Abu al-Hasan bin Isma'el al-Ash'ari (Arabic ابو الحسن بن إسماعيل اﻷشعري) (ca. 873-ca. 935), was a Muslim Arab theologian and the founder of the Ash'ari school of early Muslim philosophy.

Life Overview

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Al-Ash'ari was born in Basra, a descendant of the famous companion of the Prophet Muhammad and arbitrator at Siffin for Ali ibn Abi Talib, Abu Musa al-Ashari. He spent the greater part of his life at Baghdad. Although belonging to an orthodox family, he became a pupil of the great Mutazalite teacher al-Jubba'i (d.915), and himself remained a Mutazalite until his fortieth year. In 912 he returned to the faith of his fathers and became its most distinguished champion, using the philosophical methods he had learned in the school of heresy. Al-Ash'ari then spent the remaining years of his life engaged in developing his views and in composing polemics and arguments against his former Mutazalite colleagues. He is said to have written over a hundred works, from which only four or five are known to be extant.

Contributions

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Al-Ash'ari was noted for his teachings on atomism, among the earliest Islamic philosophies, influenced by Greek and Hindu concepts of atoms of time and matter, and for al-Ash'ari the basis for propogating a deterministic view that Allah created every moment in time and every particle of matter. Thus cause and effect was an illusion, as was free will.

The Ashari scholar Ibn Furak numbers Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari's works at 300, and a biographer like Ibn Kalkhan at 55;Beirut, III, p.286, tr. de Slaine, II, p.228 Ibn Asāker gives the titles of 93 of them, but only a handful of these works, in the fields of heresiography and theology, have survived. The three main ones are his Maqālāt al-eslāmīyīn,ed. H. Ritter, Istanbul, 1929-30 which comprises not only an account of the Islamic sects but also an examination of problems in kalām, or scholastic theology, and the names and attributes of Allah; the greater part of this works seems to have been completed before his conversion from the Mutaziltes. His Ketāb al-lomaed. and tr. R.C. McCarthy, Beirut, 1953 and his last work Ketāb al-ebāna'an osūl al-dīānatr. W.C. Klein, New Haven, 1940 are expositions of his developed theological views and arguments against Mutazilite doctrines.

Notes

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Reference

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Arab people | Arab philosophers | 873 births | 935 deaths

Ash'ari | Abu al-Hasan al-Asy'ari