The Jahmiyyah and Their Deviation

Ahmad ibn Hanbal's Al-Radd ala al-Jahmiyyah wa al-Zanadiqah opens with an account of the Jahmiyyah, the theological sect named after Jahm ibn Safwan, who was executed in 128 AH. Jahm was a student of the Jabriyya tradition and developed positions that Ahmad and the Sunni scholars regarded as deeply destructive to Islamic theology. The sect that bears his name is characterized primarily by two doctrines: the denial that Allah has real attributes, and the affirmation that the Quran is created. These positions, Ahmad argues, are not merely technical theological errors. They strike at the heart of the Muslim's knowledge of and relationship with Allah.

Jahm ibn Safwan reasoned that if Allah truly has attributes such as knowledge, power, and life, then He would resemble created beings who also possess analogous qualities. To protect divine transcendence, he concluded that these attributes could not really belong to Allah and must be interpreted away or denied. This move, which later scholars called ta'til (stripping the divine of attributes), was in Ahmad's view the more serious error compared to anthropomorphism, because it left the believer with no positive knowledge of Allah at all. If Allah has no attributes, then the names by which He calls Himself in the Quran become empty sounds, and the religion built on knowledge of and love for Allah loses its content.

Ahmad also describes the Jahmite denial of the divine speech and its consequence for the status of the Quran. If the speech of Allah is not a real attribute of His essence, then the Quran that claims to be His speech must be a created thing. Once the Quran is declared created, it loses its unique status as the uncreated word of the divine. It becomes, at least in principle, comparable to any other created thing, subject to the same categories of analysis and potentially subject to the same kind of authority. Ahmad saw this as the most politically and religiously dangerous implication of Jahmite theology, and it was this conclusion that the Abbasid caliphate attempted to impose on the scholarly community during the Mihna.

The opening of Al-Radd also identifies the Zanadiqah alongside the Jahmiyyah. The Zanadiqah were those suspected of secretly holding Manichaean or dualist beliefs while outwardly professing Islam, and Ahmad groups them with the Jahmiyyah because both, in his view, undermined the coherence of Islamic monotheism. The Zanadiqah's dualism is theologically incompatible with tawhid, while the Jahmiyyah's denial of attributes produces a deity so remote and unknowable as to be practically non-existent. Both aberrations, one from outside Islam and one from within its rationalist theological movements, represent threats to the authentic Muslim relationship with Allah as revealed in the Quran and demonstrated in the practice of the Prophet and his Companions.