Al-Ashari Quotes on God

Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī (c. 874–936), the Iraqi theologian whose break with the rationalist Muʿtazila around the year 912 and subsequent constructive doctrinal works gave Sunni Islam its principal classical kalām school, defended a middle path between the uncompromising rationalism of the Muʿtazila and the literalist traditionalism of the earliest Hanbalis. The framework affirms the reality of the divine attributes — knowledge, power, will, life, hearing, sight, speech — while denying that they are anthropomorphic in the literal sense or that they exhaust what the divine essence is, with the corresponding doctrine "without specifying how" (bi-lā kayfa) supplying the standard Ashʿarite formula for the limits of speculative knowledge of the divine.