Al-Maturidfs Theological Commitments[110]

Maturidi theology has affinities with both Mu^ttazili and Ash^tari approaches to ethics and law. With Ash^taris it shares an emphasis on God's omnipotence and with Muhazilis a confidence in human rationality and universal normativ­ity.

For Abu Mansur al-Maturidi (d. 333/944), God has absolute power and free­dom to set everything according to His will. Being wise, the way God orders things is based on and reflects His wisdom (hikma).^[111]1 Acting with wisdom, God puts everything in its proper place (wada^ra kulla shay^,in mawdi^cahu).^{[112] [113] [114]} Wisdom, thus, is the principle that guides creation, and the created world is subject to the rules of wisdom.6³ The way God creates is, in the eyes of God, the way He wants it to be. However, rejecting the Muhazili position on God having to do what is best (al-aslcih),^M for al-Maturidi, God has complete free­dom and choice (Ikhtiydr) in His creating; He could have created differently. Hence, like Ash^taris, al-Maturidi affirms that God is the sole source of ethical normativity, and He is the one who defines good and bad, not only through His commands and prohibitions, but through His very act of creation of this world. The wise harmonious ordering of the created world leads to stable ethi­cal norms because, according to al-Maturidi, God holds Himself to the norms

He has set.^{[115] [116] [117] [118] [119] [120] [121] God does not change what is bad and good at random, or else He would be foolish (cabath).}

In contrast to Ash^tarism, al-Maturidi holds that this normativity is “acces­sible to rational understanding.’^ God has created humans with the ability to reason.

Reason also leads to the recognition that humans are only able to grasp parts and traces of God's wisdom. Hence, similar to Muhazilis, Maturidis hold that Revelation is needed to inform about those matters that people cannot otherwise discern. Revelation complements and completes rational knowl­edge needed to act ethically.^{[122] [123] [124] [125] Only Revelation provides the full picture of God, His order, and the ethical value of acts that the intellect cannot grasp, such as fasting, the status of sinners, the intercession of the Prophet as well as the guidelines according to which God rewards and punishes?3 On the one hand, al-Maturidi considers human reason able to determine the ethical status of acts, namely those that are inherently good or bad; independent of Revelation, one knows that lying, injustice, and foolishness are bad?4 On the other hand, al-Maturidi holds most acts to be morally ambivalent, their ethical status only determinable in light of what God commands and prohibits?5 With regard to the role of the intellect in grasping norms, al-Maturidi, thus, stands some­where in between Muhazilis and Ashtaris.}

These three schools of thought about God and His relation to this world pro­vide the canvas on which the jurisprudents presented in the following chapters paint their ethical and legal theories. Their theological worldviews constitute the underlying rationale behind many of their legal positions; they shape and constrain their intellectual manoeuvers. While not each scholar of a par­ticular theological school holds each of the positions outlined above, their ethico-legal norm construction falls within the main parameters described here. When it comes to details, we find much variety in the same school of thought. A commitment to God’s justice, omnipotence, transcendence or wis­dom may manifest itself differently in the thought of scholars belonging to the same theological school. Hence, some caution is warranted to not take the commitments laid out here at face value without looking at how they manifest themselves in the articulation of a scholar’s ethico-legal theory.