The Voluntarist Doctrine of Allah
When we conceive of the being that Muslims call “Allah,” central to our thoughts are his oneness (Tawhid) and his transcendence. That there is “no God but Allah” is the core of their great profession (Shahada). Muslims pray it everyday and it is necessary to conversion. The conception of Allah has a lofty reputation in the halls of comparative religion.
However I would like to suggest that there are elements of Islamic theology proper which undermine that status. Central to these potential difficulties is the idea of divine will among Muslims. The doctrine we will examine is called voluntarism. This is not simply a “Muslim” doctrine, but this doctrine is more central to Muslim theology than among other religions. Indeed if we want to find supposed divine beings with the capacity for such whimsical action, we would have to harken back to the polytheism of the Greeks, Romans, or Norse.
We will proceed through six matters: from (1) the roots of voluntarism in general, and Islamic thought in particular, to (2) expressions of this doctrine in the Quran and Hadith. We will then (3) examine a variety of attributes Muslims hold to be eternal and measure them against this supreme will. Then follows three sections of implications of the doctrine: (4) on the revelation of Allah, (5) on the justice of Allah, and (6) on whether there is any love of Allah. What I will conclude is that there is neither a coherent revelation, nor justice, nor love, given this picture of Allah.
Roots of Voluntarism In and Out of Islam
The first thing to do is define what we mean by voluntarism. The word is derived from the Latin for the noun of “will or choice” (voluntas), or in verbal form, “to will” (volo). Voluntarism is contrasted to realism at least with respect to the ground of ultimate cause. We could ask this clarifying question: Did God decree all that he did on the basis of the real nature of things or entirely by his own good pleasure? The realist would see as much mischief in these horns as in the Euthyphro dilemma. Here the “nature of things” is made into a straw man, as if the only way for God to do according to nature is with respect to (a) created-finite and / or (b) separate-individual natures.
The classical realist would maintain that God is that essence (nature) according to which he is pleased to do. Thus there is no conflict between absolute sovereignty and rational causality: between divine freedom and divine necessity.
Nominalists, like William of Ockham, began to challenge this unity held by classical realism. Out east, Al-Ghazali attacked the realism of Avicenna [1] on the ground that if God’s creation was necessitated by his essence, then it follows that it would be a contradiction in terms for God to have withheld creation [2]. Hence God would not be free.
This controversy is not defined merely by the degree of sovereign will one ascribes to God. Sovereignty per se regards both ability and right. While the realist would say that whatever God pleases is always according to the divine nature, as nothing could please God more than, or even equal to, his own glory, the crucial element in voluntarism is that will is set above all of the other divine attributes. This means that there is (at least often) no reason behind the choice. God can act unpredictability and capriciously.
The moment we say, “No, he cannot: God can only choose according to his x,” whatever divine attribute x is, we are no longer voluntarists at that point, but have returned to classical realism. In the Muslim view there is even a strong tradition that Allah is the sole cause to all things: a denial of real, secondary causes. W. S. Palgrave believed that this notion is even contained in the Arabic meaning of Allah [3].
Though Duns Scotus and Ockham clashed over realism and nominalism, there seemed to be a growing consensus in both schools toward voluntarism in Late Scholasticism. According to Bavinck the brand of Scotus was based upon the notion of will as indifference: “That the will wills this thing is an immediate principle, because there is no intermediate cause … namely, why the will willed this thing, there is no reason other than that the will is will” [4]. The contingency of all created things demands this, reasoned the voluntarists. Bavinck then turns his reflection to our subject: “Scotus did not go as far as certain Muslim theologians, who asserted that by the will of God all things are created anew from moment to moment apart from any connection with each other, from any laws of nature, without substances or qualities” [5]. Is this an accurate description of the Islamic doctrine?
At the center of the Muslim doctrine is that Allah’s will is known while the rest of what we would call the divine character is not. This is what we might consider a doctrine of unintended consequences, because, as we will see, Muslim texts say all sorts of things about Allah, whether by naming or describing: attributions that do not exactly cohere with this notion of incomprehensibility.
One way to think of this is to say that volition and incomprehensibility are the two attributes that we do know with certainty about Allah. While that is paradoxical, the point for Muslims is that it is practical. One must not pry into the essence of Allah but one absolutely must know what Allah requires of mankind. There is thus a legal grounding to Islamic theology. As this is a coin with two sides, so one can trace the roots of this in two main strands: first, the “legal” development of the Muslim sources; and second, the defeat of a school within Islam that would have been given to more rational theological reflection.
As to the first, there will be more to say in the below section on justice. But whether the priority of law over theology is a cause of the voluntarist doctrine, or vice versa, the consequence is that the Muslim mind, in contemplating revelation, is to be focused more with the command in itself than in the divine nature upon which the command is based. It may be crass to say, “Do as you’re told! Don’t worry about the reason.” There is some reason always to be given, but these reasons do not ultimately rise above the book, the prophet, and the rewards or punishments handed out by Allah.
Now as far as deeper theological reflection, that was a chapter of Muslim history that closed with the defeat of the Mu’tazilite tradition and triumph of the Ash’arite tradition. The Mu’tazilite school was what we might call rationalist [6], at least in the sense that for them God could be known through human reason. Their program to make theology intelligible had implications for their doctrines of revelation and of nature. God was First Cause, but worked through secondary causes. In other words, not only did God have an intelligible nature, but so did everything else, by the principle of sufficient reason. This had implications for free will and morality. But in addition, it meant that the Quran, while reflective of eternal truth, was not itself co-eternal with God. Since the divine word was communicated to man, in human language, this took into account the nature of that language (Arabic) as a developing thing.
Now the Ash’arite school met this point for point, siding with an unknowable God, who alone is causal (no secondary causes), and who spoke the truths of the Quran from all eternity. One account even has a perfect copy of the Quran in heaven with Allah (Q85:22). Irrationalism resulted, since reason’s reflection upon natures—from God’s nature down to the nature of his effects—was discouraged.
One historian of philosophy sees Al-Ghazali’s “critique of causality” to be the root of his more famous case against the philosophers [7]. So voluntarism in this case was the impetus for irrationalism, rather than the other way around. The link is simply this: if the nature of things is either the cause or explanation of other things, then there is genuine secondary cause. The converse of the proposition—All effects are participants in secondary causes—is No effects are participants in secondary causes. The implication to reason is simply that the act of reasoning about all such effects is rendered unintelligible.
Expressions of Voluntarism in the Quran and the Hadith
In the infamous Satanic verses, after Muhammad at first made overture to the Quraysh by allowing homage to their three deities (Q53:19-21), Allah sent down a new revelation in his mercy. He can annul what Satan had suggested. Now this begins to raise questions about a wider reality in the Quran described in the doctrine of abrogation: namely, that Allah can, in general, supersede prior revelations with subsequent ones. We will come back to how this doctrine logically coheres with the eternal character of the Quran in the next section. First we must examine the main texts in the tradition that exalt Allah’s will above all.
At first glance it may seem that the Quranic statements are no different than biblical ascriptions of total sovereignty to God. For instance, “He does whatever He will” (Q85:16). We may compare this to our Psalm 115:3. However, when Allah “creates whatever he will” [having] “power over everything” (Q5:17), here the context includes destroying Christ if he so willed and refusing revelation to the other people of the book if he so willed. Moreover, torment in hell is eternal unless Allah wills otherwise in a particular case (Q11:106-107). Clearly there is something very different going on here.
Abrogation itself is taught in Q2:106, “Any revelation We cause to be superseded or forgotten, We replace with something better or similar. Do you [Prophet] not know that God has power over everything?” Notice again the reason given for abrogation: the supremacy of Allah’s will. In the case of a blind man who could not win glory in Allah’s cause, new provisions are given in a revised version of Q4:95. “Not equal are those of the believers who sit at home” became amended with the words “apart from those with an incapacity.” This change was confirmed by Sahih Al-Bukhari 6:118 [8].
While some may answer something similar to the Christian doctrine of progressive revelation, this is not the same thing. The history of Muhammad’s revelation shows a constant flow of sudden revelations specifically addressing his needs or those he perceives of his community. It has all the look not merely of divine whims, but those of the prophet.
An Incoherence of Eternal Attributes
The Muslim view of Christ depends upon a variety of misconceptions about Sonship (Q4:171; 9:30), begottenness (Q5:17), and even who the “partners” (Q5:72-73, 116-117) are in our doctrine of the Trinity. It may be that these misunderstandings are species of a larger void in philosophical thinking. I do not mean that in any elitist way, as if the “Western mind” is more naturally suitable to this or that intellectual capacity. I am simply referring to some clues in Islamic theology proper about wrong roads that were taken. For instance, “Neither is He a substance, nor do substances exist in Him” [9]. Indeed we would agree that substances do not exist in God, nor that he is in any sense divisible. There is evidence, however, that Muslim theology confuses any sort of being or subsistence with material particulars.
Though this may be an imprecise way to say it, the mainstream Muslim doctrine seems to at least speak of what many would call the incommunicable attributes of God. At the very least we recognize a kind of claim to those classical divine attributes such as aseity, unity, eternality, infinity, immutability, impassibility, omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence. Of most of these we could say that Muslim theologians only mean what some Christian theologians have meant by the via negativa. Allah is known by what he is not, or perhaps, that what we know is what he is not. The latter, however, seems only to deny that what we know is God at all.
The closest we come to a broad theology proper in Islam is the value placed on the ninety-nine names: Q7:180; 20:8; 59:22-24. What is important here, though, is memory and reciting, not inquiring, nor relating to each other.
What is ascribed of Allah very often conflicts with these incommunicable attributes. He is called “The Proud … The Indulgent and The Harmful” [10]. If Allah is also compassionate, is he really a unity? These attributes seem to be in conflict with each other. Absolute sovereignty need not be what Zwemer called “ruthless omnipotence” [11], but so it seems to be with Allah.
We have been speaking of the relation of divine attributes to this will. But what about the divine will to the nature of things below? It is taught that all things begin in a state of submission. In a sense, all things are “Muslim” by nature. But if this is true, then all created effects have natures that turned in a different direction. This happens to all humans at birth. Of course Christians also have to make an account of the origins and nature of evil, but it seems all the more difficult to do that if Allah is the sole cause of all things. He willed in the fullest sense all of what a Muslim would call evil. This is true of personal agents: “you will only wish to do so if God wills” (Q76:30).
In such a voluntarist doctrine of Allah, as Geisler and Saleeb explain, “What gives unity to all of God’s actions is that he wills them all” [12]. It may be argued that these attributes are for the most part expressions of will rather than the way that we would speak of divine attributes as God’s essential character.
If Allah wills, in the examples of superseding revelation or giving mercy against one’s real record of righteousness, contrary to what he had previously willed, has the will of Allah changed? If it is answered that this change is in time but that Allah’s will has not changed in itself, then we must ask further whether the previous revelation or record of righteousness was false. This is only to solve one problem by creating another.
All this is summarized categorically by Zwemer: “In the Moslem doctrine of the Unity all real unity is absent. The attributes of Allah can no more be made to agree than the Surahs which he sent down to Mohammed; but in neither case does this lack of agreement, according to Moslems, reflect on Allah’s character” [13].
Implications on the Revelation of Allah
We mentioned the doctrine of abrogation (naskh): that Allah may speak a word that supersedes prior revelations. “God erases or confirms whatever He will” (Q13:39); and “When We substitute one revelation for another—and God knows best what He reveals” (16:101). The first question we might ask is how any two verses can be at odds to begin with. Before we ask how the latter replaces the former, so compromising divine immutability, let us ask a matter of more common sense.
How is it, if Allah is omniscient, that he did not foresee all of the eventualities that would require the subsequent provisions? Later revelations in Islam tend to meet some new need of the prophet or the community. But these should have been accounted for already by an eternal word. Nor is this problem restricted to the Quran and later tradition.
We may recall that Muslims believe that the Jewish and Christian revelation was originally the revelation of Allah (Q3:3, 65; 5:46; 9:111): before corruption, that is. White asks, “If no one can change Allah’s words, then how is it Muslims believe that is exactly what happened with the Torah and Injil?” [14] It may be said that Muhammad was not bringing a “new” message. What is new about it is that it is final, and so will “stick” this time. This is why Abraham, David, Jesus, etc. are view as all Muslims [15].
A distinction between Allah’s word proper and the physical copies that Jews and Christians are guilty of forging may be imagined. But this only moves the problem of will one step back. This corruption: was it willed by Allah or not willed? In any event the Muslim doctrine of tawatur seems to include not merely the original revelation, but a promise that Allah protects the transmission of his word from corruption [16].
The analogous relationship between how Christians and Muslims view things is Jesus to the Quran: not Jesus to Muhammad, nor Bible to Quran [17]. As such, we can draw an analogy between Incarnation and inscripturation. The analogy is very limited, but it is sufficient for our purposes. On the surface, two facts need to be reconciled: (1) the Quran is eternal; (2) Arabic is a language which evolved and originated in time. Could it be said that as Arabic is the divine language, it was merely manifest in time? However this is resolved it does not seem that the Muslim can apply it to the question of abrogation.
Implications on the Justice of Allah
The questions of revelation and righteousness come together in practical life. Muhammad’s example is a normative for Muslims. The phrase, “the living Quran,” is even used about his words and deeds. Does this not present a problem for the eternal decree of Allah? Even we take away the Satanic Verses, what about when Muhammad felt like committing suicide after the revelation? Is this praiseworthy, blameworthy, or irrelevant? Even the living out of righteousness takes us right back to the revelation problem for Muslims. How do we know which parts are more authoritative than others? And that is only another way to ask: How do we know the will of Allah for our lives?
Let us ask an even more clarifying question: What must a Muslim do to be saved? There is great reward for fighting for Allah’s cause (Q2:217-218; 3:168-175, 195; 48:16-17). Paradise can also be gained by reciting the ninety-nine names of God [18]. But the closest thing we can call their “gospel” is that God can overlook sin arbitrarily. That is what “mercy” seems to imply in the oft repeated “merciful” (Q1:1) He can simply choose to forgive sins. There is no moral law requiring him to either punish sins or require atonement for them.
He gives moral law to man, but he himself is under no moral obligation. Yet interestingly the sin of shirk will not be forgiven. Then on what basis can there be an unforgivable sin? Why should his mercy not be able to extend to this as well? Is there a reason in him or none at all? Is there a reason outside of him? But this reason outside of him, does it not exert a causal influence over him in the effect of such inevitable unforgiveness toward Christians? What is so powerful about the bad nature of Christians that it would be determinative for the hatred of Allah?
It is interesting that the description of Allah as “holy” occurs only once in the Quran (59:23). The whole conception of divine justice seems devoid of moral quality, of virtue, so that behavior that accords with it is more like a mercenary affair. For Zwemer, “The reason is plain. Mohammed had no true idea of the nature of sin and its consequences” [19]. Note that this does not mean that there is no Muslim definition of sin. It is mentioned in quite a few surat (Q2:80, 284-286; 4:30, 46; 9:116; 14:39; 47:2-3; 69:35; 70:19-25; 86:9). The reason for the disconnect between what is right and what is holy must run deeper than sin, and so must lie in the standard against which sin is measured.
Zwemer contended that, “The words ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ have superseded the use of ‘guilt’ and ‘transgression;’ the reason for this is found in the Koran itself. Nothing is right or wrong by nature, but becomes such by the fiat of the Almighty” [20].
He goes as far as saying that the total lack of any distinction between ceremonial and moral law shows the same thing. In other words nothing is revealed to be wrong by nature because the moral nature of the Lawgiver is unknown [21]. Al-Ghazzali put it this way, “It is in His power to pour down upon men torments, and if He were to do it, His justice could not be arraigned. Yet He rewards those who worship Him for their obedience on account of His promise and beneficence, not of their merit or of necessity, since there is nothing which He can be tied to perform” [22].
We too would say that God is not indebted to anyone, but that is because (1) the sinner really is objectively guilty and (2) Christ fully satisfied God’s punishment for that guilt. So in both the sinner’s objective guilt and Christ’s objective payment, there is a ground of justice in God that is “binding” God. To say that God “must be just” is not to imagine something extrinsic to him constituting this necessity. The Muslim thinker conceives of the necessity of justice in God as somehow or other binding upon God, as if from outside of God. Thus he must posit a justice in God that is both “higher” than our ability to conceive or question, and yet still not binding on that will! So the tenth century Muslim theologian Al-Ash‘ari coined the expression la kayf, apparently meaning “without asking ‘how’” [23].
Let us set down a general principle for salvation from sin in any religion. What does it means that one could ever be “saved” by achieving an actual righteousness before the bar of divine justice? As the Reformers recognized in their argument against Rome, the only righteousness that could satisfy God is a perfect righteousness.
The Muslim’s doctrine has two choices here. Allah is either accepting human beings on the basis of justice or on the basis of his own mercy. If by justice, then it is an imperfect justice; if by mercy, then it is a mercy in the face of justice unsatisfied.
We have already examined the implications for an arbitrary mercy. But what does the Quran hold out about the other option: salvation by personal deeds? The only possible hope here is in the notion of the “scales” (Q7:8-9; 21:47; 101:4-11). Whatever the exact law behind these scales, clearly there is a causal relationship between deeds and eternal rewards and punishments. And if all else fails, Muhammad becomes a kind of mediator (Q4:80; 33:36), yet on what ultimate basis? Only one will.
Implications on the Love of Allah
This may appear as a strange heading. Muslims do not speak of the “love” of Allah in the same way that Christians speak about the love of God. However that is just the point. This is not coincidental. The question I want to close with is this: Can a deity of sheer unknowable will be either loving or loved? Now the first thing that a Muslim would say is that love is ascribed to Allah (Q3:31-32). That is true, and yet that surah speaks of the reciprocating love for man that depends upon whether or not he has first loved Allah. How different this is from that statement of John: “We love because he first loved us” (1 Jn. 4:19).
What does this have to do with voluntarism? If what was said before is true, that the attributes of Allah are really expressions of his will alone, then this “love” is an expression of his will alone. Consequently, Allah is not love but rather may love or else may not. And that for no reason in his own nature, or at least no reason of which can be spoken.
Indeed he may love one person today and choose not to love that same person tomorrow. There is no inherent reason in his being (none that we can know of) for his love to continue. Where does such a love fit in to that common division of Allah’s attributes into two: the “terrible” and the “glorious,” and the former “more numerous and more emphasized than the latter”? [24]
We receive a chilling vision of what can only be called the sadism of this deity in Sahih Hadith: “Abu Musa' reported that Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: When it will be the Day of Resurrection Allah would deliver to every Muslim a Jew or a Christian and say: That is your rescue from Hell-Fire” [25]. A being who is able and willing to throw whoever he wants into hell, in spite of (from his perspective on justice) being good, in order to reward those who are unjust, for no reason whatsoever, but simply that he wills to do so—this is hardly a being we can recognize as much of a person, let alone a good person.
This was always one of the defining characteristics of the pagan gods as the Christian God liberated their worshipers. The polytheistic deities of Israel’s neighbors, as well as those of the Greco-Roman pantheon and Oriental cults encountered by the early Church, were gods that could not be counted on for personal relationship or ultimate security. In addition to being at each other’s throats, they were capricious. At the end of the day, these false gods were like the abusive rulers who fashioned them. Gods of sheer will are gods of power, of irrational force or hopeless threat.
We cannot love what we do not know. In Christianity, God’s sovereignty and justice are reasons to worship God precisely because they are seen to be good.
We can see how God’s decrees are rooted in his holiness and our eventual good (Rom. 8:28). His ways are not always discerned, but since Jesus shows us what the Father is like, we know all of his ways as good, and we know that He bore the cost to reconcile us in spite of all our wickedness.
_______________________________
1. F. C. Copleston agrees that Avicenna taught that creation was necessary to God, but rejected that this was a result of his Aristotelian realism. Rather it resulted from the influence of Neo-Platonism; specifically from the notions of emanations and intermediaries between the One and the world: cf. Medieval Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1961), 63-64.
2. James Naify, “Al-Ghazali,” in Richard H. Popkin, ed. The Columbia History of Western Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 164.
3. cf. Samuel M. Zwemer, The Muslim Doctrine of God (CrossReach Publications, 2017), 42.
4. Duns Scotus quoted in Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Volume Two (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 235.
5. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, II:236-37.
6. cf. Colin Chapman, Cross and Crescent (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 107.
7. Naify, “Al-Ghazali,” 163.
8. James White, What Every Christian Needs to Know About the Qur’an (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2013), 272.
9. The Imam El-Ghazzali, quoted in Zwemer, The Moslem Doctrine of God, 13.
10. Zwemer, The Moslem Doctrine of God, 35.
11. Zwemer, The Moslem Doctrine of God, 12.
12. Norman Geisler & Abdul Saleeb, Answering Islam (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1991), 134.
13. Zwemer, The Moslem Doctrine of God, 35.
14. White, What Every Christian Needs to Know About the Qur’an, 54
15. White, What Every Christian Needs to Know About the Qur’an, 63
16. Peter G. Riddell & Peter Cotterell, Islam in Context (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 75.
17. Chapman, Cross and Crescent, 84.
18. Zwemer, The Moslem Doctrine of God, 16.
19. Zwemer, The Moslem Doctrine of God, 28-29.
20. Zwemer, The Moslem Doctrine of God, 30.
21. Zwemer, The Moslem Doctrine of God, 31.
22. Al-Ghazali, quoted in Zwemer, The Moslem Doctrine of God, 33.
23. Chapman, Cross and Crescent, 108.
24. Zwemer, The Moslem Doctrine of God, 27.
25. Sahih Hadith, bk. 37, ch. 8
