…such as Abū’l-Ḥasan al-Tamīmī, Abū’l-Khaṭṭāb, and others. Among the foremost scholars of the Shāfiʿī school are Abū ʿAlī Ibn Abī Hurayrah, Abū Bakr al-Qaffāl al-Shāshī, and their peers; likewise, a number of distinguished Mālikīs hold the same view, as do the ḥadīth specialists—among them Abū Naḍr al-Sijzī and Abū’l-Qāsim Saʿd b. ʿAlī al-Zanjānī, and many others.

These very authorities state that denying rational good and evil is an innovation that first appeared in Islam during the lifetime of Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī. When he debated the Muʿtazilites about predestination, employing the line of argument associated with Jahm b. Ṣafwān and other champions of determinism, he found himself compelled to advance that denial. Apart from this episode, they maintain, no one from the early generations of the ummah or its leading imams ever rejected rational good (ḥusn) and evil (qubḥ) outright.

Indeed, the words of the imams and the early authorities—when they set forth the rationales for legal rulings, explain Allah’s wisdom in His creation and His commands, and clarify the goodness that the intellect discerns in what Allah enjoins and the evil the intellect perceives in what He forbids—stand in flat contradiction to the position of the negators.

As for those who deny rational good and evil, they have no proof whatsoever. Abū’l-Ḥasan al-Āmidī exhaustively reviewed every argument they cite and showed that virtually all of them are unsound. He then mentioned an argument weaker than all the rest: their claim that goodness and evil are accidents (ʿaraḍ) and that an accident cannot subsist in another accident; yet establishing this claim does not…