The second form of opposition was to any upholding of their belief by arguments, except of the simplest and most apparent. That was an invasion by reason (aql) of the realm of traditional faith (naql). When the pious were eventually driven to dialectic weapons, their arguments show that these were snatched up to defend already occupied positions. They ring artificial and forced. Thus, in the Qur’an itself, the Qur’an is called “knowledge from God.” It is, then, inseparable from God’s quality of knowledge. But that is eternal and uncreated; therefore, so too, the Qur’an. Again, God created everything by the word, “Be.” But this word cannot have been created, otherwise a created word would be a creator. Therefore, God’s word is uncreated. Again, there stands in the Qur’an (vii, 52), “Are not the creation and the command His?” The command here is evidently different from the creation, i.e., not created. Further, God’s command creates; therefore it cannot be created. But it is God’s word in command. It will be noticed here how completely God’s word is hypostatized. This appears still more strongly in the following argument. God said to Moses, (Qur. vii, 141), “I have chosen thee over mankind with my apostolate and my word.” God, therefore, has a word. But, again (Qur. iv, 162), He addresses Moses with this word (kallama-llahu Musa taklima, evidently regarded as meaning that God’s word addressed Moses) and said, “Lo, I am thy Lord.” This argument is supposed to put the opponent in a dilemma. Either he rejects the fact of Moses being so addressed, which is rejecting what God has said, and is, therefore, unbelief; or he holds that the kalam which so addresses Moses is a created thing. Then, a created thing asserts that it is Moses’ Lord. Therefore, God’s kalam with which He addresses the prophets, or which addresses the prophets, is eternal, uncreated.
But if this doctrine grew up early in Islam, opposition to it was not slow in appearing, and that on different sides. Literary vanity, national pride, and philosophical scruples all made themselves felt. Even in Muhammad’s lifetime, according to the legend of the poet Labid and the verses which he put up in challenge on the Ka‘ba, the Qur’an had taken rank as inimitable poetry. At all points it was the Word of God and perfect in every detail. But, among the Arabs, a jealous and vain people, if there was one thing on which each was more jealous and vain than another, it was skill in working with words. The superiority of Muhammad as a Prophet of God they might endure, though often with a bad grace; but Muhammad as a rival and unapproachable literary artist they could not away with. So we find satire of the weaknesses of the Qur’an appearing here and there, and it came to be a sign of emancipation and freedom from prejudice to examine it in detail and balance it against other products of the Arab genius. The rival productions of Musaylima, the False Prophet, long enjoyed a semi-contraband existence, and Abu Ubayda (d. 208) found it necessary to write a treatise in defence of the metaphors of the Qur’an. Among the Persians this was still more the case. To them, Muhammad might be a prophet, but he was also an Arab; and while they accepted his mission, accepting his books in a literary way was too much for them. As a prophet, he was a man; as a literary artist, he was an Arab. So Jahm ibn Safwan may have felt; so, certainly, others felt later. The poet Bashshar ibn Burd (killed for satire, in 167), a companion of Wasil ibn Ata and a Persian of very dubious orthodoxy, used to amuse himself by comparing poems by himself and others with passages in the Qur’an, to the disadvantage of the latter. And Ibn al-Muqaffa (killed about 140), the translator of “Kalila and Dimna” and many other books into Arabic, and a Persian nationalist, is said to have planned an imitation of the Qur’an.
MU‘TAZILITE ATTITUDE
Added to all this came the influence of the Mu‘tazilite theologians. They had a double ground for their opposition. The doctrine of an absolutely divine and perfect book limited them too much in their intellectual freedom. They were willing to respect and use the Qur’an, but not to accept its ipsissima verba. Regarded as the production of Muhammad under divine influence, it could have a human and a divine side, and things which needed to be dropped or changed in it could be ascribed to the human side. But that was not possible with a miraculous book come down from heaven. In a word, they were meeting the difficulty which has been met by Christianity in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The least they could do was to deny that the Qur’an was uncreated.
But they had a still more vital, if not more important, philosophical base of objection. We have seen already how they viewed the doctrine of God’s qualities (sifat) and tried to limit them in every way. These qualities ran danger, they held, of being hypostatized into separate persons like those in the Christian Trinity, and we have just seen how near that danger really lay in the case of God’s kalam. In orthodox Islam it has become a plain Logos.
The position in this of an-Nazzam has been given above. It is interesting as showing that the Qur’an, even then, was given as a probative miracle (mu‘jiz) because it deprived all men of power (i‘jaz) to imitate it. That is, its æsthetic perfection was raised to the miraculous degree and then regarded as a proof of its divine origin. But al-Muzdar, a pupil of Bishr ibn al Mu‘tamir and an ascetic of high rank, called the Monk of the Mu‘tazilites, went still further than an-Nazzam. He flatly damned as unbelievers all who held the eternity of the Qur’an; they had taken unto themselves two Gods. Further, he asserted that men were quite capable of producing a work even finer than the Qur’an in point of style. But the force of this opinion is somewhat diminished by the liberality with which he denounced his opponents in general as unbelievers. Stories are told of him very much like those in circulation with us about those who hold that few will be saved, and it is worth noticing that upon this point of salvability the Mu‘tazilites were even narrower than the orthodox.