The Islamic world · c. 874–936
Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī
Muʿtazili theologian who broke with his school around 912
God’s power and will are unlimited: God creates every act, humans only “acquire” them, and good and evil are what God commands and forbids. He used rational argument to defend traditional beliefs.
Life and thought
Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī was born in Basra around 874 and studied under al-Jubbāʾī, the leading Muʿtazili theologian of the day. By the traditional account, around his fortieth year, after dreams of the Prophet, he publicly renounced Muʿtazili doctrine. He spent the rest of his life defending the creed of the traditionalists with the rational methods he had learned from his opponents, and died in Baghdad around 936.
The Muʿtazila held that God must act justly by standards reason can grasp, and that humans create their own acts, or reward and punishment would be unfair. Al-Ashʿarī replied that this limits God. God creates everything, including each human act; the human being “acquires” the act, which is enough for responsibility. Good and evil are what God commands and forbids, not standards above God. The Qur’an is God’s uncreated speech, and its descriptions of God are to be accepted “without asking how”. His school, Ashʿarism, became one of the two main theologies of Sunni Islam; al-Ghazālī was its most famous later member.
Works
Shaped
c. 1058–1111Al-GhazālīAshʿarite theologian who left his Baghdad chair for SufismCriticised by
1138–1204Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon)The Guide criticises the mutakallimūn’s atomism and occasionalism as bending nature to fit doctrine.Meanwhile, in other traditions
882–942Saadia GaonEgyptian-born head of the Sura academy in BabyloniaOn the record
Al-Ashʿarī wrote the Maqālāt al-Islāmiyyīn about 920 and al-Ibāna about 925.
Neither book can be dated. The Maqālāt was probably begun in his Muʿtazili years, on the model of al-Balkhī’s book of the same title, and revised later, though al-Dhahabī placed it in his last years. Scholars disagree on whether al-Ibāna came right after his break with the Muʿtazila (c. 912–13) or near the end of his life, and its printed text is suspected of later interpolation. The atlas now gives no year for either.
Sources: Wikipedia, “Maqalat al-Islamiyyin” (citing Leaman, Netton and al-Dhahabī)
The atlas gives al-Ashʿarī, Saadia and Rumi no teacher ties.
Their documented teachers are real but fall outside the atlas: al-Ashʿarī studied under the Muʿtazili master al-Jubbāʾī and, by the traditional account, broke with him around his fortieth year; Rumi’s poetry and teaching were transformed by the wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz, to whom the Dīwān is dedicated. The missing ties are a limit of the selection, not a claim that they had no teachers.
Sources: Wikipedia, “Abu al-Hasan al-Ashʿari” · Wikipedia, “Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi”