Ash’arism
from 920
God creates every event directly at every instant, causes in nature are habits rather than powers, and reason serves revelation rather than judging it.
- Active
- from 920
- Where
- Baghdad, then across the Sunni world
- Also
- الأشعرية al-Ashʿariyya
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Islamic
The claim
Occasionalism. Fire does not burn cotton; God creates the burning when the fire and cotton are brought together. What we call causation is a customary sequence God maintains and could suspend.
What it held
Al-Ash'ari was a Mu'tazilite for forty years and then, on his account, dreamt his way out. The school he founded uses their dialectical method against their conclusions, which is what makes it so effective.
The central move is denying secondary causation. If God is omnipotent, nothing else can have genuine causal power, so what appears to be fire burning cotton is God creating burning on the occasion of their contact. Al-Ghazali makes the argument famous: we observe succession, never necessity, and no amount of observing one after the other establishes that it must be so.
That leaves human responsibility looking impossible, and the answer is kasb — acquisition. God creates the act; the agent acquires it, and is answerable for it. Critics from the Mu'tazila onward have said this is a word rather than a solution, and the school has never entirely dispelled the charge.
On God's attributes the position is bila kayfa — without asking how. God has a hand, as revelation says; we do not enquire in what manner, and we do not reduce it to metaphor. It is a deliberate refusal of both literalism and rationalisation.
How it argued
Kalam turned against the rationalists: the same dialectical apparatus, deployed to show the limits of what reason can establish about God.
What it was arguing against
The Mu'tazila on justice and the created Quran, and falsafa on the eternity of the world, God's knowledge of particulars and bodily resurrection — the three points on which al-Ghazali declared the philosophers unbelievers.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether kasb preserves responsibility or merely names the problem. How far the occasionalist account can go before nature becomes unintelligible.
Common misconceptions
That al-Ghazali killed philosophy in Islam. Philosophy continued vigorously in the Persian east for centuries after him, and he himself used logic freely and wrote a manual of it. The claim is a nineteenth-century European invention that has proved very hard to dislodge.
How it began
Al-Ash'ari's break with the Mu'tazila around 912, offering a middle path between their rationalism and the traditionists' refusal to argue at all.
What became of it
Became the dominant Sunni theology alongside Maturidism and remains so.
Lasting influence
Hume's analysis of causation reaches the same conclusion about necessity by a different route, and the parallel with al-Ghazali is close enough to have generated a literature. Occasionalism reappears in Malebranche.
Why it still matters
The problem of how divine omnipotence and human agency coexist is not confined to Islam, and this is the most rigorously worked-out attempt at an answer.
Put another way
A film that appears continuous and is in fact being made frame by frame.
Where to start
The Incoherence, Discussion 17, on causation. It is the philosophical heart of the school.
The surprising bit
Al-Ghazali, having demolished the philosophers, then had a breakdown, abandoned the most prestigious teaching post in the Islamic world, and spent a decade as a wandering Sufi before returning to write his greatest book.
In their own words
The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary.
Without asking how.
Connections
- Answers
- Mu’tazila
The verdict
The theology that won, and whose victory has been blamed ever since for things it did not do.