152 No god but God
As the starting point for all doctrinal discussions in Islam, the Oneness
and Unity of God clearly raise some theological problems. For exam-
ple, if God is absolutely omnipotent, then is God also responsible for
evil? Does humanity have the free will to choose between right and
wrong, or are we all predetermined for either salvation or damnation?
And how is one to interpret God’s attributes—God’s Knowledge,
God’s Power, and especially God’s Speech as recorded in the Quran?
Is the word of God coexistent with God, or is it a created thing, like
nature and the cosmos? Does not an answer either way necessarily
compromise Divine Unity?
Given the relationship between religion and politics in early
Islam, it is not surprising that these distinctly theological questions
also had important political implications. The Umayyad Caliphs, for
instance, were eager to exploit the argument for God’s determinate
power to sanction their absolute authority over the Ummah. After all,
if the Umayyads were the chosen deputies of God, then all of their
actions were, in effect, decreed by God. This idea was adopted by the
distinguished theologian Hasan al-Basra (642–728), who claimed that
even a wicked Caliph must be obeyed, because he had been placed on
the throne by God.
And yet, al-Basra was no predeterminist: his position on the Ca-
liphate reflected his political quietism and his anti-Kharijite stance, not
his theological views. Like the Qadarite school of theology with which
he is often associated, al-Basra believed that God’s foreknowledge of
events did not necessarily correspond to predeterminism: God may
know what one is going to do, but that does not mean God forces one
to do it. Some theologians within the Qadarite school went one step
further, to claim that God cannot know our actions until they occur, a
notion that understandably offended the more traditionalist theolo-
gians, who believed the doctrine of tawhid necessitated the belief in
God’s determinate power. If the Creator and Creation are one, they
argued, then how could humanity contradict the will of God?
But the “predeterminists” were themselves divided between
those, like the radical sect of the Jahmites, who considered all human
activities (including salvation) to be predetermined by God, and those,
like the followers of the aforementioned legal scholar Ahmad ibn