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ISLAM
had nothing to do with what we understand by these Attributes; otherwise we would have an anthropomorphic image of God. Having denied the possibility of our understanding the meaning of the Divine Attributes, the Mu‘tazilites then denied the eternity of the Quran, which, being the Word of God, is obviously inseparable from the reality of the Divine Names and Attributes. The Mu‘tazilites also applied their rational methods to natural philosophy and developed the characteristic doctrine of atomism, for which Islamic kalām is. well known. They also developed a “rational ethics” for which they became famous. Supported by the early ‘Abbāsid caliphs, although strongly opposed by many jurists and scholars of H . adīth, the Mu‘tazilites gradually fell out of favor even with the caliphate in the latter part of the third/ninth century. They had practically disappeared from Baghdad by the fifth/eleventh century, although they survived as a notable force for another century or two, as is seen in the monumental Mu‘tazilite encyclopedia al-Mughnī (“The Self-Sufficient”) of the Persian scholar Qādī . ‘Abd al-Jabbār, who lived in the fifth/eleventh century. But this was like the swan song of Mu‘tazilism in the heartland of Islam, for Mu‘tazilite theology soon became eclipsed as a distinct school of thought except in Yemen, where its tenets were adopted by the Zaydī Shī‘ites, who continue to flourish in that land to this day. It was from this background that there arose the second major school of Sunni kalām, called the Ash‘arite, named after