Mu'tazilah Scholarship

I am on page ten of the Mutazilah book [1]. I am summarizing key points from the book. Please read the book if you are interested to find out more about them.

The Sunnis since the ninth century have stopped recognizing the Mutazilah sect (madhab). And in my last post we saw how the Zaydis and the Shias treat the Mutazilah scholarship.

The authors then compared the Mutazilah with Western Philosophies/Philosophers of the 17th and 18th century. I am not going to reproduce anything about the western scholarship here because my goal is, if possible, to just write about Mu'tazilah thoughts/thinking/Philosophy as it was known back in the 8th, 9th and 10th century.

The Mutazili believe that God operate only with rational laws and that God would not deceive HIS creatures by creating an irrational universe. The Mutazili from Basra came out against Sufis and some Sunnis who believes in miracle stories and extraordinary signs about their saints and ancestors.

The Mutazili restrict miracles of the messenger of God only pertaining to those dealing with the claimant (of prophet hood).

Abd al-Jabbar belonged to the Basra madhhab of the Mu'tazila. They adopted what the authors termed as 'a metaphysics of atomistic occasionalism'. I don't even know what this means, so I am going to quote the authors

the Basra Mu'tazila held that physical reality is composed of basic physical entities or atoms (singular jawhar) and attributes (singular 'arad) that give beings their shape, color, and other distinguishing qualities. God creates the world in each instant by creating atoms and attributes that inhere in the physical substrates that atoms form; creation is thus a continual divine activity.

Reference
[1] Martin, Richard C, Woodward, Mark R and Atmaja, Dwi S. 1997. Defenders of Reason In Islam: Mu'tazilism and Rational Theology from Medieval School to Modern Symbol. Oneworld Oxford. Preface. ISBN 978-1851681471