Divine Attributes and the Maturidi Ontology

The Maturidi school's treatment of divine attributes in Tabsirat al-Adillah reflects a careful ontological framework that both shares essential commitments with the Ash'ari tradition and differs from it in certain technical respects.

Like the Ash'ari school, the Maturidi tradition affirms real divine attributes distinct from but not separate from the divine essence. God's knowledge is a real attribute subsisting in the divine essence, not simply God Himself understood as knowing (the Mu'tazili position), and not a separately existing reality (which would compromise divine unity). The attributes are real, they are genuinely distinct from one another and from the essence insofar as they can be understood and described distinctly, but they do not constitute a plurality of divine realities.

Where the Maturidi school developed its own distinctive ontology is in the treatment of what Abu Muin an-Nasafi calls the attributes of action (sifat al-af'al) as distinct from the attributes of essence (sifat adh-dhat). In the Maturidi framework, the attributes of action — creating, sustaining, giving life, causing death, rewarding, punishing — are understood as real attributes that come into operation in time as God acts in the world. This understanding allows Maturidi theology to speak more naturally about God's ongoing interaction with His creation — His hearing prayers, responding to needs, guiding specific individuals — without reducing these to purely eternal and unchanging realities.

Abu Muin an-Nasafi also addresses the attribute of divine speech (kalam) with the care it requires in any kalam text. Like the Ash'ari school, the Maturidi tradition distinguishes between the eternal inner speech (kalam nafsi) subsisting in God's essence and the expressed forms of that speech — the Arabic Quran as recited, written, and heard by Muslims. The Maturidi tradition generally agrees with the Ash'ari tradition on this distinction, with some subsidiary differences in how the relationship between the eternal and expressed dimensions of divine speech is articulated.

The treatment of divine transcendence and its relationship to the Quranic descriptions of God follows a similar approach to the Ash'ari school: affirming that the descriptions are meaningful and refer to real divine attributes while insisting that those attributes are entirely unlike their created analogs. The Maturidi school, like the Ash'ari school, permits ta'wil (interpretation) of certain Quranic descriptions when their apparent meaning would imply limitation or corporeality incompatible with divine transcendence.