The Name Its Own Opponents Chose for Them

The school that argued hardest for human free will in early Islam is remembered today by a name its opponents gave it, and the name says the opposite of what the school believed. Qadar means decree or determination, the very thing these theologians denied applied absolutely to human acts, yet the label Qadariyya stuck to defenders of free will rather than to the determinists who might seem to own the word by right. Watt traces the reversal to how the debate was actually fought, each side accusing the other of holding qadar in the wrong sense, predestinarians charging that denying divine determination amounted to denying qadar altogether, and the accusation outlived the argument that produced it, fixing itself as a name imposed from outside rather than chosen from within. The Mutazila, direct heirs of the position, resented the label enough to prefer calling themselves the people of justice instead, arguing precisely that a God who determines an act and then punishes it commits injustice, so justice rather than destiny was the word they wanted attached to their theology. Kasb, acquisition, was the settlement a later generation reached between the two accusations, letting God remain the sole creator of the act while giving the human agent enough of a stake in it to be justly judged, a formula built to satisfy both sides and satisfying neither side fully.