On the question of the attributes of God and the creation of the Qur’an, the position of al-Ash‘ari was equally at variance with that of his Mu‘tazilite master, on the one hand, and that of the crude anthropomorphists or literalists, on the other. Moved by the desire to retain the Concept of the full-blooded Creator-God of the Qur’an, he opposed the Mu‘tazilite tendency to divest God of His positive attributes, and argued, according to a twelfth-century historiographer and fellow-Ash‘arite, al-Shahrastani, that the essential divine attributes of knowledge, power, and life are eternal and subsist in God’s essence. They cannot, however, be said to be either identical with this essence, as the Mu‘tazilah claimed, or not identical with it. For this would mean that God’s knowledge, power, or life is the same as God, So that one could address one’s petitions to God’s knowledge, power, or life instead of to God Himself, which is absurd.

In his polemical works, however, al-Ash’ari is as concerned to refute the views of the "negators of the attributes," i.e., the Mu‘tazilah, as he is to refute the position of the literalists and anthropomorphists. In their deference to Scripture, the latter had gone so far as to attribute corporeity to God, chiefly on the grounds that the text of the Qur’an undeniably stipulated it. Thus Qur’an 75:22-23 speak of the ability of the faithful to perceive God on the Last Day, and 7:54, and 20:5 speak of His sitting upon the throne. The anthropomorphists, such as Hisham b. al-Hakam, ‘Abdullah b. Karram, and their followers in the ninth century, had not hesitated to draw from such Qur’anic passages their full logical consequences and to conceive of God, as Ibn Rushd will say later, simply as an "eternal man" endowed with gross corporeal qualities.

The use of logical argument in matters of theology , and its permissibility, Should first be justified satisfactorily, however. Al-Ash‘ari’s position, though reactionary by the standards of the philosophers and thoroughgoing rationalists, is certainly nuancé. Against the literalists and Traditionists, who questioned the permissibility of deduction or analogy, al-Ash’ari invokes the authority of the Qur’an, which recognizes the principle of analogy and employs it effectively in numerous passages. In a tract devoted to the systematic discussion of this question and entitled Vindication of the Use of Theological Proof (Kalam), this ex-Mu‘tazilite doctor’s anti-Traditionist views on an issue which split the ranks of tenth-century theologians are clearly exhibited. The use of analogy, as indeed the whole method of dialectic or deduction, is repudiated by the Traditionists on the ground that the Prophet, who had dealt with every aspect of religion or morals essential to salvation, has not touched on the question of dialectic (Kalam) at all. Hence recourse to it constitutes an heretical departure (bid‘ah) from what is traditionally and authoritatively received.

This argument from silence is artfully turned by al-Ash‘ari against the Traditionists, who, by the same token, are just as heretical themselves, since their claim has no basis in the pronouncements or sayings of the Prophet either. More important still is the fact that the Prophet was fully conversant with the questions of motion and rest, accident and body, divine attributes, and so on, with which theology is concerned. However, they are referred to in the Traditions and the Qur’an in general terms only, and it is on such references that the whole of theology is based.

Finally, the silence of the Qur’an and the Traditions on those questions that were subsequently dealt with by the theologians or the jurists is easily justified. The Muslim community was not faced with the difficulties or doubts which eventually led to them, or else the Prophet would have laid down explicitly the principles for solving them. As a result, the jurists and theologians in attempting to solve them had no other recourse than to draw analogies with what was explicitly laid down in Scripture. For it is the duty of every "reasonable Muslim" in such matters, al-Ash‘ari argues, "to refer them to the body of principles consecrated by reason, sense-experience, and common sense."

If we take the Mu‘tazilite concept of free will as an instance, this dichotomy is clearly brought out. In the Ibanah, al-Ash‘ari describes the arbitrary power of God in terms that leave hardly any scope for human initiative:

We believe that Allah has created everything, by simply bidding it: Be, as He says [in Qur’an 16:42]: "Verily, when we will a thing, our only utterance is: ‘Be’ and it is"; and that there is nothing good or evil on earth, except what Allah has preordained. We hold that everything is through Allah’s will and that no one can do a thing before he actually does it, or do it without Allah’s assistance, or escape Allah’s knowledge. We hold that there is no Creator but Allah, and that the deeds of the creature are created and preordained by Allah, as He said [in Qur’an 37:94]: "He has created you and what you make" ...we hold that Allah helps the faithful to obey Him, favours them, is gracious to them, reforms and guides them; whereas He has led the unfaithful astray, did not guide or favor them with signs, as the impious heretics claim. However, were He to favor and reform them, they would have been righteous, and had He guided them they would have been rightly guided. ...But it was His will that they should be ungodly [singular: kafir], as He foresaw. Accordingly He abandoned them and sealed their hearts. We believe that good and evil are the outcome of Allah’s decree and preordination [qada’ wa qadar]: good or evil, sweet or bitter, and we know that what has missed us could not have hit us, or what has hit us could not have missed us, and that creatures are unable to profit or injure themselves, without Allah.

In this vindication of the omnipotence of God and the powerlessness of the creatures al-Ash‘ari simply reaffirms the Qur’anic Concept of the God-Despot, whose decrees are both irreversible and inscrutable. At the back of this polemic, however, is the view of the Mu‘tazilah that man is the "creator of his deeds," and consequently a fully free and responsible agent. The Concept of a co-creator with God, according to al-Ash‘ari, amounts to polytheism and involves a radical curtailing of God’s absolute power. Despite these strictures, he does not concur with the Traditionists in their claim that man does not play any part whatsoever in the drama of moral activity. In his doctrine: of al-kasb, or acquisition of the merit or demerit for the deed done, al-Ash‘ari seeks a way out of the moral dilemma of responsibility, without sacrificing the omnipotence of God. Voluntary actions, in his view, are created by God, but acquired by the human agent or imputed to him. Creation differs from acquisition in that the former is the outcome of "eternal power," whereas the latter is the outcome of the "created power" of the agent, So that the same action is said to be created by the one and acquired by the other. Stated differently, man acquires the credit or discredit for the deed created by God, since it is impossible that God should acquire it in time, while He is its author eternally. In this subtle verbal distinction between what is acquired in time and what is created or predestined eternally, lies according to al-Ash‘ari, the distinction between voluntary and involuntary action, and also that between the merit or demerit which attaches to the latter. Man, as the locus or bearer of "acquired" action, becomes responsible for such action, whereas for involuntary action, such as trembling or falling, etc., he is totally irresponsible. The fundamental relation between the two forms of action, according to al-Ash‘ari and his followers, is that man is intuitively conscious of the difference between the one action and the other.Thus, rather than restore to man the freedom of which the extreme determinists (al-Jabriyah) had robbed him, al-Ash‘ari is content restore to him the consciousness of his subjection to the "eternal power." Through this subtle distinction, the predestinarian presuppositions of the Traditionists and determinists are not repudiated, but their linguistic sting is removed without surrendering the substance of the predestinarian thesis. The elaboration of this peculiar ethical position, as well as the occasionalist world-view on which it rested, should perhaps be left to a subsequent section, because of the part which the successors of al-Ash‘ari played in developing or refining it.

The historical significance of al-Ash‘ari’s "reform" lies not in the elaborateness of his solutions of the theological problems raised by the Mu‘tazilah, but rather in his willingness to exploit their dialectical method, and, ipso facto, to moderate the claims of the Traditionists and antirationalists to whom he was temperamentally drawn. If his theological position, expressed in the classic formula of bila kaifa (ask not how) must be described as agnostic, it is nonetheless to be clearly distinguished from the blind agnosticism of the religious bigot who will entertain no questions whatsoever. For his was the qualified agnosticism of the earnest seeker who ends up by asserting, rightly or wrongly, the inability of reason to plumb the mystery of man in relation to God, or of God in relation to man.

The elaboration of the implication of al-Ash‘ari’s new theological outlook was left chiefly to his successors in the tenth and the eleventh centuries. Apart from the substance of their anti-Mu‘tazilite creed, their attention was now centered on two fundamental questions: (1) the nature and limits of rational knowledge in relation to religious truth (‘aql AS. Sam‘), and (2) the metaphysical framework in which the concept of God’s sovereignty and omnipotence should be expressed. Neither of these questions appears to have been discussed with any thoroughness by the founder of Ash‘arite movement himself.

The first major figure in the history of Ash‘arite school was Abu Bakr al-Baqalani (d. 1013), who belongs to the second generation of Ash‘arite doctors. This theologian, who is credited by later authors with refining the methods of Kalam, gives in his al-Tamhid the first systematic statement of the Ash‘arite doctrine and its metaphysical framework.

The book opens with a discussion of the nature of knowledge or science (‘ilm), in a manner which sets the pattern for similar Ash‘arite treatises such as al-Baghdadi’s Usul al-Din and al-Juwayni’s al-Irshad, but it has a distinctly modern ring. Thus, ‘ilm is defined by the author as "the knowledge of the object, as it really is." The object in question is then shown to include both that which is and that which is not (al-ma‘dum), which the Mu‘tazilah but not the Ash‘arites had declared to be a thing (shay’). Such ‘ilm falls into two major categories: the eternal knowledge of God and the temporal or created knowledge of creatures capable of cognition, such as men, angels, jinn, etc. The latter knowledge is subdivided in turn into necessary (or intuitive) and discursive.

The distinction between rational and authoritative knowledge was first broached by the Mu‘tazilah, who sought to extend the domain of reason well into regions which so far had been considered the exclusive preserve of revelation or faith. The Ash‘arite doctors, as illustrated in al-Baqalani’s case, recognized the validity of rational knowledge but reacted instinctively against the Mu‘tazilite infringement on the domain of faith. On two fundamental questions of "natural theology" and ethics, namely, whether God can be known rationally, independently of revelation, and whether the knowledge of good and evil is possible prior to revelation, the Ash‘arite theologians took a qualified anti-Mu‘tazilite stand. The existence of God and His unity can be known rationally from the consideration of the createdness (Huduth) of the world and the logical necessity of a creator (muhdith).

To demonstrate this necessity, Ash‘arite doctors argued that the world, which they defined as everything other than God, was composed of atoms and accidents. Now accidents cannot endure for two successive moments, but are continually created by God, who produces and annihilates them at will. Similarly, the atoms in which these accidents inhere are continually created by God and can only endure by virtue of the accident of duration created in them by God. It follows from this premise that the world, being created, must necessarily have a creator.

Al-Baqalani’s version of this argument differs little from the general Ash‘arite argument. He does, however, strengthen this argument by two others in which the "middle term" is different, but not the dialectical structure of the reasoning. In the first, he argues that the priority of certain things in time requires an "agent who made them prior," who is God. In the second, he introduces the concept of contingency and argues that things, considered in themselves, are susceptible of various forms or qualities. The fact that they actually possess certain forms and no others presupposes a "determinant" who decrees that they should receive these forms and no others, and this determinant is God. The last argument, or argument a contingentia mundi, is more fully developed by later authors, particularly al-Juwayni (d. 1086) in his al-Risalah al-Nizamiyah, and is the argument which, as we have seen, Ibn Sina fully exploited in his Metaphysics. It is noteworthy, however, that the generality of the Ash‘arite theologians showed a distinct predilection for the argument a novitate mundi (huduth) in so far as it harmonized with their concept of a world created in time by an omnipotent God.

The introduction of atomism certainly antedates the rise of the Ash‘arite school itself, despite the statement of Ibn Khaldun that al-Baqalani was responsible for the "introduction of the rational premises on which proofs or theories depend, such as the existence of atoms, the void, and the proposition that an accident does not inhere in another accident or endure for two moments." From the accounts of Islamic atomism contained in the earliest treatise on Islamic "schisms and heresies," Maqalat al-Islamiyin, written by the founder of the Ash‘arite school himself, it appears that atomism had become firmly established in theological circles by the middle of the ninth century. Thus Dirar b. ‘Amr, a contemporary of wasil b. ‘Ata’ (d. 748) and one of the earliest Mu’tazilite doctors of Basra, seems to have been the first theologian to challenge the generally accepted dualism of substance and accident. Al-Ash‘ari reports that Dirar held that "body is an aggregate of accidents, which once constituted, becomes the bearer of accidents." Similarly a thoroughgoing Shi’ite materialist who professed an anthropomorphic view of God of the crudest type, Hisham b. al-Hakam, challenged, as we have seen, this orthodox dualism and reduced everything to the notion of body, which according to him was divisible ad infinitum and consequently was not made up of atoms.

The number of the accidents which the orthodox recognized totals thirty. In a general way, they may be divided into primary and secondary accidents, depending on whether they accompany substance necessarily or not. The first of the primary accidents are the essential modi or states (singular: kaun) such as motion, rest, composition, location. Then come the accidents of color, heat, cold, etc. Al-Ash‘ari is reported by al-Baghdadi as holding that eight of the accidents accompany substance necessarily: motion, color, taste, smell, heat or its opposite, dampness or its opposite, life or its opposite, and finally duration.

The most peculiar variations on the theme of accidents are ascribed to Mu‘tazilite and Ash‘aite doctors. Thus the Mu‘tazilite al-Ka‘bi and his followers are said to have held thlat substance can be divested of all these "primary accidents" save color; and Abu Hashim, al-Juba’i’s son, held that upon its coming into being, an atom can be divested of all accidents save the accident of being (kaun). Another Mu‘tazilite, al-Salihi, went a step further and argued that an atom could exist without any accidents whatsoever .

It is characteristic of these accidents, as al-Baghdadi relates, that they are not susceptible by themselves of any composition, contact, or transmission, since these are characteristics of the body alone. In this regard they were obviously analogous to the atoms, which were said by some theologians to be incapable by themselves of any composition, contact, or motion. However, the two are distinguished somehow, but theoretical difficulties persisted. Thus the Ash‘arite and, to some extent, the Mu‘tazilite doctors found the phenomena of motion quite baffling, and they resorted to the most far-fetched devices in attempting to explain motion rationally. Al-Nazzam, for instance, reduced every accident or quality, including human actions, to the universal category of motion, and even explained rest as a "motion of intention." Therefore, he argued, when a body is said to be static at a certain point, this can only mean that it had "moved in it twice." To account for the possibility of covering a certain distance, which consisted to him of an infinite number of points or particles, al-Nazzam introduced the concept of the leap (tafrah), or the view that a body could move from point A to point C without passing by the intermediary point B

The most characteristic feature of the atoms of Kalam, as we have seen, was their perishable nature, which the Ash‘arites adhered to almost without exception. Not only al-Baqillani but the founder of the Ash‘arite school himself believed the accidents to be perishable by nature and to belong to the class of "transient things" (a‘rad) of this world, referred to in the Qur’an (8:67 and 46:24)

Thus the duration of substances was made contingent upon the inherence in them of the accident of duration (baqa’). Since, however, this accident is not capable of duration per se, it followed that either the durability of substance is to be referred to other accidents of duration indefinitely, or else another principle of durability had to be introduced. This principle the Ash‘arites identified with God’s own decree to preserve in being or destroy at will the atoms or ultimate components of physical objects in the world. Both the accidents and the atoms in which they inhere depended for their duration in this way on God’s decree to repeat the process of their recreation as long as He pleased. Notwithstanding this circumstance, some Ash‘arite doctors found it necessary to give a rational account of a body’s eventual corruption or annihilation. Thus al-Baqillani described annihilation (fana’) as the act of withholding the two accidents of color and mode (kaun) from the body. Inasmuch as a body can never be divested of these two accidents, such an action necessarily entailed, according to him, the annihilation of the body. Such annihilation did not depend therefore on the inherence of the accident of corruption in the body, a thesis which, despite its strangeness, had at least one exponent. Al-Qalanisi argued that when God wishes to destroy a certain body, He creates in it the accident of corruption, which results in its destruction forthwith.

The contribution of late Ash‘arite doctors, such as al-Juwayni and al-Shahrastani, consists chiefly in elaborating or defending the concepts and methods to which the school as a whole was committed. The former, known also as Imam al-Haramayn, developed some of the epistemological and theological implications of Ash‘arite doctrine in al-Shamil, of which an abridgement, al-Irshad, was made by the author. Al-Shahrastani, an author of encyclopedic learning, wrote one of the best known and most comprehensive "heresiographies" in Arabic, K. al-Milal wa’l-Nihal. The second part of it is an invaluable source for the reconstruction of the Islamic picture of Greek philosophy. In addition, al-Shahrastani wrote a compendium of theology, Nihayat al-Iqdam, which surpasses many of the earlier treatises in its thoroughness and logical coherence, although it adds little to our knowledge of the scholastic tradition in theology .

The greatest figure in the history of the Islamic reaction to Neo-Platonism is al-Ghazali, jurist, theologian, philosopher, and mystic. Born in Tus (Khurasan) in 1058, al-Ghazali addressed himself at an early age to the study of jurisprudence (fiqh) with a certain Radhkani, then moved on toJurjan, where he continued his studies with Abu’l-Qasim al-Isma’ili. His greatest teacher, however, was al-Juwayni, the outstanding Ash‘arite theologian of the period. Al-Juwayni initiated his brilliant pupil into the study of Kalam, philosophy, and logic. His introduction to the theory and practice of mysticism was due to al-Farmadhi (d. 1084), a renowned Sufi of the period.

Al-Ghazali’s fortunes took a decisive turn as a result of meeting Nizam al-Mulk, vizier of the Saljuk sultan Malikshah. This able but doctrinaire vizier was fired by an intense zeal for the defense of Sunnite orthodoxy, and he consequently attacked the Shi‘ite (Isma‘ili) heterodoxy of the rival Fatimid caliphate at Cairo. The latter had so successfully wielded the double weapon of propaganda and political assassination throughout the Muslim world that the Saljuks felt compelled to reply in kind. To this end, Nizam al-Mulk set up a series of theological schools or seminaries, named after him, throughout the eastern part of the empire, where the study of Shafi’i fiqh and Ash‘arite theology were actively pursued. Al-Juwayni had been the head of the Nizamiyah of Nishapur until his death in 1085. It now devolved upon his disciple to Serve the cause of Sunnite orthodoxy.

In a moving autobiographical work, al-Munqidh, which has been compared to St. Augustine’s Confessions, al-Ghazali tells the dramatic story of his spiritual and intellectual anxiety and doubt; his renunciation, at the height of his fame, of his’ teaching career at Baghdad in 1095; his peregrinations throughout Syria, Palestine, and Hijaz; and his eventual resumption of teaching, eleven years later, at Nishapur. This second term of instruction, however, was short lived. Five years later, in 1111, his eventful and active life as a scholar and mystic came to an untimely end.

Much has been written about al-Ghazali’s sincerity and the significance of his use of the method of doubt. Whether or not the account given in al-Munqidh is a factual record of his spiritual and intellectual experience is a purely academic question. What is of particular significance is the profound earnestness with which he depicts in this work the "states of his own soul" as it was assailed by doubt, recovered faith through the outpouring of divine light, and how finally he consented to champion publicly the cause of orthodoxy against the sectarians of heresy and deceit.

The aim of theology (Kalam), which he had first studied, was the defense of orthodoxy and the repulsion of the heretics’ attacks on it. In this defense, the theologians start with some premises that are not certain in themselves but must be accepted on the authority of Scripture or the Consensus of the community. Hence, this branch of learning, though useful, does not lead per se to that indubitable certainty which al-Ghazali was seeking.

The Isma’ili doctrine, known as Ta‘lim (instruction) during this period, did not quench his thirst for truth either; For the substance of Isma’ili doctrine is that the knowledge of truth is not possible without a teacher, and the only teacher whose teaching cannot be doubted is an infallible teacher, or, as he was called by the Isma’ilis, the Imam. Here, however, the question arises: What are the marks of such an infallible Imam and where is he to be found? Muslims have an infallible teacher, namely, the Prophet. The Isma’ilis Who recognize the authority of the Prophet argue nevertheless that he is dead. In reply to this argument it can be urged that the Imam, though not dead, is equally inaccessible, since he is said to be m temporary concealment(gha’ib).

Other fruits of al-Gazali’s philosophical intition are to be found in an important manual of Aristotelian logic, Mi’yar al-’Ilm (The criterion of Science). This work, and the Intentions and Tahafut, form a philosophical trilogy of the utmost significance for the study of history of the struggle between the theologians and the philosophers of Islam.

Al-Ghazali’s motive in writing his Tahafut (or Collapse of the Philosophers) is stated explicitly to be religious. What prompted him write this work, he tells us, was the way in which as small group of free-thinkers had been led to repudiate Islamic Beliefs and neglect the ritual basis of worship as unworthy of their intellectual attainments. They were confirmed in this by the widespread adulation reserved for ancient philosophers, from Socrates to Aristotle, who were erroneously supposed to partake of their irreligion. However, had they taken the trouble to examine the teaching of those philosophers, they would have discovered that "every one worthy of note among the ancients and the moderns" subscribed to the fundamentals of religious belief, i.e. the existence of God and the reality of the Day of judgement. Differences among them affect only incidentally the substance of their belief.

Al-Ghazali’s attack is thus judiciously leveled at the two leading Muslim Neo-Platonists directly, and indirectly at Aristotle, their master. Altogether, he enumerates sixteen metaphysical and four physical propositions that have an obvious religious relevance and against which the unguarded believer must be warned. Of these propositions, three are particularly obnoxious from a religious point of view, and consequently those who uphold them must be declared renegades, liable to the religious sanctions against renegades in Islam. These propositions are the eternity of the world a parte ante, God’s knowledge of universals only, and the denial of the resurrection of the body. The remaining seventeen propositions do not, in al-Ghazali’s opinion, justify the charge of irreligion (kufr), but simply that of heresy (bid‘ah). Many of them are professed by other sectarians of Muslim heresay, such as the Mu‘tazilah, and should not on that account be regarded as equivalent to apostasy except on a very narrow-minded or bigoted interpretation, which al-Ghazali is careful to disallow.

The first proposition of the Tahafut bears on the eternity of the world as professed by the Islamic Neo-Platonists and Aristotle. In their espousal of the emanationist world-view, as we have seen, the latter had disassociated themselves from the main body of orthodox Islam. As early as al-Ash‘ari, the heterodox implications of the thesis of eternity had been clearly discerned by the theologians, but with the exception of Ibn Hazm (d. 1064) no systematic exposition and refutation of these implications had been attempted before al-Ghazali’s time. Implicit in the polemic of the theologians against this thesis is the claim that it militated against the Qur’anic concept of creation ex nihilo, and as a corollary involved an arbitrary limitation of God’s absolute power.

Al-Ghazali next turns to the question of divine attributes. The Neo-Platonists are unable prove the unity of God (Question 5). The substance of their proof is that if we posit two necessary beings, necessity would not belong to each of them essentially, but through a cause, so that the Necessary Being would be caused, which is absurd. This proof is not valid because their distinction between the necessary-in-itself and the necessary-through-a-cause, upon which this proof rest, is unfounded. The Neo-Platonists, in fact, deny, the divine attributes altogether (Question 6). Such attributes are, according to them, accidents of the essence and, as such, involve plurality and contingency in the subject, God, they claim, cannot be the bearer often attributes, but they admit at the same time that He is nonetheless knowing (‘alim), which obviously implies that He possesses the attribute of knowledge, however we might interpret it.

The philosophers, having thus denied that God has will, are unable to prove that He has knowledge either. The substance of the argument of Ibn Sina on this score, for instance, is that the First, being entirely immaterial, must be a pure intellect (‘aql), and must accordingly know all things, since the only bar to such knowledge is matter. However, Ibn Sina and his fellow Neo-Platonists are unable to substantiate their claim that God is an intellect, but simply infer it from the premise that He is not a material entity. However, all that can be inferred from the proposition that the First is not a material object, nor an accident of a material object, is that He is self-subsistent. To argue that He is in consequence an intellect, since He knows Himself or knows other things, is to beg the question. Only on the assumption that He knows Himself, as well as other things, can it be asserted that He is a pure intellect, which is precisely the point at issue.

Perhaps the most crucial aspect of the problem of divine knowledge, from the Islamic point of view, is the denial of God’s knowledge of particulars. The Qur’an states explicitly (e.g., 34:3) that nothing escapes God’s knowledge, not even "the smallest particle in heaven or on earth." Philosophers who admit, like Ibn Sina, that God knows things other than Himself, have argued nevertheless that the mode of His knowledge is "universal." It is not subject, like "particular" knowledge, to the limitations of time or place. Thus God knows an event (say, the eclipse of the sun) prior to its occurrence or subsequently, in the same instantaneous manner. For He knows a priori the series of causes from which it will ultimately result. Similarly, He knows an individual man, for instance Zaid or Amr, in so far as He knows the "absolute man," i.e., independently of the conditions of time or place. The particular or accidental qualities, or the spatiotemporal determinations, which set such an individual apart from other individuals, are objects of sense experience of which God cannot possibly partake.

In the "physical" part of the Tahafut, al-Ghazali considers two major questions: the repudiation of the necessity of the causal nexus and the resurrection of the body. The former (Question 17) had been one of the major issues which more than two centuries earlier had set the theologians against the philosophers in general and the Peripatetics in particular. The tendency of the latter to ascribe to "secondary causes" a certain degree of efficacy in the natural order was frowned upon by the theologians on the ground that it militated against the Qur’anic concept of an omnipotent Deity who carried out His grand cosmic designs imperiously and directly and who, in consequence, had no need of any mediator. The occasionalist metaphysics of atoms and accidents, which as we have seen was developed by the theologians of the ninth century, was designed precisely to safeguard God’s absolute independence from any conditions or limitations, natural or other. With the exception of a few Mu‘tazilite theologians who introduced the concept of generation (tawallud) as a theoretical device for retaining the efficacy of natural agents, the Muslim theologians rejected "secondary causation" as incompatible with God’s uniqueness and sovereignty in the world. Al-Ghazali, however, was the first theologian to undertake a systematic refutation of the concept of a necessary causal nexus. In this, he appears to have been influenced by the Greek skeptics of the Pyrrhonian school.

The knowledge of the sequence of such events is normally dependent on their actual occurrence. Without denying that certain elements, e.g., fire, are endowed with certain properties, such as the power to burn cotton, however, it is not logically excluded that God or His angels may cause this power to be checked in such a way that it will not cause burning in the cotton; or He may create in the cotton the power to resist the action of burning. Such miracles, reported in the Qur’an, as [Christ’s] resurrecting the dead or [Moses’] turning a stick into a serpent could thus be explained in a perfectly rational manner. Or it may be possible for God to effect His miraculous designs without violence to the natural process of events, but rather through what might be called telescoping or abridging this process. Thus matter, according to the Peripatetic philosophers, is susceptible of many contrary qualities. The generation of animals, in their view, results from a series of permutations culminating in the animal in question. Earth turns into a vegetable, which upon being consumed by the animal parent turns into blood, which in turn is converted inside the body into the seminal fluid, which eventually develops into an individual offspring. Habitually, this process takes a fairly long time, but it is not logically excluded that God could bring these permutations about in a shorter period than is His wont, and then in progressively shorter periods until we come to a period so short as to be instantaneous. And this is what we denote as a miracle.

The final three "physical" questions of the Tahfut deal with the nature of the Soul and its immortality, according to Neo-Platonic doctrine. In Question 18, al-Ghazali sets forth the arguments of those philosophers for the immateriality and simplicity of the Soul and shows that they are simply inconclusive. Nor are their arguments for its immortality conclusive either, for these rest on the simplicity and the immateriality of the Soul, which they are unable to establish (Question 19).

Since none of these arguments is conclusive, the only recourse left is the authority of Scripture or revelation (al-shar‘), which asserts immortality in an undoubted manner and expatiates on the state of the Soul in the after-life. Much of what the philosophers say concerning the noncorporeal or spiritual pleasures reserved to the Soul in the after-life is in conformity with the teaching of Scripture. What we question, al-Ghazali argues, is that their knowledge of the immortality of the Soul and the spiritual pleasures or pains of the after-life are known through unaided reason, and that they are the only types of pleasure or pain which man can experience after death. There is no logical absurdity involved in positing both types of pleasure or pain, i.e., the spiritual and the bodily, as well as the bodily resurrection laid down in Scripture. The claim of the philosophers that sensuous pleasures and pains, as depicted in the Qur’an, are no more than allegories intended for the edification of the masses is very tenuous, and the analogy between the passages in the Qur’an that describe them and the passages that refer to God in anthropomorphic terms is not a sound analogy. The latter can and ought to be interpreted allegorically, but not the former. For, whereas it is logically impossible that God should be described in corporeal terms and as possessing physical members or occupying space, the bodily rewards and punishments alluded to in the Qur’an are not logically impossible, as has been shown under the general heading of miracle and the miraculous. God could thus restore the Soul on the Day of Judgment to a body either identical with or analogous to its original body, and thereby enable it to partake of both bodily and nonbodily pleasure. In fact, it is with the possibility of such a dual enjoyment that its complete happiness is bound up.

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