Ash'ariyya (the Ash'ari school of theology)

The Ash'ariyya, or Ash'ira, was a theological school, the followers of Abu 'l-Hasan al-Ash'ari. During the last two decades of his life he attracted disciples, and in this way the school was founded. The entry notes that its history has been little studied and some of its statements are provisional. ¹

The new school was attacked from several sides: by the Mu'tazila, by the Hanbalis, who saw its rational arguments as an objectionable innovation, and by the Maturidiyya, who thought some of its positions too conservative. Despite this it became the dominant school in the Arabic-speaking parts of the 'Abbasid caliphate and probably in Khurasan. It was usually allied with Shafi'i law, while its rivals the Maturidiyya were Hanafis. The Buyid sultans persecuted the Ash'ariyya in the fifth/eleventh century, but under the Saljuqs, and especially under the wazir Nizam al-Mulk, they received official support, and they lent intellectual support to the caliphate against the Fatimids of Cairo. ¹

From then until about the beginning of the eighth/fourteenth century the teaching of the Ash'ariyya was almost identical with orthodoxy. Al-Baqillani, al-Isfara'ini, al-Baghdadi, al-Juwayni, al-Ghazali, al-Shahrastani and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi are among the great names; the entry lists their death dates. Little is known of the school's views in the half-century after its founder's death; al-Baqillani is the first member whose work survives. Al-Juwayni and al-Baghdadi interpreted corporeal terms such as "hand", "face" and "sitting" metaphorically, against al-Ash'ari's bila kayf. Al-Ghazali steeped himself in the doctrines of Ibn Sina and the philosophers and attacked them on their own ground, and from then on Aristotelian logic and much Neoplatonic metaphysics were incorporated into its teaching. The teaching became intellectualised in a bad sense, and the school may be said to disappear in a blaze of philosophy. ¹