ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī (d. 333/944), the eponym of the Māturīdī school within Sunni kalām , whose theological system is centred on divine wisdom, real natures, and concurrent causation. Al-Māturīdī holds that knowledge arises from sense perception, reliable report, and reason, with reason capable of discerning moral truths such as belief in God and the obligation of showing gratitude to one's benefactor, situating his ethics more in the realm of natural law than of strict divine command theory. God is utterly unlike creation yet knowable through analogy, possessing real and eternal attributes such as knowledge, power, and speech and acting freely but always with purpose. Teleology pervades creation, with every entity possessing a purpose and existing within a network of opposites that make the world intelligible and morally meaningful. Miracles function as divine signs tied to prophetic endowment and serve as proofs of messengerhood. Al-Māturīdī's hermeneutics distinguishes between explanation and interpretation, practising interpretive restraint and consigning ultimate meaning to God where necessary. Human beings are microcosms composed of enduring accidents with a perceptual spirit and rational intellect, capable of free acts when God creates a momentary capacity that they use to choose among real alternatives. Al-Māturīdī's empiricist and naturalist leanings affirm real natures and regular laws of causation, reject the notion of prime matter, and support a practical form of methodological naturalism while maintaining divine wisdom as the ultimate ground of explanation.
