By Ilyass Amharar
Framing the Question
This third essay in our series on the early encounters between Mālikism and Ashʿarism focuses on perhaps the most contested figure in the debate over their historical relationship: Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī (d. 386/996), universally recognized as one of the greatest authorities in the history of the Mālikī legal tradition.[1] Nicknamed al-Mālik al-ṣaghīr (Little Mālik) by his contemporaries, his Risāla (Treatise)[2] remains to this day a standard pedagogical text in Mālikī legal education across North Africa and West Africa.[3] Few premodern Islamic jurists have had their intellectual biography more actively contested in recent decades. The stakes of that contest are not merely historical; they concern the very identity of the Mālikī tradition and its proper theological orientation, and they have been pursued, with considerable energy and some methodological ingenuity, by contemporary Salafī-oriented scholars seeking to claim Ibn Abī Zayd as a witness for a traditionalist, anti-kalām (speculative theology) reading of the Mālikī heritage.
The examination of this case is directly relevant to Islamic legal history because Ibn Abī Zayd’s Risāla functions, in the contemporary Mālikī world, as a kind of constitutional document, a foundational text whose theological preamble carries doctrinal authority. How Mālikī jurists and modern polemicists read that preamble, and how they classify its author, has direct consequences for how the legal tradition understands its own normative identity.
The Contemporary Salafī Reconstruction and Its Methodological Problems
One pattern has become increasingly visible in Arabic-language Islamic scholarship over the past several decades Certain Salafī-oriented authors have devoted considerable effort to demonstrating that Ibn Abī Zayd was not an Ashʿarī. They argue, alternatively, that his Ashʿarī affiliations were incidental, inconsistent, or attributable to biographical error. This allows them to use the Risāla as a vehicle for teaching their own creed, while maintaining that it agrees with the creed of the early Mālikīs.[4] The argument typically proceeds along two lines. The first is a maximalist reading of certain formulations in Ibn Abī Zayd’s writings, particularly the phrase in the Risāla’s theological introduction: wa-annahu fawqa ʿarshihi al-majīd bi-dhātih, which they render as “and that He is above His glorious Throne by His essence.”[5] Proponents take this phrase as evidence of an Atharī or traditionalist creedal position incompatible with Ashʿarī theology. The second is the citation of Ibn Abī Zayd’s reported hostility to kalām in general terms as proof that he maintained an anti-rationalist theological stance.[6]
These arguments have a surface plausibility. But they suffer from a problem that runs through much of this genre of contemporary Islamic historical writing: they are profoundly anachronistic. They project onto the fourth/tenth-century Kairouanī milieu a set of clearly demarcated doctrinal identities that crystallized into their current, mutually exclusive forms only much later, through centuries of polemic that postdate Ibn Abī Zayd by many generations.
A further problem concerns the selective use of sources. Contemporary Salafī appropriations of Ibn Abī Zayd tend to cite his reported warnings against kalām in isolation.[7] To do so, they set aside or explain away the substantial body of evidence, in classical biographical sources, of his sustained, personal, and theologically substantive engagement with Ashʿarī doctrine.[8] A reconstruction that sets this material aside is selecting its evidence rather than weighing it.
The Evidence for Ibn Abī Zayd’s Ashʿarī Engagement
The evidence for Ibn Abī Zayd’s engagement with Ashʿarism is direct rather than inferential, and it comes from both his own writings and later classical biographers.
The first and most structurally significant piece of evidence is his place within the chain of transmission of Ashʿarī doctrine. As I have documented in my genealogical reconstruction, Ibn Abī Zayd had studied under Ibn ʿAbd al-Muʾmin (death date unknown), who was himself a disciple of Ibn Mujāhid (d. ca. 370/980), the first-generation student of al-Ashʿarī that I discussed in an earlier essay.[9] This is not a tenuous connection constructed by later apologists: it places Ibn Abī Zayd within two degrees of separation from al-Ashʿarī himself, through a Mālikī chain of transmission. Ibn Abī Zayd was, in this sense, an heir to the emerging Ashʿarī tradition through the very networks, simultaneously legal and theological, that characterized Kairouanī scholarly culture in the fourth/tenth century.
The second piece of evidence is the correspondence with Ibn Mujāhid examined in the previous essay. Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (d. 544/1149), in his Tartīb al-madārik (Ordering of the Stages), records that in 368/979 Ibn Mujāhid wrote from Baghdad requesting Ibn Abī Zayd’s works on Saḥnūn’s (d. 240/854) Mudawwana (Compilation), by then celebrated in Iraq.[10] Ibn Abī Zayd sent two of his students to Baghdad, one of whom, Ibn ʿAdhrā, became a disciple of Ibn Mujāhid and brought Ibn Mujāhid’s theological Risāla fī ʿuqūd ahl al-sunna (Epistle on Sunnī Doctrine) back to Kairouan.[11] The character of the exchange is what matters here. Ibn Abī Zayd was not keeping a cautious distance from Ashʿarī circles; he and Ibn Mujāhid treated one another as recognized partners.
The third and most theologically direct piece of evidence is Ibn Abī Zayd’s own epistolary writings. He is reported to have composed an epistle in which he explicitly defended al-Ashʿarī against a Muʿtazilite opponent, declaring al-Ashʿarī to be “attached to the Sunna” (mutamassik bi’l-sunna) and granting him the honorific status of imām (authority) in theological matters.[12] To declare al-Ashʿarī an imām in kalām is a substantive act of theological alignment.
The fourth piece of evidence is institutional: when Ibn Abī Zayd became embroiled in a theological controversy related to a dispute about the miraculous gifts of saints (karāmāt al-awliyāʾ), he turned to al-Bāqillānī (d. 403/1012) in Baghdad for arbitration and support.[13] Al-Bāqillānī responded with a two-volume treatise, al-Farq bayna muʿjizāt al-anbiyāʾ wa-karāmāt al-awliyāʾ (The Distinction between the Miracles of the Prophets and the Marvels of the Saints), in whose introduction he cleared Ibn Abī Zayd of the charge brought against him.[14] That the most eminent Ashʿarī theologian of the age, himself a Mālikī, was the authority to whom Ibn Abī Zayd appealed in a theological dispute, and that al-Bāqillānī responded in kind, shows how the two men understood their relationship. This is the behavior of scholars who recognized each other as belonging to a shared intellectual tradition.
Finally, later classical biographers of the Ashʿarī school itself include Ibn Abī Zayd within its ranks. According to Muḥammad Naṣīr’s detailed study, Eastern biographers treated him as a full member of the school rather than a mere sympathiser, the same judgement they passed on his Kairouanī contemporary al-Qābisī (d. 403/1012).[15] This classification may itself be retrospective and schematic, but its existence demonstrates that the Ashʿarī tradition, in its own internal self-understanding, claimed Ibn Abī Zayd as one of its own. It did so on the basis of evidence that was visible to scholars much closer to his time than we are.
The Crux of the Matter: Fawqa ʿArshihi al-Majīd bi-Dhātih
We turn now to the phrase that has become the centerpiece of contemporary Salafī attempts to claim Ibn Abī Zayd for an anti-Ashʿarī theological position. In the theological preamble to the Risāla, Ibn Abī Zayd writes: wa-annahu fawqa ʿarshihi al-majīd bi-dhātih. For Salafī-oriented commentators, this phrase is a straightforward affirmation of divine spatial transcendence in a literalist sense: God is literally above the Throne, with His very essence, in a manner that implies directionality and location.[16] This is precisely the kind of claim that Ashʿarī theology, with its technical doctrine of divine attributes, was designed to resist.[17]
This reading has the advantage of simplicity, but it rests on a profound misapprehension: it treats as univocal a phrase that is, in fact, grammatically and semantically open to a significant range of meanings. The classical commentary tradition on the Risāla recognized this complexity from the outset,[18] and its engagement with the phrase constitutes a model of the kind of close philological reasoning that contemporary polemical readings systematically bypass.
The phrase contains four elements:
- fawqa (above)
- ʿarshihi (His Throne)
- al-majīd (the Glorious/the glorious)
- bi-dhātih (by His essence/in itself)
The meaning of the phrase as a whole depends on two grammatical variables that the Arabic text leaves formally underdetermined.
The first variable concerns the syntactic attachment of al-majīd: is it an adjective modifying ʿarshihi (in which case it must be read in the genitive case, al-majīdi, in agreement with the noun), or is it a predicate referring independently to God (in which case it must be read in the nominative case, al-majīdu, as a second independent clause)? Arabic script without full vocalization, which is how the Risāla is typically transmitted and printed, does not distinguish between these two readings visually.
The second variable concerns the mutaʿallaq, that is, the term to which the prepositional phrase bi-dhātih is syntactically attached. Every prepositional phrase in Arabic must modify something; the question is what: fawqa (above the Throne in His essence); or al-majīd (Majestic in His essence)?
The interaction of these two variables generates at least three grammatically coherent readings of the phrase:
Reading 1: al-majīdu is in the nominative case, referring to God, and bi-dhātih attaches to al-majīdu. The phrase then yields two independent statements: (a) God is above His Throne and (b) God is Majestic in His essence, meaning His majesty is intrinsic to Him, not conferred by another.
Reading 2: al-majīdu is in the nominative case as a predicate of God, but bi-dhātih attaches to fawqa, yielding: God is above the Throne in His very essence and God is Majestic. This is the reading that the anthropomorphist (mujassima) polemic requires to generate its conclusion, and it is the most problematic. Still, as I show below, even this reading need not imply spatial localization if fawqiyya (aboveness) is understood as dominion rather than physical position.
Reading 3: al-majīdi is in the genitive case, modifying ʿarshihi, and bi-dhātih attaches to al-majīdi. The phrase then yields: God is above His Throne, which is Majestic in itself. This reading removes any problematic implication regarding God’s essence, since bi-dhātih qualifies the Throne, not God’s relation to it.
This mapping of the phrase’s range of meanings allows a more precise diagnosis of where, if anywhere, a genuine theological difficulty arises.
The bare statement Allāhu fawqa al-ʿarsh (“God is above the Throne”) poses no difficulty whatsoever for Ashʿarī theology. The Arabic fawqa is lexically ambiguous between physical elevation and metaphorical superiority (fawqiyyat al-qahr wa’l-ʿuluww al-maʿnawī). Classical Arabic usage confirms this: al-malik fawqa al-wazīr means that the king is above the vizier. In such constructions, fawqa regularly expresses a relation of dominion and excellence without any spatial implication. The Qurʾān itself uses fawqa in this sense.[19] There is therefore no Ashʿarī objection to affirming that God is fawqa the Throne, understood as His sovereignty over it, just as there is no objection to saying that the Creator is above the creation.
Equally unproblematic, on Readings 1 and 3, is the association of bi-dhātih with al-majīd rather than fawqa. To say that God is Majestic in His essence is a straightforward affirmation that His majesty is intrinsic and essential, not derived or conferred from outside. This is entirely consistent with Ashʿarī theology’s insistence on the necessity and self-sufficiency of divine attributes.[20] Similarly, on Reading 3, to say that the Throne is glorious in its own right, in its essential character, is an innocuous description of a created object.
The only reading that creates a potential theological difficulty is one version of Reading 2: that God is literally and spatially located above the Throne by His very essence. This would imply divine corporeality, directionality, and spatial containment, precisely what Ashʿarī theology denies.[21] But even here, the difficulty is not inherent: it depends on understanding aboveness as physical rather than metaphorical, and bi-dhātih as a qualifier of spatial presence rather than an affirmation of essential independence. If one understands the phrase to mean that God’s domination over the Throne is not conferred by another but belongs to Him essentially (bi-dhātih), the statement is again perfectly orthodox.
Of the meanings the phrase admits, only one—and not the most natural one—generates a theological difficulty. This singular problematic reading is, moreover, a product not of the phrase itself but of a specific choice of lexical and syntactic interpretation. It is this choice that the classical commentators subject to scrutiny, in two distinct modes: some argue that the phrase bi-dhātih was never written by Ibn Abī Zayd at all; others argue that the phrase, correctly read, does not bear the meaning the anthropomorphists assign to it.
Conclusion: What the Grammar Settles
That is where the grammar leaves us. The phrase does not compel the anthropomorphist reading; it merely permits it, and only on one construction among several. But what a phrase can mean is not the same as what its readers took it to mean. The next essay turns to the Mālikī commentators who confronted this very sentence long before the present controversy.
Notes:
[1] See H.R. Idris, “Deux juristes kairouanais de l’époque zīrīde,” Annales de l’Institut d’études orientales 12 (1954), on Ibn Abī Zayd and al-Qābisī as the twin authorities (al-shaykhān) of Kairouani Mālikism.
[2] All references to the Risāla are to the facsimile edition of Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī, al-Risāla, ed. Tawrātī (Tangier: Dār al-Ḥadīth al-Kattāniyya, 2015).
[3] On its medieval reception, see Ilyass Amharar, La foi qui hisse l’âme. Tawḥīd et sainteté au Maghreb au XVe siècle : Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-Sanūsī (m. 895/1490) à travers al-Mawāhib al-qudsiyya (biographie intellectuelle, édition critique partielle et traduction) (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).
[4] See, among them, the lessons on the ʿAqīda (creed) section of the Risāla delivered by the well-known Kuwaiti preacher ʿUthmān al-Khamīs: “Lesson Two (2/9): Introduction to Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī / Mafātīḥ al-Ṭalab 1446/2025,” February 3, 2025, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFX7eYBG8jM. The commentary of wa-annahu fawqa ʿarshihi comes at 30:40 (accessed August 1, 2026).
[5] See, e.g., ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Rājiḥī, Sharḥ ʿAqīdat Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī (2), shrajhi.com.sa/lessons/1252, where the phrase is glossed as the affirmation “that God is above the Throne by His essence (bi-dhātihi), settled upon it (mustaqirr) with an istiwāʾ whose modality is unknown.”
[6] For a discussion of this, see Ilyass Amharar, Faire revivre l’ashʿarisme chez les Mālikites: édition critique, traduction et étude d’un manuscrit inédit du Ḥathth ʿalā l-baḥth d’al-Ashʿarī commenté par Abū Bakr al-Ṭurṭūshī (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2026), 69.
[7] See the treatment of the preamble in al-Rājiḥī, Sharḥ ʿAqīdat Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī, which does not engage at all the biographical evidence discussed below.
[8] On the medieval reception of Ibn Abī Zayd’s Risāla and its theological preamble, see Amharar, La foi qui hisse l’âme.
[9] Ilyass Amharar, “De Bagdad à Séville: étude d’une généalogie du kalām, d’al-Ashʿarī à Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabī,” in Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabī (543/1148): Legacy and Transmission of the Thought of al-Ġazālī (505/1111) in al-Andalus (Leiden: Brill, 2024), 152–53.
[10] Amharar, “De Bagdad à Séville,” 152; Vincent Lagardère, “Une théologie dogmatique de la frontière en al-Andalus,” Anaquel de estudios árabes 5 (1994): 72.
[11] Lagardère, “Une théologie,” 72.
[12] Muḥammad Naṣīr, “Dawr al-Bāqillānī fī talqīn al-asānīd al-ashʿariyya bi-bilād al-maghrib,” in Al-fikr al-ashʿarī bi’l-maghrib: Khilāl marḥalatay al-taʾsīs wa’l-tarsīm, ed. Jamāl ʿAllāl al-Bakhtī (Rabat: Publications de la Rābiṭa Moḥammedienne des Savants, 2016), 69.
[13] Maribel Fierro, “The polemic about the karāmāt al-awliyāʾ,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 55 (1992): 236–49.
[14] Al-Bāqillānī, Kitāb al-Bayān ʿan al-farq bayna al-muʿjizāt wa’l-karāmāt wa’l-ḥiyal wa’l-kahāna wa’l-siḥr wa’l-nāranjāt, ed. Richard J. McCarthy (Beirut: al-Maktaba al-sharqiyya, 1958); see Amharar, “De Bagdad à Séville,” 153, n. 45.
[15] Naṣīr, “Dawr al-Bāqillānī,” 73.
[16] In the lesson cited above, for example, ʿUthmān al-Khamīs suggests that Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī affirms for God three forms of fawqiyya: superiority in rank (fawqiyyat al-qadr), superiority through dominion (fawqiyyat al-qahr), and superiority in place (fawqiyyat al-makān).
[17] On the Ashʿarī doctrine of the divine attributes, see Daniel Gimaret, La doctrine d’al-Ashʿarī (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1990), esp. on the ṣifāt, 245–46.
[18] See among those: Shihāb al-Dīn al-Nafrāwī, al-Fawākih al-dawānī ʿalā Risālat Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1995); Aḥmad Zarrūq al-Fāsī, Sharḥ Zarrūq ʿalā Matn al-Risāla, ed. Aḥmad Farīd al-Mazīdī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2006).
[19] See, for example, Qurʾān 16:50: yakhāfūna rabbahum min fawqihim (which would be literally translated by: “they fear their Lord from above them”) and Qurʾān 7:127: wa-innā fawqahum qāhirūn (which would be literally translated by: “and we are above them, dominant”), where the speakers are Pharaoh’s people asserting mastery over the Israelites, not spatial position.
[20] Gimaret, La doctrine d’al-Ashʿarī, 247–58.
[21] Gimaret, La doctrine d’al-Ashʿarī, 254–56.
Suggested Bluebook citation: Ilyass Amharar, Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī, Ashʿarism, and the Politics of a Phrase: A Case Study in Historiographical Anachronism (Aug. 20, 2026), https://islamiclaw.blog/2026/08/20/ibn-abi-zayd-al-qayrawani-ash%ca%bfarism-and-the-politics-of-a-phrase-a-case-study-in-historiographical-anachronism/.
Suggested Chicago citation: Ilyass Amharar, “Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī, Ashʿarism, and the Politics of a Phrase: A Case Study in Historiographical Anachronism,” Islamic Law Blog, August 20, 2026, https://islamiclaw.blog/2026/08/20/ibn-abi-zayd-al-qayrawani-ash%ca%bfarism-and-the-politics-of-a-phrase-a-case-study-in-historiographical-anachronism/.
