Adl as a Formal Article of Faith

Divine justice, adl, stands as one of the five formal principles of Mutazili theology and remains a live article of faith in Zaydi, Twelver and Ismaili thought after the Mutazilah itself declined as an organised school. The doctrine holds that God is just by a standard human reason is capable of recognising on its own, prior to and independent of revelation. From that premise two further claims follow directly. God cannot command what is impossible to perform, and God cannot justly punish a person for an act God himself caused that person to commit. Taken together, these commitments require that human beings genuinely originate their own acts rather than merely serving as the occasion for acts God alone brings about, since a God who single handedly authored an act and then punished the human agent for it would be violating the very standard of justice the doctrine ascribes to him. The position therefore ties a theory of divine justice directly to a theory of human free will, treating the two as inseparable rather than as separate questions that happen to be discussed together. The five principles are named in Mutazili sources as tawhid, the unity of God, adl, divine justice, the promise and the threat of reward and punishment, the intermediate position for a grave sinner, and commanding good and forbidding evil, and adl is regularly treated as the principle that gives the school its own preferred name, the People of Justice.