Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Non-Voluntarists a Majority in Islam

via Laodicea, a brief but rather meaty response to the pope's Regensburg speech:
The Pope acknowledges a spectrum of Catholic views but cites only one Islamic thinker, Ibn Hazm of Cordova, whose view of an essentially non-rational, capricious God was rejected by virtually every other Muslim. Far from teaching an irrational obedience to a non-rational deity, mainstream Islamic theology insists on the systematic use of reason, since the Koran itself asks its audience to deduce the existence of God from his orderly signs in nature. Of the two schools of Sunni orthodoxy, Ash’arism and Maturidism, the latter—the orthodoxy of perhaps 80 per cent of Muslims—is particularly insistent on the rationality of God’s actions.
Abdal Hakim Murad

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