- Karen Armstrong
denied that the divine had any "human" attributes at all. How
could we say that God "spoke" or "sat on a throne," as the
Quran averred? How could we talk of God's "knowledge" or
"power"? The ahl al-hadith retorted that this wariness drained
the experience of God of all content, and reduced the divine
to a philosophical abstraction with no religious significance.
Al-Ashari agreed, but appeased the Mutazilites by saying that
God's attributes were not like human qualities. The Quran
was God's uncreated speech, but the human words which ex-
pressed it and the ink and paper of the book itself were cre-
ated. There was no point in searching for a mysterious
essence underlying reality. All we could know for certain
were the concrete facts of history. There were, in al-Ashari's
view, no natural laws. The world was ordered at every mo-
ment by a direct intervention of God. There was no free will:
men and women could not think unless the divine was think-
ing in and through them; fire burned not because it was its na-
ture to do so, but because God willed it.
The Mutazilah had always been too abstruse for the vast
majority of Muslims. Asharism became the predominant phi-
losophy of Sunni Islam. It was obviously not a rationalist
creed, but more of a mystical and contemplative discipline. It
encouraged Muslims to see the divine presence everywhere,
to look through external reality to the transcendent reality im-
manent within it, in the way that the Quran instructed. It sat-
isfied the hunger, that was so evident in the ideas of the
Hadith People, for an immediate experience of God in con-
crete reality. It was also a philosophy that was congenial to the
spirit of the Shariah. By observing the sunnah of the Prophet
in the smallest details of their lives, Muslims identified them-
selves with the Prophet, whose life had been saturated with
the divine. To imitate the Prophet, the Beloved (habib) of
God- by being kind to orphans, to the poor or to animals, or
by behaving at meals with courtesy and refinement-was to
be loved by God himself. By weaving the divine imperative