Fate and free will in Islam: 6 questions answered

Yes, and the Quran treats the two claims as compatible. “Whoever wishes, let him believe, and whoever wishes, let him disbelieve.”^[2] It also says that nobody wishes except as God wishes.^[3]

The standard reply is about knowledge. Knowing is not forcing. A teacher who knows from years of experience which student will fail the exam has not made the student fail. God’s knowledge is not bound by time as ours is, so what He knows about tomorrow is not a push from yesterday.

The strongest objection is that the analogy is weak, because a teacher guesses and God knows with certainty. If the outcome is certain, the student cannot do otherwise. Muslim theologians answered that the certainty follows the act and does not precede it as a cause. God knows the choice because the person will make it, and the person makes it as a real agent. The first verse above holds a person responsible for the choice, and the second places that choice within God’s wider will.

It does use the language of misguiding, and critics quote it. The verses are explained by their own wording. “He misleads none by it except the defiant.”^[4] The misguiding follows a person’s choice of defiance. It is not the cause of it.

The same pattern holds where the Quran speaks of sealed hearts. One verse says that God has sealed them, and the words that follow give the reason: “because of their disbelief”. Another says that when they turned aside, God turned their hearts aside.^[5] In both, the hardening is a response to a choice already made.

The Quran also says that God sends messengers “in the language of their people so that he may make clear to them,” and then guides or misguides whom He wills.^[6] Read together, the verses describe a God who offers guidance to all and who confirms a person in the direction he has already chosen.

The Quran’s answer is that life is an examination. “He created death and life to test which of you is best in deed.”^[7] A test with no possibility of failure is not a test.

The Prophet’s own prayer is careful with the point. He used to say, “All good is in Your hands, and evil is not attributed to You.”^[8] Scholars take this to mean that God permits evil as the cost of freedom and does not will it as an end. The Quran also holds people responsible for what they do to each other: “Corruption has appeared on land and sea because of what people’s hands have earned.”^[9]

One verse says that whatever good befalls a person is from God, and whatever evil befalls him is from himself.^[10] The verse before it says that everything is from God, and the commentators joined the two by distinguishing what God decrees from what a person does with it. Muslim theologians do not claim to have removed the difficulty. They hold that God’s wisdom exceeds human measure. A related challenge, whether God’s command is what makes an act good at all, gets its own answer below.

There were three main answers. The Jabriyya, associated with Jahm ibn Safwan (died 746), said that people are compelled and their acts are God’s alone. The Qadariyya and the Mu’tazila said that people create their own acts, and that justice requires it, since God would be unjust to punish what He had Himself made them do. Neither extreme won.

Al-Ash’ari (died 935) took the middle path that most Sunnis follow. God creates every act, and the person “acquires” it, meaning he chooses and owns it, and is accountable.^[11] The Maturidi school, founded by al-Maturidi of Samarkand (died 944) and followed by the Hanafis, put more weight on human choice. Faruqi, writing on the same debate about the divine attributes, praised al-Ash’ari for refusing both extremes and for answering the “how” of God’s action with bilā kayf, “without asking how”, the position that the Quran’s statements are true as they stand and cannot be pressed into human categories.^[12]

Critics call “acquisition” a verbal compromise. Defenders reply that it names a real distinction between creating an act and owning it, and it keeps both God’s power and human responsibility.

The record says no. When Umar was told about a plague in Syria he turned back, and a companion asked, “Are you fleeing from God’s decree?” He answered, “Yes, we flee from God’s decree to God’s decree.”^[13] The Prophet’s instruction to a man who left his camel unattended was “Tie it, and then rely on God.”^[14]

Trust and effort go together. A Muslim plans, works and takes medicine, and then accepts what comes. The Quran’s phrase for the second half is tawakkul, reliance on God, and it follows action. It does not replace it.

When the Companions asked whether they should rely on what was already written, the Prophet told them to act, because each person is made ready for what he was created for.^[15] The Quran also rebukes those who plead the decree as an excuse for their wrongdoing.^[16] Its instruction for a decision is to resolve the matter, and then to rely on God.^[17]

Critics translate the phrase wa Allahu khayr al-makirin as “God is the best of deceivers” and ask how a deceiving God can be trusted. The phrase closes a verse about the enemies of Jesus: they plotted, and God planned, and God is the best of planners.^[18] The same pairing describes the Meccans who plotted to kill or expel the Prophet.^[19]

In both places God’s planning is a response to a plot already under way, and it defeats the plotters. Al-Tabari explained God’s plan in 3:54 as the rescue of Jesus from those who conspired to kill him, and added that it may also mean God drawing the plotters on step by step until their appointed end arrived, as with the hypocrites in 2:15.^[20] The Arabic makr covers any hidden plan, good or bad. Used of God, it names the frustration of a wrong, and it says nothing of God deceiving the honest.

A sharper version of the decree question does not ask whether a person is free. It asks what makes an act good in the first place. Is lying wrong because God forbids it, or does God forbid it because it is already wrong? Pick the first horn and goodness looks arbitrary, since God could in principle reverse it by decree. Pick the second and something stands above God, setting the standard He merely reports, which a Muslim cannot accept of the one God who has no equal.^[21]

Muslim theologians argued this exact question for 3 centuries, well before the dilemma had the Greek name attached to it in the West. The Mu’tazila took the second horn. They held that good and evil are real properties of acts, knowable to reason without revelation in most cases, and that God commands what is good because it is good. The scholar ‘Abd al-Jabbar built the fullest version of this ethics, reasoning that a God who commanded evil, or called evil good by decree, would not be worth worshipping.^[22]

Al-Ash’ari and his school took the first horn, on purpose. Nothing is good or bad before God names it so. Reason alone, without revelation, cannot settle the question, because value just is what God commands. Critics, Muslim and non-Muslim, have pressed the same objection the Mu’tazila raised: on this view God’s choice of what to command looks unanchored, and “God is good” collapses into “God does what God does.”^[23]

Al-Maturidi, whose school the Hanafis generally follow, tried a middle path rather than picking a horn. God does have reasons for what He commands, so the command is not a coin flip. But human beings do not always have access to those reasons, even where they exist, so a person cannot simply reason his way to the full law without revelation. The command still binds because it is God’s, and it is not arbitrary, because it answers to a wisdom a person may not see the whole of.^[24]

That middle path is close to how later Sunni orthodoxy settled the question. Good is what accords with God’s nature, and God’s nature does not change on a whim, so the command is neither a free-floating standard above God nor a decree with nothing behind it. A critic can still ask what grounds God’s nature itself, and Muslim and Christian philosophers who make this same move face the same pressure.^[25] The dilemma does not disappear. It gets pushed back a level, to a point most monotheists are willing to stop and call bedrock.