The Maturidi and Ash'ari influence

It is worth pointing out one more point regarding the effect of Maturidism. Even though there is a general acceptance that the Hanafis within Sunnism adopt Maturidism in creed, in practice this school of creed has no serious distinguishing effect on ordinary believers, even those at the madrasa level. The overwhelming majority of people do not even know the difference between being a Maturidi and being an Ash'ari in creed. It is well known that, in essence, in terms of forming a reference for the creedal views of Ahl al-Sunnah, the views of these two imams have little effect in making a difference in society. In fact, "the concept of Ahl al-Sunnah wa'l-Jama'ah denotes those who agree on rejecting the Rafidis, the Kharijites and the Qadariyya" (Cemalettin Erdemci, quoting al-Isfarayini, Kelama Giriş, 2009: 61), and this formed an identity boundary uniting the entire Sunni world without any Ash'ari-Maturidi distinction, and until recent times the Ash'ari-Maturidi distinction was not a subject much dwelt upon.

Süleyman Uludağ too, in the Introduction he wrote to his translation of Taftazani's "Kelam İlmi ve İslam Akaidi, Şerhu'l-Akaid," shows in every detail, through the books taught in the Ottoman madrasas and the scholars read, that the Ottoman ulema were Maturidi in name but Ash'ari in fact and in truth. Neither the works of Imam Maturidi nor any scholar of the Maturidi school were taught in the Ottoman madrasas, and all the scholars who were taught were scholars who had been trained outside the Ottoman madrasas. In light of these facts we can say that this distinction is a distinction invented in recent times.

One motivation behind this invention stems from the fact that some Orientalist or self-Orientalist discourses have begun to hold Ash'ari morality responsible in the question of "the backwardness of the Islamic world." In the age of modernist humanism, in an environment where human will is regarded as indisputable against nature and God, Ash'arism was suddenly seen as the sought-after culprit of the Muslims' backwardness, since it was thought to annihilate the human being entirely before God by granting him a vague partial will (kasb) closer to fatalism.

Much ink was spilled over the role that modernist understandings of Islam, adopted and defended by some theological circles as well, attributed to Ash'arism in such a debate. It was stressed that Ash'arism's understanding of tanzih (God's transcendence) crushes man before God and, in terms of the position in which it places man, is far from playing a liberating role. Yet tanzih is in fact precisely a divine safeguard against every humanist metaphysical attempt that could turn God into a technical object within man's disposal.

Tanzih does not belong only to the Ash'ari; it is the most fundamental idea of the belief in God as described and enjoined in the Qur'an, and in this regard Maturidism too is not in a different position. True, it is precisely for this reason that those who criticize Ash'arism set it up not against Maturidism but against Mu'tazilism. When you go beyond tanzih or set it aside, you arrive at an anthropomorphic, that is, human-shaped, God, but this God has nothing to say to you. Whatever this god is to say, you will have made him say it. This is the most technical, most theologian's way of killing God.

In the West, the human being who killed God did not do so by pushing him out of life, or by adopting or getting others to adopt the claim, through scientific arguments, that he does not exist. On the contrary, he did it by making God like himself, by producing a conception of God as he wished, by making him not an absolute Other who would address him but a god whose otherness has been removed, by making tashbih (likening), by making God a result of his own technical will.

Behind the will to destroy tanzih lies an eternal human lust not to consent to absolute submission to God, to take over his will by bargaining with God. This is a lust that gives direction both to the quests for a "Turkish religion" and to all the quests for a religion according to one's desires. Yet Ash'arism expresses the view, shared also by the Maturidi, that God exists in His dimension of being absolutely transcendent, absolutely Other. The modernist critique of this view is in fact a repetition of the most archaic lust, which tries to reverse the God-human relationship. Apart from being modern, it has nothing new about it. Interpreting the understanding of God in the religion of Islam, whose very name is man's submission to God, in a way that almost turns into taking God captive means nothing other than turning the entire message of Islam inside out.

A second motivation that enabled the invention and construction of Maturidism is that it is relatively easier to associate it with Turkishness and with Anatolian Islam.

But at this point we must immediately state that the Turkish origin of Maturidi does not mean that he historically determined the creed of the Turks more than the Ash'ari did. Let us repeat that, in almost all the Ottoman madrasas, and among the Hanafis as well, Ash'arism has historically been more influential. Yet this influence does not mean that there is a serious difference from Maturidism either. Even though Süleyman Uludağ says there are nearly 50 differences on some subjects, it is not so easy to draw sociological causalist inferences about what kind of social structure or subjectivity difference these differences of view produce in practice. Moreover, the differences between them do not prevent treating them, in terms of religious understanding, as a whole in the same basin, within the Ahl al-Sunnah line. The completion of the process of Maturidi's invention and construction at the same time requires the invention of Ash'arism too, and the recently developed readings of Maturidism rest on such a double construction.

Yet historically, in the periods when Islam rose to its highest levels of civilization, in the periods when Muslims gave order to the world with the most determined will a human being can show in this world, the dominant creedal view of the Muslim world was Ash'arism. Therefore the claim that the views Ash'arism puts forward regarding human and God's will must have held the Muslim back from action rests only on a superficial logical assumption. When the creedal view of both the period of ascent and the period of decline is the same (Ash'arism), one must see that it becomes inevitable to look for the causes and explanation of both events in other causes outside this factor.