capable of acting from pre-eternity. Nor was this their opinion alone; it was shared by those who adopted their speculative theology.

For that reason, when a conflict broke out in the eastern lands—first during the reign of Sultan Maḥmūd ibn Sabuktagīn and later at the beginning of the Saljūq era under Alp Arslān—between the Ḥanafīs and the Shāfiʿīs, the sultan had already ordered that the people of innovation be cursed from the pulpits. This was after the heretical Egyptian ruler al-Ḥākim had written to him, inviting him to pledge allegiance. The sultan therefore wrote to the Caliph al-Qādir, informing him of the circumstances and of his own commitment to the Sharīʿah of Islam. Al-Qādir then composed the well-known Qādirī Creed, most of it versified by Shaykh Abū Aḥmad al-Karjī, instructed the then-Caliph al-Qāʾim to read it publicly, and ordered that the innovators be summoned to repent. Accordingly, the Muʿtazilites were called to repentance in the early 400s AH.

During that time Qāḍī Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn al-Ṭayyib (al-Bāqillānī) underwent an inquisition. Shaykh Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāyīnī, the Shāfiʿī, and Shaykh Abū ʿAbd Allāh ibn Ḥāmid, the Ḥanbalī, rose against him. Al-Isfarāyīnī was particularly outspoken, publicly rejecting Ibn al-Ṭayyib over his position concerning the Qur’an. At that stage Qāḍī Abū Bakr used to sign his name “Muḥammad ibn al-Ṭayyib al-Ḥanbalī,” for the Ashʿarīs still identified themselves with the Sunnah and its leading Imams, championing the well-known views of the Imam of the Sunnah, Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, and other scholars of Ahl al-Sunnah.

It was then that Qāḍī Abū Bakr authored his famous refutation of the Bāṭinīs, the faction loyal to the Egyptian ʿUbaydid ruler al-Ḥākim. Sultan Maḥmūd, for his part, enforced the public cursing of the people of innovation in the eastern domains, and the Saljūq kings who followed him maintained the same policy. Some Ḥanafīs and others even included the Ashʿarīs among those to be cursed, until Abū ʾl-Qāsim al-Qushayrī composed his well-known Complaint and Ḥāfiẓ Abū Bakr al-Bayhaqī wrote a celebrated epistle on the matter. In these works they listed a number of issues for which Abū ʾl-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī was reproached, among them his statement that the Lord was not, from eternity, capable of acting.