TWO of the most important early sects of Islám, the republican Khárijites and the legitimist Shí'ites, have been already discussed at some length; while the extremists (Ghulát) of the latter body, with their wild doctrines of Incarnation (Ḥulúl), “Return” (Rij'at) and Metempsychosis (Tanásukh), will form the subject of the following chapter (pp. 308 et seqq.). These sects may be regarded, primarily at least, as to a large extent political in their character, and as representing respectively the democratic Arabian and the monarchic Persian tendencies as applied to matters of religion. To them must be added a third sect of mainly political character, the Murjiya, and a fourth of more purely theological or speculative nature, the Qadariyya or Mu'tazila. These four sects are regarded by von Kremer,* who follows Ibn Ḥazm,* as the four primary divisions (Hauptsekten) of the Muhammadans;* and, according to his view,* the two last arose at the Umayyad capital, Damascus, partly under Christian influences, during the first half of the eighth century of our era (A.D. 718-747), while the two first, as we have already seen, were already in existence in the latter part of the seventh century.
The Murjiya (so called from the root arja'a, “he postponed,” because they postpone or defer judgment against sinful Muslims The Murjiya. till the Day of Resurrection,* and refuse to assert that any true believer, no matter what sins he may have committed, is certainly damned) were essentially that body of Muslims who, unlike the Shí'ites and Khárijites, acquiesced in the Umayyad rule. In doctrine they otherwise agreed in the main with the orthodox party, though, as von Kremer thinks, they greatly softened and mitigated its more terrible features, holding “that no believing Muslim would remain eternally in hell,”* and, in general, setting faith above works. Their views were so evidently adapted to the environment of the Umayyad Court, with which no sincere Shí'ite or Khárijite could have established any modus vivendi, though Christians and other non-Muslims stood in high favour there, and held important offices,* that it is hard to regard them otherwise than as time-servers of the Vicar of Bray type. With the fall of that ungodly dynasty their raison d'être ended, and they ceased to exist as an independent party, though from their ranks arose the celebrated Abú Ḥanífa, the founder of one of the four orthodox schools of the Sunnís which endure to the present day.
*“It is much to be regretted,” says von Kremer,* “that we have so little accurate information about this sect, but they shared the fate of that whole epoch. The Arabic historical sources of the Umayyad period perished altogether, and the oldest writings preserved to us arose in 'Abbásid times. We are therefore driven back for information as to the Murjiya to the scattered notices which we find in later Arabic writers.”
Of much greater interest and importance was the sect of the Qadariyya (“Partisans of Free Will”) or Mu'tazila The Mu'tazila. (“Seceders,”) whose leading idea, to quote Dr. Steiner,* “is best characterised as the enduring protest of sound human understanding against the tyrannical demands which the orthodox teaching imposed upon it.” They called themselves Ahlu'l-'Adl wa't-Tawḥíd, or “Partisans of the Divine Justice and Divine Unity”; of the Divine Justice, because the orthodox doctrine of Predestination, which represented God as punishing man for sins forced upon him, as it were, by a Fate which he had no power to resist, made God in effect a pitiless Tyrant; of the Divine Unity, because, said they, the orthodox party, who make the Qur'án coeternal and coexistent with God, and who regard the Divine Attributes as separate or separable from the Divine Essence, are really Polytheists or Mushrikún (associaters of other gods with the One God). The account generally given of their origin and name is that Wáṣil b. 'Aṭá al-Ghazzál, a Persian Ḥasan of Baṣra and Wáṣil b. 'Atá. disciple of the celebrated theologian Ḥasan of Baṣra, differed from his master as to the question whether a believer, after he had committed a grievous sin, still deserved to be called by that appellation. Wáṣil held that such an one could neither be called a believer nor an unbeliever, but must be regarded as occupying a middle position between the two, and withdrew to a different part of the mosque to expound this view to those of his fellow-students who followed him; whereupon Ḥasan of Baṣra observed to those who stood round him, “I'tazala 'an-ná” (“He hath seceded from us”), in consequence of which saying Wáṣil's party were called by their opponents “al-Mu'tazila” (“the Separatists” or “Seceders.”)* This, the generally received account of the origin of the sect, would make 'Iráq—“cette antique Babylonie, où la race sémitique et la race perse se rencontraient et se mélangeaient, et qui devint bientôt le centre de la science, puis, peu de temps après, sous les 'Abbásides, le siège du gouvernement”* —its birthplace and cradle; but von Kremer,* as we have seen, thinks that their doctrines were developed at Damascus under the influence of Byzantine theologians, notably of John of Damascus and his disciple Theodore Abucara. The other and more definite name—Qadariyya* —by which they were known referred to their doctrine of man's free-will; and the spurious tradition “al-Qadariyyatu Majúsu hádhihi'l-Ummati,” “the Partisans The Qadariyya compared to Magians. of Free-will are the Magians of this Church” (because, as Steiner observes, to explain the existence of Evil they also set up a second Principle, the Will of Man, against the Will of God), was freely applied to them by their adversaries. Even in much later times, at the beginning of the thirteenth century of our era, we find the Persian Ṣúfí poet Maḥmúd Shabistarí referring to this tradition in that well-known manual for mystagogues the Gulshan-i-Ráz* as follows:—
Har án kas-rá ki madh-hab ghayr-i-fabr-ast,
Nabí farmúd kú mánind-i- gabr-ast.“Every man whose faith is other than predestinarian
Is, according to the Prophet, even as a guebre.”
Von Kremer, as already noticed, considers that the Doctrine of Free-will was already taught in Damascus at the end of the seventh century of our era by Ma'bad al-Juḥaní (died in A.D. 699), who had imbibed the doctrine from a Persian named Sinbúya, and who was put to death by the Umayyad Caliph 'Abdu'l-Malik, or, according to other narratives, by Ḥajjáj b. Yúsuf. 'Awfí, the Persian thirteenth-century writer, in the account of the Umayyad Caliphs contained in bk. v of his immense collection of stories, the Jawámi'u'l-Ḥikáyát (which, unfortunately, exists only in rare manuscripts), says that Ghaylán the Qadarí was put to death in Damascus by Hishám b. 'Abdu'l-Malik (A.D. 724-743) for teaching the doctrine of Free-will; and even describes how he was confuted by the Caliph in the presence of the doctors of Syria. Yazíd II (A.D. 720-724), on the other hand, is said to have himself embraced the views of the Qadariyya, and, if 'Awfí may be believed, he also showed a marked partiality for the House of 'Alí. Shí'ite and Qadarí tenets, indeed, often went together, and the Shí'ite doctrine current in Persia at the present day is in many respects Mu'tazilite, while Ḥasan al-Ash'arí, the great opponent of the Mu'tazilites, is by the Shí'ites held in horror. Muḥammad Dárábí,* the author of an Apology for the poet Ḥáfidh,* mentions as one of the three grounds whereon objection was commonly made to his verses that some of them appeared to indicate an inclination to the doctrines of al-Ash'arí, “which,” he adds, “the doctors of the Imámiyya” (or Shí'ites of the Sect of the Twelve) “regard as false;” and he cites as an example of these Calvinistic leanings the verse:—
Dar kúy-i-ník-námí márá guzar na-dádand:
Gar tú na-mí pasandí, taghyír kun qaḍá-rá!“They suffered us not to enter the Street of Good Repute:
If thou likest it not, then change Destiny!”