to have developed a thoroughgoing atomism. Abu-Àl-Hudhayl, who success-
fully systematized the MuÀtazilite theological position, produced an influential
compromise among the ontological positions. He declared that some, but not
all, accidents exist for only a moment in time; if they are to appear again for
a second moment, they must be created afresh by God (Watt, 1985: 53;
Wolfson, 1976: 531–532). This applies above all to the accidents of will and
motion, that is, those qualities which are involved in action in the world, and
hence are implicated in the question of moral responsibility. By contrast,
AbuÀl-Hudhayl, along with many other MuÀtazilites, reserved certain features
of the physical and spiritual world for the category of durable accidents,
including color, life, and knowledge (Fakhry, 1983: 54); presumably this was
in order to preserve a responsible human entity across moments of time. God
causes both the duration and the destruction of accidents; this in turn raised
the question whether duration and destruction are themselves accidents which
exist in a spatial substratum. Secondary metaphysical problems were emerging,
and the ontological status of existence and change became a topic of debate.
In this same generation a rival MuÀtazilite school formed at Baghdad, led
by MuÀammar’s pupil Bishr al-MuÀtamir. Bishr gave a more realist ontological
slant to time-atomism. Even though God continuously intervenes in creating
and destroying attributes, every creation of existence involves a real duration,
and every destruction is a real action too (Wolfson, 1976: 522–543). God
creates these time-atoms out of nothing. But (according to later commentators)
this MuÀtazilite school held that “nothing” is also a substantive “something”;
this implies that God creates things out of a pre-existent matter.
The atomist position was not yet settled. The most radical of the MuÀtaz-
ilites, al-Nazzam, kept up Dirar’s attack on substance. Al-Nazzam argued that
substance does not exist, since it can be infinitely divided. The more moderate
MuÀtazilites had taken this argument only to a point; they were willing to
reduce attributes to instants in time, without duration, and to reduce substance
to atoms (though disputing whether they were with or without size). Al-Naz-
zam pushed onward, into an extreme time-phenomenalism: there exists nothing
but accidents, and none of these are durable. All other accidents reduce to the
accident of motion, which is inherently transitory (Fakhry, 1983: 49–51,
215–6; Wolfson, 1976: 514–517). Al-Nazzam’s Heraclitus-like position led to
difficulties of the sort raised by the Eleatics. Since a distance consists of an
infinite number of points, how is it possible to traverse all of them and arrive
anywhere? Al-Nazzam attempted to overcome this Zeno-like paradox by pro-
posing a process of “leaps” from one atomic point to another over the inter-
vening points. His doctrine of perpetual motion also had difficulties in explain-
ing the apparent rest of bodies in one place; al-Nazzam countered this by
arguing that rest consists in bodies moving into the same place twice in
succession.
400 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths