Free Will and Predestination in Early Islam

W. Montgomery Watt's Free Will and Predestination in Early Islam, published by Luzac and Co in 1948, is an early scholarly study by one of the twentieth century's most influential Western scholars of Islam, tracing the free will and predestination debate in Islamic theology from roughly the eighth century through to the theologian al-Ashari, whose synthesis on the question, the doctrine of acquisition, shaped mainstream Sunni theology. Its authority rests on Watt's own standing as a foundational figure in Western academic Islamic studies. Its limit is age, since Watt's own later and more widely cited anthology on Islamic creeds refined some of this earlier study's arguments, and more recent scholarship on early Islamic theology has continued to develop since 1948, so a very specific claim benefits from checking against that later literature as well.