Divine Existence, Attributes, and the Maturidi Positions

The heart of Sharh al-Maqasid's theological content is its treatment of the divine existence, essence, and attributes — the questions that were at the center of all classical Islamic kalam debate. At-Taftazani's presentation is particularly valuable because he engages systematically with both the Ash'ari and Maturidi traditions and notes their agreements and differences.

On the proof for God's existence, at-Taftazani presents and defends multiple arguments. The most fundamental in the kalam tradition is the argument from contingency (dalil al-imkan): the world is contingent, contingent things require a cause for their existence, and the chain of causes cannot regress infinitely, so there must be a Necessary Being that is the ultimate cause of all contingent existence. He also discusses the cosmological argument from temporal origination (dalil al-huduth): the world came into existence after not existing, and whatever comes into existence requires a cause, so the world has a cause whose existence is necessary and eternal.

On the divine attributes, at-Taftazani's presentation reflects the Maturidi tradition's somewhat different approach to the attribute of divine will. The Ash'ari school held that God wills all things, including human acts of disobedience — that nothing occurs without God's will, understood as the attribute of specification (takhsis) that selects among possibilities. The Maturidi school accepted that God wills all things but held that God does not will human acts of disobedience in the same sense that He wills acts of obedience — that there is a distinction between what God wills universally as sovereign and what He wills as a matter of approval and command.

This distinction relates to another difference: the Maturidi school held that God created human acts but that humans have real agency (kasb) in a stronger sense than the Ash'ari school attributed to it. Both schools were trying to navigate between full human determinism (jabr), which would make moral responsibility incoherent, and full human independent agency (qadr), which would compromise divine sovereignty. The solutions they developed are closely related but subtly different.

At-Taftazani also addresses the attributes of divine speech and its relationship to the Quran, the attribute of knowledge and its relation to human knowledge and action, and the various categories of divine names and attributes that appear in the Quran and hadith. His treatment throughout aims at comprehensiveness: he wants to cover not just the positions but the arguments for and against each, the responses available to different schools, and the overall logical structure of the debates.