Reconciling Divine-Will / Destiny (Qadr) and Human Free-Will
“The Lord has created and balanced all things and has fixed their destinies and guided them.” (Qur’an 87:2)
Fate is basically a kind of law of cause and effect
that applies with certainty, the operation of which is under the control of Allah. The verses that
use the word qadha illustrate that the creation of the universe and everything in it and all its contents
and all its provisions that apply to it is God’s qadha through a just law, God also enforces it in the
hereafter.
Destiny: Divine-Will
Qadr is a fundamental belief in Islam, acknowledging that everything that happens, be it good or bad, is by the will of Allah. This belief helps Muslims find contentment in every situation, knowing it’s part of a larger divine plan. This means that human choices cannot effect the larger divine plan.
Human Free-Will: Divine Knowledge
The belief in free will is essential in Islam. This is because, for Muslims, life is a test from Allah. For both Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, al-Qadr does not mean that the choices people make are not free choices. Instead, it means that Allah knows what choices people are going to make before they are made. Therefore, all human beings must make their own decisions, and they will be judged on those decisions by Allah.
On the Day of Judgement
God will reward those who have had faith and done good deeds and punish those who have not. So, God judges people on their choices, not on the destiny already decided for them.
Theodicy: God would not deceive His creatures by creating an irrational universe
Abd al-Jabbar alludes to the Mu’tazili claim that God would never permit istifsad al-adilla “corruption of evidentiary proofs,” that is, contravention of the customary pattern of the way things happen in the physical universe (nature). Thus, for the Mu’tazili mutakallimun, confidence in the rational and knowable nature of physical reality is based on theodicy: God would not deceive His creatures by creating an irrational universe. For the Basra Mu’tazila, the only “irrational” occurrences thinkable in a divinely created rational universe would be a severely restricted number of miracles that vouchsafed the claims of prophets – mainly Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad – to be sent from God.
Ash’arites
- Divine Justice
- Favors Predestination
- Justice is not the standard to judge Divine acts by, rather, Divine acts are the standard by which justice is defined.
- Good and Evil
- For the perception of good and evil, they saw reason as being in need of revelation.
- People of Tradition
- The Islamic tradition-and it only-must be followed in handling these issues.
- Tawheed
- Ash’arites, in defending the Unity of Divine actions, they were forced to deny causality and held that everything was the direct and unconditional effect of the Divine will.
Mu’tazilah
- Divine Justice
- Favored free will and justice
- They argued that justice is a reality in itself and that God, because He is bound to be just and wise, carries out acts in accordance with this standard of justice.
- Good & Evil
- Is reasonable to perceive the goodness or badness of things by itself unaided and “independently”? Or does it have to take recourse in revelation and the Divine law?
- They said: We also obviously know that our intellects became aware of these realities without needing to be guided by revelation from the outside, so to speak.
Conclusion
Although the points of contention between the Ash’arites and the Mu’tazilah are plentiful, the major ones are Divine unity and justice. Both these schools of thought saw themselves as having to take sides between Divine justice and the Unity of Divine acts. The Mu’tazilah imagined that they had to sacrifice the Unity of Divine acts to save Divine justice, while the Ash’arites thought that they must forfeit Divine justice to salvage the Unity of Divine acts. The fact is though that, on the one side, the Mu’tazilah could not properly expound Divine Justice, and on the other side, the Ash’arites could not profoundly explain the Unity of Divine acts.
