62 Livnat Holtzman
Traditionalist thinkers reacted to these harsh accusations of heresy
by asserting that although human actions are predetermined, they are
not forced upon human beings. This assertion was elaborated in dif-
ferent degrees of subtlety and sophistication by traditionalist thinkers
primarily to reject the rationalists’ claims against the traditionalist con-
cept of qadar. The Ashʿarī reaction led to their formulating the theory
of kasb, which, the Ashʿarīs claimed, was the golden mean between the
concept of free will and the concept of jabr.^3
The traditionalist thinkers attempted to disavow any similarity
between their concept of qadar and the doctrine of jabr. However,
they could not ignore the substantial resemblance of jabr to qadar, and
more so the possibility that the concept of jabr was but an overzealous
version deviating from the belief in qadar. This possibility is demon-
strated by Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) in the following description of
an early debate between the Qadariyya (here the forerunners of the
Muʿtazila) and “one of the muthbita” (here a Sunni traditionalist schol-
ar). Ibn Taymiyya argues in this passage that the belief in jabr emerged
as a reaction to early Muʿtazilī attacks on the Sunni belief in qadar:
When the Qadariyya, the deniers of predetermination (nufāt al-qadar),
first appeared, denying that God leads astray whom He will, and guides
whom He will, and that He is the Creator of everything and that human
actions are created by Him, people rejected this innovation (bidʿa). There-
fore, one of them [of the Qadariyya], when debating on this subject, said:
“This [the traditionalist doctrine of qadar] necessitates that God compels
human actions on human beings, and that He assigns them with actions
they could not possibly have performed.” Thus, one of the muthbita^4
who was arguing with them persisted on applying this and said: “Yes,3 Swartz, Merlin: Acquisition (kasb) in Early Kalām, in: Samuel M. Stern, Albert
Hourani and Vivian Brown (eds.): Islamic Philosophy and the Classical Tradition.
Essays Presented by His Friends and Pupils to Richard Walzer on His Seventieth
Birthday, Columbia 1972, pp. 355–387; Abrahamov, Binyamin: A Re-examina-
tion of al-Ashʿarī’s Theory of Kasb according to Kitāb al-Lumaʿ, in: Journal of
the Royal Asiatic Society 1 (1989), pp. 210–221.
4 Ibn Taymiyya, Taqī al-Dīn Aḥmad: Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql wal-naql aw muwāfaqat
ṣaḥīḥ al-manqūl li-ṣarīḥ al-maʿqūl, ed. by ʿAbd al-Laṭīf ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, Beirut
1417/1997, vol. 1, p. 148. See also in the following edition: Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql
wal-naql aw muwāfaqat ṣaḥīḥ al-manqūl li-ṣarīḥ al-maʿqūl, ed. by Muḥammad
Rashād Sālim, Cairo 1979, vol. 1, p. 254. The muthbita appear in different sourc-
es as ahl al-ithbāt. Like Qadariyya and Jabriyya, ahl al-ithbāt is used to denote
different theological trends. Obviously they are traditionalist Sunni scholars, as
al-Ashʿarī himself saw them as his forerunners. Gardet, Louis: ʿIlm al-Kalām, in:
EI^2 , vol. 3 (1971), pp. 1141–1150.
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