This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Ma'bad al-Juhani did not invent the question of free will in Islam, but he is among the first named figures executed at least partly for pressing it. Teaching in the late seventh century, in the unsettled decades after the early civil wars, he argued that divine justice requires human beings to possess real power over their own actions, qadar, since punishing a sinner for an act God alone caused would make God the author of injustice.
The Umayyad authorities who executed him in 699, and later Ghaylan al-Dimashqi under Caliph Hisham, read the position as more than abstract theology. A doctrine holding that rulers bear real responsibility for their own unjust acts, rather than acting as predetermined instruments, cut uncomfortably close to a regime whose legitimacy rested partly on claims of divine sanction.
The theological objection outlasted the political one. Opponents held that the Quran's own vocabulary of divine decree leaves no space for an uncaused human choice, and that Qadari teaching risked positing two independent powers, God and the believer, where Islamic theology insisted on one. No single council settled the dispute the way Nicaea or Chalcedon did in Christianity; instead the question circulated for centuries through the developing schools of kalam, reformulated by Mutazilite theologians and eventually answered, in a more cautious middle form, by al-Ashari's own doctrine of human acquisition, kasb, of an act that God alone truly creates.