This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Jahm ibn Safwan argued from the opposite direction of the Qadari teachers. If they worried that an all determining God made room for injustice, Jahm worried that any independent human power at all made room for a second creator beside God. His answer, developed in the early eighth century, was to deny human beings any real causal power whatsoever: every act, down to the smallest motion, belongs to God alone, and what looks like human choice is compulsion, jabr, dressed up as freedom.
Jahm's teaching did not stop at this one point. He also held, more controversially still to his contemporaries, that the Quran was created rather than eternal, and that God's own attributes should be understood in ways that avoided any resemblance to created things. The combination of positions made him one of the more thoroughly condemned theologians of the early Abbasid transition, and the Umayyad authorities executed him in 746, in the political chaos of the dynasty's final year.
His opponents pressed an objection that recurs in nearly every tradition that has argued this question: if God alone causes an act, on what ground is the person who performed it morally responsible for it. Qadari and later Mutazilite theologians pressed exactly this point against him. Mainstream Sunni theology did not resolve the argument by adopting the Qadari answer either. Al-Ashari's later formula kept Jahm's insistence that God alone truly creates every event, while trying, more carefully than Jahm had, to leave room for the human being to acquire, rather than cause, the act, a distinction later theologians have argued for centuries over whether it is a real difference or only a fine one.