CHAPTER V
THE MU'TAZILITES
When the Aristotelian philosophy was first made known to the Muslim world it was received almost as a revelation supplementing the Qur'an. At that time it was very imperfectly understood and the discrepancies between it and orthodox theology were not perceived. Thus the Qur'an and Aristotle were read together and regarded as supplementing one another in perfect good faith, but inevitably the conclusions, and still more perhaps the methods, of Greek philosophy began to act as a powerful solvent on the traditional beliefs.
Maqrizi refers to the Mu'tazilites as seizing with avidity on the books of the philosophers, and certainly now new difficulties begin to appear as well as the two great problems which had been prominent at the beginning of the second century—the eternity of the Qur'an and the question of free will. The new difficulties were especially concerned with the qualities of God and, later, with the Qur'anic promise of the beatific vision. The problem of the qualities of God is very closely parallel to the earlier difficulty as to the eternity of the Qur'an, indeed it appears as an enlargement of it. Christian theologians educated in
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