The Quran Is Uncreated and Eternal

Sunni orthodoxy holds that the Quran, as the speech of God, is an eternal attribute of God rather than something brought into existence at a point in time. On this account God has always spoken, in the same sense that God has always known or always willed, so his speech shares in his eternity rather than standing among the created things that came into being after not existing. The opposing position, associated with Mutazili theology, argued that treating divine speech as an eternal, uncreated reality alongside God risked compromising the strict oneness of God by implying a second eternal thing existing beside him; on that reasoning, the Quran, as verbal expression, had to be a created thing like any other act of divine speech directed at a particular time and audience. The uncreated position ultimately prevailed as the settled doctrine of Sunni Islam, but only after it was tested directly against the power of the state rather than simply argued out among scholars. The position was later written into the classic Sunni creeds, including the statement of faith attributed to the jurist Abu Jafar al-Tahawi, which states plainly that the Quran is the speech of God, uncreated, and treats affirming this as a mark of orthodox belief rather than a matter left open to private judgment.

In 833 the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun established the mihna, a formal inquisition requiring religious scholars to publicly affirm that the Quran was created, in order to impose the Mutazili position as state orthodoxy. Scholars examined under the mihna who refused to affirm the doctrine faced imprisonment and could face further punishment for continued refusal. Ahmad ibn Hanbal, already a respected traditionist scholar, became the most prominent figure to resist, enduring flogging and imprisonment between 833 and 835 rather than assent to the createdness of the Quran under interrogation. His endurance made him, in the traditionist memory of the episode, the figure most closely identified with the uncreated position's eventual triumph. The inquisition continued under al-Mamun's immediate successors before being abandoned by the caliph al-Mutawakkil in the 840s, after which the uncreated Quran became settled Sunni doctrine and Ibn Hanbal's refusal was remembered as the decisive act of resistance that made the mihna's failure, and not its success, the lasting outcome. Al-Mamun died within months of establishing the inquisition, but his successor al-Mutasim continued it, and al-Mutasim's own son al-Wathiq maintained it through his reign; only al-Mutawakkil, who came to the throne in 847, reversed the policy the following year, closing an episode that had run for roughly fifteen years.