Is it true that the four imams were athari?

The statement that the four imams were athari cannot be used to as a critique of the Ashari and Maturidi creeds for a few simple reasons:

1 Someone *not* being something does not prove that the idea is wrong because there can be many different reasons (ihtimalaat) why they were not that thing. Them knowingly rejecting the idea is only one possibility amongst many. For example, “None of the Sahaba followed any of the four madhabs, therefore the madhabs are wrong.” Does this critique make any sense? We can also say, none of the four imams removed jinn from people. Does that mean they disapproved of removing jinn? Of course not. They may not have removed jinn because jinn possession was not a high priotity problem in their time.

2 Just as there were no organized madhabs of fiqh in the time of the Sahaba, there were no organized madhabs of aqida in the time of the four imams. The statement seeks to imply that the four imams compared between schools of thought and chose the athari one, which is obviously false. 

3 People can only adopt a solution *after* the problem arises. The four imams lived in a time in which there were different problems, not the theological questions that arose later. Only Imam Ahmad lived at the beginning of the theological debates of the second Hijri century. 

4 The four imams all observe the core tenet of the Ashari and Maturidi schools, namely: the tanzih (transcendence) of Allah beyond creation and its attributes, such as physicality, movement, direction, and location.

5 Wouldn’t the immediate imams of the Hanafis, Malikis, and Shafiis know best what the founder of their school believed? They are the ones who assessed and approved of the Ashari and Maturidi doctrines and adopted them.

6 The Ashari and Maturidi schools are not bringing any new beliefs. Rather, they are merely a method of categorizing beliefs, answering challenges from philosophers, skeptics, and those looking for contradictions within the deen, and making ijtihad (scholarly judgements) on secondary matters of belief (furu’) that were not answered in earlier times, such as the question about the destiny of Prophet’s parents in the Afterlife.

Written by Shadee Elmasry

March 25, 2021

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