A history of medieval islam j j saunders

THE BREAKUP OF THE CALIPHATE were compelled to grapple with problems concerning the nature and attributes of God, the meaning and scope of revelation, and the perennial question of free will and predestination. Then there were curious baptist or gnostic sects found there, and the pagan community at Harran, in northern Mesopotamia, who professed neo-Platonism and were close students of Hellenic thought. These people did not seek converts and kept to themselves, but their strange beliefs and rites attracted Muslim attention. Very different were the Manichaeans, followers of the third century Persian prophet Mani, who propagated their teachings over a large part of Asia; their dualistic tenets were obnoxious to all their monotheistic neighbours, and their missionaries were often put to death as dangerous infidels. In Persia, though Islam had little to fear from the Zoroastrians, discredited by their close association with the defunct Sassanid regime, it was gravely disturbed by constant outbreaks of social-revolutionary religious fanaticism, which seemed to follow in the tradition of the sixth-century communist prophet Mazdak, who was alleged to have taught community of goods and women and who had been executed by Khusrau Nushirvan in 529. Out of this medley of creeds arose widespread popular faith in divine incarnations, metempsychosis, and the messianic return of a God-sent leader. Islam could hardly fail to be affected to some degree by these age-old manifestations of the Semitic-Iranian religious spirit, and they had a marked influence on Shi‘ism.

The Abbasids during the first century of their rule had to cope with a double problem of a religious nature: first, the growth of theological dissension within Islam, and secondly the threat of political religious revolutionary movements without.

As early as the reign of Hisham a group of teachers appeared known as Kadarites, who championed the freedom of the will against the upholders of predestination. They merged in a larger body, the Mu‘tazilites, “those who separated” from other Muslims on this question, or rather on the position of the sinner in the umma. The Mu‘tazilites were the real founders of speculative dogmatics in Islam, and they were strongly supported by the early Abbasid Caliphs, who accorded their theology a sort of official recognition. Some acquaintance with Greek philosophy induced them to seek a more rational basis for religion and to deny the 111