Ash'arism

Others In terms of Ihsan: Ash'arism (/æʃəˈriː/;[1] Arabic: الأشعرية, romanized: al-Ashʿariyya) is a school of theology in Sunni Islam named after Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari, a Shāfiʿī jurist, reformer (mujaddid), and scholastic theologian,[2] in the 9th–10th century.

Al-Ash'aris Knowledge was based both on reliance on the sacred scriptures of Islam and theological rationalism concerning the agency and attributes of God.

[35][36] He was noted for his teachings on atomism,[37] among the earliest Islamic philosophies, and for al-Ashʿarī this was the basis for propagating the view that God created every moment in time and every particle of matter.

He also allowed another orthodox way of dealing with the ambiguous verses in the Qur'an called ta'wil (interpretation based on the Arabic language and revelation).

The solution proposed by al-Ashʿarī to solve the problems of tashbih and ta'til concedes that the Supreme Being possesses in a real sense the divine attributes and names mentioned in the Quran.

Theologians such as al-Taftāzānī[59] and al-Jurjānī [60] argued that the Islamic sacred scriptures (the Quran and the ḥadīth) "must be proven to be true by rational arguments" before being "accepted as the basis of the religion".

[61] A series of rational proofs were developed by these Ashʿarite theologians, including proofs for "the following doctrines or propositions": The medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Taymiyyah criticised the Ashʿarī theology as (in the words of one historian, Jonathan A. C. Brown) "a Greek solution to Greek problems" that should "never" have concerned Muslims.

[63] In contrast, German orientalist scholar Eduard Sachau says that the Ashʿarī theology and its biggest defender, al-Ghazali, was too literal and responsible for the decline of Islamic science starting in the 10th century.