Kasb is the Ashari attempt to hold two things together: that God is the sole creator of everything including human acts, and that human beings are genuinely answerable for what they do. God creates the act; the human being acquires it, and the acquisition is what responsibility attaches to. Its critics on both sides have called it a form of words, the Mutazila reading it as determinism and the traditionists as an evasion, and the debate over what acquisition actually adds is unresolved.
Facts
Disputed
Point in DisputeWhat acquisition actually adds. Its critics on both sides have called it a form of words, the Mutazila reading it as determinism and the traditionists as an evasion, and the question is unresolved. 1 Kasb is the Ashari school's attempt to hold together two claims: that God alone creates every act including human acts, and that human beings are genuinely answerable for what they do. On this account, God creates the act and the human being acquires it, and responsibility is said to attach to the acquisition rather than to authorship of the act itself. W. Montgomery Watt's translated selection of classical creeds, a mid-twentieth-century rendering later scholarship has refined, records that the formula satisfied neither side of the wider debate it was meant to settle: Mutazila theologians read it as determinism wearing different words, since acquisition without authorship does not obviously differ from having no real choice at all, while traditionist critics called it an evasion that avoids stating plainly whether the human being's will is free or determined. Ashari theology became doctrinally dominant across most of the Sunni world despite this criticism, which is why kasb remains the operative formula in mainstream Sunni theology even though what acquisition actually adds beyond bare determinism has never been agreed. Origins
Held ByAshari theology, which became doctrinally dominant across most of the Sunni world. 1 Belief
SubjectThe nature of the divine 1 Status
Status Within the TraditionStandard teaching, not formally defined 1Tradition: Sunni Learn More
A Third Answer Between Two Extremes
Kasb, usually rendered acquisition, is Abu al Hasan al Ashari's answer to a problem that had split Islamic theology before he wrote: if God is the sole and true creator of everything that exists, does that include human acts, and if it does, how can a person be justly rewarded or punished for what God alone brought into being. The Mutazila school, per Encyclopaedia Britannica's summary of their position, answered that human beings create their own acts through a power God gives them, protecting moral responsibility at the cost of limiting God's creative power. A rival current, the Jabriyya, went the other way, holding that humans have no real power over their acts at all, protecting God's omnipotence at the cost of making reward and punishment appear arbitrary. Ashari's kasb tried to hold both commitments at once. God alone creates the act itself, but a human being's own choice acquires it, kasb, in a way that makes the act genuinely theirs for the purposes of judgment, without that choice having created anything from nothing. The formula gave the school that carried his name a way to affirm divine omnipotence and human accountability in the same sentence rather than trading one for the other.
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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
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