Al-Nazzam was among the most creative of these philosophers, and also
the most extreme; on the issue of the createdness of the QurÁan, he held that
it cannot even resemble the transcendent word of God (Wolfson, 1976: 274–
275). He died just before the great crisis affecting the MuÀtazilites, which threw
them from political favor into unorthodoxy. Al-Nazzam was attacked by
orthodox MuÀtazilites and scripturalists alike. His doctrines do not appear to
have had any immediate followers, and the MuÀtazilites gathered together in
defense of their more moderate atomism. Some versions of time-atomism also
held that the atoms are bearers of accidents which exist Platonically, apart
from the realm of time (Fakhry, 1983: 216). Later doctrines were to dispute
whether any accidents are exempt from existing as time-atoms continually re-
created by God. It is not clear whether AbuÀl-Hudhayl held that substances as
well as accidents are atomic time-instants; but by the early 900s, the Baghdad
MuÀtazilite al-KaÀbi (109 in Figure 8.1) was holding that every substance and
accident must be created afresh every moment by God (Watt, 1973: 301–302).
This emphasis on God’s direct causality put increasing strain on the doctrine
of free will. At this moment, the AshÀarite camp broke away and produced a
more politically respectable version of MuÀtazilite time-atomism.
Scriptural Anti-rationalists
Islamic thought was by no means primordially scriptural and conservative.
Literal defenders of holy scripture emerged gradually, in increasing polarity
with the rational theologians. There were hundreds of schools of scriptural
specialists across the Islamic Empire, dispensing religious law for local concerns
(Makdisi, 1981: 9). Their practical orientation kept their work relatively
concrete and unintellectual; abstract theological issues were not their main
interest, except insofar as these were points of political significance. The
rational theologians who emerged at the mosque at Basra and then at Baghdad
were initially part of this same undifferentiated occupation of learned Àulama.
Some of them became caught up in a network of argument which pushed the
politically significant issues onto abstract grounds, and thence into philosophi-
cal constructions which took on attention in their own right; others, including
many followers of Hasan al-Basri himself, joined the hadith specialists. The
emerging argument among these factions gradually brought several of the
schools of QurÁanic legal scholarship to prominence above the others because
of their stands on larger questions of Islamic orthodoxy. The dispersed local
schools began to shape into something like political parties among the Sunni
loyalists of the regime, and the number of positions winnowed down around
the most successful legal schools.
Their initial position was not necessarily hard-line scripturalist. The first
prominent school, organized at Baghdad in the middle generation of the 700s,
Tensions of Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom^ •^401