The Muʿtazilites and Divine Attributes: Does God Change?

Every monotheist who reads scripture eventually runs into a puzzle. The Quran calls God knowing, powerful, living, wise, and merciful. These words describe God, but what are they describing? Are they names for separate things God possesses, the way a person possesses a house and a reputation and a skill? Or are they different ways of pointing at one reality that cannot be divided? And if some of these descriptions only become true once creation exists (nobody can be “Lord of the moon” before there is a moon), then are they really descriptions of God, or descriptions of God’s relationship to what He made?

In the eighth and ninth centuries, a group of Muslim theologians known as the Muʿtazilites pressed this question harder than almost anyone before them. Their answer was radical enough that critics summarized it as the claim that God has no attributes. This article explains who they were, what they actually meant, and why their argument shares a family resemblance with an old Greek puzzle about gods and goodness. It then turns to two verses in sura al-Anʿām that bring the problem into sharp focus, where God is said to have prescribed mercy upon Himself.

Who Were the Muʿtazilites?

The movement began in Basra, a garrison city in southern Iraq that had become one of the great intellectual centers of the early Islamic world. The traditional story places its birth in a disagreement within the circle of the preacher al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 728). The question was what to say about a Muslim who commits a grave sin. One camp said he remained a believer. Another said he was effectively an unbeliever. A student named Wāṣil ibn ʿAṭāʾ (d. c. 748) took a third position, that such a person was neither, and withdrew from the circle. The name Muʿtazila is usually connected to this act of withdrawal (iʿtizāl), though the sources do not agree on every detail, and historians treat the neat origin story with caution. ʿAmr ibn ʿUbayd (d. c. 761), a Basran ascetic, is counted among the earliest figures alongside Wāṣil.

What began as a dispute about sin grew into a full program of rational theology, or kalām. The Muʿtazilites believed that human reason could establish that God exists, that He is one, and that He is just, and that revelation then fills in what reason cannot reach. They flourished in the ninth century under the Abbasid caliphs. Abū al-Hudhayl al-ʿAllāf (d. c. 840s), who lived in Basra, gave the movement its first systematic form. His contemporary al-Naẓẓām (d. c. 835–845) was famous for daring, and for conclusions that his fellow Muʿtazilites sometimes rejected. A rival school developed in Baghdad, with thinkers such as Bishr ibn al-Muʿtamir and later al-Khayyāṭ and al-Kaʿbī. The Basran tradition continued with Abū ʿAlī al-Jubbāʾī (d. 915) and his son Abū Hāshim (d. 933), and reached its most complete expression in the work of the judge ʿAbd al-Jabbār (d. 1025), who taught in Rayy in Persia and wrote the enormous al-Mughnī fī abwāb al-tawḥīd wa-l-ʿadl, as well as a compact summary of the school’s doctrine, Sharḥ al-uṣūl al-khamsa, which survives in a text recorded by his students.