An Analysis of the Concurrency of Sayyid Murtadhā’s Line of Thought with Basrian Muʿtazilites in Explaining the Nature of God’s Will

Sayyid Murtadhā and al-Shaykh al-Mufid represent two lines of thought in the Baghdad theological school. The cultural and scientific context of that era coincided with the influential and remarkable presence of the Muʿtazilite school of thought; an era in which the Imamiyyah had recently gone through the silent period of theology and faced a theological movement that dominated the theological literature and its methodology in its entirety. It was in this context that Sayyid Murtadhā and his students theorized about the nature of God’s Will. Moving on from what their Imamiyyah predecessors in the Kufa school held, to some extent they approximated the Muʿtazilite conception of God’s Will. For the Kufa school, God’s Will was temporally originated(hādith), which was neither in His essence nor detached from It; and in al-Mufid’s view, It was the object itself (nafs al-fiʿl) or, in other words, the external created object. During Sayyid Murtadhā’s time and after him, however, despite remaining temporally originated and not being reduced to knowledge(ʿilm) and motivation(da’i), ontologically speaking, God's Will remained similar to the Basrian Muʿtazilite common conception as "temporally originated not in a place"(hādith lā fi mahall). Sayyid Murtadhā’s line of thought in Baghdad strengthens and encompasses this idea.