Every monotheist who reads scripture eventually runs into a puzzle. The Quran calls God knowing, powerful, living, wise, and merciful. These words describe God, but what are they describing? Are they names for separate things God possesses, the way a person possesses a house and a reputation and a skill? Or are they different ways of pointing at one reality that cannot be divided? And if some of these descriptions only become true once creation exists (nobody can be “Lord of the moon” before there is a moon), then are they really descriptions of God, or descriptions of God’s relationship to what He made?
In the eighth and ninth centuries, a group of Muslim theologians known as the Muʿtazilites pressed this question harder than almost anyone before them. Their answer was radical enough that critics summarized it as the claim that God has no attributes. This article explains who they were, what they actually meant, and why their argument shares a family resemblance with an old Greek puzzle about gods and goodness. It then turns to two verses in sura al-Anʿām that bring the problem into sharp focus, where God is said to have prescribed mercy upon Himself.
Who Were the Muʿtazilites?
The movement began in Basra, a garrison city in southern Iraq that had become one of the great intellectual centers of the early Islamic world. The traditional story places its birth in a disagreement within the circle of the preacher al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 728). The question was what to say about a Muslim who commits a grave sin. One camp said he remained a believer. Another said he was effectively an unbeliever. A student named Wāṣil ibn ʿAṭāʾ (d. c. 748) took a third position, that such a person was neither, and withdrew from the circle. The name Muʿtazila is usually connected to this act of withdrawal (iʿtizāl), though the sources do not agree on every detail, and historians treat the neat origin story with caution. ʿAmr ibn ʿUbayd (d. c. 761), a Basran ascetic, is counted among the earliest figures alongside Wāṣil.
What began as a dispute about sin grew into a full program of rational theology, or kalām. The Muʿtazilites believed that human reason could establish that God exists, that He is one, and that He is just, and that revelation then fills in what reason cannot reach. They flourished in the ninth century under the Abbasid caliphs. Abū al-Hudhayl al-ʿAllāf (d. c. 840s), who lived in Basra, gave the movement its first systematic form. His contemporary al-Naẓẓām (d. c. 835–845) was famous for daring, and for conclusions that his fellow Muʿtazilites sometimes rejected. A rival school developed in Baghdad, with thinkers such as Bishr ibn al-Muʿtamir and later al-Khayyāṭ and al-Kaʿbī. The Basran tradition continued with Abū ʿAlī al-Jubbāʾī (d. 915) and his son Abū Hāshim (d. 933), and reached its most complete expression in the work of the judge ʿAbd al-Jabbār (d. 1025), who taught in Rayy in Persia and wrote the enormous al-Mughnī fī abwāb al-tawḥīd wa-l-ʿadl, as well as a compact summary of the school’s doctrine, Sharḥ al-uṣūl al-khamsa, which survives in a text recorded by his students.
The most dramatic chapter of Muʿtazilite history is the miḥna, the inquisition. Beginning in 833 under the caliph al-Maʾmūn, officials were required to affirm that the Quran was created rather than eternal, and scholars who refused could be imprisoned or dismissed. The most famous resister was Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal. The policy lasted roughly fifteen years before the caliph al-Mutawakkil reversed it, and the backlash did lasting damage to the Muʿtazilites’ standing among Sunni scholars and the general public. Over the following centuries the movement lost its position as a dominant school of Sunni theology. Its ideas did not disappear. They were preserved and developed by Zaydī Shiʿa communities, especially in Yemen, and by Twelver Shiʿa theologians. Many of ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s works survived in Yemeni manuscripts and were only edited and published in the twentieth century. Sunni thinkers also kept arguing with the Muʿtazilites, which means a good deal of what we know of them comes through their opponents’ books.
One point deserves emphasis before going further. The Muʿtazilites were not a monolith. They were several generations of thinkers in at least two major centers, and they disagreed with one another often and sharply. Abū al-Hudhayl and al-Naẓẓām disagreed. The Basrans and Baghdadis disagreed. Abū Hāshim broke with his own father on important points. When this article says “the Muʿtazilites held,” it means the shared core of the school. When a view belongs to one thinker, the article says so.
The shared core was summarized in five principles. (1) The first is tawḥīd, God’s absolute unity. (2) The second is ʿadl, divine justice. (3) The third is al-waʿd wa-l-waʿīd, the promise and the threat, meaning that God will do what He has said about reward and punishment. (4) The fourth is al-manzila bayna al-manzilatayn, the position between two positions, which is Wāṣil’s view of the grave sinner. (5) The fifth is commanding what is right and forbidding what is wrong. Of these, the first two carry the philosophical weight. Unity drives the doctrine of attributes. Justice drives the doctrine that good and evil are real features of acts that reason can grasp. Both will matter for what follows.
What Does It Mean to Say God Has No Attributes?
Here is the apparent paradox. The Quran describes God as knowing (ʿalīm), powerful (qadīr), and living (ḥayy) in verse after verse. No Muslim denies this. Yet the Muʿtazilites were famous for “denying the attributes” (nafy al-ṣifāt), and their opponents used the phrase as an accusation.
The Muʿtazilites did not deny that God knows. What they denied was a particular picture of how God knows. Picture a man who is wise. In ordinary life we say he is wise because he has wisdom, a quality that is distinct from him. He could lose it. It came to him from outside, through study. It is a thing he has, and he is the thing that has it. If God were like this, the Muʿtazilites argued, God would be one eternal thing, and God’s knowledge would be a second eternal thing, and God’s power a third, and God’s life a fourth. Now there are several eternal realities, and the one thing that was supposed to be absolutely one has company.
They pressed this with questions. If knowledge, power, and life are real eternal things distinct from God, has the unity of God been compromised, since there is now a plurality of eternal beings? If these are parts of God, is God composite, assembled from components like a machine? And if God needs a separate quality in order to know, so that He would be ignorant without it, then God depends on something other than Himself to be what He is. For a being defined as self-sufficient, that looks like a contradiction.
So the Muʿtazilite answer was that God is knowing, but not by means of a separate thing called knowledge. God is knowing in Himself. Think of the difference between a lamp that gives light because a bulb has been screwed into it, and the sun, which does not have light as an add-on but simply is luminous. Nobody asks where the sun keeps its brightness. The analogy is imperfect, as every analogy about God is, but it points to the claim: the knowing is not an additional item in the inventory of God’s being.
This is divine simplicity, the doctrine that God has no parts or components. The Muʿtazilites did not invent it, and it appears in various forms in Jewish, Christian, and Greek philosophical thought. Their opponents, the Ashʿarites (followers of Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī, d. 935), saw the danger of reducing God to a vague abstraction and insisted that the attributes are real and eternal. The Ashʿarites usually listed seven: life, knowledge, power, will, hearing, sight, and speech. They did not treat these as independent gods or as separable parts. Their formula was that the attributes are “neither He nor other than He,” meaning they are not identical with God’s essence but cannot exist apart from it. To the Muʿtazilites this sounded like a way of having it both ways. To the Ashʿarites, the Muʿtazilite position sounded like it emptied the Quran’s language of content.
Within the Muʿtazilites there was no single answer to how exactly to describe this. Abū al-Hudhayl said that God is knowing by a knowledge that is God Himself, a formula that tries to keep the reality of the attribute while collapsing it into the essence. His Basran successor Abū ʿAlī al-Jubbāʾī said instead that God is knowing “by Himself,” with no knowledge involved at all. Abū Hāshim proposed that God has a special state or mode (ḥāl) of being knowing, which is neither a separate thing nor nothing at all. This was controversial even among Muʿtazilites. ʿAbd al-Jabbār followed the Basran line closely and, in the Sharḥ al-uṣūl al-khamsa, lays out God’s being living, powerful, knowing, and so on as following from what God is in His own essence rather than from added qualities. The details differ, and the differences were fought over for generations, but the shared motive is the same: nothing is to stand beside God in eternity.
Essence and Action
There is a second move the Muʿtazilites make, and it matters enormously for the rest of this article. They distinguish between descriptions that belong to who God is and descriptions that arise from what God does.
Consider six statements. God is knowing. God is powerful. God is the Creator of Adam. God is the Lord of the moon. God is the God of Abraham. God is forgiving.
Do all six have to be true of God in the same way, from all eternity? The first two sound like descriptions of what God is. The next three seem different. Before Abraham existed, was God already “the God of Abraham”? The phrase presupposes Abraham. Before the moon existed, could God be “Lord of the moon”? There was no moon to be lord of. And before anything was created, was God “the Creator of Adam,” in the sense of having actually created him? Surely there is a difference between being able to create and having created.
This is a distinction between capacity and act. God’s power to create is eternal. The creating of Adam happened at a time. The phrase “Creator of Adam” becomes true when Adam comes into being. Something is true of God that was not true before. Yet this cannot mean that God changed in His essence, because the Muʿtazilites hold that God’s essence cannot change.
Philosophers have a name for this kind of situation: relational properties, or what is sometimes called extrinsic denomination. Take an ordinary example. A man has a sister, and one day she has a baby. The man is now an uncle. He was not an uncle yesterday. Yet nothing happened to him. He was asleep, or at work, or on another continent. A new description became true of him because of an event elsewhere. Philosophers call this a “mere Cambridge change,” a change in what can be said about something without any change in the thing itself. Or consider a woman who becomes a widow when her husband dies far away. She is a widow before she knows it.
If we apply this to God, the new descriptions “Creator of Adam,” “Lord of the moon,” and “God of Abraham” become true as creation unfolds, without any alteration in God’s essence. The Muʿtazilites generally treated such descriptions as attributes of action (ṣifāt al-fiʿl), as opposed to attributes of essence, and held that attributes of action are temporal while essential descriptions are eternal. Most of them placed will and speech among the attributes of action as well, a position that follows from their view that the Quran, as God’s speech, is created, which was the very issue at the center of the miḥna.
The strongest objection is easy to state. Even if God does something new, does that not require some change in God, since before He was not acting and now He is? If a man sits still and then gets up, something about the man has changed. Muʿtazilite thinkers answered in different ways, and the details are technical. The core of the Basran answer is that God’s act does not involve anything like the motion or effort of a creature. God acts by His power, which is eternal, and the effect appears when God wills it to. The change is in the world, not in God. Critics from the Ashʿarite and Māturīdite sides pressed back that this simply relocates the problem. The article returns to these objections below.
The Euthyphro Dilemma
Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro has Socrates meeting a man named Euthyphro outside a courthouse. Euthyphro is about to prosecute his own father for a killing and is confident that this is the pious thing to do. Socrates asks him what piety is. After a few false starts, Euthyphro suggests that piety is what the gods love. Socrates then asks the question that has outlived the dialogue: is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because the gods love it? (Euthyphro 10a.)
The two options are uncomfortable. If something is pious only because the gods love it, then piety seems to be a matter of divine whim. The gods could have loved cruelty, and cruelty would then have been pious. But if the gods love the pious because it is pious, then piety appears to exist independently of the gods, who are merely recognizing a standard they did not establish.
Theologians have long adapted the puzzle. Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? If the first, goodness seems arbitrary: had God commanded cruelty, cruelty would be good. If the second, goodness seems to stand above God as a standard He must obey.
But what if this is a false dilemma? What if goodness is neither an arbitrary product of God’s commands nor an independent standard standing above Him? What if God commands what is good because God Himself is good? On this understanding, goodness is inseparable from God’s nature. God does not acquire goodness from something outside Himself, nor does He manufacture goodness through arbitrary decrees. Rather, His commands express what He eternally is.
This third response provides an illuminating parallel to the Muʿtazilite understanding of divine attributes, though their own position on morality requires some distinction. The Muʿtazilites maintained that good and evil are objective realities that reason can recognize independently of divine commands. Justice is good and oppression is evil, not simply because God declares them so. Because God is just, He does not act unjustly. Their Ashʿarite opponents, by contrast, maintained that moral obligation is grounded in God’s commands rather than in a standard that binds Him independently of His will.
Yet the broader philosophical insight connects directly to the Muʿtazilites’ first principle, divine unity. Just as goodness need not be something God possesses separately from Himself, neither must knowledge, power, or life be separate eternal qualities added to God’s essence. God does not need an additional thing called knowledge in order to know, or another thing called power in order to be powerful. He is knowing and powerful by virtue of what He is. His essential attributes do not exist alongside Him; they are inseparable from His very being.
This brings us back to the distinction between God’s essence and His actions. If knowledge and power describe what God eternally is, what about descriptions such as Creator, Lord, Forgiving, and Merciful? Must these likewise describe something eternally intrinsic to God, or might some describe what God chooses to do and how He relates to His creation?
Mercy makes this question particularly interesting because the Quran does not merely describe God as merciful. It twice states that God has prescribed mercy upon Himself. If mercy is necessarily and eternally part of God’s essence, what does it mean for God to prescribe it? And if this prescription represents a choice, does that mean God becomes merciful through His actions without undergoing any change in His essential nature?
God Has Prescribed Mercy Upon Himself
Sura 6, al-Anʿām, contains two verses that use nearly identical wording. Verse 12 follows a question to the Prophet, asking to whom belongs everything in the heavens and the earth, and the answer is that it belongs to God. The Quran then says, in Rashad Khalifa’s rendering, that “He has decreed mercy as His attribute.”
[6:12] Say, “To whom belongs everything in the heavens and the earth?” Say, “To GOD.” He has decreed that mercy is His attribute. He will surely summon you all on the Day of Resurrection, which is inevitable. The ones who lose their souls are those who disbelieve.
قُل لِّمَن مَّا فِى ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ وَٱلْأَرْضِ قُل لِّلَّهِ كَتَبَ عَلَىٰ نَفْسِهِ ٱلرَّحْمَةَ لَيَجْمَعَنَّكُمْ إِلَىٰ يَوْمِ ٱلْقِيَٰمَةِ لَا رَيْبَ فِيهِ ٱلَّذِينَ خَسِرُوٓا۟ أَنفُسَهُمْ فَهُمْ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ
Verse 54 instructs the Prophet to greet those who believe in God’s revelations with peace, and again says the same of “your Lord,” and goes on to say that whoever does wrong out of ignorance and then repents and reforms will find God forgiving and merciful.
[6:54] When those who believe in our revelations come to you, you shall say, “Salãmun ‘Alaykum (Peace be upon you). Your Lord has decreed that mercy is His attribute. Thus, anyone among you who commits a transgression out of ignorance, and repents thereafter and reforms, then He is Forgiving, Most Merciful.”
وَإِذَا جَآءَكَ ٱلَّذِينَ يُؤْمِنُونَ بِـَٔايَٰتِنَا فَقُلْ سَلَٰمٌ عَلَيْكُمْ كَتَبَ رَبُّكُمْ عَلَىٰ نَفْسِهِ ٱلرَّحْمَةَ أَنَّهُۥ مَنْ عَمِلَ مِنكُمْ سُوٓءًۢا بِجَهَٰلَةٍ ثُمَّ تَابَ مِنۢ بَعْدِهِۦ وَأَصْلَحَ فَأَنَّهُۥ غَفُورٌ رَّحِيمٌ
The Arabic of the key phrase, in both places, is:
كَتَبَ عَلَىٰ نَفْسِهِ الرَّحْمَةَ
Kataba ʿalā nafsihi al-raḥmah.
Dr. Khalifa’s phrase is a free rendering that emphasizes the meaning of mercy as a characteristic of God. The words themselves say something more specific, and more literal: “He has prescribed mercy upon Himself,” or “He has written mercy upon Himself.” Three features of the Arabic deserve attention.
The first is the verb kataba, “he wrote.” In Arabic usage the verb frequently carries the sense of prescribing or ordaining, as when the Quran says that fasting has been “prescribed” (kutiba) for believers (2:183). To write something is to fix it, to make it binding. The second is the preposition ʿalā in ʿalā nafsihi. The preposition ʿalā ordinarily carries the sense of burden or obligation, as in “a duty upon him.” Here the one prescribing and the one upon whom the prescription falls are the same: God. The third is al-raḥmah, mercy with the definite article, which presents mercy as a defined, known thing rather than some mercy or other.
What does this tell us? There are at least four ways to read it, and the wording does not by itself decide between them.
On the first reading, mercy is an eternal and essential quality of God, and the verse simply expresses that. On this reading, kataba is emphatic, a way of saying that mercy is fixed and certain. The difficulty is why the Quran would use language of prescribing for something that is simply what God is. We do not say that a triangle has prescribed three sides upon itself.
On the second reading, mercy is a free commitment. God was not compelled to be merciful but bound Himself to be, and that is why the language is of writing and prescribing. This reading takes the grammar seriously. The difficulty is that it seems to make mercy optional, something God might not have prescribed, which many theologians find hard to square with the many verses that name God al-Raḥmān and al-Raḥīm.
On the third reading, mercy is relational. It is manifested in God’s dealings with creatures, and the verse describes how God has resolved to relate to His creation. This fits the immediate context of 6:54, where the prescription is tied directly to forgiveness of those who repent, which is a relationship with particular creatures.
The fourth reading combines these. God may eternally be merciful in His nature while freely prescribing the form and extent of mercy toward creation. Prescribing would then not create God’s mercy but commit God to its exercise in a specific way.
This produces the question that gives the article its center. If mercy were simply and necessarily an attribute of God’s essence in the same way as knowledge, why would the Quran speak of God prescribing it upon Himself? We do not read that God has prescribed knowledge upon Himself, or prescribed power upon Himself. The wording appears to treat mercy differently. Does the act of prescribing suggest a chosen commitment instead of an intrinsic necessity? Or could God eternally be merciful while freely prescribing how that mercy will be exercised? The wording does not conclusively establish one answer over the other.
It helps to look at how the classical interpreters handled the verse, bearing in mind that the evidence here is partial. Many commentators read kataba as meaning that God has made mercy certain, or promised it, or decreed it. Muʿtazilite commentators, as is commonly reported, tended to read it as consistent with their view that God does what is right and best for His creatures, so that mercy is something God does not fail to do. The Ashʿarites, who deny that anything can be obligatory upon God, tended to read the verse as a promise or a pledge, since God cannot be bound by anything outside Himself, though He may bind Himself by His word. While I have not found a Muʿtazilite thinker who addressed this specific question, I propose that mercy can be understood as a temporal, relational attribute of God. In the following section, I will explore how this interpretation might follow from broader Muʿtazilite theological principles.
Can God Become Merciful Without Changing?
Here is a thought experiment. Imagine God existing before anything else. There are no creatures to sustain, no sinners to forgive, no suffering beings to relieve, and nobody to receive mercy. Is God merciful in this condition, in the same sense in which He is knowing and powerful?
Three things need to be kept apart. The first is capacity: God eternally has the ability to show mercy. The second is action: God actually shows mercy to some creature. The third is relationship: God is described as merciful toward that creature because of what He has done for it.
Ordinary cases help. A doctor is a healer in the first sense even while asleep, because she has the ability. She is a healer in the second sense only when she treats someone. And she stands in the third sense, “my doctor,” only with respect to a particular patient. Nobody thinks the doctor changed internally when the patient walked through the door. A new description became true because a patient now exists.
Forgiveness makes the point clearer. Before any sin existed, God could have the ability to forgive. But could He already be said to have forgiven someone? To forgive is to forgive somebody for something. Without a sinner, “God forgives” has no object. Forgiveness in the sense of action and relationship needs a world with sin in it.
Mercy is a harder case, because mercy does not need suffering or sin. To create a creature at all, to sustain it, and to give it good things may itself be an act of mercy. So the claim here is not that mercy requires a wrongdoer. The claim is that mercy in the sense of action or relationship needs a recipient, and a recipient only exists once creation does.
If this is right, then when God acts mercifully, He does not acquire a new intrinsic quality. A new description becomes true because a recipient of mercy now exists, exactly as a man becomes an uncle when a niece is born. That keeps God’s essence untouched, which is what the Muʿtazilite commitment to unity and simplicity demands. It differs sharply from the idea that God literally changes, that His essence goes from not-merciful to merciful. On the view described here, nothing about God’s essence changes at all. What changes is the set of things that stand in relation to Him.
Is this compatible with Muʿtazilite simplicity? In structure, yes. The Muʿtazilites already accepted that some true descriptions of God, such as Creator and Lord, are attributes of action that begin with the act. Treating mercy-as-exercised in the same category is a natural extension of their own framework. But it is an extension. The Muʿtazilites did not need to say that mercy as a capacity is anything other than essential, and nothing here suggests that God lacked the ability to be merciful at any point.
Objections and Alternatives
The strongest objections deserve a fair hearing.
The first objection points out that the Quran calls God al-Raḥmān and al-Raḥīm constantly, opening nearly every sura with these names. Does this not show that mercy is eternal? It may. The names could refer to an eternal attribute. But names can also describe God’s actions and His relationship with creation. Consider the name Creator. God’s power to create may be eternal, yet the act of creating occurs in time. Similarly, God may eternally possess the capacity for mercy without eternally exercising it. The existence of a divine name alone does not establish whether it describes God’s eternal essence or His actions toward creation.
The second objection says that if God has the capacity for mercy, that already makes Him merciful, whether or not anyone receives it. This is a fair point, and it is why the article keeps capacity apart. In the capacity sense, nothing here denies that God is eternally merciful. The question is whether exercised mercy is the same thing.
The third objection says that if God prescribed mercy upon Himself, mercy must be optional. Not necessarily. A person of firm character who commits to keep a promise has bound himself freely, but it does not follow that he might as easily break it. The binding is free in origin and firm in effect. The Muʿtazilite view that God never fails to do what is best for His creatures would, if anything, push against any suggestion that mercy is a coin toss.
The fourth objection is that the whole discussion is merely a change in language. If the only thing that changes is how we describe God, then perhaps nothing real is being claimed. The reply is that the Cambridge-change idea is a claim about real things. Whether an uncle exists is a fact about the world, even though the uncle himself has not altered. The question that matters is where the change lies: in God, or in what God has made.
The fifth objection is an alternative framework. Māturīdite theologians, following Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī (d. 944), hold that God’s attribute of bringing into being (takwīn) is eternal, even though the things brought into being are created in time. On this view, God was Creator before He created, in the sense that the attribute was always His, and the temporal effect appears later. A classical creed associated with al-Ṭaḥāwī makes a similar point, saying that God had the meaning of Lord when there was nothing to be lord over, and the meaning of Creator when there was nothing created. Ashʿarite thinkers have their own account, in which eternal attributes of power and will connect to created things at the moment of creation. For these thinkers, mercy could well be an eternal attribute whose temporal manifestations are created. This is a serious position, and nothing here refutes it. The disagreement is over whether an eternal attribute of this kind adds something to God, which the Muʿtazilites doubted, or only expresses what God is, which these thinkers affirm.
The sixth objection asks whether identifying all attributes with God’s essence can really account for the differences between knowledge, power, and mercy. If they are all just God, why do they seem different? The Muʿtazilites generally answered that the differences are in how we understand and conceive God, and in the different ways His essence relates to different objects, not in God Himself. The Ashʿarites found this unconvincing, and the debate continues to this day in various forms.
Conclusion: Is God What He Is, or What He Does?
The Muʿtazilites began with a demand for absolute unity. From that demand came a distinction between who God is and what God does. Descriptions of the first kind are eternal and belong to His essence. Descriptions of the second kind arise through His actions and relationships with creation, without implying any change in His essential nature. The Euthyphro dilemma provides a useful philosophical parallel: just as goodness need not be an arbitrary product of God’s commands or an independent standard imposed upon Him, God’s essential attributes need not be separate qualities He possesses. Rather, they can be understood as inseparable from what God eternally is. The question, then, is whether mercy belongs to God’s eternal essence or describes how He chooses to relate to His creation.
The two verses in sura 6, al-Anʿām, put this question into the text itself. They do not merely say that God is merciful. They say that God has prescribed mercy upon Himself. That is a distinctive way of putting it, and it is hard to read it as merely emphatic. It could reflect a free commitment, a relational reality, an essential quality stated with force, or some combination. The wording does not force a single conclusion, and the historical record does not show that the Muʿtazilites themselves drew the conclusion explored here. What the verses do offer is a scriptural foothold for at least asking whether there is a difference between what God necessarily is and what God commits Himself to do.
So the article ends with a question rather than a verdict. If God can eternally possess the capacity for mercy without eternally exercising it, might some divine attributes describe not what God has always been in Himself, but how God has chosen to relate to His creation?
Sources and Further Reading
- Adamson, Peter. Philosophy in the Islamic World. Vol. 3 of A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
- Wolfson, Harry Austryn. The Philosophy of the Kalam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.
- Martin, Richard C., Mark R. Woodward, and Dwi S. Atmaja. Defenders of Reason in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld, 1997.
- Schmidtke, Sabine, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
- van Ess, Josef. Theology and Society in the Second and Third Centuries of the Hijra. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
- Frank, Richard M. Studies on Abū Hāshim and the doctrine of aḥwāl (divine states).
- Hourani, George F. Islamic Rationalism: The Ethics of ʿAbd al-Jabbār. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
- Plato. Euthyphro, especially 9e–11b.
