Notable Mu'tazilite Theologians and Their Views (Notes on Islamic History)

 

1. Wasil ibn Ata

-It is widely agreed that the founder of the Mu'tazilite school was a man by the name of Wasil ibn Ata.

-Wasil ibn Ata left his teacher (Hasan al-Basri) due to his belief that a sinner could be in an intermediate state (neither a believer nor an unbeliever).

-Wasil is said to have argued with Kharijite scholars in his younger days.

2. Abu al-Hudhayl al-Alaf

He was born around 750 AD.

-Abu al-Hudhayl did not speak of the "attributes of essence" as later Mu'tazilite theologians did.

-He systematized the Mu'tazilite view of the attributes that went beyond merely negative theology, i.e. telling us only what God is not, rather than what he is.

-He seems to have viewed the attributes as separate entities from the essence of Allah. 

-A common objection to the Mu'tazilite view was that it made the attributes identical with one another. Abu al-Hudhayl responded by saying that though the attributes are indeed identical, their objects are different. 

-Abu al-Hudhayl stressed the omnipotence of God in the plan of human salvation. He attempted to maintain human free will in his theology and philosophy. 

-Abu al-Hudhayl did not make a distinction between God's attributes of essence and his attributes of act.

3. Ibrahim al-Nazzam

Al-Nazzam was born around 775 AD in Baghdad, Iraq. There he studied under Abu al-Hudhayl, but eventually broke off from him and founded his own theological school.

-"He made the one significant change to Abū al-Hudhayl’s model that would become the central point in the eyes of the majority of Muʿtazilites in Basra and Baghdad: he replaced the statement ‘God is knowing thanks to an act of knowledge that is identical with him’ with ‘God is knowing through himself" (Josef van Ess, Theology and Society in the Second and Third Centuries of the Hijrah: A History of Religious Thought in Early Islam, Vol. 3, pg. 443)

-Al-Nazzam answered the objection concerning Allah's attributes being identical with one another by stating that they differ due to their opposites, each of them signifying a distinct aspect. In this regard, he disagrees with Abu al-Hudhayl.

-Al Nazzam did not make a distinction between God's attributes of essence and his attributes of act.

-Al Nazzam distinguished five senses of will: intention, command/order, decreeing something, realization, and "to be about to...".

-Al-Nazzam understood the speech of Allah (i.e. the Qur'an) to not be generated through movement (as humans do when they make sound by the movement of the tongue and other organs). 

-Al-Nazzam taught that the speech of Allah is created at the moment of revelation.