Sometime during the latter half of the reign of the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān (685–705 CE / 65–86 AH), ruler of an empire stretching from Central Asia to North Africa, he wrote to a preacher in Basra. The caliph had heard that Hasan al-Basri was teaching something about qadar that no one had taught before, and he wanted to know where it came from. Was it a report from one of the Prophet’s companions? Was it Hasan’s own opinion? Or was it something known to be true from the Quran?
Hasan’s reply, known as the Risala fi al-Qadar, is one of the earliest sustained theological arguments in Islamic history. While its authenticity is disputed, the text as we have it carries a particular feature. In the version translated by David Ede, the treatise cites over a hundred verses of the Quran and not a single hadith. Even though the man answering was arguably the best-placed Muslim of his generation to cite the Prophet’s reported words. He was asked, in effect, to choose his source of authority, and he chose only the Quran.
This article makes three moves. It introduces Hasan and the world that formed him. It explains the dispute over divine decree that the caliph was asking about, and why answering was dangerous. Then it reads the letter closely and asks what its silence on hadith tells us about how theology was done in the first Islamic century.
The man
Hasan ibn Abi al-Hasan Yasar was born in Medina in 21 AH (642 CE). The tradition classifies him among the tabi’un, the second generation of Muslims. The word does not mean children of the companions. It means those who met or saw someone from the generation before, in Hasan’s case the companions who had lived alongside the Prophet. A person could belong to the second generation at any age, so long as the contact with a companion was real.
His origins are modest and, for what follows, significant. According to the sources, his father Yasar was of Persian descent, brought into the Muslim community as a captive, and became a mawla, a client, of Zayd ibn Thabit. The name matters. Zayd was the young scribe of the Prophet who, according to the tradition, collected the Quranic material into the suhuf under Abu Bakr and later headed the committee that produced the codex under Uthman. Hasan’s father therefore belonged to the household of the man most associated with the Quran’s written transmission.
His mother Khayra was in the service of Umm Salama, a wife of the Prophet, and Hasan grew up in Umm Salama’s home after the Prophet’s death. Reports say that when his mother was sent on errands, Umm Salama looked after the infant, with mixed reports as to whether she also nursed him, further strengthening their bond. Few people in the early community had a closer vantage point on the Prophet’s family and the memory of the Prophet’s life. Hasan was fourteen in 35 AH, when delegations from Egypt, Kufa and Basra converged on Medina, besieged Uthman and finally killed him. He saw the first great rupture of the community from inside the city where it happened.
He later settled in Basra, where he studied with a number of companions, among them Anas ibn Malik, and became the dominant preacher and ascetic of the city. Students from every direction came to his circle. Later hadith scholars spent much effort debating which companions he had actually heard directly, and they preserved a large body of reports he transmitted, many of them mursal, meaning that he cited the Prophet without naming the companion in between. The point for this essay is simple. If any person alive around 80 AH could have reached into a deep store of what the Prophet reportedly said and did, it was Hasan.
The question the caliph was asking
By Hasan’s maturity, the question of qadar was no longer a seminar topic. It had become a political question.
The word qadar means measure or decree. In the late Umayyad period the dominant view, which later heresiographers labeled Jabriyya, held that everything that happens, including every human action, is fixed and produced by God, leaving humans no real power over what they do. The position was theologically defensible to its holders, and it was politically convenient to the dynasty. If God decrees who rules, then Umayyad power is God’s choice, military victory is God’s verdict, and the governors’ punishments are God’s work carried out through their hands. Resistance to the dynasty becomes resistance to the divine will. Sources preserve statements attributed to Umayyad figures in precisely this register.
Against this stood a minority who insisted that humans author their own acts and are accountable for them. The best-known early figure is Ma’bad al-Juhani, a Basran who affirmed human agency and paid for it. He was put to death between roughly 80 and 83 AH, depending on the source, by the order of Abd al-Malik or at the hands of the governor al-Hajjaj, depending on the report, and some accounts connect him to the revolt against al-Hajjaj. Whatever the details, the execution sent a message: this was a position one could be killed for.
One feature of the vocabulary needs care, because it tends to be projected backwards. In this period qadar did not mean human free will. It referred to God’s decree, and the determinist position was the one that insisted on it. The label Qadariyya was later attached to the people who affirmed human power over their acts, partly because their opponents accused them of denying God’s qadar. The term was contested from the start, and each side could claim to be defending the true meaning of the word. This is why Hasan’s letter, which defends human responsibility, spends so much energy on what qada’ and qadar actually mean in the Quran’s own usage.
A dangerous reply
Hasan’s position was delicate before the letter ever arrived. His preaching pressed his listeners constantly toward accountability for what they did: judgment is real, repentance is real, and the person who sins cannot hide behind God’s decree. In Basra under al-Hajjaj, who governed Iraq from 75 AH, this was not neutral ground. His sermons undermined the theology that propped up the regime. Yet Hasan was careful. He did not call out rulers by name. He preached principles drawn from the Quran, and one cannot easily call a preacher a rebel for explaining the Quran. Reports also describe him as opposed to armed revolt against the Umayyad governor, even while he stayed under suspicion and, at one point, in hiding.
The caliph’s letter ends that arrangement. Abd al-Malik writes politely but with an edge. He says he found the teaching “shocking, to say the least,” notes that no companion he knew spoke about this matter, and observes that no one argued about it before Hasan. Then comes the question about the source: a riwaya from one of the companions, an opinion Hasan holds, or something known to be true in the Quran. The reply had to be public enough to settle the matter and cautious enough to survive it. And the dilemma was stark. If Hasan hedged, he abandoned the substance of his teaching. If he endorsed Ma’bad’s conclusions by name, he stood beside a man the state had just executed for them.
Hasan’s solution is visible in the text. He begins with praise for the caliph that is generous to the point of extravagance. He never mentions Ma’bad or any living person. His targets are always anonymous: “the ignorant,” “the liars,” “the people who made opposition,” “those who transfer everything upon al-qadar.” He inverts the caliph’s charge of novelty, claiming that the ancestors had all agreed and that the discussion was only begun when others started distorting the Book. And he closes by urging the caliph, in direct address, not to say that God decreed for His servants what He forbade them. He argues the case as an exegete, not as a partisan.
What the letter argues
The letter’s reasoning is easy to follow once its structure is clear. It begins with purpose. God created jinn and humankind to serve Him (51:56-57), and God would not create beings for a purpose and then stand between them and it. A God who commands worship and then prevents it would be a tyrant over His servants, and the Quran denies this about God.
From there, Hasan separates decree from approval. God’s qada’ in the Quran is command: He decreed that you worship none but Him and be good to your parents (17:23). God does not like disbelief from His servants (39:7). If disbelief were His decree in the sense the determinists claim, He would be pleased with it, which the text rules out. In his reading, guidance belongs to God, and error belongs to the servants, and he marshals the Quran’s own testimony: Pharaoh led his people astray, Satan is an open enemy, the leaders misled their followers who later say they were misled. He adds the confessions of the prophets. Adam says “we have wronged ourselves” (7:23) and does not say “this is your decree.” Moses calls his killing of the Egyptian the work of Satan and asks forgiveness (28:15-16). Prophets locate error in themselves, and so does the Prophet Muhammad in 34:50, where he is told to say that if he errs, he errs against himself.
Hasan then addresses his opponents’ proof texts one by one, twelve in the translation by David Ede (McGill, 1967) used here. God leads astray whom He wills (13:27) is read in light of the verses before and after it, which describe God leading astray the wrongdoers (14:27) and turning hearts aside after they turned aside (61:5). “No one believes except by God’s permission” (10:100) means that God left the soul free and gave it power over faith. The verse that you will not will unless God wills (81:29) is true because God wills good first, by showing it. The verse about a record in a book before creation (57:22) concerns calamities in property and lives, which is why the next verse tells people not to grieve over what they miss or exult over what they gain. The people who are “wretched or happy” on the day of judgment (11:105) are described by what they did in this life, not by a fate assigned in the womb. The hearts that do not understand (7:179) are described by what they chose, and the broader promise is that God does not burden a soul beyond its capacity (2:286).
Two arguments in the letter stand apart. The first is practical. The man who excuses his own religious neglect with “the pens are dry, and it is written on the foreheads” will lock his shop, tether his camel, water his crops and hire a shepherd, and will mock anyone who tells him those precautions are pointless since everything is already decreed. His determinism covers religion and nothing else, and Hasan diagnoses the reason: truth is heavy upon people, and wrong is light. The second is linguistic. The Quran speaks to the Arabs in their own idiom, and Hasan quotes a line of Arabic poetry about mothers feeding their babies for death to show how an utterance’s literal grammar can differ from its meaning. He also distinguishes God’s knowledge from compulsion with the story of al-Khadir, who scuttles a ship, kills a boy, and rebuilds a wall. God’s foreknowledge of what a person will choose does not remove the choice. The letter closes by calling its argument a cure for what is in the hearts.
A hundred verses, no hadith
The letter quotes over a hundred verses of the Quran, while any mention of a single Hadith to support his claim is totally absent. Not one sentence is introduced with “the Messenger of God said,” not one report is attributed to Anas or Umm Salama or any companion Hasan knew, and nothing is offered as the Prophet’s practice on the question of decree.
The absence is not an oversight, because the caliph handed him the opening. The letter asks whether Hasan’s view is a riwaya from the companions, an opinion, or a matter known to be true in the Quran. Hasan could have answered with the first. He answers with the third, and he is explicit about the standard: every idea that is not based on the proof of the Book of God is wrong. When he mentions the Sunnah, it is in the general sense. The companions, he says, followed the way of the Prophet and never attributed to God anything but what God attributed to Himself. That is an appeal to the character of the early community, not a citation.
Even the Prophet is brought in through the Quran. The Prophet’s own statement that error is from himself is cited as Quranic speech (34:50). And the only language in the letter that sounds like hadith comes from the mouths of the opponents. “The pens are dry” and “it is written on the foreheads” are phrases the opponents use, and they echo wording that appears in reports later collected in the canonical books. The claim that God creates people wretched or happy in the womb is attributed to those who misread 11:105, but it matches a well-known report on the angel who writes a person’s provision, lifespan, deeds, and fate in the womb, which appears in both Bukhari and Muslim. Hasan engages the idea and answers it with the verse and its context. He does not answer it with a hadith, and he does not cite the report even to dispute its meaning.
This matters because David Ede’s thesis makes a related observation: the radical determinism of the hadith material in Bukhari and Muslim and the position of Hasan’s treatise are two interpretations of the Quran, with two different relationships to the Prophetic reports. Read next to Hasan, the later determinist hadith look less like the neutral inheritance of the Prophet’s teaching and more like one side of an argument that was still going on.
The significance is this. Hasan clearly knew the Prophet’s life. He grew up in the household of the Prophet’s wife, he sat with companions, and later scholars cited him constantly. Knowing what the Prophet did and said is one thing. Treating reports of it as the proof for a theological position is another. On the question that most divided the Umayyad world, the person with the greatest access to reports of the Prophet did not use them as evidence. For him, theological argument was Quranic argument: reading verses in context, refusing to let one part of the Book cancel another (he insists the Book is homogeneous, “one part similar to the other,” each confirming the rest), and testing every claim against what the text says.
The hadith Hasan could have cited
The silence means more once it is set against what a hadith-minded Basran would have had within reach. The test has limits that need stating first. The collections that preserve these reports were compiled in the third century AH, so a chain running through Basra does not prove the report existed in its surviving form when Hasan wrote, and scholars of early hadith such as G. H. A. Juynboll have argued that many reports acquired their chains later. What the chains do show is that the material sits in Hasan’s city, among his teachers’ and contemporaries’ generation, and that it addresses the questions the letter addresses. Four reports in Sahih Muslim make the point.
Muslim 8a
The first, Muslim 8a, places the controversy in Basra by name. Yahya ibn Ya’mar describes how he and Humayd ibn Abd al-Rahman met Abd Allah ibn Umar and asked about people in Basra who, as Yahya puts it, claimed لا قدر وأن الأمر أنف, that there is no qadar and that the matter is unuf, meaning events arise fresh, with no prior determination. The report traces this position to Ma’bad al-Juhani.
The vocabulary needs care, because qadar points in two directions depending on whose it is. Applied to God, it means the decree that fixes everything beforehand, and a person who affirms it in that sense denies human freedom. Applied to humans, it means the power to act and choose. The origin of the later label Qadariyya is explained in two ways. In one account, it began as an accusation, so the free-will side is named after the doctrine its opponents say it rejects. In the other, it is named for affirming that humans have qadar over their acts, and the free-will side’s own retort was that the true Qadaris are the determinists who place all qadar in God.
Ibn Umar disowns those who deny God’s Qadar, predestination, and advocate free will. He answers with a report from his father about the visit of Gabriel, in which belief in qadar is part of faith: وَتُؤْمِنَ بِالْقَدَرِ خَيْرِهِ وَشَرِّهِ, that you believe in the decree, its good and its evil. The report does not define qadar, and the claim it condemns, that events have no prior determination, is more radical than the one the letter makes. Hasan affirms God’s knowledge and argues only that knowing is not compelling, and he never cites this report, even though, since its origins are in Basra, one would assume he should have known of it.
It is narrated on the authority of Yahya b. Ya’mur that the first man who discussed qadr (Divine Decree) in Basra was Ma’bad al-Juhani. I along with Humaid b. ‘Abdur-Rahman Himyari set out for pilgrimage or for ‘Umrah and said: Should it so happen that we come into contact with one of the Companions of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) we shall ask him about what is talked about taqdir (Divine Decree). Accidentally we came across Abdullah ibn Umar ibn al-Khattab, while he was entering the mosque. My companion and I surrounded him. One of us (stood) on his right and the other stood on his left. I expected that my companion would authorize me to speak. I therefore said: Abu Abdur Rahman! There have appeared some people in our land who recite the Qur’an and pursue knowledge. And then after talking about their affairs, added: They (such people) claim that there is no such thing as Divine Decree and events are not predestined. He (Abdullah ibn Umar) said: When you happen to meet such people tell them that I have nothing to do with them and they have nothing to do with me. And verily they are in no way responsible for my (belief). Abdullah ibn Umar swore by Him (the Lord) (and said): If any one of them (who does not believe in the Divine Decree) had with him gold equal to the bulk of (the mountain) Uhud and spent it (in the way of Allah), Allah would not accept it unless he affirmed his faith in Divine Decree. He further said: My father, Umar ibn al-Khattab, told me: One day we were sitting in the company of Allah’s Apostle (peace be upon him) when there appeared before us a man dressed in pure white clothes, his hair extraordinarily black. There were no signs of travel on him. None amongst us recognized him. At last he sat with the Apostle (peace be upon him) He knelt before him placed his palms on his thighs and said: Muhammad, inform me about al-Islam. The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said: Al-Islam implies that you testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah, and you establish prayer, pay Zakat, observe the fast of Ramadan, and perform pilgrimage to the (House) if you are solvent enough (to bear the expense of) the journey. He (the inquirer) said: You have told the truth. He (Umar ibn al-Khattab) said: It amazed us that he would put the question and then he would himself verify the truth. He (the inquirer) said: Inform me about Iman (faith). He (the Holy Prophet) replied: That you affirm your faith in Allah, in His angels, in His Books, in His Apostles, in the Day of Judgment, and you affirm your faith in the Divine Decree about good and evil. He (the inquirer) said: You have told the truth. He (the inquirer) again said: Inform me about al-Ihsan (performance of good deeds). He (the Holy Prophet) said: That you worship Allah as if you are seeing Him, for though you don’t see Him, He, verily, sees you. He (the enquirer) again said: Inform me about the hour (of the Doom). He (the Holy Prophet) remarked: One who is asked knows no more than the one who is inquiring (about it). He (the inquirer) said: Tell me some of its indications. He (the Holy Prophet) said: That the slave-girl will give birth to her mistress and master, that you will find barefooted, destitute goat-herds vying with one another in the construction of magnificent buildings. He (the narrator, Umar ibn al-Khattab) said: Then he (the inquirer) went on his way but I stayed with him (the Holy Prophet) for a long while. He then, said to me: Umar, do you know who this inquirer was? I replied: Allah and His Apostle knows best. He (the Holy Prophet) remarked: He was Gabriel (the angel). He came to you in order to instruct you in matters of religion.
The second, Muslim 2646, comes from Anas ibn Malik, who settled in Basra and, according to the biographical tradition, was one of Hasan’s teachers and most prominent influence. The Prophet is reported to have said that God appoints an angel over the womb, who asks about the embryo at each stage and then whether the child will be wretched or fortunate, what its provision will be and how long it will live, and that these things are written while the child is in the womb. This is the doctrine the letter must confront when it reaches 11:105 and the wretched and the happy. The report itself does not say whether the writing records foreknowledge or fixes the person’s choices, but its predestinarian use is clear.
Anas b. Malik reported directly from Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) that he said: Allah, the Exlated and Glorious, has appointed an angel as the caretaker of the womb, and he would say: My Lord, it is now a drop of semen; my Lord, It is now a clot of blood; my Lord, it has now become a lump of flesh, and when Allah decides to give it a final shape, the angel says: My Lord, would it be male or female or would he be an evil or a good person? What about his livelihood and his age? And it is all written as he is in the womb of his mother.
The letter never mentions the report. It argues from the verse’s context that these are people on the Day of Judgment, described by what they did and held to in this life. It can be argued that the letter appears to know the idea and meets it through exegesis, not citation, and uses it as a claim made by the opposition.
Muslim 2650
The third, Muslim 2650, is the most pointed. It is attributed to Imran ibn Husayn, a Basran companion, and passes through Abu al-Aswad al-Du’ali and Yahya ibn Ya’mar, the same Yahya who appears in the first report. Imran asks Abu al-Aswad whether what people do is already decreed or is something they face according to what their Prophet brought. Abu al-Aswad says it is decreed. Imran asks whether that would not be injustice, and Abu al-Aswad, alarmed, answers that everything is God’s creation and He is not questioned about what He does. Imran then explains that he was only testing him, and relates that two men of Muzayna put the same question to the Prophet, who answered that it is decreed and confirmed it from the Book with 91:7-8: وَنَفْسٍ وَمَا سَوَّاهَا فَأَلْهَمَهَا فُجُورَهَا وَتَقْوَاهَا. The soul and what fashioned it, and inspired it with its wickedness and its piety.
Abu al-Aswad reported that ‘Imran b Husain asked him: What is your view, what the people do today in the world, and strive for, is it something decreed for them or preordained for them or will their fate in the Hereafter be deterrained by the fact that their Prophets brought them teaching which they did not act upon? I said: Of course, it is something which is predetermined for them and preordained for them. He (further) said: Then, would it not be an injustice (to punish them)? I felt greatly disturbed because of that, and said: Everything is created by Allah and lies in His Power. He would not be questioned as to what He does, but they would be questioned; thereupon he said to me: May Allah have mercy upon you, I did not mean to ask you but for testing your intelligence. Two men of the tribe of Muzaina came to Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) and said: Allah’s Messenger, what is your opinion that the people do in the world and strive for, is something decreed for them; something preordained for them and will their fate in the Hereafter be determined by the fact that their Prophets brought them teachings which they did not act upon. and thus they became deserving of punishment? Thereupon, he said: Of course, it happens as it is decreed by Destiny and preordained for them, and this view is confirmed by this verse of the Book of Allah, the Exalted and Glorious:” Consider the soul and Him Who made it perfect, then breathed into it its sin and its piety” (xci. 8).
Three things stand out. The report raises the very objection that drives the letter, that decreed wrongdoing makes punishment unjust. It answers that objection against the letter’s thesis. And the verses it uses are ones the letter uses too. Hasan cites 91:7-10 to argue that God put into the soul the knowledge of wickedness and piety and that the person who purifies it succeeds while the one who corrupts it fails, which is why God cannot be the one who corrupts it. In the letter, the passage proves responsibility. In the hadith, the Prophet himself supplies the reading that makes it prove decree. A writer who believed Prophetic reports settle the meaning of the Quran would have had to deal with that report, and in the text translated here, Hasan does not.
Muslim 2652
The fourth, Muslim 2652, is the well-known report in which Adam disputes with Moses and appeals to what God had decreed before his creation. The letter’s treatment of Adam reads like a rebuttal of that reasoning. It cites 7:23, where Adam and his wife say they have wronged themselves, and adds that Adam did not say “this is your qada’ and your qadar.” Some scholars have noted the resemblance. Resemblance falls short of proof that Hasan knew the report, but the pattern holds across all four: the other side’s material in Basra concerns the places where the letter argues most carefully, and the letter answers each of them from the Quran without citing a hadith.
Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (way peace be upon him) as saying: There was argument between Adam and Moses. Moses said to Adam: You are our father. You did us harm and caused us to get out of Paradise. Adam said to him: You are Moses. Allah selected you (for direct conversation with you) and wrote with His own Hand the Book (Torah) for you. Despite this you blame me for an act which Allah had ordained for me forty years before He created me. Allah’s Apostle (ﷺ) said:. This is how Adam came the better of Moses and Adam came the better of Moses.
Sahih Muslim 2652a
https://sunnah.com/muslim:2652a
This does not establish why. The reports may not yet have circulated in these forms, or Hasan may have known them and rejected them, or he may have known them and declined to give them authority over the Quran. The text does not choose among these. What it shows is that on the question dividing his city, the argument was conducted at the level of the Book.
Objections
The argument from silence has limits, and the objections should be stated plainly.
The first is authenticity, and it bears directly on the claim. Hellmut Ritter, Michael Schwarz and Josef van Ess defended the letter as genuinely Hasan’s, while Michael Cook, Suleiman Mourad and Alexander Treiger regard the attribution as unreliable, with Mourad arguing that it is a later composition by advocates of human freedom. Two further points complicate the silence. Van Ess initially read the scarcity of hadith as a sign of the letter’s antiquity, but Cook replied that an author can decline to cite hadith without those reports being nonexistent, since he may not have thought them decisive. Cook also notes that a fragment of the letter preserved by the Mu’tazili scholar Abd al-Jabbar mentions a predestinarian hadith, so not every witness to the text is free of them. The claim here is therefore limited to the version translated by Ede, which does not rely on hadith for its positive case. If the later view of authorship is right, the absence reflects the choice of a later Qadari author, and the point survives in modified form, since the community that preserved the letter built its picture of Hasan around an argument from the Quran. Either Hasan argued this way or the people who remembered him believed he would have.
A second objection is that Hasan may have changed his mind, and the tradition does contain reports to that effect. This is shown in Abu Dawud 4621-4624. Abu Dawud preserves one in which Ayyub al-Sakhtiyani says Hasan told him he would never return to anything of it. Mourad cites parallel reports in Ibn Sa’d in which Ayyub says the only charge against Hasan was his belief in free will and that he ceased to profess it. The Arabic of the Abu Dawud report does not name the subject, and the Ibn Sa’d report turns on a verb that can mean he stopped arguing the matter or stopped holding it. Other reports point the opposite way, such as Qurra ibn Khalid telling his students not to be misled about Hasan because his view was the sunna and the right. Mourad treats both sets as products of a contest over Hasan’s legacy, in which Sunni transmitters wanted a Hasan who had given up free will and Mu’tazilis and Shi’is wanted one who held it. He notes, following van Ess, that the effort to separate Hasan from the Qadariyya tends to confirm the association, and he concludes that Hasan remained a Qadari in doctrine. The letter itself is untouched by the question, because a later retraction would not change what an earlier text argues. And reports of Hasan affirming qadar do not have to be reversals, since the letter affirms qadar as God’s decree and knowledge and denies only that wrongdoing is decreed in the sense of being willed or approved.
The third is audience. A caliph who asked whether the view came from the Quran may have wanted a Quranic answer, and Hasan may have tailored the reply. That is possible. But the question offered riwaya as one of three options, so the choice of Quran alone was still a choice.
The fourth is timing. Around 80 AH, hadith had not been organized into collections, and one could argue that no one yet expected a hadith to settle a doctrinal question. That does not undermine the claim here. It supports it, because it suggests that the later habit of resolving theology by citing reports of the Prophet was a development and not an inheritance from the first generations. A final caution is that this is one letter. It shows what Hasan did on one question at one moment, and it cannot establish what he did everywhere.
What the silence says
A caliph asked the most learned preacher in Basra where his position came from. The preacher, who had spent his life among the companions and the Prophet’s family, did not point to a report. He pointed to the Book and to the way the Book speaks. The letter shows a first-century Muslim who knew the life of the Prophet intimately and still reasoned about God’s justice from the Quran alone. That contrast, between knowing the Prophet’s biography and building theology from hadith, is one that later Islamic thought blurred. In Hasan’s reply, it is still visible.
Ede, David Arnold. “Some Considerations on the Freedom-Determinism Controversy in Classical Islamic Theology.” Master’s thesis, McGill University, 1967. McGill Institutional Repository.