The Quran is created

Ibadi Muslims affirm that the Quran is created in time rather than eternally co-existent with God. The question convulsed early Islam: the rationalist Mutazila held the Quran created, while the emerging Sunni consensus, associated with Ahmad ibn Hanbal, affirmed it uncreated and eternal, and made that affirmation a test of orthodoxy. Ibadism, the tradition descended from the early Kharijite movement and surviving chiefly in Oman, retained the position that the speech of God as a written, recited scripture is a created thing, holding that only God is eternal.

The dispute reached its sharpest point in the Mihna, an inquisition imposed by the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun beginning in 833 CE, which required scholars and judges to publicly affirm that the Quran was created; Ahmad ibn Hanbal refused under imprisonment and flogging and became a symbol of resistance, and the policy was abandoned by Caliph al-Mutawakkil around 848 to 851, after which the doctrine of an eternal, uncreated Quran hardened into the Sunni mainstream position and the Mutazila went into decline as an organised school. Ibadism's own retention of the createdness position developed independently of the Mutazila, from within its Kharijite theological inheritance, but it is frequently discussed alongside the Mutazili view because both stood, on this specific question, against the position that came to dominate Sunni orthodoxy.

For Ibadis the doctrine guards divine unity (tawhid) by refusing to place anything alongside God in eternity, and it connects to their denial that the blessed will see God with physical eyes in the hereafter, another point on which they part from the Sunni majority. The affirmation marks Ibadism as a distinct third branch of Islam alongside Sunni and Shia, preserving in its theology positions that the wider community debated and largely set aside in the classical period. The denial of a literal beatific vision follows the same logic as the createdness doctrine: Ibadi theologians hold that a literal sight of God with the physical eye would require God to occupy space and face a direction relative to the viewer, which they judge incompatible with divine transcendence, and they read the Quranic verse most often cited for the vision, "faces that day will be radiant, looking at their Lord" (75:22 to 23), as figurative for awaiting God's favour rather than literal sight.

Sunni theology, particularly in its Ashari and Hanbali forms, affirms the vision as real and future, resting on this and other texts alongside hadith reports, and treats denying it as a serious theological error, a disagreement that runs parallel to, and reinforces, the older dispute over whether the Quran itself is created or eternal.