In an endeavor to safeguard what it regarded as
the
Qur'anic concept of divine omnipotence, the dominant
school of
Islamic theology (kalām), founded by al-
Ash'arī (d. 935), adopted the
occasionalist doctrine that
causal efficacy resides exclusively with the
divine will.
The Ash'arites denied the concept of
“natural” causa-
tion,
that is, that action proceeds from an existent's
very nature or essence.
They thus rejected the Aris-
totelian
concept of natural efficient causality, subject-
ing it to criticism on logical and empirical grounds.
They also
rejected Aristotle's theory of eternal matter,
advocating a metaphysics of
contingent atoms and
accidents that are created ex nihilo, combined to
form
bodies, and sustained in temporally finite spans of
existence by
direct divine action. Accordingly, the
orderly flow of these events has no
inherent necessity,
being no more than a habit ('āda), decreed arbitrarily
by the divine will. Hence
when God creates a miracle,
that is, when He disrupts the habitual course
of nature,
no contradiction obtains. As for human volitions, acts,
and
cognitions, the Ash'arites regarded these also as
temporal events (ḥawādith), the direct creation of
God.
This doctrine, held with individual modifications,
became widely accepted
and represents the most dis-
tinctively
Islamic causal concept. The history of its
development reflects two main
phases: (1) an early
phase where it is primarily concerned with
doctrinal
questions within kalām; (2) a
later phase, initiated by
Ghazali (al-Ghazālī; d.
1111), where it directs itself
more explicitly against the necessitarian metaphysics
of the
Islamic Neo-Platonists, Alfarabi (al-Fārābī;
d.
950) and Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā; d. 1037).
