God's Attributes Are Real and Are Neither God Nor Other Than God

Ashari theology affirms that God's knowledge, power, life and speech are real attributes rather than empty names for a single undivided essence, while at the same time refusing to treat them as separate eternal things existing alongside God's essence, a formula stated as neither He nor other than He. Islamic Creeds: A Selection presents the wording as a deliberate compromise position, holding a middle course between the Mutazili theologians, who denied that God possesses attributes distinct from His essence at all, treating talk of divine attributes as merely figurative, and a position the Asharis judged to compromise divine oneness by multiplying eternal realities alongside God. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition records that this formula became, through the Ashari school's wide adoption across the Sunni world, one of the most consequential settlements in the history of Islamic theology, since it allowed scripture's frequent references to God's knowing, willing and speaking to be read as straightforwardly true statements rather than as metaphor requiring reinterpretation, without conceding the philosophical difficulties the Mutazila had raised against a crude multiplication of divine eternals.

The Ashari position on divine attributes traces to Abu al-Hasan al-Ashari, who trained within Mutazili theology before breaking from it and developing a rival system that retained some of Mutazili logical rigour while rejecting its central conclusions about the divine attributes and the createdness of the Quran. The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam situates this break within the aftermath of the mihna, the inquisition imposed under Abbasid patronage of Mutazili doctrine in the ninth century, a period whose eventual collapse left Sunni theology searching for a settlement capable of affirming scripture's plain sense against Mutazili rationalism without abandoning reasoned argument altogether. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition records that Ashari theology, developed in the generations following that search, went on to become the dominant theological school across most of the Sunni world, its formula on the divine attributes carried into standard creeds and taught in Sunni institutions long after the specific ninth century controversy that produced it had receded from active memory, so that a position born from one historical crisis became the ordinary theological common sense of later centuries.