Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari

Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Ismail al-Ashari was born in the city of Basra, Iraq, in 873. He was descended from the
Asharia clan of Yemen who had governed Iraq during the time of the Prophet’s Successors. The foremost amongst
the clan had been Abu Musa Al-Ashari, on whom the Prophet Muhammad had once singled out:

“If the Asharis go on an expedition or if they only have a little food among them, they would gather all they have on
one cloth and divide it equally among themselves. They are thus from me and I am from them“.

Works

The Ashari scholar Ibn Furak numbers Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari's works at 300, and the biographer Ibn Khallikan at
55;[10] Ibn Asāker gives the titles of 93 of them, but only a handful of these works, in the fields of heresiography and
theology, have survived. The three main ones are:

• Maqālāt al-islāmīyīn,[2] it comprises not only an account of the Islamic sects but also
an examination of problems in kalām, or scholastic theology, and the names and
attributes of Allah; the greater part of this works seems to have been completed
before his conversion from the Mutaziltes.
• Kitāb al-luma[3]
• Kitāb al-ibāna 'an usūl al-diyāna,[4] an exposition of his developed theological views
and arguments against Mutazilite doctrines. However the works is disputed as the
last or the first books upon rejecting Mu'tazilite as mentioned by Imam Abu al-Hasan
`Ali ibn Ibrahim al-Muqri (Ibn Matar) who died in the year 306: "Imam al-Ash`ari
composed it in Baghdad upon his arrival there." [11]

opposed the doctrines of the Mu'tazila

The chief points on which he opposed the doctrines of the Mu'tazila were:

(1)He held that God had eternal attributes such as knowledge, sight, speech, and that it was
by
these that He was knowing, seeing, speaking, whereas the Mu'tazila said that God had no
attributes distinct from His essence.

(t) The Mu'tazila said that qur'anic expressions, such as God's hand and face, must be
interpreted to mean 'grace', 'essence' and so on. Al-Ash'ari, whilst agreeing that nothing
corporeal was meant, held that they were real attributes whose precise nature was
unknown.
He took God's sitting on the throne in a similar way.

(3) Against the view of the Mu'tazila that the qur'an was created, al-Ash'ari maintained that
it
was God's speech, an eternal attribute, and therefore uncreated.

(4) In opposition to the view of the Mu'tazila that God could not literally be seen, since that
would imply that He is corporeal and limited, al-Ash'ari held that the vision of God in the
world
to come is a reality, though we cannot understand the manner of it.

(5) In contrast to the emphasis of the Mu'tazila on the reality of choice in human activity,
al-Ash'ari insisted on God's omnipotence; everything, good and evil, is willed by God, and He
creates the acts of men by creating in men the power to do each act. (The doctrine of
'acquisition' or kasb [q.v.], which was in later times characteristic of the Ash'ariyya, is
commonly
attributed to al-Ash'ari himself, but, though he was familiar with the concept, he does not
appear to have held the doctrine himself; cf. JRAS, 1943, t46 f.).

(6) While the Mu'tazila with their doctrine of al-manzila bayn al-manzilatayn held that any
Muslim
guilty of a serious sin was neither believer nor unbeliever, al-Ash'ari insisted that he
remained a
believer, but was liable to punishment in the Fire.

(7) Al-Ash'ari maintained the reality of various eschatological features, the Basin, the Bridge,
the
Balance and intercession by Muhammad, which were denied or rationally interpreted by the
Mu'tazila.

Al-Ash'ari was not the first to try to apply kalam or rational argument to the defence of
orthodox
doctrine; among those who had made similar attempts earlier was al-Harith b. Asad
al-Muhasibi. Al-Ash'ari, however, seems to have been the first to do this in a way acceptable
a
large body of orthodox opinion. He had the advantage, too, of having an intimate and
detailed
knowledge of the views of the Mu'tazila (as is shown by his descriptive work, Maqalat al-
Islamiyyin,
Istanbul, 19t9; cf. R. Strothmann, in Islam, xix, 193-t4t). His many followers came to be
known as the Ash'ariyya [q.v.] or Asha'ira, though they mostly deviated from him on some
points.

The mihna, as the inquisition came to be known, cemented opposition for the Mutazilite school amongst traditional
scholars. In the time of Al-Ashari, though, the school still had many powerful and brilliant patrons. In fact, while the
Mutazilite school eventually waned amongst Sunni Muslims, it remains a significant part of Shia Islam. Jamal al-
Din al-Afghani, father of modern-day Salafism, had also been a Shia Muslim who favored Mutazilism doctrines,
though he hid the fact through a Shia device called taqiya, or disambiguation.

At around 912, during the month of Ramadan, Al-Ashari went into spiritual retreat, where he began to re-examine
many of his beliefs. He had doubts about the positions that the Mutazilites held, and prayed for guidance. Then, in
his sleep, the Prophet Muhammad began to appear to him.

"O Ali," the Prophet said. "Support the positions that have been transmitted from me, for they are the truth."

And thus, the Prophet confirmed the favor that had been bestowed on the clan of Asharia through the words: “They
are thus from me and I am from them“. The dream occurred three times, in which the Prophet also promised that
Al-Ashari would receive divine aid in the effort. Al-Ashari had little doubt that the dream was real, and immediately
went to a mosque to make public his repentance and repudiation of Mutazilite beliefs.
The position we take and the religious views we profess are: to hold fast to the book of our Lord and the Sunnah of
the Prophet and to what has been related on the authority of the companions and the followers of the Imams of the
Hadith. Moreover, we profess what Abu Abdullah Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Hanbal taught…and we contradict all
who contradict his teachings.

Al-Ashari followed Imam Ash-Shafi’i's School of Jurisprudence and possessed profound knowledge of the Quran
and Hadiths. He greatly admired Ahmad ibn Hanbal because of the fact that the latter had remained steadfast in the
face of Mutazilite persecution. While Al-Ashari also considered himself an adherent of the Hanbali methodology,
Hanbalis typically adopt a literal interpretation of the Quran and hadiths and despise all theology.

Like Imam Ash-Shafi’i before him, Al-Ashari developed a unique synthesis between opposing views of theology
that trod between two extremes. One end of the spectrum lay the rationalist tendencies of his previous Mutazilite
beliefs, while on the other lay the firmly literal interpretations of the Hanbalis. In fact, centuries after Al-Ashari, a
Hanbali scholar named Imam Abdul Rahman ibn Al-Jawzi would rise to criticize his contemporaries for extending
Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal’s original position on God’s Attributes to zealous extremes. Al-Ashari made a robust
argument that exclusive reliance on the Scripture alone is the attitude of the lazy or ignorant, while sole reliance on
reason is dangerous. His method was to distill the best principles from both scripture and reason. Revelation can be
justified by reason only up to a certain point, as some of the earlier generations of Muslim scholars had well
understood. Anything beyond must simply be accepted as revealed truth.

One important issue in which the Mutazilites, the Hanbalis and Al-Ashari differed was on God’s Attributes. The
Mutazilites argued that when the Quran talks about God’s hands, eyes and face, the verses must be interpreted
metaphorically. God’s Hands, for example, refer to His Grace. The Hanbalis, being literalists, asserted that if the
Quran talks about God’s Hands, then it is God’s Hands and that is the end of it. Al-Ashari stated that if the Quran
mentions that God created with His two hands, then that is sufficient proof that he did so. He explained that it does
not make linguistic sense to say that God had created ‘with My Grace’. However, Al-Ashari cautioned that the
Attributes are not to be understood in a crude anthropomorphic manner, a trait that Imam Abdul Rahman ibn Al-
Jawzi later accused some of his Hanbali colleagues of holding, but rather the descriptions just have to be accepted
without asking how. This is a principle known as bila kayf.

Al-Ashari’s approach mirrored the approach of the Salaf, who read such verses without pausing and pondering over
them. Although the Salaf made no comment most of the time, they never understood the verses about God’s
Attributes in a literal fashion. That would have meant bestowing on God distinctly human characteristics. The
balance and relative stability that is inherent in al-Ashari’s theology endeared itself to most adherents of the major
Schools of Jurisprudence, with the exception of the Hanbalis, who remain suspicious of all forms of theology.

CONCLUSION:

In later life he moved to Baghdad,

and died there in 3t4/935-6.

Without doubt, the Prophetic dream that appeared to Imam Al-Ashari has had such a vast impact on the Islamic
world that later scholars like Imam Ibn Hajar Haytami eventually came to define the entirety of Ahl al-Sunna waal-
Jemaa as,

"…those who follow Abul Hasan Ashari and Abu Mansur Maturidi, the Two Imams of Ahl al-Sunna."