Reflections of a Traveler

The Ash’ari and the Maturidi Schools

By Nuh Keller

The tenets of faith of Ahl Al Sunna orthodoxy are given here in the same order as they appear in traditional Ash’ari references such as the Matn al-Sanusiyya and others.  For more than a thousand years, such works have been learned at an early age by virtually all Maliki and Shafi’I scholars, by many Hanafis, particularly in the Near East, and by some Hanbalis – all of whom were taught that attainment of this knowledge was personally obligatory upon every Muslim, and who knew it simply as Islam, not Ash’arism.

The Maturidis mostly followed the Hanafi school of law and predominated in the lands beyond the Oxus in central Asia.  Their tenets have not been given a separate treatment because according to Imam Taj al-Din al-Subki, they do not differ from the Ash’aris except on six questions, which excluding merely verbal differences are;

(1)    Ash’aris believe that if God willed He could in principle punish the obedient and reward the disobedient, since He is free do anything, however He has promised though revelation to reward the obedient and punish the disobedient; while the Maturidis believe that he must in principles reward the obedient and punish the disobedient, and that His doing the opposite is absurd;

(2)    Ash’aris believe that man is responsible to believe in God because of revelation, not merely because he is endowed with human reason, and that he has no responsibility prior to revelation, while Maturidis believe that man is responsible to believe in God even before revelation, by the mere fact of having reason;

(3)    Ash’aris believe that divine attributes of agency such as creation, giviging life, giving death, resurrection the dead and so forth, are temporal; while the Maturidis believe they all are manifestations of a single beginnglessly eternal attribute termed “existentiation” (takwin);

(4)    Ash’aris believe that God’s own beginninglessly eternal speech may be heard, while the Maturidis believe it may not;

(5)    Most Ash’aris believe that in principle God may impose moral obligations that man cannot endure, while Maturidies believe this impossible; though both agree that in practice He never does;

(6)    Ash’aris hold two views about the possibility of prophets committing lesser sins that are not sordid: the first being that they are possiblie for them to absentmindedly commit, while the second it that they are not.  The Maturidis say this is impossible, and that they are divinely protected from both enormities and lesser sins, a position that Taj al-Subki concurs with (Tabaqat al Shafi’iyya al kubra, 3.386-388)

Whoever reflects on these questions can see they are relatively speculative and minor, and they mainly serve to underscore the broader agreement of the two schools on more central issues.  This is why the Imams of Ahl al-Sunna consider both schools together to represent Sunni orthodoxy.  As religious historian R.M. Speight of the Harvard Theological Seminary has noted: “as Sunni theology matured after the tenth century, scholars freely appropriated elements of thought from Maturidi and Ash’ari alike.  No clear-cut lines of distinction between the Ash’ariyya and the Maturidiyya can be discerned in the later history of Muslim thought” (The Encyclopedia of Religion, 9.286)