Al-Ash'ari
The theologian who turned against his own teachers to argue that reason must serve revelation, founding the school that became Sunni orthodoxy.
Al-Ash'ari trained among the Mu'tazila, the rationalist theologians who made reason the measure of faith, then broke with them at forty in a public reversal. God's will, he argued, is not bound by our logic; the world holds together only because God recreates it at every instant, so that fire does not burn by its own nature but because God wills the burning. Reason has its place, but as the servant of revelation, not its judge. His middle path between blind literalism and unchecked rationalism became the dominant theology of Sunni Islam.
Places
Ideas
Words
“Fire does not burn by its own nature, but because God wills the burning at every instant.”
Works
Life & Moments
Born in Basra
Born in Basra and trained among the rationalist Mu'tazila theologians.
The Public Break
Renounced the Mu'tazila in a public reversal and founded the theology that would become Sunni orthodoxy.
Reason Serves Revelation
Taught that God's will is not bound by human logic and that the world is sustained by divine recreation each instant.
Death in Baghdad
Died in Baghdad having set the middle path that would dominate Sunni theology for centuries.
Influence
Influenced
- Al-Ghazali
Al-Ghazali worked within, and brought to its height, the Ash'ari theology that al-Ash'ari had founded.
- Ibn Hazm
Ibn Hazm attacked Ash'arite theology as speculation dressed as piety, insisting that God's book and God's law be read as they stand rather than harmonized with the categories of rational theology.
