Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/144

 and still adhere to the opinion that God has real qualities. Those who laid emphasis on this in opposition to the Mu'tazilite speculations are commonly known as Sifatites (sifat, qualities), but they admit that, as God is not like a man, the qualities attributed to him in the Qur'an are not the same as those qualities bearing the same names which are referred to men, and it is not possible for us to know the real import of the qualities attributed to God.

A more pronounced recoil against the Mu'tazilite speculations appears in Abu 'Abdullah b. Karram (d. 256) and his followers who were known as Karramites. These returned to a crude anthropomorphism and held that God not only has qualities of precisely the same kind as a man may have, but that he actually sits on a throne, etc., taking in plain literal sense all the statements made in the Qur'an.

The Mu'tazilite school of Baghdad concerned itself mainly with the metaphysical question—"what is a thing?" It was admitted that "thing" denotes a concept which could be known and could serve as subject to a predicate. It does not necessarily exist, for existence is a quality added to the essence: with this addition the essence becomes an entity (mawjud), without this addition it is a non-entity (ma'dum) but still has substance and accident, so that God creates by adding the single attribute of existence.

The whole course of Mu'tazilite speculation shows the influence of Greek philosophy as applied to Muslim theology, but the influence is for the most