(Allah be well-pleased with him)
by GF Haddad
`Ali ibn Isma`il ibn Abi Bishr Ishaq ibn Salim, Abu al-Hasan al-Ash`ari al-Yamani al-Basri al-Baghdadi (260-324),1 a descendent of the Yemeni Companion Abu Musa al-Ash`ari, was in the first half of his scholarly career a disciple of the Mu`tazili teacher Abu `Ali al-Jubba'i, whose doctrines he abandoned in his fortieth year after asking him a question al-Jubba'i failed to resolve over the issue of the supposed divine obligation to abandon the good for the sake of the better (al-sâlih wa al-aslah). At that time he adopted the doctrines of the sifatiyya, those of Ahl al-Sunna who assert that the Divine Attributes are obligatorily characterized by perfection, unchanging, and without beginning, but He is under no obligation whatsoever to abandon the good for the sake of the better.2 He left Basra and came to Baghdad, taking fiqh from the Shafi`i jurist Abu Ishaq al-Marwazi (d. 340).3 He devoted the next twenty-four years to the refutation of "the Mu`tazila, the Rafida, the Jahmiyya, the Khawarij, and the rest of the various kinds of innovators" in the words of al-Khatib. His student Bundar related that his yearly expenditure was a meager seventeen dirhams.
(cont'd)
http://privat.bahnhof.se/wb042294//Text ... n-gfh.htmlStatistik: Postat av b — mån jan 24, 2011 1:58
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