The Competing Position: Justice as Whatever God Does

The Mutazili account of adl was never uncontested, and the opposing position became, in time, the dominant one in Sunni theology. Traditionist and later Ashari thinkers argued that justice has no standard external to God by which his acts could be measured in the first place. On this view, an act is just simply because God performs or commands it, not because it conforms to some independent rational criterion; to say otherwise, the objection ran, is to place a rule above God rather than treating him as the source of all rules. This reversal has direct consequences for human agency. If justice is defined by divine will rather than measured against it, there is no logical requirement that a person genuinely originate their own acts before God can justly judge them, which left more room within Sunni theology for doctrines of divine determination of human action than Mutazili, Zaydi, Twelver and Ismaili thought could accept. The dispute over adl is, in this sense, the theological root of a wider and older argument within Islam over how much human freedom divine justice actually requires. Ashari theologians gave their own account of human responsibility a name, kasb, acquisition: God alone originates every act, but a person acquires it through a created power God places in them at the moment of acting, a formula intended to preserve both divine sovereignty and a workable sense of moral accountability.