The Older the Text, the Less Categorization

The one thing that this book does not do, which anyone who has read other books on ʿaqīdah may have noticed… To sum up some of the books of ʿaqīdah briefly: in most of the older books, one can see how this development took place. Nowadays, things are needed that are very, very particular, very categorized: speaking about one subject, and then going on to the other. That is just the way our minds work, because that is just the way the tradition is nowadays.

Reading this text, one finds him reiterating certain points. He does not say in this book: the essential attributes are this, this and that; the active attributes are this, that and the other. He does not make any lists of that nature. He is presenting the same points, though, using different words, different phraseology; he is not listing anything. Imam Abū Ḥanīfah does a bit of listing, where he talks about the essential attributes and the active attributes. But again, that is still very limited compared to some of the later books of ʿaqīdah.

Take, for example, the poem of al-Laqānī, which is called Jawharat al-Tawḥīd, and the many commentaries on that by al-Bājūrī and al-Ṣāwī and others; or take, for instance, Umm al-Barāhīn, which is by al-Sanūsī. These are some of the later Ashʿarī texts. It has to be said that, comparing texts of the Ashʿarīs and the Māturīdīs, the Ashʿarīs seem to have developed the ṣifāt a lot more. The discussions on the ṣifāt are a lot more detailed, a lot more categorized; they split them into different categories and things.

The older the text is, the less of this categorization will take place. This is quite an old text; that is why he does not really list the attributes. But he has just mentioned quite a few of them already, as can be noticed. So the various categorizations of attributes are set out below, together with how they relate to their effect; there is a discussion about that which needs to be understood as well.