Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/141

 was due to oriental influences which were now beginning to appear in Islam.

Ma'mar's pantheism was more fully developed by Tumameh b. al-Ashras (d. 213) who treats the world as indeed created by God, but created according to a law of nature so that it is the expression of a force latent in God and not due to an act of volition. Tumameh entirely deserts al-Allaf's attempt to reconcile the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of matter with the teaching of the Qur'an, and quite frankly states that the universe is eternal like God. This is by no means the last word in Islamic pantheism, but its subsequent development rather belongs to the doctrines of the extremer Shi'ite sects and to Sufism.

Reverting to an-Nazzam, the great leader of the middle age of the Mu'tazilites, we find his teaching continued by his pupils Ahmad b. Habit, Fadl al-Hudabi. and 'Amr b. Bakr al-Jahiz. On the theological side all the Mu'tazilites admitted the eternal salvation of good Muslims, and most agreed that unbelievers would receive eternal punishment: but there were differences of view as to those who were believers but died unrepentant in sin. For the most part the Mu'tazilites took the lax view that these would be favourably treated as against the rigorist opinion which reserved eternal salvation to good Muslims, an opinion which appeared amongst the stricter believers during the 'Umayyad period. The two first named of an-Nazzam's pupils, however, introduced a new theory entirely repugnant to