Nevertheless, they do not need as much rational argument in the fundamentals of religion as the Muʿtazilah do. The Muʿtazilah claim that prophethood cannot be established without their doctrines concerning divine oneness and justice. They therefore make denial of divine decree one of their rational foundations, as they do the negation of the divine attributes.
As for this group, their prevailing view is that, when a qualifying miracle is witnessed, it is necessarily known to confirm the messenger’s truthfulness. The existence of the Creator is likewise known necessarily or through necessary premises. Thus, the rational premises through which the validity of transmitted revelation is known are few and necessary. By contrast, the Muʿtazilah have greatly extended their premises and made them inferential. This group is therefore better than the Muʿtazilah in the fundamentals of religion in many respects, although the Muʿtazilah are better than them in some respects.
When Abū al-Hasan al-Ashʿarī abandoned the Muʿtazilī school, he followed the approach of Ibn Kullāb, inclined towards the people of the Sunnah and hadith, and affiliated himself with Imam Ahmad, as he stated in all his books, including al-Ibānah (The Clarification), al-Mūjaz (The Epitome), al-Maqālāt (Doctrinal Views), and others. He associated with the people of the Sunnah and hadith as a speculative theologian in their midst, occupying a position comparable to that of Ibn ʿAqīl among their later generations. Yet al-Ashʿarī and the leading figures among his followers adhered more closely to the principles of Imam Ahmad and other imams of the Sunnah than did the likes of Ibn ʿAqīl in many instances, or those who followed Ibn ʿAqīl, such as Abū al-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī in many of his books. Earlier followers of Ahmad, such as Abū Bakr ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, Abū al-Hasan al-Tamīmī, and others like them, mentioned al-Ashʿarī in their books as someone broadly in accord with the Sunnah, and cited his accounts of the Muʿtazilah’s contradictions. There was between the Tamīmīs