Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/245

 of the canonists, who, in Spain as elsewhere, were the followers of recognised schools, such as that of Abu Hanifa and the other orthodox systems, and it was not until a full century afterwards that he gained any number of adherents. In theology he admitted the Ash'arite doctrine of mukhalafa, the difference of God from all created beings, so that human attributes could not be applied to him in the same sense as they were used of men; but he carried this a stage further, and opposed the Ash'arites, who, though admitting the difference, had then argued about the attributes of God as though they described God's nature, when the very fact of difference deprives them of any meaning intelligible to us. As in the Qur'an ninety-nine descriptive titles are applied to God we may lawfully employ them, but we neither know what they imply nor can we argue anything from them. The same method is applied to the treatment of the anthropomorphical expressions which are applied to God in the Qur'an; we may use those expressions, but we have not the slightest idea of what they may indicate, save that we know they do not mean what they would mean as used of men. In ethics the only distinction between good and evil is based on God's will, and our only knowledge of that distinction is obtained from revelation. If God forbids theft it is wrong only because God forbids it; there is no standard other than the arbitrary approval or disapproval of God.

Although it took a century for these views to