2.1 A metaethics of the divine names

The foundations of the Prophet’s ethics are themselves rooted in what Toshihiko Izutsu has described as divine ethics. In his Ethico-Religious Concepts of the Quran, Izutsu singled out three primary ethical relationships in the revelation of Islam (2002). The first of these involve God’s interactions with the human being, mediated through His names. God is ‘the Merciful’, ‘the Just’, ‘the Benevolent’, and ‘the Forgiving’, to use but a few examples, which means that He acts towards the human being in mercy, justice, benevolence, and forgiveness. This is simply another way of saying that in each moment the human being encounters God through a divine name (or cluster of them). Now, since ‘to God belong the most beautiful names’ (Q 7:180), it follows that the human being must also comport himself beautifully, which is to say, ethically – beauty and ethics being closely intertwined.

This brings us to the second relationship, one that pertains to the human being’s interactions with God. To quote Izutsu, ‘the very fact that, according to the Qur’anic conception, God is of an ethical nature and acts upon man in an ethical way, carries the grave implication that man, on his part, is expected to respond in an ethical way’ (2002: 17). The human being has, in this light, a set of obligations to his Creator, and these are modeled, at least partially, on God’s own activity towards him. To give a simple example, God is the Oft-Re/turner (al-Tawwāb), but what does this imply? It means that just as God reveals Himself to the human being in tawba (re/turning), he too must for his part approach Him in tawba, with the turning of the former being one of guidance and forgiveness, and of the latter, in repentance (Khalil 2018). Similarly, God is Grateful (Shākir), which is to say that He receives in full-knowledge and gratitude, in shukr, all that the human being offers Him by way of piety, virtue, devotion, and good deeds. In turn, the human being must never become unthankful for the blessings God confers on her, both inward and outward, both manifest and hidden. Or to use yet another example, God is Patient (Ṣabūr) with the human being in the face of his insolence and sinfulness, and so he too must, in return, exercise patience with God for the trials and hardships through which He tests him. Naturally, not all divine Names are to be internalized or embodied, ethically speaking, by the creaturely servant (‘abd), because of the line that separates the two orders of reality, the one divine, the other human. The former is by nature independent and self-subsisting while the latter is, in its essence, impoverished and contingent. To assume qualities of power, magnificence and lordship before God is to set oneself up as a rival, as a co-partner. It is to prepare the stage for one’s inevitable ruin. Moreover, the precise manner the Names are to be manifest – when it is ethical to do so, and this, it must be stressed, is not always the case – naturally differs between the human being and God. Nevertheless, the metaethical template of the divine Names provides a rudimentary blueprint for one’s comportment with her Maker.

As for the third relationship, it involves interpersonal interactions. And these exchanges are also to be modelled on the pattern of divine ethics, for just as God is generous, clement, just, and forgiving, humans should likewise internalize and embody these qualities with one another, and beyond that, in their inter-sentient relationships with His creatures, forming in effect, an ecological ethics. And in the same manner that certain qualities are not to be exercised towards God, there are Names that should not be exercised towards others, such as tawwāb (repentance being directed towards God alone). This third set of relationships, also modelled on the divine Names, came to define the social ethics of the faith, and was developed, as far as the rules regulating interpersonal relations were concerned, most fully by the jurists (fuqahā; Izutsu 2002: 18). However, the precise knowledge of how to embody these Names, both with God and others, was drawn from the teachings and example of the Prophet, and in this respect, he acted as a necessary intermediary between divine and human ethics, without which the former would be too vague and abstract to serve as a concrete model for human behavior. This is why he was instructed in the Quran to inform his followers, ‘If you love God, then follow me’ (Q 3:31), with the emulation and love of God being intimately bound to that of the Prophet.

While the dialectical theologians, in their desire to preserve and safeguard divine transcendence, deemphasized the notion of divine ethics, focusing their attention, like that of the jurists, on the pattern of the Prophet alone, they could not entirely escape the notion since it animates Muslim revelation. It would be left to the mystics of Islam to draw out the full implications of such an idea in their theological anthropology, particularly through their doctrines of the Muhammadan Reality (ḥaqīqa muḥammadiyya) and the Perfect Human Being (al-insān al-kāmil) – doctrines that would serve to bridge the gap between the divine and human orders. (More on this below.)

2.2 The historical context

When we turn to the ethics of the Quran from a historical vantage point, what we encounter in Scripture is a recasting and revaluation of values. In other words, the moral and ethical substrate of the Quran is drawn from the pre-Islamic Arabian context of late Antiquity. From this substrate, certain qualities were brought to the center, others were allowed to remain more or else where they stood, and yet others were left behind. There were, in short, continuities and discontinuities with the past that formed the recreation and remapping of the ethical landscape of the land, wherever it was that the new faith was able to plant itself under the religious and later politico-religious leadership of the Prophet.

The tribal nature of pre-Islamic society played a significant role in determining the values of the culture out of which the faith emerged. At its heart lay ‘aṣabiyya, a kinship-based sense of solidarity that helped demarcate the lines between in-groups and out-groups, and which stood higher than any possible feelings of moral obligation, or to be more precise, which itself conditioned the very nature of moral obligation. One’s primary loyalty (wafā‘) was to the clan, then to the tribe of which the clan was part, and then to other tribes with whom alliances may have been formed. The sentiment that summarized the ethos of such a socio-political context was, ‘help your brother, whether he be the oppressor or the oppressed’ (unṣur akhāka ẓāliman aw maẓlūman; Pakatchi). The Prophet helped re-forge these bonds so that religious ties centered around tawḥīd and an acknowledgement of his nubuwwa replaced those of the tribe, with the caveat that such an allegiance could never overturn one’s commitment to justice. He did this by reiterating the pre-Islamic sentiment but with the qualification that to help the oppressor now required of one to ‘prevent him from oppressing others’ (ta’khudhu fawqa yadayhi; Bukhārī, no. 2444). The help lay in restraining him not only from violating the rights of innocents, but also in holding him back from exercising self-harm, since to wrong the other was in the end to wrong oneself. Thus, both the subject and object of the intended injury were to be protected (the latter materially, the former ethically). The theme would appear in Ghazālī’s (d. 1111) meditations on spiritual fraternity in The Revival of the Religious Sciences, in a discussion on the duties of loyalty (wafā‘), where he is explicit: loyalty to a brother in faith cannot carry over into helping him in sin, since the tie that binds the two together is itself rooted in a higher principle, the betrayal of which would tear apart the fabric of that relationship. One may, however, remain in such a friendship if the intention is to lead him back to piety (1998: 300–303 [vol. 2]).

The cultural mindset and norms of behavior of the pre-Islamic Arabs came to be identified with the advent of Islam with that of jāhiliyya or ‘ignorance’, and the period described as the ‘Age of Ignorance’. In his lexicon of Quranic Arabic, Iṣfahānī (d. 1108) delineated three primary meanings of the j-h-l root from which the word stems: (i) an absence of knowledge, (ii) a belief about something contrary to fact, and (iii) to act in a manner that violates what knowledge demands, regardless of whether one’s convictions about the matter are sound (2006: ‘j-h-l’). When the Quran states in Q 6:111 that the pagan Arabs would continue to deny the revelatory nature of the Prophet’s message, even if angels were to appear to them from the unseen, or they were to be addressed by the dead, due to the stubbornness of their jahl (ignorance), it is this third meaning the verse appears to draw attention to.

Yet beyond the rather straightforward connotations of ignorance, it was understood that jāhiliyya – a word that appears in the Quran on four occasions (Q 3:154, 4:50, 33:33, 48:29) – also implied impulsive rashness, quickness to temper, vengefulness, and an absence of self-restraint. The Quran speaks, for example, of ḥamiyyat al-jāhiliyya (Q 48:26), which is to say, the ‘arrogance’, ‘haughtiness’, and ‘zealotry’ of the pre-Islamic Arabs. It was this very quality that riled them to battle at the slightest provocation, prolonged their blood feuds, extended their tribal vendettas, and fueled their antagonism to the Prophet. The opposite of such a condition was not merely ‘ilm (knowledge), but ḥilm, which may be defined as ‘forbearance’, ‘forgiveness’, ‘gentleness’, ‘patience’, and ‘self-control’.

In Islamic literature, the historians often draw attention to this latter quality of the Prophet, particularly on those occasions when he had the right and power to punish yet pardoned in a spirit of clemency, exemplified most famously in the Conquest of Mecca when he forgave his most implacable enemies from the pagan establishment, those who had breached all bounds of decency (even by their own standards) in their treatment of the nascent religious community, as witnessed for example in the aftermath of the battle of Uhud, in the mutilation of the dead by the Quraysh. Nor was it lost to Muslims that the Prophet’s wet-nurse was a woman by the name of Ḥalīma (from the same ḥ-l-m root), implying, symbolically, that he was nourished by the milk of this very trait from childhood in a culture that embodied its antithesis. Nor for that matter was it insignificant that al-Ḥalīm stands as a name of God in the Quran, one most often coupled with the divine name al-Ghafūr, ‘the Forgiving’ (Q 2:225, 2:235, 3:155, 5:101, 17:44, 35:41), only to be followed by al-‘Alīm, ‘the Knowing’ (Q 4:12, 22:59, 33:51). If pre-Islamic jāhiliyya was a marked by ignorance and unrestrained vengeance, then Islam sought to remold such a society by moving ḥilm from the periphery of its value system to its center. Ḥilm was not absent, but it did not play a key role in such a culture. We cannot also ignore that Abraham, whose message the revival of which was integral to the Prophet’s own mission, as he saw it, is also described in the Quran by the same attribute (Q 9:114, 11:75).

2.3 Some more key themes

Any attempt to extrapolate the most salient ethical concepts of the Quran is bound to be met with the accusation of being subjective. Since each reader will discern in the text what stands out or speaks to them, it is only natural that there will be some measure of variation regarding what precisely those key themes are. With that said by way of a preliminary qualification, let us proceed, keeping in mind the limitations imposed by constraints of space, and developing what has already been outlined above.

If the summum bonum of the Quran is īmān or ‘faith’, the key to salvation, then its summum malum, that which leads to damnation, is kufr (Izutsu 2002; March 2013). While the latter is usually translated as ‘disbelief’, etymologically it means to conceal or cover over, and in a pre-Islamic context meant ‘ingratitude’, since the ingrate, the kāfir, was someone who failed to acknowledge gifts by concealing acts of benefaction, either to himself or to the gift giver – or both. He failed, in short, to demonstrate shukr. It is significant that the Quran selected the shukr-kufr dichotomy on which to peg the key concepts of faith and disbelief, around which the entire edifice of its ethics would be built. The implication was that īmān was at heart an act of gratitude to God for guidance, while kufr was inversely a state of hiding and thereby denying God’s supreme benefaction, a stubbornness for which one had no real excuse. At the time of the Prophet, some of this was due, from the Quran’s own point of view, to the haughtiness and rebellious pride of the kāfir, a quality fostered by jāhiliyya. Some of it was also the consequence of a natural predilection humans have for being unmindful of gifts, for failing to recognize them either due to heedlessness, or because of the debts of gratitude that necessarily follow. In a sense, ingratitude seems to be one of the cardinal vices in the anthropology of the Quran, one that it repeatedly draws attention to. ‘Most people are not grateful’, we read on a few occasions (Q 2:243, 12:38, 40:61; cf. 10:60; 27:73); ‘Little gratitude do you show’ (Q 7:10, 32:9); and ‘Few of My bondsmen are truly grateful’ (Q 34:13). And near the end, we encounter the verse, ‘Verily the human being is terribly ungrateful to his Lord’ (Q 100:6). The cultivation of īmān, should, it is implied, foster a tendency to become more aware of blessings, since to become mindful of God and his revelations is to become mindful of His benefactions – the two being intertwined. Indeed, just as kufr means to hide and conceal, shukr, the other antonym of kufr, means to expose and reveal. The mu’min, the person of īmān, does not hide or deny gifts of guidance, in the same manner that the shākir, the person of shukr, does not hide or deny gifts of benefaction (cf. Khalil 2015; Lumbard 2021).

Another prominent theme in Muslim revelation is of the need to establish communal and social justice (‘adl, qisṭ). The Quran states, for example, that messengers and scriptures were sent to bring about justice (Q 57:25); the Prophet is commanded to judge with fairness (Q 5:42); the believers are instructed likewise to be fair in their dealings with others (Q 4:58; Q 4:135); the upholders of justice are mentioned alongside the prophets (Q 3:21); and we are told that ‘Surely God loves the justice’ (Q 5:42; cf. Pakatchi 2018). The motif is so recurring that in his Major Themes of the Quran, Fazlur Rahman argued the revelation targeted what were in fact two intertwined aspects of Meccan society, its polytheism and its gross economic disparities, both of which reflected deep internal fissures within its social fabric. The unequal distribution of wealth coupled with the nature of tribal culture and the values promoted by its polytheistic cults led to the abuse of slaves, orphans, women, the poor, the powerless, and the tribeless. While Mecca was commercially prosperous, it had, in Rahman’s words, ‘a subterranean world of exploitation’ (2009: 38). The attempt of the Prophet to remedy such a situation was inseparable from what he believed to be his larger mission, namely, to create a fair and equitable society by eradicating its maltreatment of the weak and the oppressed.

This concern can be discerned when we consider how frequently the Quran condemns ẓulm or ‘injustice’, from a root (ẓ-l-m) whose derivatives occurs in Scripture on more than three hundred occasions. God, we are told, does not commit ẓulm, even the weight of a mustard seed (Q 4:40), and humans should naturally follow suit. Unfortunately, however, they are notoriously guilty of ẓulm, and the culture of jāhiliyya was seething with it. The need to pursue justice – individually and collectively, internally within the soul and outwardly within the social context – from the Quran’s point of view, remains part in parcel of the teleological function of the khilāfa or viceregency of the human being, as God’s representative on earth, however much he may fail. We are told that when God created Adam, the angels recognized the bloodshed and violence he would cause (Q 2:30). Yes, despite their protests, God sent him to the earth, commissioning him to rule with justice in accordance with His guidance. There is an element of mystery here, however, in why God still entrusted him with authority and power, fully aware of his propensity for wrongdoing and corruption, alluded to by the end of verse when He assures the angels, ‘I know what you know not’ (Q 2:30). Adam had a redeeming quality the precise nature of which the Quran remains ambiguous, and which would later become the subject of extensive exegetical debate.

Another key ethical concept in Scripture is taqwā. In the words of Rahman, it is ‘perhaps the most important single term in the Qur’ān’ (2009: 28). If life in jāhiliyya was characterized by the unrestrained pursuit of passions, a failure to discern right from wrong, the consequence of an undeveloped moral imagination, taqwā implied both discernment and self-control. Stemming from an Arabic root (w-q-y) which means to ‘guard’, ‘protect’, ‘shield’, or ‘fear’, it is not an easy word to translate. It may mean ‘God-consciousness’, ‘God-wariness’, and ‘God-fearingness’, just as it can ‘piety’, ‘virtue’, ‘holiness’, and ‘righteousness’. It may also be defined, following Reinhart, as a ‘prudential concern for one’s eternal welfare’ (2004). The Quran praises the muttaqūn (the people of taqwā) in no less than forty-nine instances. If ethical activity for the pagan Arabs was inspired by the desire for tribal honor and social standing, in Islam it was to be motivated at least in part by taqwā, by a desire to protect the soul from the detrimental consequences of a morally reckless life, the full measure of which would only be encountered after death, on Final Judgement, when ‘every soul will know what it has put forth and left behind’ (Q 82:5). Taqwā in this respect implied reigning in passions, controlling the lowest impulses of the soul, and cultivating moral discernment.

Yet the fear of God that accompanies taqwā, we are taught, should never allow one to become hopeless in the face of one’s ethical and religious failures. Human beings are not angels, and the text is explicit, ‘Do not ascribe purity to yourselves’ (Q 53:32). It is true the Quran does not propound a doctrine of original sin. It also is true that there is an essential goodness associated with human fiṭra, the soul’s innate, primordial disposition (cf. Chittick and Murata 1994; Sell 1999). However, the human being is by nature prone to forgetfulness (ghafla), and in continuous need of remembrance (dhikr). Moreover, ‘the human being was created weak’ (Q 4:28). It is only inevitable therefore that despite his best efforts, he will remain unable to realize the ideal of moral perfection set before him by faith. Yet his failures, no matter how wide or severe, should never render him despondent or cause him to lose sight of God’s unfathomable mercy and compassion, His raḥma. As the Quran states, ‘O ye who have been prodigal against your own souls, despair not of God’s mercy, for God forgives all sins’ (Q 39:53).

If taqwā remains inseparable from a fear of God’s justice, hope in His forgiveness is bound to His raḥma – a quality that far exceeds His wrath (ghaḍab). What is required is of one to turn to God in the wake of every wrong, whether it be of commission or omission, in genuine repentance, the doors of which remain open until death. If, as Christian doctrine teaches, the blood of Christ washes away one’s sins, in Islam such a ‘cleaning of slate’ is realized by the tears of penitence accompanied by a conscious effort to rectify past mistakes through setting matters aright (iṣlāḥ). The Islamic mechanism of atonement centers around an act – tawba – the object of which is forgiveness mediated through what is in effect His greatest attribute (Khalil 2023). When the Quran states, ‘Your Lord has inscribed upon Himself mercy (kataba ‘alā nafsihi al-raḥma)’ (Q 6:54), a verse that may also be rendered, ‘Your Lord has constrained Himself by mercy’, it draws attention to the unique rank of this quality, since there is no other attribute through which He imposes such limits on His own creative will and power. To despair of divine mercy on account of one’s sins is, in the final scheme, to despair of God Himself (cf. Q 12:87).

The defining place of this attribute in the divine ethics of the Quran is underscored by the well-known fact that each one of its chapters (except one) opens with the basmala – ‘In the name of God, the Raḥmān, the Raḥīm’ – a phrase that draws attention to the two divine names that encapsulate the reality of raḥma. Translators differ in how best to render the pair. Some opt for ‘The Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful’, others for ‘The Merciful, and Benevolent’, and yet others for ‘The Most Kind, the Most Caring’, with each choice having its own unique advantages. We can move closer to grasping the underlying meaning of this quality, however, by an etymological consideration: raḥma derives from a root (r-ḥ-m) from which we also get the word for ‘womb’, namely raḥm. In this light, raḥma may be best described as a maternal sentiment that reflects the emotions of mother for what she carries and brings forth from within her own body. God’s raḥma in this sense is analogous to a mother’s sentiments for her child, defined by feelings of compassion, mercy, kindness, care, and benevolence. The idea of divine rahma as a creative, nurturing, feminine and maternal quality is echoed in the hadith literature, in traditions where the Prophet explicitly likened God’s compassionate care for human beings with that of mothers for their children (Muslim, no. 2753; Ibn Mājah, no. 4297; cf. Sell 1999).

This theological feature of the God of Islam has profound ethical ramifications since the Prophet is also described by this very same quality in the Quran. ‘We have not sent you except as a mercy to the worlds’, we read in Q 21:107, a verse frequently cited by Muslims in their meditations on the universal compassion he is believed to have for all people, not just those confined to his own religious community. A similar idea animates the hadith literature, as in when he said about himself that he is ‘the prophet of mercy’ (Muslim, no. 4351), and ‘a mercy that has been raised up’ (Muslim, no. 2599). To emulate the Prophet in his raḥma towards others is therefore to emulate, commensurate to the human being, the mercy of God – revealing yet again how human ethics is to be patterned on a prophetic ethics that is itself modelled on divine ethics. It is also to open the soul here below to a greater reception of divine mercy from above. As the Prophet once reprimanded a Bedouin who was reluctant to show affection to his children, out of a misguided Spartan sense of masculinity, ‘He who does not show mercy will not receive mercy’. To be devoid of mercy and compassion in one’s interactions with others is to be devoid of a virtue without which the ethical life remains incomplete.

Finally, it should be noted, despite a common misconception in the West, the Quran is anything but a book of law, at least in the conventional sense. Even by the most liberal counting, only about five hundred of its more than six thousand verses deal with ‘rules’ (Reinhart 2004: 68). Instead, Muslim revelation offers general guidelines for a godly life. One must fulfill one’s oaths (Q 2:283), take care of those in need (Q 51:19, 70:24), maintain family ties (Q 47:22), observe filial piety (Q 2:38), respect God’s creatures (Q 6:38, 7:32), spend on orphans (Q 76:8), and neither spy on nor speak ill of others in their absence (Q 49:12), to give but a few examples (cf. Daghestani 3). Nor does the Quran proscribe elaborate rules for the observance of rites and rituals, often diverting one’s attention to the importance of faith, to the spirit behind worship, to the cultivation of virtue, and to the care for others, as in the famous qibla verse (Q 2:177). In one passage, representative of the ethos of the Quran as a whole, we are reminded that it is not the flesh and blood of the sacrificial animal that reaches God, but the taqwā of the human being (Q 22:30). ‘It is notable’, writes Reinhart, ‘that the Quran exhorts the Muslim to act virtuously but seldom specifies the exact form of that virtuous conduct. At most the Quran provides lists of good or bad acts that suggest the scope of morality, but do not define it’ (2004: 60).

3.1 The science of hearts

The most influential reflections on ethics in the Islamic tradition can be found in the pages of the manuals of Sufism or taṣawwuf, although the percolation of these ideas into broader society often occurred through the oral instruction and embodied piety of scholars, preachers, spiritual masters, and most importantly, holy men and women believed to be ‘friends of God’ (awliyā’), whether in West Africa or the Balkans, in China or the Indian subcontinent. Until the advent of colonization, modernization, and Westernization – three intertwined disruptions that redefined the trajectory and unfolding of Islamic history – Sufism animated Muslim life for well over a millennium. It so deeply colored the religious culture and climate of Islam, that even to separate it as a distinct phenomenon presents its own unique challenges.

Within Muslim tradition, taṣawwuf has often been identified with the dimension of the faith which deals with iḥsān. In the famous hadith of Gabriel, the Prophet described it as a condition where ‘you worship God as if you see Him. For even if you do not see Him, He nevertheless He sees you’ (Bukhārī, no. 50; cf. Chittick and Murata 1994). The virtues that an awareness of God’s ever-present gaze – for those who do not already witness Him – give rise to include not only, as one would except, taqwā, but also sincerity. After all, the implication of the hadith is not only that God, as an omniscient being, is aware of what we do outwardly, He is also fully cognizant of our internal promptings. His gaze extends beyond our actions into the interior recesses of the soul. It follows that since God knows what is happening inside, we cannot fool Him, no matter how outwardly pious our behavior may be or how much we adorn ourselves with the paraphernalia of religion. We may succeed in deceiving others, we may even deceive ourselves, but not God, since ‘whether you conceal what is within your chests, or reveal it, God knows it’ (Q 3:29). Elsewhere, we are told, ‘God knows what lies in their hearts (qulūb)’ (Q 4:63).

Since Muslims understood that the moral worth of an action depended on the state of the heart (qalb) in which it was performed, there developed very early on in Islamic history a ‘science of hearts’ (‘ilm al-qulūb), the aim of which was to purify and maintain the soundness of this primary organ of spiritual perception. Although the foundations of such a science were present in the Quran and sunnah contrary to certain early Orientalist conceptions that continue to persist in the Western study of Islam (cf. Khalil and Sheikh 2019) – its systematic development and formulation did not take place until after the death of the Prophet. In Muslim tradition, Ḥasan al-Basrī (d. 728) was often credited with outlining its principles, although the first to write about it extensively appears to have been the moral psychologist Muḥāsibī (d. 857), who drew attention to the critical distinction between ‘actions of the limbs’ and ‘actions of the heart’. If the rules that regulated the former lay within the provenance of Islamic Law, those of the latter lay within what came to be later defined as taṣawwuf. This is why Makkī (d. 996) in his Nourishment of Hearts described the masters of this science as ahl al-qulūb, the ‘people of hearts’, or the ‘folk of the heart’, since they understood the nature, inner-workings, and constitution of the qalb better than anyone else (Khalil 2012). This knowledge was itself the fruit of having purified and mastered the heart through a regimen of intense spiritual practice that formed ‘the greater jihād’ described in the well-known prophetic tradition (cf. Nasr 1982).

3.2 The states and stations

In the process of developing this science, a discipline that comprised the convergence of ethics, mysticism and psychology, its masters outlined the virtues of the heart, qualities of the soul the internalization of which were necessary for the transformation and refinement of character (tabdīl al-akhlāq, tahdhīb al-akhlāq). These included (to name but a few) contentment, hope, gratitude, patience, repentance, love, and trust in God. And the meditations on them comprised a genre of Sufi literature which dealt with what are known as the ‘states’ and ‘stations’, stages of the soul in its journey to Paradise, and beyond that, to God. Many of the virtues were themselves patterned on the divine attributes, bringing us back to the theme of divine ethics. The hadith which underscored this idea most explicitly was the exhortation of the Prophet to ‘assume the attributes of God’, or ‘adorn yourself with God’s character traits’, i.e. His akhlāq (cf. Ghazālī 2008).

For many Sufis of a metaphysical persuasion the ideal was in fact to realize the station of the ‘complete human being’ or al-insān al-kāmil, modeled on the metahistorical Muhammadan Reality (ḥaqīqa muḥammadiyya). As the first entity created by God, it later entered time (or so the belief went), travelling through each of the prophets and messengers of history, beginning with Adam and appearing in its fullness and finality in the figure of the Prophet Muhammad (cf. Hourani 1985). To realize this reality through an emulation of the sunnah was to realize kamāliyya, not ‘perfection’, as is sometimes understood, but ‘completeness’, since perfection in the purely moral sense remained, for the human being, outside of one’s grasp. While it was acknowledged that one could be preserved from major sins (not a major accomplishment in itself), freedom from all sins, especially lapses of the heart and moments of inattentiveness to the divine presence, remained a virtual impossibility because of the unique conditions of the human state. As the Prophet said, ‘all the children of Adam are sinners, and the best of sinners are those who turn to God in repentance’. The completeness to be sought was not the result of a total protection from sin, but one that entailed returning to God in the wake of every slip, or as Ibn ‘Arabī (d. 1240) would argue (somewhat provocatively), returning to God through a recognition of the beauty of the creative divine act in the very sin itself (Khalil 2006). However one conceived the precise nature of kamāliyya, the path to such a station lay in polishing and purifying the heart through the remembrance of God (dhikr), the refinement of character, ethical transformation, and the internalization of the virtues.

3.3 Sincerity and self-deception

As noted, one of the most important virtues of the ethical life is sincerity or ikhlāṣ, a concept also expressed by the term ṣidq, usually translated ‘truthfulness’. If the person of ikhāṣ is sincere and genuine in word and deed, the person of ṣidq not only speaks the truth but also remains true, through her actions, to her inward state, so that there is a congruence between her outer and inner self, between what she does and what she intends. This condition is contrary to that of the hypocrite, whose private and public self are discordant.

A recurring motif in the Quran and hadith literature is that the moral worth of an act depends (aside from being based on sound knowledge) on the motivation behind it. The belief is so central to the ethics of Islam, Bukhārī (d. 870) opens his collection of traditions with the famous hadith, ‘Verily, actions are by intention’, which is to say, the merit of a deed is contingent on the aim that guides it. Ideally, the act should have as its goal the pleasure and acceptance of God. Naturally, there is a soteriological felicity (i.e., Paradise) for which one also aspires with such an intention, but the focus, especially in the ethical literature of Sufism, is on single-mindedly directing one’s attention towards that Being who is the ultimate origin and end of human existence, since ‘from God we come and to Him we return’ (Q 2:156).

In the Quran, this idea is captured by the expression – unusual in English – ‘for the face of God’ (Q 72:9; cf. Q 2:272, 13:22, 30:30). As Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210) explains, to say in Arabic that something was done ‘for the face of so-and-so’ means it was performed solely for that individual, with no other intention in mind. This is unlike the expression lahu, ‘for him’, which can imply, with respect to an act, that it may have been inspired by multiple, overlapping, and even conflicting motivations. Yet when one says, ‘for his face’, it precludes the possibility of any such convergence. Thus, when the Quran praises deeds performed for ‘the face of God’, at least one meaning, according to Rāzī, is that they have been carried out for His good pleasure with no co-partnering in the intention. While he notes that the expression may also refer, more literally, to a desire for the beatific vision (Q 75:22–23), the two interpretations are not mutually exclusive since the desire is still directed towards the same divine object of affection (Rāzī 1990).

Such a single-minded intention, however, is not easy to realize, because of the propensity of the soul for deception, even self-deception. If one is not introspective enough, however, he will fail to discern how numerous motivations may coalesce to inspire even seemingly pious deeds – some worldly, for transient benefits, and some otherworldly. This is why Makkī writes, ‘it may be that in a single act multiple intentions come together’ (1995: 309 [vol. 2]), a theme Ghazālī develops in the Revival, in his Book of Intention, when he differentiates between four kinds of actions with respect to intentionality:

A. There is, Ghazālī explains, an act that can have two motivating forces, one for God, the other for some worldly gain. Each of them may on their own be enough to bring about the deed, yet their combined power makes it easier for the moral agent to carry it out. The example he gives is of two men who help each other carry a heavy object which each one of them is capable of lifting on his own. Their shared strength, however, makes the task easier. While such an act is not without its own merit, it is not entirely sincere because of the polluting presence of the worldly motivation.

B. Second, there is an act in which the intention for God is weak, and the intention for the world, also weak, but together their force is enough to produce the action. Using the previous example, it is like two men who desire to carry an object that is too heavy for each of them to lift on his own but which their shared power enables them to. Ghazālī gives a more concrete illustration of how this might play out ethically. Consider an individual, he says, who will spend in charity when others are present, out of ostentation and his own faith, yet not in private, since that faith is not strong enough to inspire him to part with his wealth when alone. Had he no faith at all, however, he would not give in public either. The motivation created by the covetousness for honor and his faith in God allows him to be charitable, but only when others are there to witness his giving. Such an act is worse than A, but not entirely without merit since a religious motive is not completely absent.

C. Then there is an act in which the intention for God is strong, and where it is sufficient to bring about the deed, but it is aided or helped by a worldly intention, which makes it easier and more enjoyable to perform. The worldly motivation, however, is not strong enough on its own to move the act. An example of this would be of a man who carries out his prayers with great devotion and gives abundantly in charity, yet whose deeds become easier for him when others are there to witness him. He would still carry these actions out in their absence, even with the same degree of commitment, yet the recognition and praise of people renders their performance sweeter and more pleasurable. Such a state is better than A and B, yet still not for Ghazālī fully sincere.

D. Finally, there is that act which is moved solely by the desire for divine pleasure and nothing else. The example Ghazālī provides is of a man who is attacked by a beast of prey. His attempt to escape from the clutches of the wild animal is for one reason, and that one reason alone, to save himself from a terrible imminent death. He has nothing else in mind. For Ghazālī the intention of the man in his flight is pure and sincere (fa hādhihi-l niyya tusammā khāliṣa), since it is not colored by any other end or purpose. Most importantly, this is the kind of single-minded intention one should cultivate in all ethical behavior. This act differs from the previous three, the underlying intentions of which are tainted in differing degrees and that their moral worth diminished accordingly.

(Ghazālī 1998: 113–114 [vol. 5]; cf. 2013: 14–15)

The ideal state as outlined by Ghazālī in example D, is, needless, to say, extremely difficult to obtain. Makkī draws attention to this when, quoting an earlier authority, he writes, ‘purifying one’s intention for pious deeds is the most difficult of deeds’ (1995: 310 [vol. 2]). But how can such purity of action be brought about?

One such method is to cultivate the remembrance of God – the very heart of prayer (cf. Q 20:14) – since the fruit of such a spiritual exercise is the expansion of the invoker’s consciousness of her Maker, transposing, in effect, purely worldly concerns and preoccupations from the center of the heart to its periphery. The concerted invocation of God, argue the Sufis, will then begin to color her intentionality, making her more mindful of God, even when she moves outside of the formal practice of dhikr. As the inner state of remembrance carries over into her everyday life, God will gradually and increasingly come to occupy the center of her awareness.

Alongside dhikr, the moral agent should also engage in an introspective examination of conscience, a process known as ‘self-accounting’ or muḥāsaba (after which, incidentally, Muḥāsibī, who was known for the exercise, was named = Ar. kunya). By shining the light of the mind into the inner chambers of the heart, she may then begin to discern his real motivations. A simple illustration, offered by Ghazālī, of how this might work would be if one’s doctor instructed her to fast for medical reasons on a day which happens to fall on ‘Arafa, a time when Muslims are encouraged to fast. Is one’s intention here in abstaining from food and drink for God or for health? To answer this, one simply should ask herself whether she would have felt just as motivated to fast had the doctor not given her any such instructions.

By turning the mind inward to observe the ‘movements of the heart’, one can, the Sufi masters assert, begin to gradually recognize the underlying causes behind one’s outward behavior. The moral agent must simply cultivate the practice of interiorizing the mind, since by doing so she will become more self-aware and self-conscious. It is not an easy process, particularly because of the mind’s tendency towards dispersion and exteriorization, but it forms an essential part of ethical refinement and transformation. After all, it is not enough to act in a certain way, one must also have the right intentions. This is why for the Sufis, taṣawwuf conceived of as a science of the heart is not simply an appendage or sectarian expression of Islam, but an indispensable element of religion, without which it stands at the risk of becoming consumed by an exteriorized moralism. In this respect, Sufism embodies an ethos that, as we saw earlier, is present in the Quran, one that often directs its readers not to just to the particularities of piety, but to the spirit behind it, and to the cultivation of an introspective and self-reflective consciousness of God.

4.1 The ontology and epistemology of ethics

One of the earliest debates in Islamic ethics, particularly in the field of kalām or dialectical theology, centered around the nature of the good, or to be more precise, around two interrelated questions about this nature. The first of these was, is knowledge of the good obtainable through the intellect (‘aql), or is revelation (waḥy) necessary? And the second was, is the good independent of God, or does He determine it? This latter question had been posed in a slightly different form much earlier by Plato in one of his dialogues, where he had his teacher Socrates ask his interlocutor, Euthyphro, ‘is the pious (τὸ ὅσιον) loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?’ (Euthyphro 10a). The first question revolved around the epistemology of the good (i.e., ‘how we do know it?), and the second revolved around its ontology (i.e. ‘what precisely is it?’ or, in a theological context, ‘what relation does it have to God?’).

There were two general responses formulated to these overlapping questions. The first of them was offered by the Mutazilites, a school of theology that originated according to the source material with Wāṣil b. ‘Aṭā’ (d. 748–749) and ‘Amr b. Ubayd (d. 761). The former had for some period been a student of Ḥasan al-Basrī (prominent not only in the development of Sufism but also Islamic theology) before he separated from his teacher over a point of doctrinal contention. It was in this act of separation (i‘tizāl) that the Mutazilites (= mu‘tazila) acquired their name, although other theories have also been offered (El-Omari 2016: 133–134). For our purposes, the partisans of this school argued that the human mind could discern the moral value of an act independent of God’s guidance. The good was rationally discernable to anyone who had the intellectual capacity to do so. As proponents of ethical objectivism, the good was also, for them, in its essence, independent of God (Hourani 1985). Moreover, it had a reality that was universal, unconditioned by cultural variation. It was precisely its universality, in fact, that made knowledge of it accessible to every man or woman of intelligence. A true, uncorrupted religion simply confirmed and reinforced, in their view, what could be known through sound reasoning and reflection.

The second response was formulated by the Asharites, a school that emerged largely in response to the Mutazilites, and which was eponymously traced back to Abū-l Ḥasan al-Ash‘arī (d. 935/936), a figure who had for some time been theologically affiliated with them, being a close student of Jubbā’i (d. 915), one of their leading theologians. Unlike their adversaries, the Asharites adhered to a doctrine according to which the mind was incapable of determining good and evil on its own, and which therefore stood in need of the light of prophecy and revealed law (shar‘). In addition, the good was for them subordinate to divine will, which is to say, it was determined by God. As advocates of ethical subjectivism, they rejected the idea of objective values and espoused a divine command theory. This meant that the good (khayr) was simply what God instructed us to carry out and perform, and evil (sharr), what He instructed us to leave and avoid. Moreover, had God so willed, He could have instructed us to do what He had prohibited, and conversely, prohibited us from doing what He had instructed. In either case, the good was simply His prescriptive command (al-amr al-taklīfī).

4.2 The merits of Mutazilism

Each of these two theological schools had its own unique strengths and buttressed its arguments through both rational and scriptural proofs. On the side of the Mutazilites, one of the strengths of their ethical objectivism was that many of the moral intuitions that underlie many of our conceptions of right and wrong do seem, in fact, to have a basis in objective reality. After all, who in all sincerity can deny that killing an innocent child, lying for the benefit of one’s own gain, or stealing the hard-earned wealth of another, is intrinsically wrong? The notion that these actions are, in themselves, morally neutral seems counterintuitive. So powerful in fact are our intuitions on these matters, in Western ethics Immanuel Kant used them as an argument for the existence of God. Our knowledge and awareness of the good, he felt, must lead us to a being that is good in itself – an archetype, so to speak, of the Good, one that stands above the world of phenomena.

Moreover, for the Mutazilites it was clear that the Quran often appeals to the moral sensibilities of its audience, under the assumption that there are certain general notions of good and evil independent of prophecy that every individual is cognizant of. Historically, it was this appeal which made the ethical message of Scripture attractive to many of the early converts, especially those who felt socially and economically disenfranchised by Meccan society and who experienced the brunt of its injustices. Closely related to this, nor can one ignore that a common argument for the veracity of Muhammad’s prophecy, from the Islamic perspective, relies on his akhlāq or character traits, qualities that include, for example, his honesty, generosity, and clemency. Now, if recognizing the virtuous nature of these traits – as virtues – is contingent on revelation, we are faced with a circular argument, since the values lauded by the revelation brought by the Prophet are needed for one of the proofs of his prophecy (i.e. his laudable akhlāq) to be operative.

Yet another strength for the Mutazilite position was that it appeared to better account for the historical state of people whom an uncorrupted revelatory message did not reach. Each person, for the Mutazilites, could through his rational faculty arrive at notions of good and evil for which he would then be accountable before God. No one could be morally absolved for ‘not having known better’, since every individual has a moral compass rooted in his ‘aql – a compass that functions (in its own right) as a type of prophecy, and which, in the presence of actual prophecy, is simply refined and reinforced. God’s justice for the Mutazilites therefore encompassed everyone, not just those exposed to divine revelation. Every individual’s life had moral meaning.

4.3 The advantages of Asharism

As for the Asharites, their system was also not without its own unique theological and philosophical advantages. For one thing, the underlying rationale behind their espousal of divine command theory served to preserve God’s omnipotence, since to do otherwise would be to place Him ontologically below a conception of value He did not have control over. After all, to return to Plato, if the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, it follows that it has a certain measure of power over the gods, who are incapable of rendering the pious impious. The pious, in such a scenario, stands as a principal above the gods, having ontological priority. On the other hand, if it is pious because the gods love it, then the determining power and privilege return to the gods, whose love makes it pious. When transposed on to a monotheistic framework, the latter position safeguards divine omnipotence by retaining the subordination of ethics to God.

Another one of the weaknesses of the Mutazilite view was that it made moral action grounded not in a desire for God, but in a veneration for the good. This is evident for example in the thought of the Mutazilite theologian Shashdīw Mānkdīm (d. 1034). When, for example, he outlines the conditions of repentance, he is explicit that the regret (nadam) over an evil deed must be over its evilness (‘alā al-quḅh li qubḥḥiḥi; Mankdīm 791; cf. Ash‘arī 1980: 105, Vasalou 2008: 39–40). It is not because one has disobeyed God or violated one of His commandments, since the commandments – qua commandments – are after all not a defining feature of Mutazilite ethics (Bājūrī 2002: 85). Despite the Mutazilite emphasis on divine unity, the theocentrism of Islam so prominent in the Quran becomes marginalized in their ethics. This feature is captured, for example, in the discussion above regarding the importance of intentions defined by a yearning for the countenance, good-pleasure and beatific vision of God.

The Asharites also had good reasons for their ethical subjectivism of a philosophical nature which resonate in some respects with modern critiques of ethical objectivism. On the question of the ostensibly intellectual basis of values, Ghazālī, to use one example, argued that what we take to be objectively true moral intuitions are in fact the products of cultural conditioning and our own psychological propensities, with no basis in demonstrative reasoning. There are, in other words, no rational proofs for the intrinsic moral worth of any act. Our judgements on these matters, to quote Ghazālī, are such ‘that if one were to confine oneself to pure reason, his faculties of estimation and sense, the mind (with the aid of reason and sense alone) would never arrive at any of them. Rather, the mind makes these judgements as the result of accidental causes that confirm and fix them in the soul’ (cited in Marmura 2005: 267).

Among such ‘accidental causes’, Ghazālī includes a natural tenderness of heart or sentimentalism as well as self-interest. The latter is particularly important, since it often leads us to morally evaluate as fair and good what is in fact simply conducive to our own material well-being, however we may conceive it, and as undesirable and evil what is not so conducive. Thus, a nation may extol the merits of peace when nonviolence works to its advantage (usually when it is weak) just as it may laud the necessities of war when the prospects of conquest and the acquisition of wealth become alluring (usually when it is strong). In addition, Ghazālī argues that if certain ideas about what constitutes virtuous behavior are repeated often enough, especially from childhood, they become ingrained in the mind, so that one may simply take it as a given that this is how things are to be done, that they are ‘good’, ‘proper’ and ‘pious’, and that this is what every rational person believes, or in the very least, should believe This is particularly the case for closed communities unexposed to other ways of life. Yet the diversity of values surrounding, for example, sexual mores and dietary restrictions, reveal what appear to be fundamental differences in notions of good and evil. Moreover, even the prohibitions against lying, stealing, and murder are contextual, and sometimes these acts become necessary, which means they cannot be taken as objective absolutes to define human behavior in all circumstances (Marmura 2005: 267–271). Interestingly, this last point has been used in modern philosophy as a critique of Kant’s categorical imperative.

While’s Ghazālī’s insights into the psychological (even psychoanalytic) construction of values and his somewhat pessimistic view of human nature prefigure in some interesting ways the arguments of Nietzsche (as articulated, for example, in his Genealogy of Morals) he was no moral nihilist. He simply felt that no system of ethics could have a rational basis and must instead be founded on the message of an uncorrupted prophecy through which God guides humankind to what is conducive to its ultimate felicity, both in general and specific terms. Revelation should not therefore simply play second fiddle to reason, as Mutazilite doctrines implied, but must itself serve as the very source of values. This is not to suggest that reason is not to be accorded an important role in its own right. Ghazālī and by extension the Asharites do not, it should be clear, espouse an unrefined ethical fideism. On the contrary, for them reason must function as a tool for the interpretation of scripture. After all, no hermeneutic exercise can entirely escape the use of rationality, since to articulate a perspective is to make use of basic principles of logic, such as the law of excluded middle. However, it must be kept in check through a recognition of its scope and limits. It is true that among the later Asharites, especially from the time of Rāzī, the ‘aql came to occupy a more privileged position, due in part to the disappearance of the Mutazilites from the intellectual landscape of Sunni Islam and the gradual integration into Asharism of much of their rationalizing impulse (cf. Shihadeh 2006). Many of the central ideas of the Mutazilites were also adapted into Shi‘i theology, ‘buttressed by the study of philosophy among Shi‘i scholars’, to quote Cyrus Zargar, ‘and brought into line with the teachings of the Shī‘ī imams’ (2017: 3; cf. Ansari and Schmidtke 2016). However, the basic principles of early Asharism remained even in later articulations of the school.

4.4 The Maturidi middle-ground

So far, we have briefly explored the responses of the Asharites and the Mutazilites to questions surrounding the ontology and epistemology of ethics, but there was also a third response. This was not that of the Hanbali ‘traditionists’ or Atharis who eschewed rational theology and are therefore of no immediate relevance to our present inquiry, which is focused first and foremost on kalām. Instead, this third school comprised a group of thinkers who retraced their origins to a contemporary of Ash‘arī, Abū al-Manṣūr al-Māturīdī (d. 944), after whom they were named. The seeds of their theological outlook, however, were planted much earlier by Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 767) (Rudolph 2015: 4–5), the founder of one of the four schools of Sunni Law with which they were most closely affiliated, in much the same way that the Asharites tended to be affiliated with the Shafi‘is, and the Hanbalis, as noted, with the Atharis.

Unlike the Asharites, the Maturidis believed not only in objective values, but values which could be known through reason. However, the cognition of them was in their eyes rudimentary at best in the absence of revelation and varied considerably from one person to another, due to differences in intellectual aptitude and purity of soul, as well as a range of environmental and social factors. Thus, prophecy was necessary for an ethical life. What revelation did, however, was awaken and make clear certain moral intuitions imbedded in human fitra (see Harvey: ‘fitra’), supplementing them with rituals, rites, and other non-rationally deducible religious obligations. Yet the Maturidis did not go so far as to suggest that God is incapable of creating another system of objective values. In other words, although they believed in universal moral truths of which we have rational intuitions, God could have created a world where those values and intuitions differed. In this respect, they were able to preserve (at least from their own point of view) divine omnipotence, because they did not subordinate God to a conception of the good that was independent of Him. Had the Maturidis gone so far, it is unlikely they would have come to comprise, along with the Asharites and Atharis, what would later be loosely recognized as Sunni orthodoxy.

The relation between the Atharis and the dialectical theologians of the Asharites and Maturidis, was, however, often an uneasy one, largely because the Atharis sought to eschew the use of reason almost entirely on creedal and exegetical matters, and often accused the dialectical theologians of corrupting the meanings of revelation (taḥrīf ma‘āni al-qur’ān) through their rationally inspired metaphorical interpretations of Scripture. While, as noted, the Maturidis did espouse a form of ethical objectivism, the ontological status of their values differed from that of the Mutazilites (due to the possibility of their alteration). Nevertheless, the objective nature of values in their ethical philosophy allowed them to appeal to the akhlāq of the Prophet as proof of his messengerhood, without falling into the kind of circular reasoning the Asharites stood at risk of were they to employ similar arguments.

In general, the Maturidis had more faith in the powers of reason than the Asharites (particularly early exponents of the school) and this was particularly true regarding their views about the existence and unity of God. In this respect, the Maturidis occupied a middle-ground on the status of those whom revelation did not reach. Recall that for the Mutazilites, such a class of people were accountable by God after death for their ethical decisions. They were also, in their eyes, responsible for their belief, or lack thereof, in tawḥīd. Generally, the Asharites adhered to an opposing position. Thus, Bājūrī (d. 1860) would explain that those who lived in between the descent of a new revelation and the corruption and loss of a previous one – the ahl al-fatra – or those whom revelation simply did not reach, were saved (nājūn) in the afterlife. This was because for the Asharites, there could be no obligation or taklīf, moral or otherwise, in the absence of prophecy (2002: 85-86). Divine mercy, in their case, would have the final say. Such a position, however, presented certain obvious problems, the foremost of them being the complete absence of any kind of accountability after death.

The Asharites were not, however, without what they believed to be scriptural proofs for this position, drawing their main evidence from Q 17:15, ‘We do not punish until We have sent a messenger (rasūl)’, a verse also used by a group of Atharis (jamā‘a min al-ḥanābila) for the same theological stance (Nasafī 2000: 82–83; cf. Bājūrī 2002; 82). Curiously, the Mutazilites (no less reverential of the Quran than their adversaries), interpreted the rasūl in the verse as a reference to the ‘aql, or the proofs by furnished it, a faculty created by God and available to every sane adult (cf. Zamakhsharī, commentary on Q 17:15).

The Maturidis, on the other hand, felt that those who fell into this category were responsible for tawḥīd and elementary moral principles, such as the near universal prohibition of theft, murder, and deceit, provided they were mature enough to reason and reflect. Nasafī (d. 1114) the Maturidi theologian explicitly states in his Ocean of Kalam that no one can be excused (ma‘dhūr) for disbelief in God, drawing on the Quranic accounts of the prophet Abraham and the People of the Cave, all of whom inferred through their own powers of reflection, without the aid of revelation, the existence of a single creator (Q 6:78, 18:14; Nasafī 2000: 82–83). The precise extent to which the Maturidis were willing to absolve those whom revelation did not reach of ethical obligations, however, remains difficult to determine, in view of the wide range of circumstances those who fell into such a group might find themselves in, as well as differences among Maturidis themselves.

4.5 The ethics of Sufi metaphysics

A noticeable lacuna in the debates around ethics in kalām centered around the idea of divine ethics. It is rare, in fact, to find extensive inquiries into how God’s akhlāq might serve as a metaethical template for human behavior. While there were certainly traces of it among the Mutazilites who conceived of divine goodness and justice along similar lines to human goodness and justice, generally the specialists of kalām, the mutakallimūn, emphasized the unique otherness and dissimilarity of God and therefore the ontological gulf that separated Him from humans. This was due to the pride of place they gave to reason. The Mutazilites in fact went so far in such a direction, they were accused by their opponents of ta‘ṭīl, of ‘divesting’ God of His attributes altogether (because of their fear of anthropomorphizing God). While they rejected such claims as simplified caricatures of their own views, what the Mutazilites, Maturidis, Asharites and all who made use of kalām had in common was an impulse to press the differences between the divine and human orders of reality. And when they did speak of takhalluq or ‘assuming character traits’, the traits they usually had in mind were not of God but of the Prophet (cf. Ṣāwī 1999: 434–435).

The problem, and a glaring one at that, in virtually ignoring divine ethics, or its relevance to human conduct, was that it meant overlooking a theme which, as we saw earlier, appears prominently in the Quran. While it is true that the Atharis did not eschew the idea (largely due to their disinterest in rational theology), they did not develop it in any meaningful way, simply opting to assent, as they usually did, to the literal meanings of seemingly anthropomorphic and anthropopathic references to God in the Quran and hadith, bi lā kayf, ‘without (asking) how’, a view shared in moderate form by the early Asharites (cf. Ash‘arī 1999). It would be left to the philosophically minded Sufis, particularly Ibn ‘Arabi and his school ( = the ‘Akbarians’), to fill in this lacuna. And they would do so by developing an ethical model premised on the idea of becoming divine-like through a realization of the primordial Adamic nature of the self, created, as the hadith states, ‘alā ṣūratihi, ‘in His form’, as an imago dei (Muslim no. 2612). In this conceptualization of ethics, the teleological end of the human being, which entailed a felicitous return to God, also entailed a return to one’s theophanic nature, a repository of the divine names (cf. Ali 2021; Chittick 1993; Khalil 2021).

How was this nature to be realized? It involved for the proponents of Sufi metaphysics an acquiescence to the Prophet’s injunctions to ‘assume the attributes of God’. While Ghāzālī discussed the pertinence of this tradition, he emphasized not the convergences but divergences that characterized the sharing of names between God and the human being. About a century later, however, Ibn ‘Arabī would move in a different direction, particularly in a lengthy section on ethics in his Meccan Revelations within the context of an analysis of the states and stations. However, the theological anthropology he would formulate would involve not a crude deification of the human being, an incarnationism, or what in classical Islamic texts was sometimes criticized as a belief in ‘the indwelling of God’ (ḥulūl), but a complex and paradoxical interplay of divine transcendence (tanzīh) and immanence (tashbīh) in the human self. In relation to takhalluq, this meant that the goal was not to internalize and embody the names as they are manifest in God, but in a mode commensurate to the ontological status of the human being, whose essential reality is that of need and nothingness, much like an empty mirror. As the Quran states, ‘you are the poor in relation to God’ (Q 35:15). To aspire to anything else would be to risk vying with Him as co-partner. And the template of how to do this lay, it was argued, in an emulation of the Muhammadan Reality as it was embodied in the persona of the Prophet, which in a Sufi context meant traversing through the sharī‘a (law) and the ṭarīqa (mystical path) in order to reach the penultimate stage of the ḥaqīqa (the realization and knowledge of ultimate reality). This was journey that brought with it the ethical refinement and beautification of the soul. Iḥsān, which according to the hadith is the highest level of faith, after all means ‘to beautify’, and derives from the same ḥ-s-n root from which we also get the frequently employed Quranic term, ḥasanāt, ‘beautiful deeds’.

For Ibn ‘Arabi and his school, the significance of being fashioned in the divine form meant not only that there is a latent goodness in the human being, but also knowledge, in potentia, of how to live virtuously. However, the full actualization of such a state required prophecy, which outlined the specifics of how to pursue a godly, pious, and ethical life. In this respect, his position approached the Maturidis, who were not willing to absolve the human being of taklīf altogether in the absence of prophecy. Unlike the Maturidis, however, the Akbarian doctrine was predicated not on a particular conception of the nature of the ‘aql, or its relation to the good, as much as it was on the very nature of human selfhood, one in which God breathed His Spirit (Q 35:15; Ibn al-'Arabī 1980; cf. Khalil 2021). As for the dilemma posed by the Euthyphro, the Akbarian response would be to see a mistake in separating God from the good, since His love for the good was and is, in fact, a love for His own nature. The human being’s yearning for the good is, in this light, a yearning for nothing other than God Himself.