The Qadar: Its Four Levels, the Servant's Deeds, and the Wisdom of Allah

The Qadariyyah and the Muʿtazilah: “there is no qadar”, “the servant creates his own deeds”

The response

Al-Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Jabbār stated their doctrine in Sharḥ al-Uṣūl al-Khamsah and al-Mughnī, as it is quoted from them in Mawsūʿat al-Firaq:

The first Qadariyyah denied the knowledge itself, and the Companions disavowed them; Imām al-Shāfiʿī and others said: debate the Qadariyyah with the knowledge: if they affirm it, they are defeated, and if they deny it, they have disbelieved. The later Muʿtazilah affirmed the knowledge and the writing and denied the will and the creation: the servant creates his deed, and Allah does not will the disobedience.

Allah said: Allah created you and what you do. And He said: you do not will except that Allah wills. If the servant created his own deeds, there would be creators besides Allah, which is why the Prophet ﷺ called them the Magians of this ummah: the Magians made a creator of good and a creator of evil, and these made every servant the creator of his acts. And if something happened in the dominion of Allah that He did not will, He would be overcome in His own dominion, exalted is He above that.

Their argument, that He would then punish for what He created, confuses the creating with the doing. Allah created the deed as a thing made; the servant did it by his will and choice. The punishment falls on the doing, not on the creating; and Allah is not asked about what He does, while they will be asked.

The Jabriyyah and the doctrine of “acquisition”: “the servant has no real ability”

The response

Al-Shahrastānī, himself an Ashʿarī, defined it in al-Milal wa-l-Niḥal:

So the Jabrī, as al-Shahrastānī defines him, is one who denies any effect to the servant’s ability.

And al-Nafrāwī the Mālikī gave the poem of the Jawharah in al-Fawākih al-Dawānī:

Lay the Jawharah next to al-Shahrastānī. An ability that “has no effect” is, by the definition of the Ashʿarī al-Shahrastānī, the moderate Jabriyyah. The poem says the words and denies the name. The people of Islam made it a proverb:

Ibn Taymiyyah said in Minhāj al-Sunnah:

Ibn Taymiyyah said of them: a people of the affirmers went to extremes until they stripped the servant of his ability and choice, and took the wisdoms and benefits out of the actions of Allah. Jahm said it openly: the servant is compelled, and his acts are attributed to him only figuratively, as one says the tree moved or the sun set.

The Ashʿarī kasb tried to stand between the two, and ended near Jahm. If the servant's ability has no effect at all in his deed, and the deed is created at the moment the ability is present without the ability taking any part in it, then the servant's “acquisition” is a word without a meaning; it was said of it among the scholars that the three things whose reality cannot be understood are the leap of al-Naẓẓām, the states of Abū Hāshim, and the kasb of al-Ashʿarī.

The Qurʾān refutes them in every verse that attributes the deed to the servant, rewards him for it and punishes him for it: whoever of you wills to be upright; whoever does an atom's weight of good will see it. Allah does not punish a tree for moving in the wind. The servant's will and ability are real causes, created by Allah, and the effect of the cause is by the will of Allah; that is the creed of Ahl al-Sunnah, between the Qadariyyah who make the servant independent and the Jabriyyah who make him nothing.

“If Allah decreed the sin, why does He punish it?” and “Why did Allah create evil?”

The response

The argument by the qadar for sin is the argument of the mushrikūn, and Allah refuted it: they said, had Allah willed we would not have associated partners, and Allah answered that those before them said the same until they tasted His punishment. No one accepts this argument in the affairs of this world: the man whose property is taken does not excuse the thief because the theft was decreed. The one who argues with the qadar for his sin does not accept it when it is used against him.

As for the question why Allah created evil, the answer is the one given above: the evil is in the thing made, not in Allah's act; and Allah created it for a wisdom, some of which He showed and some of which He kept, and the servant knows only a little. The trial reveals the patient, the existence of disbelief reveals the faith of the believers and their jihād, and the sin reveals the vastness of His forgiveness. Whoever demands that Allah explain every wisdom to him has demanded to be the equal of his Lord in knowledge; and you have not been given of knowledge except a little.

The rule that removes the difficulty is the distinction between what is His own action and what He has made. Lying, theft and oppression are found in what He has made, and they describe the one in whom they occur.

Ibn al-Qayyim said in Miftāḥ Dār al-Saʿādah:

Ibn al-Qayyim has shown who is named by what. The reason why the name of evil does not reach the Lord comes in Shifāʾ al-ʿAlīl.

And he said in Shifāʾ al-ʿAlīl:

To this are added a series of arguments, among the clearest things said on the subject. First: this man does not know what has been decreed for him until after he has acted, so when he stepped forward to the sin, he did not step forward on the basis of the decree. He stepped forward by his own desire, and he picked up the decree afterwards to defend himself. Why did he not suppose that Allah had decreed obedience for him, and obey? Second: no sword was held to his face. Allah said that He has “guided him to the way, whether he be grateful or ungrateful”. The two of them, the grateful and the ungrateful, were shown the road alike.

Third: he does not use this argument anywhere else. He travels the earth for his living though his provision is written. When he is ill, he searches for the most skilful doctor though his term is written. Offered two roads to a city, one paved, short and safe, and one rough, long and full of danger, he takes the first, and he does not say that the second was written for him. So he treats the two paths of the Hereafter in a way that he would never treat the two roads to a city, although the Messengers made the roads of the Hereafter far clearer than anyone has made the roads of this world, and their ends are guaranteed by the promise of Allah. Fourth: he is inconsistent in his use of the argument, for he is a Jabrī when he goes astray and a Qadarī when he obeys.

That is, when he sins he says that it was written, and when he obeys he says that he did it himself and he reminds Allah of it. And there is a further test that this man will not accept: let someone strike him or take his property, and then say that it was decreed. He will not leave him alone on that account. So he knows very well that the decree does not excuse the one who does wrong.

“No action is good or evil in itself; it becomes so only by the command and the prohibition”

The response

Al-Juwaynī said in al-Irshād, as the editor of al-Muwāfaqāt quotes him:

Al-Ghazālī, in the creed that he placed at the head of the Iḥyāʾ, drew the conclusion for the actions of Allah:

He said under the sixth principle:

Look at what this makes of the Book. Allah said, “and your Lord does not wrong anyone”, and He praises Himself with this in many verses. If oppression is only the disposal of what another owns, and if that cannot be conceived of Him, then He has praised Himself for not doing what cannot be done at all. No one is praised for failing to do the impossible. On this doctrine the verse says nothing that distinguishes the Lord of the worlds from any other, and the warning “whoever does righteous deeds while he is a believer will fear neither wrong nor loss” has no content, for the believer would be punished forever and it would still not be wrong.

The doctrine also contradicts what every human being knows before any argument is made. Ibn al-Qayyim said of those who deny that actions have these qualities:

He said:

The Muʿtazilah fell into the other extreme, and it is this that frightened the Ashʿarīs into their denial. They said that since reason knows a deed to be evil, its doer deserves punishment by reason alone, before any Messenger has come, and that reason lays down what Allah is obliged to do. The Ashʿarīs supposed that they could only escape this by denying that deeds have any quality in themselves. There is no such choice to make, and the Qurʾān has one verse that answers both of them:

Allah, the Exalted, said in Sūrat al-Qaṣaṣ:

The verse speaks of an affliction that comes for what their own hands sent ahead, and of an excuse they would have made. Ibn al-Qayyim shows what that does to both parties.

Ibn al-Qayyim said on it:

The verse says “for what their hands have put forward”. So their deeds were already a cause of calamity before the Messenger came, and that is the evil in the deed itself. And it says that He sent the Messenger so that they could not say “why did You not send”. So the punishment waits for the Message, and that is the mercy and justice of the Lord. Then Ibn al-Qayyim turned to what the denial does to the very proof of prophethood, and this is the part that its holders have never answered:

He said, addressing them:

The circle is plain. The man will not look until looking is obligatory, looking is not obligatory until the Message is established, and the Message is not established until he looks. And if lying and truthfulness are alike to the Lord, a miracle in the hands of a claimant tells us nothing, for it could as well be given to a liar. So those who claim to be defending revelation against reason have taken away the means of knowing that the revelation is from Allah.

It remains to answer al-Ghazālī’s definition of oppression and the verses that are cited for it. Ibn al-Qayyim states what it commits them to, and they do not hide from it:

He said in Miftāḥ Dār al-Saʿādah:

The Salaf explained the word differently, and their explanation fits every verse in which it occurs.

He said:

He has given the true meaning of oppression, and he now names the verse.

He continued:

Their reading makes the verse praise Him for leaving what cannot be done, and he shows why no praise can rest on that.

And he said:

They have verses and reports of their own: “If You punish them, they are Your servants”; “He is not asked about what He does”; and the ḥadīth that if Allah punished the people of His heavens and His earth, He would punish them without being an oppressor to them. All of this is true, and none of it says what they need it to say.

He said in reply:

The claim of the Ashʿarīs is answered with the words of ʿĪsā, which they use as a proof.

And he said on the verse of ʿĪsā:

“Allah does nothing for a purpose, and no wisdom can be given for His actions”

The response

Al-Rāzī said in his Tafsīr on the change of the qiblah, in Sūrat al-Baqarah:

He rests this on one verse, and the very next verse in the muṣḥaf gives the reason for the change that he says has no reason:

Allah, the Exalted, said in Sūrat al-Baqarah, directly after it:

He gives the witnessing as a reason, and He gives the knowing as a reason. Allah Himself says why, in the place where al-Rāzī says that it is impossible to say why. Ownership of the east and the west answers the fools who objected to the change, for the Owner directs His servants as He wills, and it does not remove what He said in the next line. The Qurʾān is full of this.

He said in Sūrat al-Muʾminūn:

Sūrat al-Muʾminūn denies that creation is in vain, and Sūrat al-Dhāriyāt names what it was for.

And He said in Sūrat al-Dhāriyāt:

The first verse rebukes the one who thinks that there was no purpose in his creation, and on this doctrine that is what one must think. To say that the lām in the second verse only marks a result is to contradict what happened, for many of the jinn and mankind did not worship Him. Ibn al-Qayyim exposed this reading:

He said in Miftāḥ Dār al-Saʿādah:

Their chief argument for this is that to act for a purpose is the mark of a creature who lacks something, so that it makes the Lord like His creation. That is the argument they use against every Attribute, and it receives the same answer. The wisdom of the Creator is no more like the wisdom of the creature than His Essence is like theirs.

Ibn al-Qayyim said, answering them:

Nor is this the doctrine of all who are named with the Sunnah, as those who hold it would like it to appear. Ibn Taymiyyah said in answer to the Rāfiḍī, who had charged Ahl al-Sunnah as a whole with it:

He said in Minhāj al-Sunnah:

They have a further argument: every purpose comes down to gaining a pleasure or removing a pain, and Allah is able to bring about either at once with no means, so to create anything as a means would be pointless. Ibn al-Qayyim gave it in their words and answered it.

He said in Shifāʾ al-ʿAlīl:

And al-Rāzī himself cannot hold to his doctrine when he comes to the question of suffering. In the commentary on al-Fātiḥah, where he is explaining the mercy of Allah, he reasons as the people of wisdom reason:

He said:

If the pain is there for the sake of the good, then the action has a purpose, and that is what he has said is impossible at 4/81. Ibn Taymiyyah meant that, in the words quoted above, of those who agree with al-Ashʿarī in one place and contradict themselves in another. No one who has to answer a suffering man can keep to the doctrine that his suffering is for nothing.

“Whatever Allah wills He loves, and whatever He does not will He hates”

The response

Ibn Taymiyyah recorded who holds it, in Minhāj al-Sunnah, when the Rāfiḍī charged that Allah wills disobedience from the disbeliever and does not will obedience from him:

So the Ashʿarī and the Qadarī begin from one premise, that will and love are one. The Qadarī, knowing that Allah does not love disobedience, concludes that He did not will it. The Ashʿarī, knowing that nothing happens except by His will, concludes that He loves it. Each of them holds half of the truth and uses it to break the other half. Allah separated the two in a single verse:

Allah, the Exalted, said in Sūrat al-Zumar:

Disbelief occurs, and so it is willed; and He says that He does not approve it. Those who hold this doctrine have two ways of dealing with the verse, and Ibn al-Qayyim gave them and gave the reply:

He said in Shifāʾ al-ʿAlīl:

So on their saying He would be pleased with what He has willed, and the Qurʾān says otherwise.

He continued, after showing that on their saying the verse would mean that He does not approve disbelief where it did not occur, and would love it and be pleased with it if it occurred:

“The evil in the world proves that there is no wise and merciful Lord”

The response

This objection is older than Islam. Its standard form is credited to Epicurus, whose words on this have reached us through those who answered him. The Latin writer Lactantius gives it in this form:

Lactantius reports it in his treatise on the anger of God:

The Scottish philosopher David Hume put it in the mouth of one of the speakers in his dialogues, in the form that has been repeated ever since:

Hume wrote in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion:

Charles Darwin turned it from the suffering of men to the suffering of animals. He wrote to the botanist Asa Gray of the wasp that lays its eggs inside a living caterpillar:

Darwin wrote in a letter to Asa Gray:

Take what Darwin wrote next, for he did not stop there, and those who quote him usually stop short of it. He could not bring himself to conclude what the atheist concludes:

He continued in the same letter:

So the man most often cited for this objection saw that it does not reach its conclusion. As for the dilemma, each of its horns treats mercy as the only thing that a Lord could have in view, and the removal of pain as the only thing that mercy could want. The third possibility never enters into it: that He is able, that He is merciful, and that He has a wisdom in what He has left which the objector does not know. Lactantius himself, though he was a Christian and we do not share his creed, saw that the argument has a gap at this point. The replies follow.

The argument does not reach its own conclusion. Nothing joins “evil exists” to “there is no Creator”, for a world that contains pain has still been made, and its being made is what needs explaining. At the very most, the objection would be a question about what He is like, and the one who raises it has already spoken of a Lord whose mercy he expects.

Next, ask the one who makes the objection what he means by evil. If there is no Lord, then there is no standard above men, and the pain of a child is a fact about nerves, as the falling of a stone is a fact. He cannot call it wrong, and that it ought not to be is the entire force of his argument. So he has borrowed the moral law from the Lord he denies in order to accuse Him.

Then the argument supposes that the purpose of this life is comfort, and that pain is a failure of that purpose. Allah has told us otherwise: He “created death and life to test you, which of you is best in deed”. A place of testing requires what tests. Patience has no meaning where there is nothing to bear, nor courage where there is nothing to fear, nor forgiveness where no one has done wrong. And the account is not closed in this world, for the one who was wronged here will stand with the one who wronged him before a Judge who forgets nothing.

Then the argument looks at the small part of creation which pains it and it leaves out the rest. The rain which destroys a house has given life to the whole land. Ibn al-Qayyim said:

He said in Ṭarīq al-Hijratayn:

The objector’s last refuge is to ask why rain could not have been created without its harm, or fire without its burning. Ibn al-Qayyim put this very question to his shaykh:

He said:

So fire that does not burn is not fire, and a creature who has no need is not a creature. The objector is asking why what is created does not have the qualities of the Creator. Asked plainly, that question answers itself.

The first thing to require of the objector is that he consider the Lord as He is, and not one Attribute cut away from the others. He is the Merciful, and He is the Wise, the Just, the Forgiving, the Subduer and the King. A father who loves his child takes him to the man who will cut him. That is only an example drawn from a creature, and Allah has the highest description, but it shows that mercy and pain are not opposites, and that a person who thinks that love could only ever mean comfort has not yet understood what love is. It is the same man who stands in the operating room of a hospital and calls the knife a proof that the place was built for cruelty.

Ibn al-Qayyim said in Ṭarīq al-Hijratayn:

Then he must be made to consider who he is. He is passing judgement on the wisdom of the One who made him, on the basis of what he can see from where he stands. The angels were told, “I know what you do not know”, and the Companions were told, “Allah knows and you do not know”.

Ibn al-Qayyim said in Shifāʾ al-ʿAlīl:

That is not a flight from the question. Men of reason accept a great deal whose inner workings they have not seen, once they know the one who made it. Whoever sees in a city its streets, its walls and its water laid out with skill, and then comes across one locked house whose use he does not know, does not conclude that the city was built by chance. Allah has shown some of His wisdoms and kept some back, and those shown are enough to decide the matter of those kept back.

Then let him weigh what he has left out. Evil in this world is the smaller part of it, and it is mixed with good.

Ibn al-Qayyim said:

The hardest case that is put is Iblīs himself, and disbelief, for these are said to be evil with no good in them. Ibn al-Qayyim met it directly:

He said:

The Qurʾān gives the example of this in the torrent. Allah said in Sūrat al-Raʿd that He sends down water and the valleys flow according to their measure, and the torrent carries a rising foam; and that from what they heat in the fire to make ornaments or tools comes a foam like it; and that “as for the foam, it goes away as scum, and as for what benefits the people, it remains in the earth”.

Ibn al-Qayyim said on it:

So the objector stands at the bank and looks at the foam. Mūsā, peace be upon him, saw a boat holed, a boy killed and a wall set up for people who had refused hospitality, and he could not keep silent. Then he was told about the king who was seizing every sound boat, about the parents of the boy, and about the treasure beneath the wall. Al-Khiḍr said, “a mercy from your Lord”. What was outwardly evil was inwardly mercy, and this was shown to one of the greatest of the Messengers in order that those who come after him should know what to say when they are not shown.

“Man is driven and has no choice”, or “Is man compelled or free?”

The response

The answer begins with the questioner himself. Did anyone force him to ask this question? Does he not choose which car he buys? And then: does an accident strike him by his choice, does illness, does death? Let him ask himself these and he has his answer. What a sane man does, he does by choice, and what falls upon him without choice is purely by the Qadar, and he has no will in it. So the question cannot be answered with one word, for there are two kinds of event.

They divide in this way. There is what Allah Himself brings about in His creation, such as sending rain, growing crops, giving life and death, sickness and health; no one has any choice in these. And there is what is done by creatures who have a will; these are done by the choice of their doers, for Allah has given that to them. There are examples that no one can argue with: a man goes down from a roof by the stairs and he knows that he has chosen to; he falls from the roof and he knows that he has not. A man with incontinence knows the difference between that and his ordinary state. The one who does not distinguish between the two, and treats the fall and the stairs as the same, has rejected what is known by necessity through the religion, through reason and through daily life.

The Qurʾān speaks of man’s will in many places, as in “whoever wills, let him believe, and whoever wills, let him disbelieve”, and “among you are those who want this world, and among you are those who want the Hereafter”. And it gives the true relation of the two wills in one verse, “For whoever of you wills to be upright; and you do not will except that Allah wills, the Lord of the worlds”. If the Jabrī were right, three things would follow. The law would be void from its root, for one is neither praised nor blamed for what one has no choice in. The Lord would be, exalted is He far above it, an oppressor to whoever He punished, which the Book denies in express words:

He said in Sūrat Qāf, of the disbeliever and his companion:

So He gives the reason why the punishment is not oppression: He had sent the warning beforehand, and they chose what they chose. And the sending of the Messengers would remove no excuse, which is the third point:

He said in Sūrat al-Nisāʾ:

The Qadar did not stop when the Messengers came. It was there before them and it remained after them. If it were an argument for the disbeliever, it would be as good an argument after the Messengers as before them, and Allah says that after the Messengers there is no argument at all. Therefore it was never an argument.

“What is decreed is the act, and only the manner of it is left to us”

The response

It is to be rejected from both ends. The idea of building the mosque came to the man by his choice. No one forced him to it, any more than one is forced to the idea of repairing one’s own house. It was also decreed for him, though he had no awareness of it, for the Qadar is known only when it occurs or when revelation informs of it. And the manner of building is likewise decreed, for Allah has determined all things in general and in detail, and a man cannot choose what Allah has not decreed. So the division is false. The whole action, its origin and its manner, is by the choice of the servant, and the whole of it is by the decree of Allah. The man feels no force upon him when he acts, and when he has acted, we know with certainty that Allah decreed it.

The same is true of the sinner. His idea of the sin is his own and he was not compelled to it. So he has no excuse in the act and none in the manner, and the punishment falls upon the voluntary act itself. That is why, if someone truly forces a person to break the law, no ruling for the breach applies to him and he is not punished, for then his excuse is established. The Sharīʿah knows what compulsion is, and the sinner’s state is not that.

“If it is written, then why work, why seek medicine, and why supplicate?”

The response

The Companions put this question to the Prophet ﷺ himself. It was a sincere question, asked by people who believed, and he answered it in a word:

Al-Bukhārī reported in his Ṣaḥīḥ, in the tafsīr of Sūrat al-Layl:

After telling them to work, he recited what shows why.

Then he recited from Sūrat al-Layl:

In this ḥadīth the Prophet ﷺ forbade them to rely on the writing because there is no way of knowing it, and commanded them with what is within their ability, which is the deed. And the verse shows the order: the giving and the fear come first, and the making easy comes after them.

As for supplication, he says that it turns back the decree in one respect and it does not in another. A sick man calls upon Allah and is healed. It is true that without the supplication he would have remained sick, and it is also true that what was written from the beginning is that he would be healed by way of this supplication. So the supplication has a real effect, and it changes nothing in the writing, because the supplication was written and so was what comes through it. All causes are like this, for the causes are written and the effects are written. There is the Companion who recited al-Fātiḥah over the chief who had been bitten by a snake, who stood up healed. The recitation had its effect and the cure was by the decree of Allah.

The same answer resolves a ḥadīth that troubles many people:

Al-Bukhārī reported in his Ṣaḥīḥ from Anas that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said:

Does a person then have two lifespans, one if he keeps his ties and another if he cuts them? The Shaykh says no. The lifespan is one and the decree is one. The one for whom it was decreed that he would keep his ties will keep them. The Prophet ﷺ urged what is good, in the way that we say: whoever wants a child, let him marry. The marriage is written and the child is written, and no one reasons from this that he has no need to marry. The servant does not know what is written, and so he is told what to do.

“Ādam argued from the Qadar and won, so the sinner can argue from it too”

The response

Al-Bukhārī reported in his Ṣaḥīḥ:

The answer is that this is citing the decree for a calamity and not for a sin. Mūsā did not reproach him for disobeying his Lord, for Ādam had repented of that, and Allah had chosen him and accepted his repentance, and no prophet would blame a man for a sin that had been forgiven. What Mūsā reproached him with was the expulsion from Paradise, the loss that had come upon his children. Ādam did not disobey in order to be expelled. The expulsion was a calamity, and calamities are met by saying that Allah decreed them. So the Shaykh gives an example: a man goes on a journey for some benefit and has an accident, and someone asks him why he travelled. He answers that this was the decree of Allah, for he did not go out in order to have an accident. His answer is sound.

He adds a second category. A man commits a sin, regrets it and repents, and a brother reproaches him, and he says that this was the decree of Allah. That is valid, for he is not using the decree to go on sinning.

Al-Bukhārī reported in his Ṣaḥīḥ:

What ʿAlī said is true, for souls are in the hand of Allah. Yet the Prophet ﷺ called it argument, because it was offered for leaving an act. That is the rule in brief, and it comes from the one to whom the ḥadīth of Ādam was revealed.

“Allah has not written guidance for me”

The response

Ask him how he knows. He has read neither the Tablet nor the unseen. He has claimed knowledge that no one has, for the Qadar is known only after it occurs, and that the one who says this should be told that Allah has shown him guidance and forbidden him misguidance and did not will to leave His servants upon misguidance, and that He is more joyful at his repentance than the man who found his lost camel in the desert. So he stands at the road with the door open and calls the road closed.

Moreover, Allah has told us the cause on the side of the servant. He said “So when they deviated, Allah caused their hearts to deviate”, and He said of those who broke their covenant, “We cursed them and made their hearts hard”.

He said in Sūrat al-Ṣaff:

The deviation of the heart came after their deviation. These verses answer the man who asks what remains for him, if Allah has decreed that he should go astray: Allah guides those who are fit for guidance and leaves astray those who are fit for misguidance. And that fitness is something which a man can see in himself, and he can do something about it now.

“The Book overtakes a man and his deeds are lost, though Allah does not waste good deeds”

The response

The ḥadīth of Ibn Masʿūd continues in al-Bukhārī:

It is explained by another wording of the Prophet ﷺ himself:

Al-Bukhārī reported in his Ṣaḥīḥ, in the account of the man who fought fiercely and then killed himself, that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said:

“In what shows to the people”. So the deed had not been good in its reality. The verse says that He does not waste the reward of the one who “does good”, and the one who is good in his heart and in his outward deeds has no reason to fear it. No one who was sincere in his heart has ever been betrayed by this ḥadīth. As for the second half, it is the mercy of Allah upon one who repents as his death draws near. What it leaves the believer with is fear for his end, and hope for the worst of men, and neither fatalism nor despair.

“He says He guides whom He wills, and He says whoever wills let him believe”

The response

He said in Sūrat al-Anʿām:

Guidance and misguidance are His. And in the same Book the servant’s will stands, so that neither verse is dropped for the other.

And He said in Sūrat al-Kahf:

The Shaykh’s answer is that the man under obligation has a will, a choice and an ability, and that it is Allah who created his will, choice and ability, so that a creature has no will except by the will of Allah. The verse of al-Takwīr states the two together. As to when Allah wills to guide or misguide a man, the verses of al-Layl and al-Ṣaff tell us, and the cause of a servant’s going astray is in himself. There is a principle for every case of this kind: there is no contradiction in the speech of Allah or in what is authentic from His Messenger ﷺ. If two texts look as though they clash, look again, and the matter will become clear; and if it does not, then stop, and leave it to the One who knows.

“Why do sin and disbelief exist at all?”

The response

The answer is that what is loved is of two kinds: what is loved in itself, and what is loved for the sake of something else. A thing that is hateful in itself is sometimes loved for what is in it of wisdom and benefit, and so it is loved in one respect and hated in another. Then there are wisdoms that we can see in the existence of sin and disbelief:

First, the fulfilment of His word, for He has promised to fill the Fire: “And the word of your Lord is fulfilled: I shall surely fill Hell with jinn and mankind all together.” Second, the manifestation of His wisdom and power in dividing the servants into the obedient and the disobedient, each fit for what he does, for “Allah knows best where to place His message”. No one has the power to do this division but Allah, and He said to His Prophet ﷺ: “Indeed, you do not guide whom you love, but Allah guides whom He wills.” Third, that the obedient man should know the value of the favour done to him when he sees the state of the disobedient. Fourth, that a servant should turn to his Lord in supplication to keep him far from sin, and supplication is worship.

Fifth, that the one who falls into sin and is granted repentance returns with a broken heart, and he is sometimes better after his repentance than he was before it, for his vanity and self-admiration have gone and he knows how much he needs his Lord. Sixth, the establishment of jihād, and of commanding the good and forbidding the evil, none of which could exist without sin and disbelief. And he says that there are many other wisdoms, and that Allah has His ways with His creation.

Of the calamities that come as a result of sin he says that there is no evil in the decreeing, and that the evil lies in what is decreed, and that this is evil in one respect and good in another. He gives the verse that names the cause and the purpose together.

He said in Sūrat al-Rūm:

“Because of what the hands of people have earned” is the cause, and their returning to Him is the wisdom. The corruption is a harm in itself, and its end is good.

“No harmony is worth the tears of one child, so I return the ticket”

The response

The objection has never taken a stronger form, and in this form it is less an argument than a refusal. Dostoevsky gave it to his character Ivan, who has been telling his brother stories of tortured children. Dostoevsky wrote in Russian, and the translation here is ours.

Ivan says to his brother Alyosha:

He returns the ticket. Then Ivan puts the question that he thinks cannot be answered.

And he asks:

Notice first where Ivan’s force comes from. Everything he says is that the suffering is unavenged and that the wrongdoer goes unanswered. He assumes that this must be so. The revelation says the opposite, and it says so in plainer words than anything in his speech. No one has to forgive the torturer in order for the world to be just, for the right of the wronged is not dropped. The Prophet ﷺ said:

Muslim reported in his Ṣaḥīḥ from Abū Hurayrah that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said:

And the ḥadīth qudsī quoted above swears to it: “By My power and My majesty, I shall surely obtain retaliation for the wronged from the wrongdoer, even for a slap.” So the tears are not unavenged, and no one will be asked to embrace the torturer. The mother does not forgive what is not hers, and neither does anyone else on her behalf. Ivan is rebelling against a harmony in which the wrong is smoothed over, and that is not what the Messengers taught. His quarrel is with a Christian doctrine of a universal forgiveness, and the Book never asked him to accept it.

Second, he has no ground to stand on once he has handed in his ticket. He says that the torment of a child is a wrong which no plan could make right. By what law? In the world that he is left with, if he gives up his Lord, there is no court and no right, and a child’s pain is an event like the falling of a stone. Then he has no one to accuse and nothing to accuse him of. The moral force of his speech is borrowed from the Lord he is refusing. Dostoevsky himself saw where it leads, and in the same novel he has Ivan’s doctrine carried through to murder by one who took him at his word.

Third, Ivan asks about the architect who tortures a child in order to reach a good end, and so he has measured the Lord by a man. If a man did that, he would be a criminal, because the child is not his, because he has no power to repay it, because he does not know the end, and because he has no authority over its life. The Lord owns the child, He knows the end, and He repays beyond all that was lost. Ibn al-Qayyim said that this analogy is the root of the error of the Qadariyyah: that what is evil from a creature must be evil from Him.

On the pain of children itself, Ibn al-Qayyim has a chapter, and he said of it that you will hardly find its like in most books. He gives the positions of the people:

He said in Miftāḥ Dār al-Saʿādah, after discussing the benefit of an infant’s crying:

That was the first position, and Ibn al-Qayyim shows that it fails. He then goes to the next.

He continued with the second position:

Neither of the two answers has held, and those who gave them were left bewildered. He now gives the third.

And he gave the third position:

What he has described is the nature of man in this world. He draws the consequence for the one who wants this world to be the next.

He said:

So far he has answered the objection. Here he turns it against the one who raised it.

And he drew the conclusion that turns Ivan’s premise around:

The Muslim therefore does not say that a child’s pain is good. He says that the world in which it occurs is not the last world, that it is hateful to Allah for anyone to be wronged, that the wrongdoer will pay, and that what is hidden in it is known to the One who made the child and loves him more than his mother does. Ivan returns the ticket without having looked to see what it was a ticket to.

“A God who does not make Himself clear cannot be good”

The response

Nietzsche wrote in Morgenröte:

Everything in this depends upon the God that Nietzsche had in front of him, and it was the God of the Church, who is known by a mystery that reason cannot enter and who damns for an error of doctrine. He was writing against the Christianity of his own country. The Lord who speaks in the Qurʾān said the opposite on each point. Nothing has been left hidden on the things that matter, for the natural disposition knows Him, the signs in creation point to Him, and the Messengers came with what cannot be mistaken:

He said in Sūrat Fuṣṣilat:

And He does not punish the one to whom the proof has not come. This has been given above from al-Qaṣaṣ 47 and from Ibn al-Qayyim on the deeds done before the Message, and it is the plain meaning of “so that the people would have no argument against Allah after the Messengers”. As for those who mistake the truth after striving for it, the one who is sincere has been promised, “And those who strive for Us, We shall surely guide them to Our ways”. So what Nietzsche calls a God who hides and then threatens is a God who has been made known to every human being and who threatens only those who turned away.

“If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him”

The response

Bakunin wrote in God and the State, reversing Voltaire’s saying:

Bakunin does not even claim here to have shown that there is no Lord. He says that he would prefer that there were none, and he calls the severity of his logic so plain that it needs no development. It needs a great deal. He has taken the relation of one man to another, in which a master profits from his slave and takes away what the slave owns, and he has put the Lord of the worlds in the place of the master. The Lord gains nothing from the servant and takes nothing from him, for all that the servant has came from Him.

The error in his logic is that man is not choosing between service and freedom. He is choosing between masters. The man who has thrown off his Lord serves his desire, his party, his state or the opinion of those around him. Bakunin’s own life was spent in the service of a cause, under discipline, and he knew what a revolution demands of those who serve it. Allah gave the example:

He said in Sūrat al-Zumar:

That is the freedom of the believer. He is the slave of One, and for that reason he is no one else’s slave. He fears no ruler’s displeasure and hopes for nothing from the crowd, and he does not need to be told what he is by those who hold power. Bakunin was right that if the Lord were as a human tyrant, one would have to rebel against Him. And it is precisely this Lord that has been forbidden to us. There is nothing like Him.