Free Will and Predestination in Early Muslim Rational Philosophy

Abstract

Dawud al-Muqammas, the elder colleague of the much better known Sadia Gaon, the first prominent figure in medieval Jewish philosophy, wrote his major work Isrún-Maqalat (Twenty Chapters) at the end of the 9^th century, which was preserved in a manuscript discovered in the National Library of St Petersburg at the end of the 19^th century, although not in its entirety. The work was written in Arabic, as was the custom of the time, and forms an integral part of the intellectual-historical fluid known as the (mutazilite) kalam. The world over languages and religions, which was the golden age of Muslim and Jewish philosophy – approximately the 10^th-12^th centuries – could perhaps be called rational theology in scholastic terms. A particular feature of the genre is that its representatives, from the Pyrenees to modern-day Afghanistan, pondered the same problems: the uniqueness of God, his transcendence, his purely pneumatic character, in short, the borderline questions of revelation and Hellenic philosophy. The main work of Al-Muqammas, especially its 11^th chapter, interprets a very complex issue, the relations between predestination and free will in a Jewish, Muslim and Syriac Christian context, attempting to overcome the contradictions that these three religions, and especially Islam, brought to the surface again and again at the turn of the 9^th and 10^th centuries.