Al-Ashari's Break and a Settlement After the Mihna

The Ashari position on divine attributes traces to Abu al-Hasan al-Ashari, who trained within Mutazili theology before breaking from it and developing a rival system that retained some of Mutazili logical rigour while rejecting its central conclusions about the divine attributes and the createdness of the Quran. The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam situates this break within the aftermath of the mihna, the inquisition imposed under Abbasid patronage of Mutazili doctrine in the ninth century, a period whose eventual collapse left Sunni theology searching for a settlement capable of affirming scripture's plain sense against Mutazili rationalism without abandoning reasoned argument altogether. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition records that Ashari theology, developed in the generations following that search, went on to become the dominant theological school across most of the Sunni world, its formula on the divine attributes carried into standard creeds and taught in Sunni institutions long after the specific ninth century controversy that produced it had receded from active memory, so that a position born from one historical crisis became the ordinary theological common sense of later centuries.