A Third Answer Between Two Extremes

Kasb, usually rendered acquisition, is Abu al Hasan al Ashari's answer to a problem that had split Islamic theology before he wrote: if God is the sole and true creator of everything that exists, does that include human acts, and if it does, how can a person be justly rewarded or punished for what God alone brought into being. The Mutazila school, per Encyclopaedia Britannica's summary of their position, answered that human beings create their own acts through a power God gives them, protecting moral responsibility at the cost of limiting God's creative power. A rival current, the Jabriyya, went the other way, holding that humans have no real power over their acts at all, protecting God's omnipotence at the cost of making reward and punishment appear arbitrary. Ashari's kasb tried to hold both commitments at once. God alone creates the act itself, but a human being's own choice acquires it, kasb, in a way that makes the act genuinely theirs for the purposes of judgment, without that choice having created anything from nothing. The formula gave the school that carried his name a way to affirm divine omnipotence and human accountability in the same sentence rather than trading one for the other.