Theology

Theology was influenced by political splits in early Islam. As well as the Shi’a there were the Khawarij and others. Theology was also influenced by Christian theology and debates with Christians.

The idea of predestination was considered early.

The mu’tazila (intermediate) school (not their preferred name) that began in Basra and became prominent in Baghdad was an early theological school that was associated with the Greek ideas of rationality. It had precursor ideas in earlier Syrian theology upon which it drew.

One major argument concerned whether the Qur’an was eternal. Ibn Hanbal, as a Hadith scholar and not a logician, (and his supporters) said it was but mu’tazilites saw that as tantamount to deifying the words and thus giving Allah a partner (a special blasphemy in Islam as asserted by the mu’tazilites). They further argued that the very idea of God’s justice (which was certainly Islamic) clearly implied the existence of a form of freewill. Their name comes in part from their view that a major sinner is in an intermediate position (with regard to God’s justice) between a true believer and an infidel (kāfir).

The Ash’ariyya school was named after its founder who had been a mu’tazilite. It became the dominant theological school and it asserted that the nature of God was beyond the power of human rationality to comprehend. Ash'ari and his school held the Qur’an to be eternal and held God to be the creator of human acts which humans 'acquire' from God (in some mystical way, presumably) in order to do the acts. There were also Khawarij and Shi’a theology schools.

Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani and ‘Muhammad Abduh were prominent theologians emphasising the concept of God's oneness (Tawhid) in the last couple of centuries and Muhammad Arkoun, Muhammad Shahrur and others have been still more recent critics of standard theologies.