Ash'arism

Ash'arism is a school of Sunni Islamic theology founded in Basra in the early tenth century CE by Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari, a former Mu'tazilite who broke with his teachers to defend a theology built on revelation and the limits of unaided reason rather than rationalist first principles. The school holds that God's attributes, such as knowledge, power and speech, are real and eternal without specifying how they inhere in the divine essence (bila kayfa, "without asking how"), and it developed an occasionalist account of causation in which God directly creates each event and apparent natural causes carry no independent efficacy of their own. Ash'ari theologians affirmed human responsibility through the doctrine of acquisition (kasb), by which God creates each human act but the human agent acquires it and bears moral responsibility for it, a formula meant to preserve both divine omnipotence and human accountability. Systematized further by al-Baqillani and al-Ghazali, Ash'arism became the dominant theological school of Sunni Islam across much of the medieval and modern Islamic world, shaping mainstream Sunni positions on divine attributes, causation and the relationship between reason and revelation.