The Founding Rupture
Al-Ash’ari’s famous separation from al-Jubbai (his teacher) is preserved as a debate about three hypothetical men: one believer, one unbeliever, one child who died before reaching moral responsibility. Al-Ash’ari asked what God owed each. Al-Jubbai (Mu’tazili) answered according to the principle that God necessarily does what is best (al-aslah) for each person. Al-Ash’ari exposed the problem: what if it would have been better for the child to have lived to believe, but God took him early? Al-Jubbai could not answer without either constraining God’s will or abandoning the aslah principle.
Al-Ash’ari concluded: God is not constrained by human notions of the good. God’s will is sovereign.
The Core Positions
Divine attributes: God has real attributes (knowledge, power, will, life, hearing, seeing, speech) that are neither identical to His essence nor other than it — a middle position between Mu’tazili negation of attributes and Hashwi literalism.
Divine speech: The Quran as divine speech (kalam Allah) is eternal as meaning but temporally created as letters and sounds — the famous lafdh-ma’na (utterance-meaning) distinction.
Human action: Humans “acquire” (kasb) their acts — God creates the act, the human acquires it through intention. This position attempted to balance human moral responsibility with divine sovereignty over all creation.
Ethical grounding: Ethical obligation is revealed by God, not discoverable by unaided reason. Reason cannot independently determine that something is obligatory or forbidden.
Spread and Dominance
Ash’arism became the dominant Sunni theological school through al-Ghazali, al-Baqillani, al-Juwayni, and later Fakhr al-Din al-Razi. It is the theological framework underlying the vast majority of Sunni legal and exegetical scholarship from the 4th AH century onward.
See also: Ilm Al Usul, Ilm Al Tasawwuf, Ilm Al Firaq, Tawil Esoteric Interpretation, Fiqh Al Wasatiyyah