GOD’S QUDRA (POWER) AND NATURAL CAUSALITY BETWEEN FALSAFA AND ISLAMIC OCCASIONALISM

Islamic Occasionalism finds its origins in the theological discussions about one of the most important attributes of God: power (qudra). In the Koran God’s power is said to be over everything. The first significant development of the theological Islamic tradition occurred during the first centuries of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate, approximately between VIII and IX centuries, when many translations of philosophical texts from Greek into Arabic were made. The ʿAbbāsid caliphate endorsed the Muʿtazilite theology, namely, the first attempt to check Islamic dogma against the implications of a systematic assimilation of Aristotle’s doctrines and Neo-Platonic philosophy. Then was the time of al- Ašʻarī (d. 935), for about forty years follower of the Muʿtazila and then the founder of Ašʻarite school, and after him with al-Baqillānī (d. 1013). They both gave complete formulation to the Ašʻarite “philosophy of nature”. Atomism seemed in the Ašʻarite school the perfect doctrine to save the dogma of the absolute power of God, the only Agent: the creation is made of indivisible contingent atoms, created directly by God in every single moment, because their existence lasts only one instant. Only at the price of this hard Occasionalism the Ašʻarite theologians believed to save the divine omnipotence. The closest comparison between the assumptions of the Islamic Occasionalism and the natural causality described by the falāsifa is presented in al-Ġazālī’s The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al- falāsifa), mas’ala XVII, entitled On causality and miracles. This text, one of the most studied in the history of Islamic-Arabic Philosophy and Theology, presents a continuous movement between the affirmation of the absolute power of God in an Ašʻarite perspective and that of a natural causality. Al-Ġazālī desperately looks for a compromise solution which, saving the divine omnipotence and thus the possibility of miracle, does not border man to an experience of unintelligibility of the world. For this reason he tries to regain space to a natural order that God created as such and which He decides sometimes to change towards an end of absolute good. According to this thesis, however, man’s knowledge is reduced to a customary understanding, created by God, of how the world mostly runs. Is this true knowledge according the falāsifa?