104 DESTINY DISRUPTED
not be eternal and uncreated (as the ulama proclaimed) because if it were,
the Qur'an would constitute a second divine entity alongside Allah, and
that would be blasphemy. They argued, therefore, that the Qur'an was
among Allah's creations, just like human beings, stars, and oceans. It was
a great book, but it was a book. And if it was just a book, the Qur'an
could be interpreted and even (gasp) amended.
Tawhid, they went on to say, prohibited thinking of Allah as having
hands, feet, eyes, etc., even though the Qur'an spoke in these terms: all
such anthropomorphic references in the Qur'an had to be taken as
metaphorical language.
God, they went on to say, did not have attributes, such as justice,
mercy, or power: ascribing attributes to God made Him analyzable into
parts, which violated tawhid-unity. God was a single indivisible whole
too grand for the human mind to perceive or imagine. What human be-
ings called the attributes of God only named the windows through which
humans saw God. The attributes we ascribe to Allah, the Mu'tazilites said,
were actually only descriptions of ourselves.
From their conception of Allah, the Mu'tazilites derived the idea that
good and evil, right and wrong, were aspects of the unchanging reality of
God, reflecting deep principles that humans could discover in the same
way that human beings could discover the principles of nature. In short,
this or that behavior wasn't good because scripture said so. Scripture man-
dated this or that behavior because it was good, and if it was already good
before scripture said so, then it was good for some reason inherent to itself,
some reason that reason could discover. Reason, therefore, was itself a valid
instrument for discovering ethical, moral, and political truth independently
of revelation, according to the Mu'tazilites.
This is where this quarrel among theologians has implications for the de-
velopment of science, a mode of inquiry that depends on the application of
reason without recourse to revelation. The Mu'tazilites were talking about
reason as a way of discovering moral and ethical truths, but in this time and
place, the principles of human conduct and the principles of nature all be-
longed to the same big field of inquiry: the quest for absolute truth.
The philosopher scientists generally affiliated themselves with the
Mu'tazilite school, no doubt because it validated their mode of inquiry.
Some of these philosophers even rated reason above revelation. The