An Examination and Critique of al-Shaykh al-Mufīd's Objections of al-Shaykh al-Ṣadūq's View of the Human Nature

The nature of the human being is an important issue in kalam or Islamic theology, on which many other significant issues such as “obligation,” “the quality of resurrection,” “reward and punishment,” and “promise and threat,” hinge. Muslim theologians have offered a variety of views regarding the nature of the human being. The dominant view among Mu’tazili theologians is a materialist conception of the human being. They take the reality of the human being to consist in the visible body. On the contrary, some Imāmī theologians, such as Hishām b. Ḥakam, al-Shaykh al-Ṣadūq and al-Shaykh al-Mufīd, have appealed to some Quranic verses and hadiths to support dualism according to which the human being consisted of a body and an immaterial soul. Al-Shaykh al-Mufīd agrees with al-Shaykh al-Ṣadūq in taking the human being to consist of a body and a soul, but he objects to some of al-Shaykh al-Ṣadūq’s concepts of the soul. In this paper, we seek to show how cogent the arguments of both parties of the debate are and how compatible they are with rational and transmitted evidence. To do so, we review al-Ṣadūq’s view, and examine al-Mufīd’s objections to him given rational and transmitted evidence, showing that in most cases, al-Shaykh al- Ṣadūq’s views are supported with stronger evidence.