, though they also say that revealed law has made them obligatory. Their treatment of this, however, contains confusion that this is not the place to discuss. The same applies to the arguments they have introduced concerning matters of belief, such as proving that the world had a beginning by arguing from accidents and the bodies they necessarily imply. They deny the divine attributes and divine decree, calling this “monotheism and justice.”

Jahm ibn Safwān and his followers go further in negation, denying the divine names as well as the attributes. They are the foremost proponents of determinism. The Ash'arīs agreed with them on determinism, but disputed with them in merely verbal terms by affirming acquisition and the capacity for it. They regard these rational principles—knowledge of what necessarily belongs to the Lord, what is impossible for Him, and what acts it is possible for Him to perform—as the greatest and noblest branches of knowledge. They believe that through them they have surpassed the Companions, and that the Prophet did not teach them to the Companions: either because he left the community to deduce them, because the Companions were too occupied with jihad to study them, or because he told them things on this subject that they did not transmit, without occupying them with the proofs because they were engaged in jihad.

These are the “rational principles” upon which they and those who agree with them rely, such as al-Qādī Abū Ya'lā, Abū al-Ma'ālī, and Abū al-Walīd al-Bājī, following al-Qādī Abū Bakr and others like him. He and his followers contest the views of 'Abd al-Jabbār and others like him, just as al-Ash'arī and others like him contested those of Abū 'Alī and Abū Hāshim.