porary of al-AshÀari. By the time of al-Baqillani, the AshÀarites were laying out
time-atomism systematically as their own doctrine. The impression widespread
in the West that Muslim theology is fatalistic, holding that an all-controlling
God determines everything that happens in the world, is the result of the
orthodox stamp which the AshÀarites put on this MuÀtazilite doctrine.
The MuÀtazilite-AshÀarite network, for all the concessions the latter made
to scripturalism, took indigenous Muslim philosophy toward issues compara-
ble at many points to positions later argued by the famous philosophers of
medieval Christendom and early modern Europe. Let us note the following:
- Al-AshÀari rejected the MuÀtazilites’ extreme emphasis on the unity of
God in order to agree with the traditionalists’ view that God has positive
attributes (power, knowledge, life, and so on as described in the QurÁan). These
cannot be considered identical with God’s essence; but they are eternal, and
subsist in God’s essence (Fakhry, 1983: 53, 58–59, 204–205, 214–215). This
line of argument had already become acute with AshÀari’s MuÀtazilite teacher
al-JubaÁi, and his son Abu Hashim. The latter worked out subtle distinctions
of state and attribute, moving along a path similar to that of Duns Scotus in
the Christian network four centuries later. Abu Hashim took the discussion of
bodies and their accidents to its most extreme step, holding that a body can
be stripped of all accidents except being. Other MuÀtazilites had argued about
which attributes were most primordial; al-KaÀbi, the strongest advocate of
time-atomism, held that bodies can be divested of all attributes except color,
while the AshÀarites distinguished between primary and secondary accidents,
the former of which necessarily accompany substance, and include motion,
rest, and location. The argument looks something like Locke’s primary and
secondary qualities, although the AshÀarites went on to include among primary
accidents features such as taste and smell, dampness and dryness, heat and
cold. The primary-secondary distinction was not worked out with the radical-
ness of Locke because the level of abstraction upheld by the intellectual
network did not remain very high. - The AshÀarites held that God’s decrees are fiat, independent of and
superior to any rational or moral conditions. Al-Baqillani argued that if God
desired, he could have created an entirely different world, or refrained from
creating the world at all. Here we have a position like that which was taken
by Duns Scotus and the Ockhamists, emphasizing the unlimited and miracu-
lous power of God’s will. The condemnation of Averroist determinism by the
Paris authorities in 1277, which led to this conception of the unlimited power
of God, is structurally paralleled by the political condemnation of the MuÀtaz-
ilites’ rational restrictions on God as following from his unity and justice. In
both cases a philosophy is constructed which extends the implications of the
opposite position.
412 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths