The History of Philosophy in Islam

Besides these considerations which are partly of an a priori character, there are also detached notices which indicate that some of the earliest Muslims, who taught the Freedom of the Will, had Christian teachers.

A number of purely philosophic elements from the Gnostic systems, and afterwards from the translation-literature, associated themselves with the Hellenistic-Christian influences.

2. An assertion, expressed in logical or dialectic fashion, whether verbal or written, was called by the Arabs,—generally, but more particularly in religious teaching—a Kalam (λόγος), and those who advanced such assertions were called Mutakallimun. The name was transferred from the individual assertion to the entire system, and it covered also the introductory, elementary observations on Method,—and so on. Our best designation for the science of the Kalam is ‘Theological Dialectics’ or simply ‘Dialectics’; and in what follows we may translate Mutakallimun by ‘Dialecticians’.

The name Mutakallimun, which was at first common to all the Dialecticians, was in later times applied specially to the Antimutazilite and Orthodox theologians. In the latter case it might be well, following the sense, to render the term by Dogmatists or Schoolmen. In fact while the first dialecticians had the Dogma still to form, those who came later had only to expound and establish it.

The introduction of Dialectics into Islam was a violent innovation, and it was vehemently denounced by the party of the Tradition. Whatever went beyond the regular ethical teaching was heresy to them, for faith should be obedience, and not,—as was maintained by the Murdjites and Mutazilites—, knowledge. By the latter it was laid down without reserve that speculation was one of the duties of believers. Even to this demand the times became reconciled, for according to tradition the Prophet had said already: ‘The first thing which God created was Knowledge or Reason’.

3. Very numerous are the various opinions which found utterance in the days even of the Omayyads, but especially in those of the early Abbasids. The farther they diverged from one another, the more difficult it was for the men of the Tradition to come to an understanding with them; but gradually certain compact doctrinal collections stood out distinctly, of which the rationalist system of the Mutazilites, the successors of the Qadarites, was most widely extended, particularly among Shiʻites. From Caliph Mamun’s time down to Mutawakkil’s, it even received State recognition; and the Mutazilites, who had been in earlier days oppressed and persecuted by the temporal power, now became Inquisitors of the Faith themselves, with whom the sword supplied the place of argument. About the same time, however, their opponents the Traditionalists commenced to build up a system of belief. Upon the whole there was no lack of intermediary forms between the naive Faith of the multitude and the Gnosis of the dialecticians. In contrast to the spiritualistic stamp of Mutazilitism these intermediary forms took an anthropomorphic character with regard to the doctrine of the Deity, and a materialistic character with regard to the theory of man and the universe (Anthropology and Cosmology). The soul, for example, was conceived of by them as corporeal, or as an accident of the body, and the Divine Essence was imagined as a human body. The religious teaching and art of the Muslims were greatly averse to the symbolical God-Father of the Christians, but there was an abundance of absurd speculations about the form of Allah. Some went so far as to ascribe to him all the bodily members together, with the exception of the beard and other privileges of oriental manhood.

It is impossible to discuss in detail all the Dialectic sects, which often made their first appearance in the form of political parties. From the standpoint of the history of Philosophy it is enough to give here the chief doctrines of the Mutazilites, in so far as they can lay claim to general interest.

4. The first question, then, concerned man’s conduct and destiny. The forerunners of the Mutazilites, who were called Qadarites, taught the Freedom of the human Will; and the Mutazilites, even in later times, when their speculations were directed more to theologico-metaphysical problems, were first and foremost pointed to as the supporters of the doctrine of Divine Righteousness,—which gives rise to no evil, and rewards or punishes man according to his deserts—, and, in the second place, as the confessors, or avowed supporters of the Unity of God, i.e. the absence of properties from his Essence considered per se [or the predicateless character of the essential nature of God]. The systematic statement of their doctrines must have been influenced by the Logicians (v. IV, 2 § 1); for even in the first half of the 10th century, the Mutazilite system began with the confession of the Unity of God, while the doctrine of God’s Righteousness, announced as it is in all his works, is relegated to the second place.

The responsibility of man, as well as the holiness of God, who is incapable of directly causing man’s sinful actions, had to be saved by asserting the freedom of the Will. Man must therefore be lord of his actions; but he is lord of these only, for few entertained any doubt that the energy which confers ability to act at all, and the power of doing either a good or a bad action come to man from God. Hence the numerous subtle discussions,—amalgamated with a criticism of the philosophic conception of Time—on the question whether the power, which God creates in man, is bestowed previous to the action, or coincidentally and simultaneously therewith: For, did the power precede the act, then it would either have to last up to the time of the act, which would belie its accidental character (cf. II, 3 § 12), or have ceased to exist before the act,—in which case it might have been dispensed with altogether.

From human conduct speculation passed on to consider the operations of nature. Instead of God and man, the antithesis in this case is God and nature. The productive and generative powers of nature were recognized as means or proximate causes; and some endeavoured to investigate them. In their opinion, however, nature herself, like all the world, was a work of God, a creature of his wisdom: And just as the omnipotence of God was limited in the moral kingdom by his holiness or righteousness,—so in the natural world it was limited by his wisdom. Even the presence of evil and mischief in the world was accounted for by the wisdom of God, who sends everything for the best. A production or object of Divine activity, evil is not. “God may be able, indeed,”—so an earlier generation had maintained—“to act wickedly and unreasonably, but he would not do it.” The later Mutazilites taught, on the other hand, that God has no power at all to do anything which is in this way repugnant to his nature. Their opponents, who regarded God’s unlimited might and unfathomable will as directly operative in all doing and effecting were indignant at this teaching, and compared its propounders to the dualistic Magians. Consistent Monism was on the side of these opponents, who did not care to turn man and nature into creators—next to and under God—of their acts or operations.

5. The Mutazilites, it is clear from the foregoing, had a different idea of God from that which was entertained by the multitude and by the Traditionalists. This became specially evident, as speculation advanced, in the doctrine of the Divine attributes. From the very beginning the Unity of God was strongly emphasized in Islam; but that did not prevent men from bestowing upon him many beautiful names following human analogy, and ascribing to him several attributes. Of these the following came gradually into greatest prominence, under the influence assuredly of Christian dogmatics:—viz.: Wisdom, Power, Life, Will, Speech or Word, Sight and Hearing. The last two of these—Sight and Hearing—were the first to be explained in a spiritual sense, or entirely set aside. But the absolute Unity of the Godhead did not appear to be compatible with any plurality of co-eternal attributes. Would not that be the Trinity of the Christians, who before now had explained the three Persons of the One Divine Being as attributes? In order to avoid this inconvenience they sought sometimes to derive several attributes out of others by a process of abstraction, and to refer them to a single one—for instance to Knowledge or Power—and sometimes to apprehend them each and all as being states of the Divine essence, or to identify them with the essence itself, in which case of course their significance nearly disappeared. Occasionally an attempt was made through refinements of phraseology to save something of that significance. While, for example, a philosopher, denying the attributes, maintained that God is by his essence a Being who knows, a Mutazilite dialectian expressed it thus: God is a Being who knows, but by means of a knowledge, which He himself is.

In the opinion of the Traditionalists the conception of God was in this way being robbed of all its contents. The Mutazilites hardly got beyond negative determinations,—that God is not like the things of this world,—that he is exalted above Space, Time, Movement, and so on; but they held fast to the doctrine that he is the Creator of the world. Although little could be asserted regarding the Being of God, it was thought he could be known from his works.

For the Mutazilites as well as for their opponents, the Creation was an absolute act of God, and the existence of the world an existence in time. They energetically combated the doctrine of the eternity of the world,—a doctrine supported by the Aristotelian philosophy, and which had been widely spread throughout the East.

6. We have already found ‘Speech’ or ‘the Word’, given as one of the eternal attributes of God; and, probably by way of conformity with the Christian doctrine of the Logos, there was taught in particular the eternity of the Koran which had been revealed to the Prophet. This belief in an eternal Koran by the side of Allah, was downright idolatry, according to the Mutazilites; and in opposition thereto the Mutazilite Caliphs proclaimed it as a doctrine accepted by the State,—that the Koran had been created: Whoever denied this doctrine was publicly punished. Now although the Mutazilites in maintaining this dogma were more in harmony with the original Islam than their opponents, yet history has justified the latter, for pious needs proved stronger than logical conclusions. Many of the Mutazilites, in the opinion of their brethren in the faith, were far too ready to make light of the Koran, the Word of God. If it did not agree with their theories, it received ever new interpretations. In actual fact reason had more weight with many than the revealed Book. By comparing not only the three revealed religions together, but these also with Persian and Indian religious teaching and with philosophic speculation, they reached a natural religion, which reconciled opposites. This was built up on the basis of an inborn knowledge, universally necessary,—that there is one God, who, as a wise Creator, has produced the world, and also endowed Man with reason that he may know his Creator and distinguish between Good and Evil. Contrasted with this Natural or Rational Religion, acquaintance with the teaching of revelation is then something adventitious,—an acquired knowledge.

By this contention the most consistent of the Mutazilites had broken away from the consensus of the Muslim religious community, and had thus actually put themselves outside the general faith. At first they still appealed to that consensus,—which they were able to do as long as the secular power was favourably disposed to them. That condition, however, did not last long, and they soon learned by experience what has often been taught since,—that the communities of men are more ready to accept a religion sent down to them from on high, than an enlightened explanation of it.

7. Following up this survey let us take a closer view of one or two of the most considerable of the Mutazilites, that the general picture may not be wanting in individual features.

Let us first glance at Abu-l-Hudhail al-Allaf, who died about the middle of the 9th century. He was a famous dialectician, and one of the first who allowed philosophy to exercise an influence on their theological doctrines.

That an attribute should be capable of inhering in a Being in any way is not conceivable, in the opinion of Abu-l-Hudhail: It must either be identical with the Being or different from it. But yet he looks about for some way of adjustment. God is, according to him, knowing, mighty, living, through knowledge, might and life, which are his very essence; and just as men had done even before this, on the Christian side, he terms these three predicates the Modi (wudjuh) of the Divine Being. He agrees also that hearing, seeing and other attributes are eternal in God, but only with regard to the world which was afterwards to be created. Besides, it would be easy enough for him and for others, who were affected by the philosophy of the day, to interpret these and similar expressions—such as God’s ‘beholding’ on the last day, [11]—in a spiritual sense, since generally they regarded seeing and hearing as spiritual acts. For example, Abu-l-Hudhail maintained that motion was visible, but not palpable, because it was not a body.

The Will of God, however, is not to be regarded as eternal. On the contrary, Abu-l-Hudhail assumes absolute declarations of Will as being different both from the Being who wills and the object which is willed. Thus the absolute Word of Creation takes an intermediate position between the eternal Creator and the transient created world. These declarations of God’s Will form a kind of intermediate essence, to be compared with the Platonic Ideas or the Sphere-spirits, but perhaps regarded rather as immaterial powers than as personal spirits. Abu-l-Hudhail distinguishes between the absolute Word of Creation and the accidental Word of Revelation, which is announced to men in the form of command and prohibition, appearing as matter and in space, and which is thus significant only for this transient world. The possibility of living in accordance with the Divine word of revelation, or of resisting it, exists therefore in this life alone. Binding injunction and prohibition presuppose Freedom of Will and capability of acting in accordance therewith. On the other hand in the future life there are no obligations in the form of laws, and, accordingly, no longer any freedom: everything there depends on the absolute determination of God. Nor will there be any motion in the world beyond, for as motion has once had a beginning, it must, at the end of the world, come to a close in everlasting rest. Abu-l-Hudhail, therefore, could not have believed in a resurrection of the body.

Human actions he divides into Natural and Moral, or Actions of the members, and Actions of the heart. An action is moral, only when we perform it without constraint. The moral act is Man’s own property, acquired by his own exertions, but his knowledge comes to him from God, partly through Revelation, and partly through the light of Nature.

Anterior even to any revelation man is instructed in duty by Nature, and thus is fully enabled to know God, to discern Good from Evil, and to live a virtuous, honest and upright life.

8. Noteworthy as a man and a thinker is a younger contemporary of Abu-l-Hudhail’s, and apparently a disciple of his, commonly called Al-Nazzam, who died in the year 845. A fanciful, restless, ambitious man, not a consistent thinker, but yet a bold and honest one,—such is the representation of him given us by Djahiz, one of his pupils. The people considered him a madman or a heretic. A good deal in his teaching is in touch with what passed among the Orientals as the Philosophy of Empedocles and Anaxagoras (Cf. also Abu-l-Hudhail).

In the opinion of Nazzam God can do absolutely no evil thing; in fact he can only do that which he knows to be the best thing for his servants. His omnipotence reaches no farther than what he actually does. Who could hinder him from giving effect to the splendid exuberance of his Being? A Will, in the proper sense of the term,—which invariably implies a need,—is by no means to be attributed to God. The Will of God, on the contrary, is only a designation of the Divine agency itself, or of the commands which have been conveyed to men. Creation is an act performed once for all, in which all things were made at one and the same time, so that one thing is contained in another, and so that in process of time the various specimens of minerals, plants and animals, as well as the numerous children of Adam, gradually emerge from their latent condition and come to the light.

Nazzam, like the philosophers, rejects the theory of atoms (v. II, 3 § 12), but then he can only account for the traversing of a definite distance, by reason of the infinite divisibility of space, by postulating leaps. He holds bodily substances to be composed of ‘accidents’ instead of atoms. And just as Abu-l-Hudhail could not conceive of the inherence of attributes in an essence, so Nazzam can only imagine the accident as the substance itself or as a part of the substance. Thus ‘Fire’ or ‘the Warm’, for instance, exists in a latent condition in wood, but it becomes free when, by means of friction, its antagonist ‘the Cold’ disappears. In the process there occurs a motion or transposition, but no qualitative change. Sensible qualities, such as colours, savours and odours, are, in Nazzam’s view, bodies.

Even the soul or the intellect of Man he conceives to be a finer kind of body. The soul, of course, is the most excellent part of man: it completely pervades the body, which is its organ, and it must be termed the real and true Man. Thoughts and aspirations are defined as Movements of the Soul.

In matters of Faith and in questions of Law Nazzam rejects both the consensus of the congregation and the analogical interpretation of the Law, and appeals in Shiʻite fashion to the infallible Imam. He thinks it possible for the whole body of Muslims to concur in admitting an erroneous doctrine, as, for instance, the doctrine that Mohammed has a mission for all mankind in contradistinction to other prophets. Whereas God sends every prophet to all mankind.

Nazzam, besides, shares the view of Abu-l-Hudhail as to the knowledge of God and of moral duties by means of the reason. He is not particularly convinced of the inimitable excellence of the Koran. The abiding marvel of the Koran is made to consist only in the fact that Mohammed’s contemporaries were kept from producing something like to the Koran.

He has certainly not retained much of the Muslim Eschatology. At least the torments of hell are in his view resolved into a process of consuming by fire.

9. Many syncretistic doctrines, but all devoid of originality, have come down to us from the school of Nazzam. The most famous man, whom it produced was the elegant writer and Natural-Philosopher Djahiz († 869), who demanded of the genuine scholar that he should combine the study of Theology with that of Natural Science. He traces in all things the operations of Nature, but also a reference in these operations to the Creator of the world. Man’s reason is capable of knowing the Creator, and in like manner of comprehending the need of a prophetic revelation. Man’s only merit is in his will, for on the one hand all his actions are interwoven with the events of Nature, and on the other his entire knowledge is necessarily determined from above. And yet no great significance appears to accrue to the Will, which is derived from ‘knowing’. At least Will in the Divine Being is quite negatively conceived of, that is, God never operates unconsciously, or with dislike to his work.