Contemporaries, Both Striving in the Same Cause

Abū Zahrah writes in his al-Madhāhib al-Islāmiyyah: “The two great Islamic scholars, Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī and Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī, were contemporaries, both striving in the same cause. The difference was that Imam al-Ashʿarī was geographically closer to the camps of the opponents,” meaning the Muʿtazilīs. “Basra had been the birthplace of the Muʿtazilī ideology, and the place from where it grew and spread; and it was also one of the main fronts in the ideological war between the Muʿtazilah and the scholars of hadith and jurisprudence. Though Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī was far from this battlefield, its echoes had reached the lands where he lived; and hence there were Muʿtazilah in Transoxiana mimicking the Muʿtazilah of Iraq, and it was al-Māturīdī who stood up to combat them.”

That was the inception of these groups, their birth. At the time, nobody said, “This is the Ashʿarī madhhab,” or “This is the Māturīdī madhhab.” This is a name that developed later. What happened then is that Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī taught people, and there were those who took this from the mainstream: al-Bāqillānī, Imam al-Ḥaramayn ʿAbd al-Malik al-Juwaynī, Imam al-Ghazālī. All of these were scholars who followed the Ashʿarī point of view, and further developed this madhhab, this school of Islamic theology. It became known as the Ashʿarī school of thought.

What is known today, and what exists today, of the Ashʿarī school of thought is not necessarily reflective of all of the opinions of Imam Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī when he passed away. Imam Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī went through three different periods in his life. And they say his final point of view was one of no taʾwīl: of consigning the ambiguous verses of the Qur'an and the Sunnah to Allah (swt), as was the way of the true Salaf.

There is a lot of contention here. Some people today try to say that yes, his opinion was that of the Salaf, but they project another idea onto that. That point belongs to the issue of tafwīḍ, which is taken up later. One thing is certain: the Ashʿarī books of theology today have been developed far more than they were at the time of Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī, and that was not necessarily what he believed to be the way to deal with this. It is not wrong; it is a different methodology. He decided simply to stay with the safer course of action.