From a Contested Formula to the Sunni Mainstream

Kasb never fully silenced the objection that it distinguishes without really explaining, since critics on both sides asked what exactly a human being was doing, if not creating, when they acquired an act God alone had brought into being. The doctrine's staying power came less from settling that objection outright than from the institutional path the Ashari school traveled after Ashari's own death. Frank Griffel's study of al Ghazali traces how Ghazali, writing in the late eleventh century as one of the most influential scholars in Sunni Islam, absorbed Ashari theology, kasb included, into his own synthesis of law, mysticism and philosophy, and in doing so helped move Ashari kalam from one contested school among several toward the default theology of Sunni orthodoxy. Mutazili rationalism, which had rejected kasb's premise that God creates human acts at all, receded from mainstream Sunni institutions over the same centuries, surviving afterward mainly as a target for refutation rather than a live rival. By the time later Ottoman and Mamluk era scholarship treated Ashari and the closely related Maturidi school as the two acceptable Sunni theologies, kasb had stopped being one contested answer among many and become the standard one, whatever its philosophical seams still showed on close inspection.