Divine Attributes in Kitab at-Tawhid

The treatment of divine attributes in Kitab at-Tawhid is central to the work's theological argument and establishes the foundational positions of the Maturidi school on questions that would remain central to Islamic theology for centuries.

Al-Maturidi affirms that God has real attributes — knowledge, power, life, will, hearing, sight, and speech — that are genuinely distinct from the divine essence without being separate from it. This position places him between the Mu'tazila (who identified the attributes with the essence, effectively reducing them to the divine self understood under different descriptions) and hypothetical anthropomorphists (who would make the attributes fully independent realities, compromising divine unity). The Maturidi formula — that the attributes are neither identical to the essence nor separate from it — is identical in its basic structure to the Ash'ari formula and represents a shared achievement of the classical Sunni kalam tradition.

Where al-Maturidi develops distinctive insights is in his analysis of specific attributes and their relationship to divine action. His treatment of the attribute of divine speech is particularly significant. He argues that the eternal Quran — the inner reality of divine speech — is uncreated, while accepting that the human expression of that speech in recitation, writing, and sound involves created elements. This framework, closely related to what became standard in both Ash'ari and Maturidi theology, is articulated in Kitab at-Tawhid with arguments that influenced all subsequent discussion.

On the divine will and its relationship to human freedom, al-Maturidi's position in Kitab at-Tawhid helped establish the Maturidi school's characteristic approach: affirming comprehensive divine sovereignty over all events while maintaining the genuine reality of human agency and accountability. He engages at length with the Mu'tazili arguments for human creation of one's own actions and with the Jabri arguments for complete divine determination, showing in each case where the arguments go wrong and how the Maturidi middle position avoids both errors.

His treatment of divine transcendence — tanzih — is robust and sophisticated. He insists that all Quranic descriptions of God must be understood in a way that preserves God's absolute uniqueness and dissimilarity from created things, while also affirming that these descriptions are genuinely meaningful rather than empty negations. This combination — real affirmation with genuine transcendence — is the core achievement of the Maturidi approach to the divine attributes.