The Mutual Influences of Qazi ‘Abd ol-Jabbar Mo’tazili and Sayyid Murtada in Theological Viewpoints

The Imamaiyyah Sjiites scholars, including Sayyid Murtada, have long been claimed by people like Khayyat, Ash’ari, Ibn-i Teymiyyeh, and … to have been influenced by the theological viewpoints of the rational Mo’tazilies. The major Imamiyyah characters, such as Sheikh Mufid, have rejected this claim totally. There are also some valuable current researches in this regard, which have been referred to in this article.

To this end, the present article is a focus on two samples and has studied two influential characters, i.e. the Imamiyyah outstanding figure, Sayyid Murtada, and his Mo’tazili outstanding figure, Qazi ‘Abd ol-Jabbar, who has valuable works in this regard. The author has rejected the claim through referring to the major cases of disagreements between the two mentioned characters. Of course, the points of agreements have also been identified.

The commonality in the approval of appealing to reasoning, as one of the resources of the religion, has resulted in the similarity of the Shiites and the Mo’tazilies in believing in the principles such as unity, justice, rational goodness and badness, etc. In this article, it is discussed that the similarity is the consequence of the intellectual approach, and it is not related to the mutual influences of the two schools of thought. In order to find out mutual influences, one needs to study the beliefs of the two schools comprehensively. This articles deals with: some issues of concordance, including reasoning, science and knowledge; and some issues of discordance, including miracle, attributes of God, pains and evils, the position between the two positions, cancellation and excommunication, enjoin in good and forbid from doing evils, and imamate.

Keywords: Shiite theology, Sayyid Murtada, Mo’tazilah, Qazi ‘Abd ol-Jabbar. Imamiyyah, reasoning