Meaningfulness of Divine Attributes in the Viewpoint of Mu‘tazila

Meaning is the truth realized in one's mind and conveyed to them after perceiving the levels or the appearance of reality. The question of the meaningfulness of theological propositions and especially those related to divine attributes is one of the most important topics that forms the foundation of every religious system and, due to God's transcendence and the negation of His likeness to creation, it has been the matter of conflict between philosophers of religion and theologians. In this article, the opinion of Mu‘tazila, as one of the most rationalist movements in Islamic theology, has been explored with a descriptive-analytical method. According to them, with the criterion of correspondence of propositions with reality, knowledge of God's intent is achieved after knowledge of God's Attributes. The inspiration of guiding messages of revelation to the prophets is for the ordinary people, and therefore it is possible for them to understand God's intention and divine attributes. Mu‘tazila explained the semantics of God's Essential Attributes with different theories such as aḥwāl (states), representation of His Essence by the Divine Attributes and the negative meaning theory, none of which gives us positive knowledge. Also, they resolved the conflicts of religious texts, including narrated attributes (khabariyya) or attributes of similarity which implies the corporeality of God and His resemblance to mankind, by using esoteric interpretation, metaphor, paying attention to lexical issues and referring to rare recitations, which in some cases led to neglecting the apparent meaning of the Qur'an.