ABSTRACT
Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn al-Masarrah was born in Cordova (Cordoba) in 269/883. His father, an ascetically inclined theologian, had journeyed to Basrah nearly thirty years before with a much older merchant son of his, reportedly to study the ideas of the Mu‘tazilah. The school, then in its heyday, was soon to be widely condemned, with the ascendancy of its traditionalist rivals. For it ascribed human acts to human choices rather than to God’s inscrutable power, and it held God responsible for doing justice to humankind and requiting unmerited sufferings, if not in this world then in the next. Ruddy-skinned and fairhaired, ‘Abd ‘Allāh might have passed for a Norman or a Slav in Iraq. But he was a Spanish Muslim, client, by the fortunes of history, to a Berber from Fez. His close friend Khalīl, branded by the orthodox with the sobriquet Khalīl al-Ghaflah, “the intimate of indifference”, had also travelled to Iraq and was, we are told, cross-examined on his return by an erudite of Islamic tradition: “What do you say of the balance in which God will weigh man’s deeds?” His answer, defiant of the literalism that was now growing strident: “I say it is God’s justice. So it is a balance that has no pans.” “What do you say about the narrow path that souls must walk to reach paradise?” “I say it is the straight way, the religion of Islam.” Another slap at literalism, although couched in conciliation of the still ill-fitting faith. “What do you say of the Qur’ān?” Here, the hostile sources tell us, Khalīl could only babble, “The Qur’ān, the Qur’ān”, but it was clear from his silence that he held to the hated Mu‘tazilite doctrine that the Qur’ān was created, not eternal. “And what do you say of destiny and the determination of human acts?” “I say that the good acts come from God, but the bad from man.” This alone, the master seethed, would be grounds enough to denounce you as an infidel and make you pay with blood for all your impieties. In fact the young scholar was merely driven away and banned from his master’s classes. 278But at his death a mob of jurists ransacked his house and burned all but his law books.
