This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Ash'ari theology did not remain one ninth century theologian's personal resolution of a dispute between rationalism and literalism. In the centuries after Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari's death in 936, it became the dominant kalam, theological, school across most of the historical Sunni world, a documented spread rather than a position that stayed confined to the city where he taught.
Two of the four Sunni legal traditions, the Shafi'i and Maliki schools, adopted Ash'ari theology as their doctrinal framework, pairing his middle course between Mu'tazilite rationalism and strict literalism with their own legal methods. Later theologians, including al-Baqillani and al-Juwayni, codified and extended his positions further, building an institutional and scholarly tradition on top of the bila kayfa doctrine rather than leaving it as a single thinker's own formulation.
That a theological position formed by one scholar's break with his own rationalist training went on to become the doctrinal framework adopted by two of Sunni Islam's four legal schools and elaborated by generations of later theologians marks Ash'ari theology's spread as a documented case of a single scholar's resolution outgrowing its own originator by a wide historical margin.