 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, This is a Test, the Mortazilites. History teaches some lessons the hard way. For instance the lesson that the strongest leaders often leave the most disruption and discord when they die. The Greeks learned this from the chaos that followed the death of Alexander the Great. The same was brought home to the Romans by the demise of Constantine, and a few centuries later early Islamic society faced a similar experience. In this case, the question of political legitimacy was compounded by a problem of religious authority. When the Prophet Muhammad died in the year 632, it was not entirely clear who should succeed him, nor was it even clear what principles of legitimacy might justify one candidate over another. Was it crucial that the next leader be from the family of the prophet, or were personal qualities and suitability for the post decisive? On the religious front, who would guide the Muslim community now that Muhammad was gone, and with him, the direct link to divine revelation? He was the seal of the prophets, so it was clear that nothing like the Qur'an would be sent again, to the Muslims or to anyone else. Nor could the Qur'an itself provide all the answers. Like any text it stood in need of interpretation, but who should be recognized as an authoritative leader, and who could be trusted to extrapolate from the Qur'an to settle issues not addressed explicitly in the revelation itself? These questions would dominate much of the history of Islam, and lead to the fundamental division between Sunnis and Shiites. The split did not occur immediately, but its origins can be traced back to events immediately following Muhammad's death. The prophet's cousin and husband to his daughter Fatima was Ali. Shiite Muslims believe that rightful leadership of the Muslim community is inherited through a familial line beginning with Ali. In fact, the word Shiite comes from the Arabic shia'ali, meaning the party of Ali. Ali did succeed to the caliphate eventually, but only after being passed over for three other caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman. These four are known as the Rashidun, or rightly guided caliphs, and they played an enormous role in shaping Islamic society. During their reigns, the Muslims began their startling military and cultural conquests from their base in what is now Saudi Arabia. Within a few generations, the Islamic empire would stretch from the Iberian peninsula to Central Asia. The sequence of rightly guided caliphs ended with the assassination of Ali in the year 661, about 20 years later his son Hussein was killed in battle. When Hussein died, so did the prospect that the house of Ali might hold political rule. The next few centuries would see two lines of caliphs or caliphates, neither of which was descended from him. The word caliph derives from the phrase, khalifat rasul alaa, successor to the prophet of God. From 661 until 749, the succeeding would be done by the Umayyads from their capital in Damascus, and they were in fact fairly successful. This period saw continued expansion of the Islamic empire. Indeed, the Umayyad line continued in the far west maintaining a foothold in Iberia even when the Umayyads were mostly vanquished by the Abbasids in the mid-8th century. This new line of caliphs drew their strength from the east, from the Central Asian lands known as Khurasan, and from Iraq, which had already been a power base for Ali. The Abbasids could not claim descent from Ali himself, but at least took their name from their forefather Abbas, an uncle of the prophet. Thus, they could say that they were keeping the caliphate in the family. Accordingly, much more than the Umayyads, the Abbasid caliphs made explicit claims to religious as well as political authority. For example, the caliph al-Ma'mun claimed the title of imam while contending with his brother in a civil war over the caliphate. As we'll be seeing in later episodes, the supporters of the House of Ali would refer to the figures they recognized as rightful leaders as imams, and ascribe to them unique status as interpreters of Islam, as well as secular legitimacy. Al-Ma'mun is important for the story I want to tell in this episode, which is about not just political power, but Islamic theology and the philosophical positions that underlay that theology. At the end of his reign in 833 AD, al-Ma'mun laid down the so-called mihnah, a test or inquisition. He instructed that judges and scholars should be required to admit that the Qur'an was created by God and not eternal, like God himself. This may seem a rather abstract point, but al-Ma'mun thought it important enough to persecute and imprison anyone who disagreed with him. It's worth emphasizing how unusual this was. Risks of religious orthodoxy had not been imposed by caliphs before al-Ma'mun. Rather, the rights and wrongs of religious belief had usually been determined by the judgment of scholars, men who were steeped in the study of the Arabic language, the life and deeds of Muhammad, and the text and context of the Qur'an itself. It was no doubt part of al-Ma'mun's objective to assert his own authority over that of the scholars, and towards that end he may even have liked the idea of demoting the Qur'an to the status of a mere creature. But this doctrine of the Qur'an's createdness was not invented by al-Ma'mun. He took it from a group of thinkers who can, with some justice, claim to be the first philosophers of Islam, the Murtazilites. Justice was, in fact, one of the main obsessions of the Murtazilites. They liked to style themselves akhl atawhid wal ahl, the upholders of oneness and justice. Like Augustine arguing that the whole message of the Bible boils down to charity, for Murtazilites, the core teaching of Islam is that God is one and that He is just. Their most distinctive positions come directly from these two principles, as we'll see shortly. First, though, I should explain the sense in which one might reasonably describe these thinkers as philosophers. They certainly were not spending most of their time reading Aristotle, albeit that some of them did show, or at least claim, that they were familiar with his works. Rather, these were theologians, and their sacred texts were, well, sacred texts, the Qur'an itself of course, and also the collected sayings and anecdotes about the Prophet known as Hadith. Muslims are enjoined to follow the example of the Prophet in all things, and the practice of collecting Hadith emerged in order to address the problem I mentioned before. If the Qur'an is silent on a given question, whether it deals with practical arrangements or abstract religious belief, how should we know the answer to that question? An obvious strategy was to follow whatever Muhammad had said or done in his lifetime, insofar as this could be ascertained through reliable reports. Hadith scholarship, which blossomed during the Abbasid era, determined which reports were reliable by recording chains of testimony all the way back to eyewitnesses and companions of the Prophet. The accepted Hadith, alongside the Qur'an, became a second principal source for both Islamic law and Islamic theology. The Mu'tazilites certainly did base their theories on these two sources, but they also drew on a third resource, aql, or reason. It is really this that distinguishes the kind of theology we call kalam, and separates its practitioners, the muttaqallimun, from other Muslim scholars who often had a more conservative traditionalist bent. For instance, Mu'tazilite muttaqallimun would have no hesitation in adopting a figurative reading of Qur'anic descriptions of God as having a face, or sitting on a throne, since reason shows that God has no body. Traditionalists would instead accept such statements at face value. This point connects to the first of the Mu'tazilites' principles, God's unity. Here, their signature teaching was that God must be recognized as one not only in the sense that He is unique—all Muslims would, after all, affirm that there are no gods other than God—but also one in the sense that He is utterly free from multiplicity of any kind. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity fell afoul of this restriction, of course. So did certain views on a central issue of kalam, the status of God's attributes, such as His knowledge and power. The Mu'tazilites tended to deny the reality of attributes, or at least deny that they had any reality distinct from God's own reality. The role of reason here was to explain how it could still be true to say that God is knowing or powerful if there is no distinctly existing knowledge or power that belongs to Him. In this, God is unlike the things He creates. As we'll see in a moment, various Mu'tazilite theologians took various views about the physical makeup of created things, but in general they endorsed a theory according to which God connects certain attributes to atomic bodies. These atoms are indivisible bearers of properties, which are distinct from the atoms themselves in precisely the way that God's attributes are not distinct from Him. When it came to the second fundamental issue of God's justice, reason again laid down a fundamental ground rule. No one can be morally responsible for actions that were not in their own power. Thus, if humans are to be responsible for what they do, and if God is therefore to be just in rewarding and punishing them for what they do, then humans must have free will. This was sometimes expressed in terms of the physical theory. A man is an atom, or compound of atoms, and the man's actions or choices are attributes or properties that adhere in the atomic subject. Since the man is responsible for these actions or choices, it must be up to the man, and not to God, whether he comes to have the relevant attributes. Some Mu'tazilites even admitted that humans create their actions, whereas everything else is created by God. All of this relates to the apparently obscure teaching on the Qur'an's createdness, the one enforced in al-Mamun's Inquisition. Theologians understood the Qur'an as being a sort of divine attribute, as God's word. So, in denying the eternity of the Qur'an, the Mu'tazilites were simply adhering to their standard position on God's attributes. To make God's word, the Qur'an, a separately existing thing that is co-eternal with God, would be to deny tawhid, God's uniqueness and oneness, and would in fact be tantamount to shirk, or polytheism. The createdness of the Qur'an was also important for God's justice. In it, we find verses that condemn the specific opponents of Muhammad as sinners who are surely destined for hellfire. Mu'tazilites worried that, if such verses had been eternally established as part of God's word, then the sinners in question would simply be doing what had always been inevitable, rather than exercising their free will. In that case, God's justice would be compromised. He would be eternally promising damnation to people who had no choice in sinning. In part because of the political situation out of which they emerged, the Mu'tazilites and other Mu'takallimun had a particular interest in this question of sin and moral responsibility. In fact, the origins of the name Mu'tazilite are supposedly bound up with this issue. According to tradition, the man who began Mu'tazilite school in the first half of the 8th century was Wasil ibn Ata'ah. One day he was sitting with another early theologian named Hasan al-Basri, discussing the moral status of sinners. Hasan al-Basri held that sinners are believers, which Wasil found too generous. He did not go so far as other hardline theologians who condemned sinners as non-believers, but instead offered what would become the standard Mu'tazilite position, that Muslim sinners occupy an intermediate position, neither believers nor non-believers. Thus Wasil withdrew from the circle gathered around Hasan al-Basri and walked away, taking some new followers with him. They were the Mu'tazilites, meaning the ones who withdrew. An unkind observer might think that Wasil's intermediate position looks less like a solution and more like dodging a politically and theologically fraught issue. That is typical of kalam, in that theologians frequently offer positions that seem designed mostly to diffuse intractable debate. In this respect, kalam could be compared to late ancient debates over the Trinity, where verbal compromises were put forward in an attempt to satisfy groups who would never really agree. But also as in late antiquity, many theologians persisted in wanting a rigorous and detailed, indeed philosophical, account of the matters at hand. Nor should this story, with its pleasingly vivid etymology of the term Mu'tazilite, mislead us into thinking that the Mu'tazilite movement had a history like that of the Hellenistic philosophical schools, with a founder laying down a set of doctrines that subsequent members took pride in following. Indeed, even calling these early theologians Mu'tazilites is to some extent anachronistic, a habit borrowed from later authors who wanted neat classifications of theological groups. Eventually, the Mu'tazilites did cohere into two stable groups, associated with the cities of Baghdad and Basra. The Baghdadis and Basrans agreed about the main principles of Mu'tazilite kalam, including the points I just sketched, a denial of real and separate divine attributes, an insistence on human freedom, and an analysis of created things as atoms that bear properties. But there were points of dispute between the two groups, and there had been even more disagreement among earlier so-called Mu'tazilites. To reconstruct those early views, we unfortunately have to depend on later accounts, often written by hostile theologians. Our knowledge of early kalam is, in this respect, not unlike our knowledge of the pre-Socratics, or early Stoics. For complete texts, we mostly have to wait until the 9th century. For a really complete overview of Mu'tazilite doctrine, our best source is the enormous and aptly named, sufficing work, or muhni, of the Basran theologian Abd al-Jabbar, who lived around the turn of the 1st millennium AD. The lack of early unanimity among theologians of a Mu'tazilite persuasion is well illustrated by an 8th century theologian named Jahm ibn Safwan. Jahm put forward a view on divine attributes like the one I just described, which led some later authors to see him as linked to Mu'tazilism. But if card-carrying Mu'tazilites might have liked his stance on attributes, they would have been appalled by his remarks on freedom, which looks straightforwardly determinist. Jahm remarked that belief in God is bestowed by the choice of God, not of the believer himself. Without pushing the point too far, it might be helpful to think of the standard Mu'tazilite view as being akin to that of the Pelagians. You'll recall them as the late ancient Christians who insisted that humans must have it within their power to be righteous or to sin, since otherwise God could not punish sinners with justice. Jahm's view was more like that of Augustine, in maintaining that God alone could bestow the gift of faith. Mu'tazilite discussions of this issue attained a remarkable level of sophistication which would not embarrass a modern-day metaphysician working on the free will problem. Not that modern-day metaphysicians are easily embarrassed. Consider for instance the aforementioned Basran Mu'tazilite Abd al-Jabbar. He identified a problem that is familiar in the free will debate nowadays, when he worried that our choices might be determined by our own motivations. Suppose I see an almond croissant and stuff it eagerly into my mouth. It looks as though my powerful desire for the croissant caused me to perform this action. Where in that picture is free will? Whether my action is caused by my desire or by God, there was no possibility that I would do anything different, and if my action is inevitable, how can it be freely chosen? Abd al-Jabbar solves the puzzle by saying that even if some motivations compel us to act, not all motivations are like this. We can see this from the fact that people sometimes reflect on their already existing desires, perhaps with the help of external advice, and form a view as to whether these motivations are appropriate ones. In such a case, what began as a weaker motivation, such as the desire to lose weight, might wind up trumping an originally stronger motivation, like the desire to eat delicious pastries. Motivations then are causally relevant to action, but not irresistible causes. So, there remains space for free will. Similar ingenuity was applied in the other areas of mortazolite theory. An impressive early example is Abu'l-Dael, who might be seen as the Chrysippus of mortazolism. As you'll recall, Chrysippus was not the founder of Stoicism, but an early, sophisticated member of the school who systematized the teachings of the movement. Abu'l-Dael played something of the same role for the mortazolites. One of his more prominent teachings concerned the increasingly familiar problem of divine attributes. On the one hand, for the reasons already mentioned, he wanted to deny that the attributes have real and distinct existence. On the other hand, the Qur'an itself describes God as knowing, powerful, merciful, and so on. How can such statements be true if there is no such thing as divine knowledge, power, or mercy? Abu'l-Dael's suggested solution was that God is, as Abu'l-Dael put it, knowing with a knowledge that is nothing other than God. This yields the desired result that God is really knowing, even though his knowledge has no independent reality, for he simply is knowledge. Of course, the same analysis can be applied to other attributes. But that leads to a further problem. If God is identical to both his knowledge and his mercy, for instance, then won't his knowledge be the same thing as his mercy? That doesn't sound right. Here, Abu'l-Dael remarked that the attributes are neither the same as nor distinct from one another. Again, this at first looks uncomfortably like someone playing with words, but we can make sense of the view as follows. It is only in relation to the things he creates that God's knowledge becomes distinct from his mercy. For instance, he knows how many hairs are on my head. Not many. But this is not an object of his mercy. More like his wrath, in fact. In itself, though, God's essence remains one. A related Mu'tazilite distinction contrasts what they called attributes of essence and attributes of action, with the former describing the unity that is God himself, and the latter the relations that God bears to the things he creates. When it came to the nature of those created things, we see a similar dynamic of innovation and disagreement among early Mu'tazilites. Like Muttaqallimun of all persuasions, both at this period and later in the tradition, Mu'tazilites emphasized the radical dependence of such bodies on God. They even devised an argument for God's existence on the basis of their atomic physics. Since bodies cannot exist without possessing properties, and since the properties themselves come into and out of existence, bodies themselves must be created. That means they must have a creator. This sort of argument is occasionally referred to in contemporary philosophy of religion as the kalam proof for God. Again, though, broad consensus masks a large amount of dispute concerning the details of the physical theory. They disagreed, for instance, about how many atoms were the minimum needed to make up a discrete body. Abuludel, like an expert cricket batsman, went for six. A particularly radical version of kalam physics was put forward by An-Nadam, who was the nephew of Abuludel and one of the most radical and innovative of the 9th century Mu'tazilites. An-Nadam questioned the rigorous distinction between bodies and properties, using the word body to describe even things like colors, tastes, hardness, coldness, and so on. What we naively consider as bodily substances are nothing but interpenetrating properties. Some of these properties remain latent until they are caused by God to become manifest. For instance, when wood lights on fire, its latent heat and brightness suddenly manifest themselves. Not content with this rather daring theory, An-Nadam went on to deny the underlying atomic theory embraced by other Mu'tazilites, asserting instead that bodies are infinitely divisible. This left him with a problem that had already bedeviled anti-atomist philosophers in antiquity, familiar from the paradoxes of motion proposed by Zeno. If bodies and spatial intervals are infinitely divisible, then won't motion be impossible? After all, any given body will have to pass through an infinite number of points to complete even the smallest motion, but nothing can finish an infinite series of tasks. An-Nadam avoids the difficulty by proposing that bodies do not glide continuously over all points in an interval. Rather, they leap from one position to another. Thus, the physical world around us is like a motion picture, with seemingly continuous motion in fact emerging from a more fundamental reality of discontinuous bodily arrangements. Of course, with these examples of early philosophical kalam, I am, like one of An-Nadam's bodies, skipping over a lot. But I hope I've managed to persuade you that Mu'tazilism offers plenty of material for the historian of philosophy. As I've said, figures like Abu'l-Dail and An-Nadam did not engage carefully with the legacy of Greek philosophy, though some have suggested possible Hellenic sources, such as the Stoics. Their project was more akin to that of the more rationalist Church Fathers, like Origen or Augustine in some of his moods. They believed in order to understand, placing their trust in God's gift of reason. Here too, some scholars have claimed to find more than a parallel, and pointed to the possibility of real historical influence of Christian theology on early Islamic kalam. This is not impossible. As we'll see next time, Greek ideas, including those of the Fathers, were kept alive in places like Syria in the 7th and 8th centuries. Indeed, it can be hard not to think of ancient thought when reading about early Mu'tazilism. For instance, Abu'l-Dail's move of identifying God with his attributes is reminiscent of Boethius. Still, it would be a mistake to reduce Mu'tazilism to a mere echo of Christian theology or Greek philosophy. In fact, the direction of influence is at least as much the other way. As we'll be seeing, Mu'tazilites and other mutakallimun had a great impact on the way that Greek ideas were used and understood by more explicitly philosophical authors in the Islamic world, like Al-Kindi and Avicenna. Of course, for that to happen, the Greek texts first needed to be translated into Arabic. This too happened in the 8th to 10th centuries, the same period that saw the high point of the Abbasid Caliphate and the first flowering of kalam and of hadith scholarship. It happened in part thanks to our new friend al-Ma'mun. Legend relates that he once had a dream in which he was visited by Aristotle. The legend goes on to say that, once his alarm clock went off, al-Ma'mun decided to sponsor a massive translation movement. He would make Aristotle and the rest of Hellenic philosophy and science accessible to Islamic civilization. This story doesn't have much historical credibility, sadly, and not just because I added the bit about the alarm clock. But it is true enough that al-Ma'mun and his fellow Abbasid caliphs did support translations from Greek, even as they were imposing the Mu'tazilite-inspired mihnah on their subjects. You never know when you yourself might need to pass a test on all this stuff, so you better join me next time for the Greek-Arabic translation movement here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. .