Mu’tazila

The claim

God is just, and justice is not whatever God happens to do. Since a just God cannot punish what he compelled, human acts must be genuinely the agent's own.

What it held

The Mu'tazila called themselves the people of unity and justice, and both words are doing technical work.

Unity means God has no attributes distinct from his essence. Saying God has knowledge, as though knowledge were a thing alongside him, introduces multiplicity into what must be simple — and it is this that generates their most famous position, that the Quran is created. If it were eternal, there would be an eternal thing beside God.

Justice means that good and evil are real properties, knowable by reason, and that God is bound by them. This inverts divine command theory: God commands the good because it is good, not the reverse. And it forces the free-will conclusion, since punishing an act God himself produced would be manifestly unjust.

The school also faced the problem of evil more squarely than most, arguing that God must do what is optimal for his creatures — a position their opponents found presumptuous, since it makes God's options constrained.

They held state power under the caliph al-Ma'mun and used it: the mihna, an inquisition enforcing the created-Quran doctrine, imprisoned Ibn Hanbal for refusing to assent. It is the one episode that most damaged them.

How it argued

Kalam — dialectical theology, arguing from rational premises to doctrinal conclusions, with atomistic physics deployed to explain how God acts on the world.

What it was arguing against

Determinists who made human acts God's own, anthropomorphists who read God's hand literally, and the traditionists who held that reason has no authority over revelation.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether God is obliged to do what is best, which the Basra and Baghdad branches took differently. What exactly a grave sinner is — the question the school was born from, and it answered that he occupies an intermediate position, neither believer nor unbeliever.

Common misconceptions

That they were rationalists in the modern secular sense. Every one was a committed Muslim theologian arguing about revelation. And they were not the tolerant party by temperament — the mihna was theirs.

How it began

Traditionally, Wasil ibn Ata withdrawing from al-Hasan al-Basri's circle over the status of the grave sinner. The name means those who withdraw.

What became of it

Lost state backing when al-Mutawakkil reversed the policy in 848, and were gradually displaced by Ash'arism. Their texts were largely lost until manuscripts surfaced in Yemen in the twentieth century.

Lasting influence

Jewish kalam took their arguments almost entire — Saadia Gaon is a Mu'tazilite in method. Twelver Shi'i theology retains much of the position. Modern Islamic reformism reaches back to them deliberately.

Why it still matters

The question of whether the good is independent of divine will is central to philosophy of religion, and this is its sharpest premodern statement.

Put another way

A scale that God himself is standing on rather than holding.

Where to start

A modern survey. The primary texts are largely untranslated and the school is known mostly through its opponents.

The surprising bit

Their doctrine was enforced by an inquisition. The school most associated with reason in Islam is also the only one that imprisoned people for disagreeing with it about a metaphysical point.

In their own words

Connections

Opposed by

Ash’arism, Maturidism

Influenced

Islamic Modernism, Philonism

The verdict

The most rationalist theology Islam produced, undone partly by argument and partly by having once held power.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy