of vice produced by bigotry when

there is argument. This also is of the harm ofkalam.

As for its benefit, it might be supposed that it is to reveal truths and know them as they trulyare. And how farfetched! Kalam theology is simply unable to fulfill this noble aim, and it

probably founders and misguides more than it discovers or reveals. If you had heard these

words from a hadith scholar or literalist, you might think, People are enemies of what they

are ignorant of. So hear them instead from someone steeped in kalam theology, who left it

after mastering it in depth and penetrating into it as far as any scholar can, and who then

went on to specialize in closely related fields, before realizing that access to the realities of

true knowledge was barred from this path. By my life, theology is not bereft of revealing and

defining the truth and clarifying some issues, but it does so rarely, and about things that are

already clear and almost plain before learning its details.

Rather, it has one single benefit, namely guarding the ordinary mans faith we have justoutlined [the Jerusalem Creed] and defending it by argument from being shaken by those

who would change it with heresies. For the common man is weak and susceptible to the

arguments of heretics even when false; and the false may be rebutted by something not in

itself especially good; while people are only responsible for the creed we have presented above

(Ihya ulum al-din (c00), 1.86).

In this and other passages of Ihya ulum al-din, al-Munqidh min al-dalal, and Faysal al-

tafriqa which summarize his life experience with kalam theology, Ghazali distinguishes

between several things. The first is ilm al-aqaidor the knowledge of basic tenets of faith,

which we have called above personal theology, and which he deems beneficial. The second

is what we have called discursive theology, or kalam properly speaking, the use of rational

arguments to defeat heretics who would confuse common people about tenets of faith.

Ghazali believes this is valid and obligatory, but only to the extent needed. The third we may

call speculative theology, which is philosophical reasoning from first principles about God,

man, and being, to discover by deduction and inference the way things really are. This

Ghazali regards as impossible for kalam to do.

VI

The scholars ofkalam certainly did not agree with Ghazali on this latter point, and history

attests to their continued confidence in it as a medium of discovery, producing what hassubsequently been regarded by almost everyone as a period of excess in kalam literature. Taj

al-Din al-Subki (d. 771/1370) who was himself steeped in kalam theology wrote:

Upon reflectionand no one can tell you like someone who truly knowsI have not found

anything more harmful to those of our times or more ruinous to their faith than reading

books ofkalam written by latter-day scholars after Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and others. If they

confined themselves instead to the works of the Qadi Abu Bakr al-Baqillani, the great Abu

Ishaq al-Isfarayini, the Imam of the Two Sanctuaries Abu al-Maali al-Juwayni, and others of

those times, they would have nothing but benefit. But truly I believe that whoever ignores the

Quran and sunna [defended by these scholars] and instead occupies himself with the debates

of Ibn Sina and those of his pathleaving the words of the Muslims: Abu Bakr and Umar(Allah Most High be well pleased with them) said, Shafii said, Abu Hanifa said,

Ashari said, Qadi Abu Bakr said; and instead saying: The Sovereign Sage (al-Shaykh


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al-Rais) said meaning Ibn Sina, or The Great Master (al-Khawaja) Nasir said, and so on

that whoever does so should be whipped and paraded through the marketplaces with a

crier proclaiming: This is the punishment of whoever leaves the Quran and sunna and

busies himself with the words of heretics (Muid al-niam (c00), 7980).

For Subki, it showed how far kalam had strayed for latter-day authors to call heterodox

figures such as Ibn Sina(2) or Tusi(3) Sovereign Sage or Great Master in workssupposedly explaining the faith of Islam. The reason he found nothing more harmful to

those of our times or more ruinous to their faith than reading the books of kalam theology

written by latter-day scholars was that they had vitiated the very reason for kalams

existence: to defend the truth. By widening its universe to include heretics and giving them

titles of authority, kalam literature had become a compendium of wrong ideas.

To summarize, although Sunni theology first defined orthodoxy and rebutted heresy, it

afterwards swelled with speculative excesses that hearkened back those of the Jahmiyya and

Mutazila. At this juncture, it met with criticism from figures who knew it too well to accept

this, such as Imam Ghazali, Taj al-Subki, Nawawi, and others, whose view was that kalam

was a medicine useful in moderation, but harmful in overdose. Their criticisms were valid,for when theology obeys a speculative rather than an ethical imperative, it ceases to give

guidance in mans relationship to God, and hence is no longer a science of the din.

What has been forgotten today however by critics who would use the words of earlier Imams

to condemn all kalam, is that these criticisms were directed against its having become

speculative theology at the hands of latter-day authors. Whoever believes they were

directed against the aqida or personal theology of basic tenets of faith, or the discursive

theology of rational kalam arguments against heresy is someone who either does not

understand the critics or else is quoting them disingenuously.

We conclude our remarks with a glance at kalams significance today. What does traditional

theology have to offer contemporary Muslims ?

VII

With universal comparison, the door today is open to universal skepticism, not only about

particular religions, but belief in God and in religion itself. It is hence appropriate to consider

the legacy ofkalam proofs for the existence of God.

At the practical level, most people who believe in God do not do so because of philosophical

arguments, but because they feel a presence, inwardly and outwardly, that uplifts hearts,answers prayers, and solves their problems. Yet Muslims and others find their faith

increasingly challenged by an atheistic modern world. The question becomes, can traditional

kalam arguments answer modern misgivings?

Now, philosophy as taught today in many places dismisses traditional proofs for the existence

of God as tautological, saying that they smuggle in the conclusions they reach by embedding

them in the premises. A young American Muslim philosophy student asked me, How can we

believe with certainty that there is a God, when logically speaking there is no argument

without holes in it? He mentioned among the arguments of kalam that (a) the world is

hadith or contingent; (b) everything contingent requires a muhdith or cause; (c) if there is

no first cause that is necessary or uncaused, this entails an infinite regress, which is absurd;and (d) therefore the world must ultimately have an uncaused or necessary cause as its

origin.


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While scholars like Majid Fakhry in his History of Islamic Philosophy point out that saying

that the contingent (hadith) requires a cause (muhdith) is a mere play on words, one can

answer that while theform of this argument does contain a play on words, if we penetrate to

the contentof these words, they express an empirical relationship so basic to our experience

that science regards it as axiomatic. That is, to provide a scientific explanation for something

is to suggest a probable cause for it, and then present evidence for the particular cause being

adduced as its explanation.

In cosmology, for example, the origin of the universe must be explained causally, and most

scientists currently believe that the universe began about fifteen billion years ago in a cosmic

cataclysm they term the Big Bang. And yet this most interesting of all events, indeed the

effective cause of all of them, is somehow exempted from the scientific dictum that to explain

something is to suggest a cause for it. Why the Big Bang? What urged its being rather than its

nonbeing? This is no trivial enigma, still less a play on words. If to explain an event is to find

a cause for it, then the Big Bang is not an scientific explanation for the origin of the

universe in any ordinary sense of the word. Here, the kalam argument that the contingent

must return to the necessary is still relevant today, and has been cited by name in works such

as Craig and Smiths Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology. The prevailing cosmologicalview among scientists is that the universe did have a beginning, and this requires an

explanation.

Another traditional kalam argument vitally relevant to the teaching of Islam is the argument

from design, namely that the complexity of many natural phenomena is far more analogous

to our own intentionally planned processes and productions than to ordinary random events.

That is, the perfection of design in nature argues for the existence of a designer. As in the

previous example, to teach this argument directly from kalam would seem to many

intellectual Muslims today, particularly those scientifically literate, to be a mere tautology or

play on words. But when filled in with examples drawn from scientific literature, its cogency

becomes plain.

Examples abound. One of them forms the central thesis of the workJust Six Numbers by the

British Astronomer Royal Martin Reese of Cambridge. He has determined that the fabric of

the universe depends on the coincidence of six basic physical number ratios, two of them

related to basic forces, two fixing the size and texture of the universe, and two fixing the

properties of space itself. These six numbers, in Reeses own words, constitute a recipe for

a universe. Moreover, the outcome is sensitive to their values: if any of them were to be

untuned [the slightest bit different in numerical value], there would be no stars and no life

(Just Six Numbers (c00), 4). If any of these six numbers were dependent on the others, the fact

that they allow for the existence of the universe would be less astonishing, but none of themcan be predicted from the values of the others, and each number compounds the unlikelihood

of the others. The only consequence mathematically inferable from this is that the universe

that we know and live in is unlikely to an absurd degree. The statistical probability of the

confluence of just these numbers is, to borrow the expression of astronomer Hugh Ross,

about as likely as the possibility of a Boeing 747 aircraft being completely assembled as a

result of a tornado striking a junkyard (Discover(c00), 21, no. 11).

The shocking improbability of ourselves and our universe is no play on words, and shows the

relevance of the kalam argument for the existence of God from design.

Another example of the argument from design is the origin of life, especially with what isknown today, after the advent of the electron microscope, about the tens of thousands of

interdependent parts that compose even the simplest one-celled organism known. The


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probability of such an entity not only assembling itself, but also simultaneously assembling a

viable reproductive apparatus to produce another equally complex living reality does not

urge itself very strongly according to anything we know about empirical reality. That is, the

origin of perfectly articulated functional complexity argues for a design, and a design argues

for the existence of a designer.(4)

A third example of the relevance of the argument from design is what physicist Paul Davieshas called in his Mind of Godthe unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in describing

and predicting the phenomena of the physical world. The unreasonableness in it is that if,

as scientism avers, the structure of our brains that determines the way we view reality is only

an evolutionary accident, which would presumably be much different if we were, say, a race

of aliens who had evolved on different planet, why is it that so much of the mathematics that

was first worked out as an abstract exercise in the minds of pure mathematicians has been so

spectacularly effective in explaining the physical world? If man were hundreds of times

larger than he is or hundreds of times smaller, his perceptual reality would be so completely

different that he might well not have developed the integers or other mathematical tools that

he did. But because man has turned out just so, by an uncannily improbable coincidence, the

mathematical rules formulated by pure mathematicianswhich should be a mere accident ofmans evolutionary and cultural historyturn out, often years after their discovery, to be

exactly the same rules nature is playing by.

The enigma here is that, while there is a distinct evolutionary advantage in knowing the

world by direct empirical observation, we have been equipped with a second faculty, of no

selective evolutionary advantage at all, which can incorporate quantum and relativistic

mathematical systems into our mental model of the world. For Davies these facts suggest that

a conscious Being has encoded this ability within humanity, knowing that one day they would

reach a degree of comprehension of the universe that will bring them to the realization that

the unreasonable correspondence of nature to pure thought is not a coincidence, but the

outcome of a great design.

There are many other examples of the argument from design, particularly in the complexity

of symbiotic and parasitic relationships between species of the natural world, which, if too

long to detail here, also strongly attest to the relevance of the kalam argument for the

existence of God.

VIII

As for the role of kalam in defending Islam from heresies, Jahm and the Mutazilites are

certainly less of threat to orthodoxy today than scientism, the reduction of all truth tostatements about quantities and empirical facts. The real challenge to religion today is the

mythic power of science to theologize its experimental method, and imply that since it has not

discovered God, He must not exist.

Here, the task of critique cannot be relegated to traditional proofs drawn from the literature

of a prescientific age. Rather, it belongs to scientifically literate Muslims today to clarify the

provisional nature of the logic of science, and to show how its epistemology, values, and

historical and cultural moment condition the very nature of questions it can askor answer.

Omniscience is not a property of science. In physics today, at the outset of the twenty-first

century, we do not yet understand what gives physical matter its mass, its most basicproperty. In taxonomy, estimates vary, but probably less than 3 percent of the living

organisms on our own planet have been named or identified. In human fertility, many


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fundamental mechanisms remain undiscovered. Even our most familiar companion, human

consciousness, has not been scientifically explained, replicated, or reduced to physical laws. In

short, though we do not base our faith on the current state of science, we should realize that if

science has not discovered God, there is a long list of other things it has not discovered that

we would be ill-advised to consider nonexistent in consequence.

In short, attacks today on religion by scientism should be met by Muslims as Ashari andMaturidi met the Mutazilites and Jahmites in their times: with a dialectic critique of the

premises and conclusions thoroughly grounded in their own terms. The names that come to

mind in our day are not Ashari, Baqillani, and Razi, but rather those like Huston Smith in

hisBeyond the Post-Modern Mind, Charles Le Gai Eaton in hisKing of the Castle, Keith Ward

in his God, Chance, and Necessity, and even non-religious writers like Paul Davies in The

Mind of God and John Horgan in his The End of Science and The Undiscovered Mind.

Answering reductionist attacks on religion is a communal obligation, which Muslims can only

ignore at their peril. This too is of the legacy of kalam, or the aptness of words to answer

words.

IX

A final benefit ofkalam is to realize from its history that there is some range and latitude in

the beliefs of ones fellow Muslims. In an Islamic world growing ever younger with the

burgeoning population, there is a danger that those quoting Quranic verses and hadiths

without a grasp of the historical issues will stir up the hearts of young Muslims against each

other in sectarian strife. People like to belong to groups, and the positive benefits of bonding

with others in a group may be offset by bad attitudes towards those outside the group. The

Wahhabi movement for example, recast in our times as Salafism, began as a Kharijite-like

sect that regarded nonmembers, including most of the Umma, as kafirs or unbelievers. Here,

a working knowledge of the history and variety of schools of Islamic theology would do much

to promote tolerance.

The figures we have cited, from Ashari to Razi to Dhahabi to Ibn Taymiya, were men who

passionately believed that there was a truth to be known, and that it represented the beliefs of

Islam, and that it was but one. They believed that those who disagreed with it were wrong

and should be engaged and rebutted. But they did not consider anyone who called himself a

Muslim to be a kafiras long as his positions did not flatly deny the truthfulness of the Prophet

(Allah bless him and give him peace). Imam Ghazali says in Faysal al-tafriqa:

Unbelief (kufr) consists in asserting that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace)

lied about anything he conveyed, while faith is believing that he told the truth in everythinghe said (Faysal al-tafriqa (c00), 78).

There is wide scholarly consensus on this tolerance of Islam, and we have heard from Imam

Ashari that he did not consider anyone who prayed towards the qibla to be an unbeliever,

from Razi that he did not consider anyone to be an unbeliever whose words could possibly

mean anything besides, and from Ibn Taymiya that he considered everyone who faithfully

prays with ablution to be a believer. None of them believed that a Muslim can go to hell on a

technicality.

X

To summarize everything we have said, the three main tasks of kalam consist in defining the

contents of faith, showing that it contradicts neither logic nor experience, and providing


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grounds to be personally convinced of it, and these three are as relevant today as ever.

First, the substantive knowledge of the aqida each of us will die and meet Allah upon will

remain a lasting benefit as long as there are Muslims.

Second, demographers expect mankind to attain close to universal literacy within fifty years.

Members of world faiths may be expected to question their religious beliefs for coherence,logicality, applicability, and adequacy, and the work ofAhl al-Sunna scholars will go far to

show that one does not have to hang up ones mind to enter Islam.

Third, universal communication will make comparisons between religions inevitable. Blind

imitation of ethnic religious affiliation will become less relevant to people around the globe,

and I personally believe Islam has stronger theological arguments for its truth than other

world religions. Indeed, Islam is a sapiential religion, in which salvation itself rests not on

vicarious atonement as in Christianity, or on ethnic origin as in Judaism, but on personal

knowledge. Whoever knows that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the

Messenger of God is by that very fact saved.

So in the coming century, three areas of kalams legacy will remain especially relevant for

Muslims: first, the proofs for the existence of God from necessity and design, second, the

rebuttal of the heresy of scientistic reductionism and atheism, and third, promoting tolerance

among Muslims. The latter is one of the most important lessons that the history ofkalam can

teach; that if Muslims cannot expect to agree on everything in matters of faith, they can at

least agree on the broad essentials, and not to let their differences descend from their heads to

their hearts.

(The above is the text of a talk given to the Aal al-Bayt Institute of Islamic Thought on 4

January 2005 in Amman, Jordan.)

(1) Dhahabi goes on: This is my own religious view. So too, our sheikh Ibn Taymiya used to

say in his last days, I do not consider anyone of this Umma an unbeliever, and he would

relate that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, No one but a believer

faithfully performs ablution [Ahmad ((c00), 5.82: 22433. S], saying, So whoever regularly

attends prayers with ablution is a Muslim (Siyaral-alam (c00), 15.88).

(2) Ibn Sina, the Sovereign Sage referred to by latter-day kalam authors here, had a

number of heterodox beliefs. First, he believed that the world is beginninglessly eternal, while

Muslims believe that Allah created it after it was nothing; second, he believed that Allah

knows what is created and destroyed only in a general way, not in its details, while Muslimsbelieve that Allah knows everything; and third, he held that there is no bodily resurrection,

while Muslims emphatically affirm in it. Taj al-Subkis above passage continues: Is he [such

a latter-day kalam author] not ashamed before Allah Most High to espouse the ideas of Ibn

Sina and praise himwhile reciting the word of Allah Does man not think We shall gather

together his bones? Indeed, We are well able to produce even his index finger (Quran 75:7)

and mention in the same breath Ibn Sinas denial of bodily resurrection and gathering of

bones? (Muid al-niam (c00), 80). Imam Ghazali, despite his magisterial breadth of

perspective in aqida issues, held it obligatory to consider Ibn Sina a non-Muslim (kafir) for

these three doctrines (al-Munqidhmin al-dalal(c00), 4445, 50).

(3) The Great Master Nasir al-Din al-Tusi was the traitor who betrayed Baghdad and itswhole populace to their Mongol slaughterers out of sectarian malice against the Sunni

caliphate. In tenets of faith, he introduced philosophy into Shiism, reviving Ibn Sinas


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thought in a Twelver Shiite matrix, and authored Tajrid al-aqaid, the preeminent work of

Shiite dogma to this day, in which he describes man as the creator of his works

(Encyclopedia of Religion (c00), 6.324, 7.316, 13.265)while the Quran tells us that Allah

created you and what you do (Quran 37:96).

(4) The Associated Press on Thursday 9 December 2004 carried the story Famous Atheist

Now Believes in God, in which religion writer Richard Ostling mentions that a Britishphilosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-

century has now changed his mind. At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake,

Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the

universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the

complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England. He also recently

said that biologists investigation of DNA has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity

of the arrangements which are needed to produce [life], that intelligence must have been

involved (U.S. National AP Website, 9 December 2004).

Literalism and the Attributes of Allah

Chapter - 2


I received a letter in Jordan not too long ago from a British Muslim, asking me questions

about modern calls to replace traditional Islam with an ostensible "return to the way of the

Salaf, or early Muslims." When I answered one of these questions, I realized that manyother people might be wondering the same thing, and thought that presenting the question to

you tonight in a wider forum might be of greater benefit to the British Muslim and non-

Muslim audience.

The letter asked me:

Are the Hanbali Mujtahid Imams al-Dhahiri and Ibn Hazm considered Ahl al-Sunna? And was

Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal an anthropomorphistmeaning someone who ascribed human

attributes to Allah? Can you provide me examples of the sayings of Imam Ahmad that show he

did not have anthropomorphic Aqida?

The questions proved to be related in ways unsuspected by their author. What unites them is

literalism as an interpretive principle, which is the subject of my talk tonight. We will look at

it first in respect to ijtihad, meaning the qualified deduction of Islamic legal rulings from the

Qur'an and hadith. But we will look at literalism also, and most carefully, from the point of

view of aqida or Islamic belief, in understanding the Qur'anic verses and prophetic hadiths

that are called mutashabihator unclear in meaningsuch as the verse in Surat al-Fath that

says,

"Allahs hand is above their hands" (Qur'an 48:10)


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termed unclear in meaning, mutashabih, because linguistically hand can bear multiple

interpretations, and its ostensive sense seems to imply belief in a God with human

attributes, that is, anthropomorphism, an understanding categorically rejected by the

Qur'anic verse in Surat al-Shura,

"There is nothing whatsoever like unto Him" (Qur'an 42:11).

We shall see that literalism was a school of thought in Islamic jurisprudence, though not

considered a very strong one by traditional scholars. But in tenets of faith, and particularly in

interpreting the relation of the mutashabihat to the attributes of Allah, literalism has never

been accepted as an Islamic school of thought, neither among the Salafor early Muslims,

nor those who came later.

In answer to the first question, "Are the Hanbali Mujtahid Imams al-Dhahiri and Ibn Hazm

considered Ahl al-Sunna?" Dawud ibn Ali al-Dhahiri of Isfahan, who died 270 years afterthe Hijra, and Abu Muhammad ibn Hazm, who died 456 years after the Hijra, were not

followers of Ahmad ibn Hanbal butDhahiris or literalists in jurisprudence. Whether Dawud

al-Dhahiri was a mujtahidmeaning qualified to issue expert Islamic legal opinionhas been

disagreed upon by Muslim scholars, not only for reasons we will discuss, but also because

little that he wrote has come down to us.

As for Ibn Hazm, traditional Islamic scholars have not accepted his claims to be a mujtahid,

the first qualification of which is to have comprehensive knowledge of the Qur'an and hadith.

Scholars point to his many substantive mistakes in hadith knowledge, and adduce, for

example, that if someone doesnt even know, as Ibn Hazm did not, about the existence of the

Sunan of al-Tirmidhi, who died nearly a hundred and fifty years before Ibn Hazm did, it isnot clear how he can be considered a mujtahid. But aside from their qualifications, what

interests us tonight is theirDhahirism or textual literalism as an interpretive method.

What the Dhahiris are most famous for is their denial of all qiyas or analogy. It is recorded,

for example, that Dawud held that the Qur'anic prohibition of saying "Uff" in disgust to

ones parents did not prove that it was wrong to beat them, since the literal content of the

verse only concerned saying "Uff," and no analogy could be drawn from this about anything

else. Similarly, Ibn Hazm seems to have believed the prohibition in hadith of urinating into a

pool of water did not show that there is anything wrong with defecating in it. These are two

examples of denials of what is called in Arabic a qiyas jaliyy meaning an a fortiorianalogy.

Denying the validity of the a fortiorianalogy is so counterintuitive, that Imam al-Juwayni,

who died 478 years after the Hijra, has said:

The position adopted by the most exacting of scholars is that those who deny analogy are

not considered scholars of the Umma or conveyers of the Sharia, because they oppose out of

mere obstinacy and exchange calumnies about things established by an overwhelming

preponderence of the evidence, conveyed by whole groups from whole groups back to their

prophetic origin (tawatur).

For most of the Sharia proceeds from ijtihad, and the uniquivocal statements from theQur'an and hadith do not deal [n: in specific particulars by name] with even a tenth of the

Sharia [n: as most of Islamic life is covered by generalprinciples given by Allah to guide


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for example, in joining between a number of hadiths on a particular question that seem to

conflict, or the many other intellectual problems involved in doing ijtihad. This has made

some contemporary Muslims seriously believe that it is a matter of either following "the

Qur'an and sunna," orone of the schools of the mujtahidImams.

This idea has only gained credibility today because so few Muslims understand what ijtihadis

or how it is done. I believe this can be cured by familiarizing Muslims with concrete examplesof how mujtahidImams have derived particular Sharia rulings from the Qur'an and hadith.

Such examples would first show the breadth of their hadith knowledgeMuhammad ibn

Ubayd Allah ibn al-Munadi, for example, who died in 272 years after the Hijra, heard

Ahmad ibn Hanbal say that having memorized three hundred thousand hadiths was not

enough to be a mujtahidand second, would show the mujtahids mastery of the deductive

principles that enabled them tojoin between all the primary texts.

Until this is done, the advocates of this movement will probably continue to follow the ijtihad

of non-mujtahids (the sheikhs who inspire their confidence), under the catch phrase "Qur'an

and sunna" just as if the real mujtahids were unfamiliar with these. The followers perhaps

cannot be blamed, since "for someone who has never travelled, his mother is the only cook."But I do blame the sheikhs who, whatever their motivations, write and speak as if they were

the only cooks.

Finally, if the shortcomings of Dhahiri interpretation is plain enough in fiqh, in aqida, it can

amount to outright kufr, as when someone reads the Qur'anic verse,

# ( #

"Today We forget you as you have forgotten this day of yours" (Qur'an 45:34),

and affirms that Allah forgets, which is an imperfection, and not permissible to affirm of

Allah. Of this sort of literalism, Dawud al-Dhahiri and Ibn Hazm were innocent, for this is

anthropomorphism, meaning to believe Allah has human attributes, and as such is beyond

the pale of Islam.

Regarding the second question that I received in my letter, of whether Imam Ahmad ibn

Hanbal was an anthropomorphist, this is something that has been asked since early times,

particularly since someone forged an anthropormorphic tract called Kitab al-sunna [The

book of the sunna] and put the name of Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbals son Abdullah on it. It was

published in two volumes in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, by Ibn al-Qayyim Publishing House, in

1986.

I looked this book over with our teacher in hadith, Sheikh Shuayb al-Arnaut, who had

examined it one day, and said that at least 50 percent of the hadiths in it are weak or outright

forgeries. He was dismayed how Muhammad al-Qahtani, the editor and commentator, could

have been given a Ph.d. in Islamic faith (aqida) from Umm al-Qura University in Mecca for

readying for publication a work as sadly wanting in authenticity as this.

Ostensibly a "hadith" work, it contains some of the most hard-core anthropomorphism

found anywhere, such as the hadith on page 301 of the first volume that "when He Most

Blessed and Exalted sits on the Kursi, a squeak is heard like the squeak of a new leathersaddle"; or on page 294 of the same volume: "Allah wrote the Torah for Moses with His hand

while leaning back on a rock, on tablets of pearl, and the screech of the quill could be heard.


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There was no veil between Him and him," or the hadith on page 510 of the second volume:

"The angels were created from the light of His two elbows and chest," and so on.

The work also puts lies in the mouths of major Hanbali scholars and others, such as Kharija

[ibn Musab al-Sarakhsi], who died 168 after the Hijra, and who on page 106 of volume one is

quoted about istiwa (sometimes translated as being established on the Throne), "Does

istiwa mean anything except sitting?" with a chain of transmission containing a liar(kadhdhab), an unidentifiable (majhul), plus the text, with its contradiction (mukhalafa) of

Islamic faith (aqida). Or consider the no less than forty-nine pages of vilifications of Abu

Hanifa and his school that it mendaciously ascribes to major Imams, such as relating on page

180 of the first volume that Ishaq ibn Mansur al-Kusaj, who died 251 years after the Hijra

said, "I asked Ahmad Ibn Hanbal, Is a man rewarded by Allah for loathing Abu Hanifa and

his colleagues? and he said, Yes, by Allah." To ascribe things so fatuous to a man of

godfearingness (taqwa) like Ahmad, whose respect for other scholars is well attested to by

chains of transmission that are rigorously authenticated (sahih), is one of the things by which

this counterfeit work overreaches itself, and ends in cancelling any credibility that the name

on it may have been intended to give it.

The ascription of this book to Ahmad ibn Hanbals son Abdullah fails from a hadith point of

view, since there are two unidentifiable (majhul) transmitters in the chain of ascription whose

names are given as Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Simsar and Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-

Harawi, of whom no other trace exists anywhere, a fact that the editor and commentator,

Muhammad al-Qahtani, on page 105 of the first volume tries to sweep under the rug by

saying that the work was quotedby Ibn Taymiya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya.

But the fact that such a work even exists may give one an idea of the kinds of things that have

been circulated about Ahmad after his death, and the total lack of scrupulousness among a

handful of anthropomorphists who tried literally everything to spread their innovations.

Another work with its share of anthropomorphisms and forgeries is Ibn al-Qayyim al-

Jawziyyas Ijtima al-juyush al-Islamiyya [The meeting of the Islamic armies], published by

Awwad al-Mutiq in Riyad, Saudi Arabia, in 1988, which on page 330 mentions as a hadith

of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), the words "Honor the cow, for it has not

lifted its head to the sky since the [golden] calf was worshipped, out of shame (haya) before

Allah Mighty and Majestic," a mawdu hadith forgery apparently intended to encourage

Muslims to believe that Allah is physically above the cow in the sky.

On page 97 of the same work, Ibn al-Qayyim also mentions the hadith of Bukhari, warning of

the Antichrist (al-Masih al-Dajjal), who in the Last Days will come forth and claim to be God;of which the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, "Allah has sent no prophet

except that he warned his people of the One Eyed Liar, and that he is one-eyedand that

your Lord is not one-eyedand that he shall have unbeliever(kafir) written between his two

eyes" (Sahih al-Bukhari, 8.172). Ibn al-Qayyim comments, "The Prophet (Allah bless him

and give him peace) negated the attribute of one-eyedness [of Allah], which is proof that Allah

Most High literally has two eyes." Now, any primer on logical fallacies could have told Ibn al-

Qayyim that the negation of a quality does not entail the affirmation of its contrary, an

example of the "Black and White Fallacy" (for example, "If it is not white, it is therefore

black," "If you are not my friend, you must be my enemy," and so on), though what he

attempts to prove here does show the kind of anthropomorphism he is trying to promote.

Forged chains of hadith transmission in Ibn al-QayyimsIjtima al-juyush al-Islamiyya are thesubject of a forthcoming work by a Jordanian scholar, In Sha Allah, which those interested


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may read.

For all of these reasons, the utmost care must be used in ascribing tenets of faith to Ahmad

ibn Hanbal or other Imams, especially when made by anthropomorphists whose concern is to

create credibility for the ideas we are talking about. Many would-be revivers of these ideas

today have been misled by their uncritical acceptance of the statements and chains of

ascription found in the books of Ibn Taymiya and Ibn al-Qayyim, which they cite in print andrely on, and from whence they get the idea that these were the positions of the early Muslims

and prophetic Companions orSahaba.

Umbrage has unfortunately been taken at the biographies I appended to my translation

Reliance of the Travellerabout Ibn Taymiya and Ibn al-Qayyim, which detail the gulf between

Ibn Taymiyas innovations and the aqida of the early Muslims, though anyone interested can

read about it in any number of other books, one of the best of which has been published in

Cairo in 1970 by Dar al-Nahda al-Arabiyya, and is called Ibn Taymiya laysa salafiyyan [Ibn

Taymiya is not an early Muslim], by the Azhar professor of Islamic faith (aqida) Mansur

Muhammad Uways, which focuses primarily on tenets of belief. Another was written by a

scholar who lived shortly after Ibn al-Qayyim in the same city, Taqi al-Din Abu Bakr al-Hisni, author of the famous Shafii fiqh manual Kifaya al-akhyar [The sufficiency of the

pious], whose book on Ibn Taymiya is called Daf shubah man shabbaha wa tamarrada wa

nasaba dhalika ila al-sayyid al-jalil al-Imam Ahmad[Rebuttal of the insinuations of him who

makes anthropomorphisms and rebels, and ascribes that to the noble master Imam Ahmad],

published in Cairo in 1931 by Dar Ihya al-Kutub al-Arabiyya. Whoever reads these and

similar works with an open mind cannot fail to notice the hoax that has been perpetrated by

moneyed quarters in our times, of equating the tenets of a small band of anthropomorphists

to the Islamic belief (aqida) of Imam Ahmad and other scholars of the early Muslims (al-

salaf).

The real (aqida) of Imam Ahmad was very simple, and consisted, mainly oftafwid, that is, to

consign to Allah the meaning of the mutashabihat or unapparent meanings of the Qur'an

and hadith, accepting their words as they have come without saying or claiming to know how

they are meant. His position is close to that of a number of other early scholars, who would

not even countenance changing the Qur'anic order of the words or substituting words

imagined to be synonyms. For them, the verse in Sura Taha,

# #

"The All-merciful is established (istawa) upon the Throne" (Qur'an 20:5)

does not enable one to say that "Allah is established upon Throne," or that "The All-

merciful is upon the Throne" or anything else besides "The All-merciful is established

(istawa) upon the Throne." Full stop. Their position is exemplified by Sufyan ibn Uyayna,

who died 98 years after the Hijra, and who said, "The interpretation (tafsir) of everything

with which Allah has described Himself in His book is to recite it and remain silent about it."

It also resembles the position of Imam Shafii, who simply said: "I believe in what has come

from Allah as it was intended by Allah, and I believe in what has come from the Messenger of

Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace) as it was intended by the Messenger of Allah."

It should be appreciated how far this school oftafwidor consigning the knowledge of what ismeant to Allah is from understanding the mutashabihat or unapparent in meaning,

scriptural expressions about Allah as though they were meant literally (ala al-dhahir). The


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Hanbali Imam Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Khallal, who died in Hijra year 311, and who took

his fiqh from Imam Ahmads students, relates in his book al-Sunna through his chain of

narrators from Hanbal ibn Ishaq al-Shaybani, the son of the brother of Ahmad ibn Hanbals

father, that

Imam Ahmad was asked about the hadiths mentioning "Allahs descending," "seeing Allah,"

and "placing His foot on hell"; and the like, and Ahmad replied: "We believe in them andconsider them true, without how and without meaning(bi la kayfa wa la mana)."

And he said, when they asked him about Allahs istiwa[translated above as established]: "He

is established upon the Throne (istawa ala al-Arsh) however He wills and as He wills,

without any limit or any description that be made by any describer (Daf shubah al-tashbih,

28).

This demonstrates how far Imam Ahmad was from anthropomorphism, though a third

example is even more explicit. The Imam and hadith master (hafiz) al-Bayhaqi relates in his

Manaqib al-Imam Ahmad[The memorable actions of Imam Ahmad], through his chain of

narrators that:

Ahmad condemned those who said Allah was a "body," saying, "The names of things are

taken from the Sharia and the Arabic language. The languages possessors have used this

word [body] for something that has height, breadth, thickness, construction, form, and

composition, while Allah Most High is beyond all of that, and may not be termed a "body"

because of being beyond any meaning of embodiedness. This has not been conveyed by the

Sharia, and so is rebutted" (al-Barahin al-satia, 164).

These examples provide an accurate idea of Ahmads Aqida, as conveyed to us by the hadith

masters (huffaz) of the Umma, who have distinguished the true reports from the spuriousattributions of the anthropomorphists opinions to their Imam, both early and late. But it is

perhaps even more instructive, in view of the recrudescence of these ideas today, to look at an

earlier work against Hanbali anthropomorphists about this bida, for the light this literature

sheds upon the science of textual interpretation, and I will conclude my talk tonight to it.

As you may know, the true architect of the Hanbali madhhab was not actually Imam Ahmad,

who did not like to see any of his positions written down, but rather these were conveyed

orally by various students at different times, one reason there are often a number of different

narratives from him on legal questions. It is probably no exaggeration to say that the real

founder of the Hanbali madhhab was the Imam and hadith master (hafiz) Abd al-Rahman

ibn al-Jawzi, who died 597 years after the Hijra, and who recorded all the narratives fromImam Ahmad, distinguished the well-authenticated from the poorly-authenticated, and

organized them into a coherent body offiqh jurisprudence.

Ibn al-Jawziwho is not to be confused with Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyatook the question

of people associating anthropomorphism with Hanbalism so seriously that he wrote a book,

Daf shubah al-tashbih bi akaff al-tanzih [Rebuttal of the insinuations of anthropomorphism

at the hands of transcendence], refuting this heresy and exonerating his Imam of any

association with it.

One of the most significant points he makes in this work is the principle that al-Idafatu la

tufidu al-sifa, meaning that an ascriptive construction, called in Arabic an idafa, the x of they or in other words, ys x does not establish that x is an attribute of y. This is important

because the anthropomorphists of his day, as well as Ibn Taymiyya in the seventh century


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after the Hijra, used many ascriptive constructions (idafa) that appear in hadiths and

Qur'anic verses as proof that Allah had "attributes" that bolstered their conceptions of Him.

To clarify with examples, you are doubtless familiar with the Qur'anic verse in Surat al-Fath

of the Sahaba swearing a fealty pact (baya) to the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him

peace), that says,

"Allahs hand is above their hands" (Qur'an 48:10).

Here, with the words yad Allahithe hand of Allah, Ibn al-Jawzis principle means that we

are not entitled to affirm, on the basis of the Arabic wording alone, that "Allah has a hand"

as an attribute (sifa) of His entity. It could be that this Arabic expression is simply meant to

emphasize the tremendousness of the offense ofbreakingthis pact, as some scholars state, for

the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) placed his hand on top of the Sahabas, and

the wording could be a figure of speech emphasizing Allahs backing of this action; andclassical Arabic abounds in such figures of speech.

The Prophet himself (Allah bless him and give him peace) used handas a figure of speech in

the rigorously authenticated (sahih) hadith,Al-Muslimu man salima l-Muslimuna min lisanihi

wa yadih "The Muslim is he who the Muslims are safe from his tongue and his hand," where

handmeans anything within his powerto do to them, whether with his hand, his foot, or by

any other means. As Imam al-Ghazali says of the word hand:

One should realize that handmay mean two different things. The first is the primary lexical

sense; namely, the bodily member composed of flesh, bone, and nervous tissue. Now, flesh,

bone, and nervous tissue make up a specific body with specific attributes; meaning, by body,something of an amount (with height, width, depth) that prevents anything else from

occupying wherever it is, until it is moved from that place.

Or [secondly] the word may be used figuratively, in another sense with no relation to that of a

body at all: as when one says, "The city is in the leaders hands," the meaning of which is well

understood, even if the leaders hands are missing, for example (al-Ghazali, Iljam al-awam

an ilm al-kalam [Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi, 1406/1985], 55).

We have already mentioned the school of thought of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Shafii, and other

early Muslims of understanding the mutashabihat or unapparent in meaning, scriptural

expressions about Allah by tafwid or consigning the knowledge of what is meant to Allah.

But secondly, we have seen from the example of the hand, that because of the figurative

richness the Arabic language, and also to protect against the danger of anthropomorphism,

many Muslim scholars were able to explain certain of the mutashabihat or unapparent in

meaning expressions in Qur'anic verses and hadiths by tawil, or figuratively.

This naturally drew the criticism of neo-Hanbalis, at their forefront Ibn Taymiya and Ibn al-

Qayyim, as it still does of todays "reformers" of Islam, who echo these twos arguments that

figurative interpretation (tawil) was a reprehensible departure (bida) by Asharis and

others from the way of the early Muslims (salaf); and who call for a "return to the sunna,"

that is, to anthropomorphic literalism. Now, the obvious question in the face of such"reforms" is whether literalism is really identical with pristine Islamic faith (aqida). Or

rather did figurative interpretation (tawil) exist among the salaf? We will answer this


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question with actual examples ofmutashabihat or unapparent in meaning Qur'anic verses

and hadiths, and examine how the earliest scholars interpreted them:

1. Forgetting. We have mentioned above the Qur'anic verse,

# ( # "Today We forget you as you have forgotten this day of yours" (Qur'an 45:34),

which the early Muslims used to interpret figuratively, as reported by a scholar who was

himself an early Muslim (salafi) and indeed, the sheikh of the early Muslims in Qur'anic

exegesis, the hadith master (hafiz) Ibn Jarir al-Tabari who died 310 years after the Hijra, and

who explains the above verse as meaning: "This day, Resurrection Day, We shall forget

them, so as to say, We shall abandon them to their punishment." Now, this is precisely tawil,

or interpretation in other than the verses ostensive sense. Al-Tabari ascribes this

interpretation, through his chains of transmission, to the Companion (Sahabi) Ibn Abbas

(Allah be well pleased with him) as well as to Mujahid, Ibn Abbass main student inQur'anic exegesis (Jami al-bayan, 8.202).

2.Hands. In the verse,

#


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Zayd, whose hadiths are hasan or well authenticated.

4. Laughter. Of the hadith related in Sahih al-Bukharifrom Abu Hurayra that the Prophet

(Allah bless him and give him peace) said,

Allah Most High laughs about two men, one of whom kills the other, but both of whom enter

paradise: the one fights in the path of Allah and is killed, and afterwards Allah forgives thekiller, and then he fights in the path of Allah and is martyred,

the hadith master al-Bayhaqi records that the scribe of Bukhari [Muhammad ibn Yusuf] al-

Farabri related that Imam al-Bukhari said, "The meaning of laughter in it is mercy" (Kitab

al-asma wa al-sifat, 298).

5. Coming. The hadith master (hafiz) Ibn Kathir reports that Imam al-Bayhaqi related from

al-Hakim from Abu Amr ibn al-Sammak, from Hanbal, the son of the brother of Ahmad ibn

Hanbals father, that Ahmad ibn Hanbal figuratively interpreted the word of Allah Most

High,

C (

"And your Lord shall come . . ." (Qur'an 89:22),

as meaning "His recompense (thawab) shall come."

Al-Bayhaqi said, "This chain of narrators has absolutely nothing wrong in it" (al-Bidaya wa

al-nihaya,10.342). In other words, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, like the Companions (Sahaba) and

other early Muslims mentioned above, sometimes also gave figurative interpretations (tawil)

to scriptural expressions that might otherwise have been misinterpretedanthropomorphically. This was also the way of Abul Hasan al-Ashari, founder of the Ashari

school of Islamic belief, who had two views about the mutashabihat, the first being tafwid, or

consigning the knowledge of what is meant to Allah, and the second being tawil or

figurative interpretation when needed to avoid the suggestion of the anthropomorphism

that is explicitly rejected by the Qur'an.

In light of the examples quoted above about such words about Allah as forgetting, hands,

shin, laughter, coming, and so forth, it is plain that Muslims scholars of Aqida, whether

of the Ashari school or any other, did not originate tawil or figurative interpretation, but

rather it had been with Muslims from the beginning, because that was the nature of the

Arabic language. And if the above figures are not the salafor early Muslims, who are? Ibn

Taymiya and Ibn al-Qayyim, who died more than seven centuries after the Hijra?

In view of the foregoing examples of figurative interpretation by early Muslims, we have to

ask, Whose early Islam would todays reformers of Aqida have us return to? Imam Abu

Hanifa first noted, "Two depraved opinions have reached us from East, those of Jahm [ibn

Safwan], the nullifier of the divine attributes, and those of Muqatil [ibn Sulayman al-Balkhi,

the likener of Allah to His creation" (Siyar alam al-nubala, 7.202).

These are not an either-or for Muslims. Jahms brand of Mutazilism has been dead for over

a thousand years, while anthropomorphic literalism is a heresy that in previous centuries wasconfined to a handful of sects like the Hanbalis addressed by Imam Ibn al-Jawzi in his Daf

shubah al-tashbih , or like the forgers ofKitab al-sunna who ascribed it to Imam Ahmads son


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Abdullah, or like the Karramiyya, an early sect who believed Allah to be a corporeal entity

"sitting in person on His Throne."

As for Islamic orthodoxy, the Imam of Ahl al-Sunna in tenets of faith, Abd al-Qahir al-

Baghdadi says in his aqida manual Usul al-din [The fundamentals of the religion]:

Anyone who considers his Lord to resemble the form of a person [. . . ] is only worshipping aperson like himself. As for the permissibility of eating the meat he slaughters or of marriage

with him, his ruling is that of an idol-worshipper.

. . . Regarding the anthropomorphists of Khurasan, of the Karramiyya, it is obligatory to

consider them unbelievers because they affirm that Allah has a physical limit and boundary

from underneath, from whence He is contact with His Throne (al-Baghdadi, Usul al-din

[Istanbul: Matbaa al-Dawla, 1346/1929], 337).

In previous Islamic centuries, someone who worshipped a god who sits, moves about, and so

forth, was considered to be in serious trouble in his faith (aqida). Our question should be: If

anthropomorphic literalism were an acceptable Islamic school of thought, why was it counted

among heresies and rejected for the first seven centuries of Islam that preceded Ibn Taymiya

and his student Ibn al-Qayyim, and condemned by the scholars of Ahl al-Sunna thereafter?

To summarize everything I have said tonight, we have seen three ways of understanding the

mutashabihat, or unapparent in meaning verses and hadiths: tafwid, consigning the

knowledge of what is meant to Allah, tawil, figurative interpretation within the parameters

of classical Arabic usage, and lastly tashbih, or anthropomorphic literalism.

We saw that the way of tafwidor consigning the knowledge of what is meant to Allah, was

the way of Shafii, Ahmad, and many of the early Muslims. A second interpretive possibility,the way of tawil, or figurative interpretation, was also done by the Companions (Sahaba)

and many other early Muslims as reported above. In classical scholarship, both have been

considered Islamic, and both seem needed, though tafwidis superior where it does not lead to

confusion about Allahs transcendence beyond the attributes of created things, in accordance

with the Qur'anic verse,

"There is nothing whatsoever like unto Him" (Qur'an 42:11).

As for anthropomorphism, it is clear from this verse and from the entire history of the

Umma, that it is not an Islamic school of thought, and never has been. In all times and places,

Islam has invited non-Muslims to faith in the Incomparable Reality called Allah; not making

man a god, and not making God a man.

Is Allah in the Sky?

Chapter - 3


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No. The literal sense of being in the sky would mean that Allah is actually in one of His

creatures, for the sky is something created. It is not permissible to believe that Allah indwells

or occupies (in Arabic, hulul) any of His creatures, as the Christians believe about Jesus, orthe Hindus about their avatars.

What is obligatory for a human being to know is that Allah is ghaniyy or absolutely free

from need of anything He has created. He explicitly says in surat al-Ankabut of the Quran,

Verily Allah is absolutely free of need of anything in the worlds (Quran 29:6). Allah

mentions this attribute ofghina or freedom of need for anything whatsoever in some

seventeen verses in the Quran. It is a central point of Islamic aqida or faith, and is the

reason why it is impossible that Allah could be Jesus (upon whom be peace) or be anyone else

with a body and form: because bodies need space and time, while Allah has absolutely no need

for anything. This is the aqida of the Quran, and Muslim scholars have kept it in view in

understanding other Quranic verses or hadiths.

Muslims lift their hands toward the sky when they make supplications (dua) to Allah

because the sky is the qibla for dua, not that Allah occupies that particular directionjust as

the Kaaba is the qibla of the prayer (salat), without Muslims believing that Allah is in that

direction. Rather, Allah in His wisdom has made the qibla a sign (ayah) of Muslim unity, just

as He has made the sky the sign of His exaltedness and His infinitude, meanings which come

to the heart of every believer merely by facing the sky and supplicating Allah.

It was part of the divine wisdom to incorporate these meanings into the prophetic sunna to

uplift the hearts of the people who first heard them, and to direct them to the exaltedness and

infinitude of Allah through the greatest and most palpable physical sign of them: the visible

sky that Allah had raised above them. Many of them, especially when newly from the

Jahiliyya or pre-Islamic Period of Ignorance, were extremely close to physical, perceptible

realities and had little conception of anything besidesas is attested to by their idols, which

were images set up on the ground.

Umar ibn al-Khattab mentions, for example, that in the Jahiliyya, they might make their

idols out of dates, and if they later grew hungry, they would simply eat them. The language of

the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace) in conveying the exaltedness of

Allah Most High to such people was of course in terms they could understand without

difficulty, and used the imagery of the sky above them. Imam al-Qurtubi, the famousQuranic exegete of the seventh/thirteenth century, says:

The hadiths on this subject are numerous, rigorously authenticated (sahih), and widely

known, and indicate the exaltedness of Allah, being undeniable by anyone except an atheist or

obstinate ignoramus. Their meaning is to dignify Allah and exalt Him above all that is base

and low, to characterize Him by exaltedness and greatness, not by being in places, particular

directions, or within limits, for these are the qualities of physical bodies (al-Jami li ahkam

al-Quran. 20 vols. Cairo 1387/1967. Reprint (20 vols in 10). Beirut: Dar Ihya al-Turath

al-Arabi, n.d.,18.216).

In this connection, a hadith has been related by Malik in hisMuwattaand by Muslim in hisSahih, that Muawiya ibn al-Hakam came to the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him

peace) and told him, I am very newly from the Jahiliyya, and now Allah has brought Islam,


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and he proceeded to ask about various Jahiliyya practices, until at last he said that he had

slapped his slave girl, and asked if he should free her, as was obligatory if she was a believer.

The Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) requested that she be brought, and then

asked her, Where is Allah? and she said, In the sky (Fi al-sama); whereupon he asked

her, Who am I? and she said, You are the Messenger of Allah; at which he said, Free

her, for she is a believer (Sahih Muslim, 5 vols. Cairo 1376/1956. Reprint. Beirut: Dar al-

Fikr, 1403/1983, 1.382: 538). Imam Nawawi says of this hadith:

This is one of the hadiths of the attributes, about which scholars have two positions. The

first is to have faith in it without discussing its meaning, while believing of Allah Most High

that there is nothing whatsoever like unto Him (Quran 42:11), and that He is exalted

above having any of the attributes of His creatures.

The second is to figuratively explain it in a fitting way, scholars who hold this position

adducing that the point of the hadith was to test the slave girl: Was she a monotheist, who

affirmed that the Creator, the Disposer, the Doer, is Allah alone and that He is the one called

upon when a person making supplication (dua) faces the skyjust as those performing the

prayer (salat) face the Kaaba, since the sky is the qibla of those who supplicate, as the Kaabais the qibla of those who perform the prayeror was she a worshipper of the idols which they

placed in front of themselves? So when she said, In the sky, it was plain that she was not an

idol worshipper (Sahih Muslim bi Sharh al-Nawawi. 18 vols. Cairo 1349/1930. Reprint (18

vols. in 9). Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1401/1981, 5.24).

It is noteworthy that Imam Nawawi does not mention understanding the hadith literally as a

possible scholarly position at all. This occasions surprise today among some Muslims, who

imagine that what is at stake is the principle of accepting a single rigorously authenticated

(sahih) hadith as evidence in Islamic faith (aqida), for this hadith is such a single hadith, of

those termed in Arabic ahad, or conveyed by a single chain of transmission, as opposed to

being mutawatiror conveyed by so many chains of transmission that it is impossible it could

have been forged.

Yet this is not what is at stake, because hadiths of its type are only considered acceptable as

evidence by traditional scholars of Islamic aqida if one condition can be met: that the tenet

of faith mentioned in the hadith issalimun min al-muarada or free of conflicting evidence.

This condition is not met by this particular hadith for a number of reasons.

First, the story described in the hadith has come to us in a number of other well-

authenticated versions that vary a great deal from the Where is Allah?In the sky version.

One of these is related by Ibn Hibban in his Sahih with a well-authenticated (hasan) chain oftransmission, in which the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) asked the slave girl,

Who is your Lord? and she said, Allah; whereupon he asked her, Who am I? and she

said, You are the Messenger of Allah; at which he said, Free her, for she is a believer (al-

Ihsan fi taqrib Sahih Ibn Hibban, 18 vols. Beirut: Muassasa al-Risala, 1408/1988, 1.419: 189).

In another version, related by Abd al-Razzaq with a rigorously authenticated (sahih) chain

of transmission, the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said to her, Do you testify

that there is no god but Allah? and she said yes. He said, Do you testify that I am the

Messenger of Allah? and she said yes. He said, Do you believe in resurrection after death?

and she said yes. He said, Free her (al-Musannaf, 11 vols. Beirut: al-Majlis al-Ilmi,

1390/1970, 9.175: 16814).

In other versions, the slave girl cannot speak, but merely points to the sky in answer. Ibn


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Hajar al-Asqalani has said of the various versions of this hadith, There is great

contradiction in the wording (Talkhis al-habir, 4 vols. in 2. Cairo: Maktaba al-Kulliyat al-

Azhariyya, 1399/1979, 3.250). When a hadith has numerous conflicting versions, there is a

strong possibility that it has been related merely in terms of what one or more narrators

understood (riwaya bi al-mana), and hence one of the versions is not adequate to establish a

point of aqida.

Second, this latter consideration is especially applicable to the point in question because the

Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) explicitly detailed the pillars of Islamic faith

(iman) in a hadith related in SahihMuslim when he answered the questions of the angel

Gabriel, saying, True faith (iman) is to believe in Allah, His angels, His Books, His

messengers, the Last Day, and to believe destiny (qadr), its good and evil (Sahih Muslim,

1.37: 8)and he did not mention anything about Allah being in the sky. If it had been the

decisive test of a Muslims belief or unbelief (as in the in the sky hadith seems to imply), it

would have been obligatory for the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) to mention

it in this hadith, the whole point of which is to say precisely what iman is.

Third, if one takes the hadith as meaning that Allah is literally in the sky, it conflicts withother equally sahih hadiths that have presumably equal right to be taken literallysuch as

the hadith qudsirelated by al-Hakim that Allah Most High says, I am with My servant when

he makes remembrance of Me and his lips move with Me (al-Mustadrak ala al-Sahihayn. 4

vols. Hyderabad, 1334/1916. Reprint (with index vol. 5). Beirut: Dar al-Marifa, n.d., 1.496), a

hadith that al-Hakim said was rigorously authenticated (sahih), which al-Dhahabi confirmed.

Or such as the hadith related by al-Nasai, Abu Dawud, and Muslim that the closest a

servant is to his Lord is while prostrating (Sahih Muslim, 1.350: 482)whereas if Allah were

literally in the sky, the closest one would be to Him would be while standing upright. Or

such as the hadith related by al-Bukhari in his Sahih, in which the Prophet (Allah bless him

and give him peace) forbade spitting during prayer ahead of one, because when a person

prays, his Lord is in front of him (Sahih al-Bukhari, 1.112: 406). Finally, in the hadiths of

the Miraj or Nocturnal Ascent, the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) was

shown all of the seven heavens (samawat) by Gabriel, and Allah was not mentioned as

being in any of them.

Fourth, the literal interpretation of Allah being in the sky contradicts two fundamentals of

Islamic aqida established by the Quran. The first of these is Allahs attribute of mukhalafa

li al-hawadith or not resembling created things in any way, as Allah says in surat al-Shura,

There is nothing whatsoever like unto Him (Quran 42:11), whereas if He were literally in

the sky, there would be innumerable things like unto Him in such respects as havingaltitude, position, direction, and so forth. The second fundamental that it contradicts, as

mentioned above, is Allahs attribute ofghina or being absolutely free of need for anything

created that He affirms in numerous verses in the Quran. It is impossible that Allah could

be a corporeal entity because bodies need space and time, while Allah has absolutely no need

for anything.

Fifth, the literalist interpretation of in the sky entails that the sky encompasses Allah on all

sides, such that He would be smaller than it, and it would thus be greater than Allah, which is

patently false.

For these reasons and others, Islamic scholars have viewed it obligatory to figurativelyinterpret the above hadith and

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