CAUSATION IN
ISLAMIC THOUGHT
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).
I
Ash'arite causal doctrine was at first adopted largely
in opposition to
fundamental tenets of the most impor-
tant of
the earlier schools of kalām, the
Mu'tazilite.
This school attained the height of its influence in the
first half of the ninth century, a period caught in the
throes of the first
wave of the transmission of Greek
philosophy and science to the Arabs.
Although greatly
influenced by Greek thought, the Mu'tazilites
remained
essentially dogmatists, selecting and reformulating
philosophical ideas to serve theological ends. Now the
Islamic version of
atomism that underlies Ash'arite
causal doctrine had its origin with the
Mu'tazilite
school, many of whose members adopted varying oc-
casionalist views. There was, however,
no consensus
of opinion among the Mu'tazilites on causal questions,
their differences betraying the difficulties they encoun-
tered in reconciling the concept of divine
omnipotence
with the two cardinal principles of their theology,
those
of divine unity and justice. Ash'arite causal doc-
trine meant the rejection of these principles.
The first principle denied the distinction between
God's eternal attributes
and His essence. This raised
a question concerning the concept of divine
will in
relation to the doctrine of the world's temporal crea-
tion. Most of the Mu'tazilites rejected
Aristotle's theory
of the potentially infinite divisibility of
substance,
adopting atomism as the only view consistent with the
Qur'anic statement that God knows the determinate
number of all things.
Moreover, they transformed
Greek atomism into a doctrine of transient atoms
and
accidents, created ex nihilo, constituting a world cre-
ated in time. The doctrine of the world's eternity,
they maintained, deprived God of will. It meant the
simultaneity of cause
and effect which only obtains,
as in natural causes, when the effect is
necessitated by
the agent's nature or essence. Here, however, their
principle of divine unity faced a major difficulty: if
the divine will is
conceived as an eternal attribute and
hence not distinct from the divine
essence, God's acts
become in reality essential, not voluntary. This
led
many Mu'tazilites to argue that the divine will itself
is
created—a doctrine vulnerable to the Ash'arite criti-
cism that such a will requires another created will
to
create it and so on ad infinitum.
The principle of divine justice posed further diffi-
culties. Based on the premiss that some acts have in-
trinsic moral value, it asserted (a) that
God performs
only the just act and (b) that He performs it because
it
is in itself good. Al-Naẓẓām (d. ca. 848) argued that
it is impossible for God to act unjustly. Other Mu'ta-
zilites, rejecting this view as a denial of
divine omni-
potence, held that God has the
power to perform unjust
acts, but in fact never does. How then were they
to
account for evil without implicating God? In one at-
tempt to solve this problem, Mu'ammar (d. ca. 825)
maintained that God creates only bodies, imprinting
on them specific
natures: accidents (bad or good) are
either the necessitated effects of
these natures or the
effects of voluntary agents like man. This latter
point
entailed the doctrine of man's freedom of the will,
universally
endorsed by the Mu'tazilites who argued
that a just God can only judge men
for acts they
themselves initiate. They agreed that man
“creates”
his acts, but disagreed as to whether the
human will
is effective in the outer world. Is man the real author
of
“the generated acts” (al-af'āl al-mutawallida), the
events in the outer
world normally regarded as the
effects of his action? Some affirmed this
either wholly
or with qualifications; others denied it. Among the
latter, some held that the generated acts are necessi-
tated by the causal properties in nature; others,
de-
nying natural causes, attributed them to
direct divine
action. A curious position was attributed by Muslim
writers to Thumāma Ibn al-Ashras (d. 828) who was
alleged to have
argued as follows: since it is possible
for a person to will an act and
then die before the
consequent generated acts, and since action is not
attributable to the dead, generated acts cannot be
attributed to man. Nor
can they be attributed to God,
since they may be evil. Hence, generated
acts have
no author.
These inconsistencies, the Ash'arites argued, arise
from the erroneous
Mu'tazilite principles of unity and
justice. The eternal attributes, they
argued, are “addi-
tional” to God's essence and include His will. It is thus
that God's acts are voluntary, not necessitated by His
essence. As for the
second principle, all acts, the
Ash'arites argued, are in themselves
morally neutral.
An act is just simply because God performs or com-
mands it; unjust, because He prohibits it.
Divine deci-
sions are not conditioned by any
intrinsic values in acts
and the question of whether God has the power
to
act unjustly is redundant. Men do not create their acts.
Human
acts, like all other events, are created directly
by God. To avoid
identification with the Islamic deter-
minists (al-mujabbira) who held that human acts
are
“compelled” by God, the Ash'arites resorted to
the
proverbially enigmatic doctrine of “acquisition”
(
al-
kasb
). They distinguished between a compulsory act,
like a spasmodic
bodily movement, and a deliberate
act. While both kinds of acts are created
in man by
God, the second is created together with the
“power”
(al-qūwa),
which exists only with the act, not before
it. They also seem to have held that whatever is nor-
mally regarded as the effect of man's
deliberate act
is also created by God simultaneously with the power,
so that both “power” and “effect”
are acquired by man
from God. In other words, the relation between
man's
“created power” and the “created
effect,” as in all
sequences in the world, is that of mere
concomitance.
(But this point has been interpreted differently; see
Bibliography).
II
Initial Ash'arite repudiation of natural causation, as
we have seen, arose
out of doctrinal disputes within
kalām. The arguments, as far as the available
sources
indicate, are mainly theological and metaphysical. A
second
phase in the history of the Ash'arite causal
theory is marked by a more
explicit attack on the
Aristotelian theory of necessary efficient causality
as
adapted to the emanative metaphysics of Alfarabi and
Avicenna. Here
we encounter two developments: (1)
an emphasis on the purely
epistemological argument
that necessary causal connection is provable
neither
logically nor empirically; (2) an attempt to uphold the
Aristotelian method of scientific demonstration and
its
claims of attaining certainty, on occasionalist, non-
Aristotelian, metaphysical grounds.
Both these devel-
opments are largely due
to Ghazali. Elements of the
epistemological argument are found in earlier
Ash'arite
writings, but it was Ghazali who gave this argument
its most
forceful expression and who first attempted
an occasionalist
reinterpretation of Aristotelian dem-
onstrative logic.
Ghazali's criticism of necessary efficient causation
pervades his Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (The Incoherence of
the Philosophers), directed
mainly at Avicenna's
emanative metaphysics. Avicenna described the effi-
cient cause as that “which
brings about an existence
other than itself.” In natural
science, he held, this
existence represents motion in one of its forms.
For
the metaphysician, however, and here we note his
Neo-Platonism,
the efficient cause is also productive
of existence as such. In Avicenna's
cosmogony, the
world emanates eternally from God as a chain of ne-
cessitated and necessitating existents,
terminating in
the world of generation and corruption. In this sub-
lunar world, for the effect to follow from
the efficient
cause, the material, formal, and final causes must also
exist. The efficient natural cause must be the proximate
cause and there
must be no impediment. Agency, in
a natural cause, is “an
essential attribute,” hence pro-
ductive of one specific kind of act. Action is also
determined by
the specific nature of its recipient.
When such causal conditions obtain,
the effect follows
by necessity.
Ghazali attacked Avicenna's concept of divine cau-
sality as a negation of the divine attributes of life, will,
and
power. Only inanimate beings, Ghazali argued, are
said to act by necessity.
By definition, a necessitated
act is not a voluntary act. Ghazali also
opposed
Avicenna's scheme on the grounds that it does not
allow God to
act directly in the world of men, but
only through the mediation of other
causes. Since the
chain of existents proceeding from God is
necessarily
connected, there can be no disruption of its order.
Miracles, defined by the Ash'arites as the disruption
of nature's habitual
order, are thus impossible and a
prophet proclaiming their occurrence
becomes a de-
ceiver. It is in arguing for the
possibility of miracles
that Ghazali levelled his epistemological
argument
against the concept of necessary causal connection:
The connection between what is habitually believed to
be the cause
and what is habitually believed to be the effect
is not necessary
for us. But in the case of two things, neither
of which is the
other and where neither the affirmation nor
the negation of the one
entails the affirmation or the nega-
tion of the other, the existence or non-existence of the one
does not necessitate the existence or non-existence of the
other;
for example, the quenching of thirst and drinking,
satiety and
eating, burning and contact with fire, light and
the rising of the
sun, death and decapitation.... On the
contrary, it is within God's
power to create satiety without
eating, death without decapitation,
to prolong life after
decapitation and so on in the case of all
concomitant things.
[Trans. by the author.]
He then argued that necessary causal connection is
never observable in
nature: when, for example, cotton
is brought in contact with fire, all that
is seen is the
occurrence of burning “with” (ma') the contact, not
the burning of the cotton
“by” or “through” (bi) the
fire. The one who enacts the burning, he asserted,
is
God.
Ghazali did not deny that events in the world are
ordered in sequences of
priority and posteriority, tem-
poral and
ontological, ordinarily regarded as causes and
effects and on the basis of
which scientific inferences
about nature can be drawn. He denied, however,
that
these latter are real causes and that their order is
inherently
necessary. He endorsed Aristotle's method
of scientific demonstration, but
sought its interpretation
in occasionalist terms. He thus used Avicenna's
argu-
ment to justify the principle of
nature's uniformity, but
drew from it a different conclusion. Avicenna
(basing
himself on Aristotle, Physics ii. 5. 196b
10-15) had
argued that mere observation of past uniformities does
not
suffice to give us the certainly of their future
continuance; in addition,
there is the “hidden syl-
logism” to the effect that if these had been accidental
or coincidental, “they would not have continued al-
ways or for the most part.” Ghazali endorsed the argu-
ment to this point, but unlike Avicenna,
who concluded
that the uniformity derives from the natural necessary
connection between things, Ghazali maintained it de-
rives from God's arbitrary decree. For Ghazali, God
creates in
man knowledge that the world is orderly,
but also that its order is
contingent and disruptible.
When a miracle occurs, God refrains from
creating in
man the expectation of the uniform event, creating
instead
knowledge of the miracle. Ghazali did not
elaborate on this latter point,
leaving unanswered seri-
ous questions arising
from it.
III
In Dalālat
al-Ḥā'irīn (The
Guide of the Perplexed),
of which a Latin version, based on a
Hebrew transla-
tion, was known to Christian
scholastics early in the
thirteenth century, Moses Maimonides (d. 1204)
dis-
cussed the occasionalist atomism of
kalām, criticizing
it mainly on the
metaphysical level. Averroës (Ibn
Rushd; d. 1198), in his Tahāfut al-Tahāfut (The In-
coherence of
“The Incoherence”), answered Ghazali's
Tahāfut, quoting almost all of it; a Latin
translation
of Averroës' work was first made in the
fourteenth
century. These translations have raised the question of
a
possible Islamic influence on parallel criticisms of
causation in Europe,
particularly that of Nicolaus of
Autrecourt (d. 1350) whose writings
suggest acquaint-
ance with Maimonides'
account of Islamic atomism.
For the history of the concept of causation in
Islam,
however, Averroës' Tahāfut
is of special interest. In
this and other shorter works Averroës
was attempting
to check the spread of Ash'arism, particularly in North
Africa and Muslim Spain. The attempt, however, was
abortive, and
Aristotelian causal theory, though it con-
tinued to be held in Islam, remained on the defensive.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Pertinent medieval Arabic sources in translation include
al-Ash'arī, Kitāb
al-Luma', trans. R. J. McCarthy (Beirut,
1953);
Averroës, Tahāfut
al-Tahāfut, trans. S. Van Den Bergh
(London,
1953), particularly the 3rd and 17th discussions;
Avicenna, La Métaphysique du Shifā',
French translation
by M. M. Anawati, mimeographed edition (Quebec,
1952),
particularly, Book IV, Ch. 1; al-Ghazālī,
Tahāfut al-Fal
āsifah, trans. S. A. Kamali (Lahore, 1958); Ibn
Khaldūn, The
Mugaddimah, trans. F.
Rosenthal, 3 vols. (New York, 1958;
2nd ed., 1967), Vol. III, Ch. IV,
Sec. 14; al-Khayyāt, Kitāb
al-Intiṣār, reprint of M. Nyberg's Arabic
edition with a
French translation by A. N. Nader (Beirut, 1957); Maimon-
ides, The Guide
of the Perplexed, trans. S. Pines (Chicago,
1966), Chs. 73-76.
A basic historical account of Islamic occasionalism with
a philosophical
discussion defending a Thomistic approach
to causality is M. Fakhry's
Islamic Occasionalism and its
Critique by Averroës and Aquinas (London,
1958). For an
interpretation of Ibn Khaldun's discussion of causality,
see
H. A. Wolfson, “Ibn Khaldun on Attributes and Predes-
tination,” Speculum,
34 (October, 1959), 585-97, reprinted
in H. A.
Wolfson, Religious Philosophy: A Group of Essays
(Cambridge, Mass., 1961). For a detailed discussion of
Ghazali's
attempt at interpreting Aristotelian demonstrative
logic in
occasionalist terms, see M. E. Marmura, “Ghazali
and
Demonstrative Science,” Journal of the History
of Phi-
losophy,
3 (October, 1965), 183-204. On kalām theories of
free will and ethical value, see
M. Fakhry, “The Mu'tazilite
View of Free Will,”
The Muslim World,
42, 2 (April, 1953),
95-109; G. F. Hourani,
“Two Theories of Value in Medieval
Islam,” The Muslim World,
50, 4 (October, 1960), 269-376;
A. N. Nader,
Le Système Philosophique des
Mu'tazila
(Beirut, 1956); W. M. Watt, Free
Will and Predestination
in Early Islam (London, 1948). For an
interpretation of the
doctrine of kasb differing
from ours that allows a measure
of genuine efficacy in deliberate human
action, see R. M.
Frank, “The Structure of Created Causality
according to
al-Ash'arī,” Studia Islamica,
25 (1966), 13-75. On Islamic
atomism, see S.
Pines, Beiträge zur Islamischen
Atomenlehre
(Berlin, 1936). For the question of a possible
Islamic influ-
ence on Nicolaus of
Autrecourt, see J. R. Weinberg, Nicolaus
of
Autrecourt (Princeton, 1948). For general accounts of
Islamic
theology, see L. Gardet and M. M. Anawati, Intro-
duction à la
Théologie Musulmane (Paris, 1951); D. B.
Macdonald, Development of Muslim Theology, Jurispru-
dence and Constitutional
Theory (New York, 1903), outdated
but still pertinent; W. M.
Watt, Islamic Philosophy and
Theology
(Edinburgh, 1962).
MICHAEL E. MARMURA
[See also Atomism;
Causation; Causation in Law;
God;
Islamic Conception; Necessity;
Neo-Platonism.]