154 No god but God
speculation, as the Mu‘tazilah claimed, there would be no need for
prophets and revelations; the result would be a confusion of theologi-
cal diversity that would allow people to follow their own wills rather
than the will of God. The Ash‘ari considered reason to be unstable
and changing, while the prophetic and scriptural traditions—especially
as they were defined by the Traditionalist Ulama—were stable and fixed.
With regard to the question of free will, Rationalist theologians
adopted and expanded the view that humanity was perfectly free to act
in either goodness or evil, meaning that the responsibility for salva-
tion rested directly in the hands of the believer. After all, it would be
irrational for God to behave so unjustly as to will belief and unbelief
upon humanity, then reward one and punish the other. Many Tradi-
tionalists rejected this argument on the grounds that it seemed to
compel God to act in a rational, and therefore human, manner. This,
according to the Ash‘ari, was shirk. As the omnipotent creator of all
things, God must be the progenitor “of the good and evil, of the little
and the much, of what is outward and what is inward, of what is
sweet and what is bitter, of what is liked and what is disliked, of what
is fine and what is bad, of what is first and what is last,” to quote the
Hanbali creed, unquestionably the most influential school of thought
in the modern world.
The Rationalist and Traditionalist theologians further differed in
their interpretation of God’s attributes. Both believed that God was
eternal and unique, and both grudgingly acknowledged the anthropo-
morphic descriptions of God provided by the Quran. However, while
most Rationalists interpreted these descriptions as merely figurative
devices intended for poetical purposes, most Traditionalists rejected
all symbolic interpretations of the Revelation, claiming that the
Quran’s references to God’s hands and face, while not meant to be
likened to human hands or faces, must nevertheless be read literally.
God has a face, argued Abu’l Hasan al-Ash‘ari (873–935), founder
of the Ash‘arite school, because the Quran says so (“the face of your
Lord will endure forever”; 55:27), and it is not our place to ask how or
why. Indeed, the Ash‘arites often responded to the rational incon-
gruities and internal contradictions that resulted from their rigid
interpretation of religious doctrine by cultivating a formula of bila
kayfa, loosely translated as “Don’t ask why.”