child? Then had I escaped Hell.'" Al-Jubba'i was silenced, and Al-Ash'ari went away in triumph. Three years after his pupil had left him the old man died. The tellers of this story regard it as disproving the Mu'tazilite doctrine of "the best"—al-aslah—namely, that God is constrained to do that which may be best and happiest for His creatures. Orthodox Islam, as we have seen, holds that God is under no such constraint, and is free to do good or evil as He chooses.

But the story has also another and somewhat broader significance. It is a protest against the religious rationalism of the Mu'tazilites, which held that the mysteries of the universe could be expressed and met in terms of human thought. In this way it represents the essence of al-Ash'ari's position, a recoil from the impossible task of raising a system of purely rationalistic theology to reliance upon the Word of God, and the tradition (hadith) and usage (sunna) of the Prophet and the pattern of the early church (salaf ).

The stories told above represent the change as sudden. According to the evidence of his books that was not so. In his return there were two stages. In the first of these he upheld the seven rational finalities (sifat aqliya) of God, Life, Knowledge, Power, Will, Hearing, Seeing, Speech: but explained away the Qur'anic anthropomorphisms of God's face, hands, feet, etc. In the second stage, which fell, apparently, after he had moved to Baghdad and come under the strong Hanbalite influences there, he explained away nothing, but contented himself

with the position that the anthropomorphisms were to be taken, bila kayfa wala tashbih, without asking how and without drawing any comparison. The first phrase is directed against the Mu'tazilites, who inquired persistently into the nature and possibility of such things in God; the second, against the anthropomorphists (mushabbihs, comparers; mujassims, corporealizers), mostly ultra Hanbalites and Karramites, who said that these things in God were like the corresponding things in men. At all stages, however, he was prepared to defend his conclusions and assail those of his adversaries by dint of argument.

The details of his system will be best understood by reading his creed and the creed of al-Fudali, which is essentially Ash'arite. Both are in the Appendix of Translated Creeds. Here, it is necessary to draw attention to two, only, of the obscurer points. On the vexed question, "What is a thing?" he anticipated Kant. The early theologians, orthodox and theoretical, and those later ones also who did not follow him, regarded, as we have seen, existence (wujud) as only one of the qualities belonging to an existing thing (mawjud). It was there all the time, but it lacked the quality of "existence"; then that quality was added to its other qualities and it became existent. But al-Ash'ari and his followers held that existence was the "self" (ayn) of the entity and not a quality or state, however personal or necessary. See, on the whole, Appendix of Creeds.

On the other vexed question of free-will, or, rather, as the Muslims chose to express it, on the ability of men to produce actions, he took up a mediating position.