The Jahmiyyah and the Karrāmiyyah

So there were the Qadariyyah and the Jabariyyah. There were other groups who were not as big. There were the Jahmiyyah, the followers of Jahm ibn Ṣafwān al-Samarqandī. They were Jabariyyah as well. There are a lot of overlaps as well. Some of these people would be Muʿtazilī in certain beliefs, or would have influenced the Muʿtazilīs. Some were Jabariyyah. Like the Muʿtazilah, Jahm rejected the eternal divine attributes. He was the first person to say that the Qur'an was created^*****. He said that paradise and Hell are not forever, but will eventually come to an end as well.

To go a little more in depth about the Jahmiyyah: this word is heard a lot on the internet. There are people labelling others Jahmiyyah. They fling this title around quite easily. That is why al-Kawtharī says that, unfortunately, nowadays (in his time, that is, about a hundred years ago) one has to be very careful, with this word Jahmiyyah, about what exactly the Jahmiyyah beliefs were originally. Because today this word is used for any opponent of a person. Someone has an opponent, and he calls him a Jahmiyyah; it is like a derogatory term. It is heard being used on the internet nowadays as well.

There was another group called the Karrāmiyyah. It can be traced back to Abū ʿAbdullāh Muḥammad ibn Karrām, who died in 255 Hijrī, which is about 868. They were Mujassimah, because he declared that his God (and it is "his God", his belief about God, because Allah is above and transcendent over what he says) rests on the throne; that He is above, as in the physical direction; that He is substantive; and that there are physical movements, displacement and descension for Him. Some Karrāmiyyah also claim that Allah is a body. They further divide into about 12 sects.

Even the Muʿtazilah had many different sects: the Jubbāʾiyyah, the Naẓẓāmiyyah, and so on. Any deviant group is going to very, very easily splinter into many other groups. That has been seen nowadays. Certain groups came up with a big cry and a loud noise; they split up into at least two or three groups before they lost all their vigour. That is the way it is, because there is no tested belief that they hold, tested over time. It is something that just comes up (it is slogans) and then they suddenly start dividing, with the internal differences among them. So there are the Muʿtazilīs, who went into all of these factions; there are the Karrāmiyyah, who went into all of these factions; and there are others as well who are of that nature.