Introduction

If God is omnipotent and the Creator of all things, including, as we have seen in earlier chapters, our actions, in what sense can man be said to be free? And if man is endowed with volition to believe or not believe, as the Quran says that he is, how is this reconcilable with the fact that God not only has knowledge of man’s future, but also brings that future into being by his ‘command’, which is a ‘decree determined’?

The issue of the compatibility or incompatibility of absolute Divine sovereignty with human free will has taxed the minds of scholars of theology since the birth of the discipline. The question was addressed by Muslim scholastic theologians (mutakallimun) relatively early on, leading to a series of debates during the early Abbasid period between various theological factions representing often radically different standpoints. The various groups who made up the Jabriyya, for example, held a number of beliefs that tended to reinforce the idea that man has absolutely no say in what happens to him, and is ‘predestined’ in every sense of the word. According to the exegete al-Qurṭubī (d. 1273), the ‘twelve sects’ of the Jabriyya supported, inter alia, the following positions: