By Ilyass Amharar
Where the Previous Essay Left Off
The previous essay set out the grammatical anatomy of the phrase fawqa ʿarshihi al-majīd bi-dhātih (and that He is above His glorious Throne by His essence) in the theological preamble to Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī’s (d. 386/996) Risāla (Treatise). The essay reached a deliberately narrow conclusion.[1] Of the readings the Arabic admits, only one produces a theological difficulty. Such a reading is neither the most naturally available nor the one the tradition adopted. The question that remains is historical rather than grammatical: what did Mālikī readers actually do with this sentence? They noticed the difficulty early, and they addressed it in two distinct ways: by questioning whether Ibn Abī Zayd wrote the words at all, and by establishing their correct reading. This essay follows both lines of response, then turns to the one early Mālikī figure who complicates the argument of this series.
Two Classical Strategies: Interpolation and Correct Reading
Several major classical commentators on the Risāla advance the position that bi-dhātih (by His essence/in itself) is not an authentic part of Ibn Abī Zayd’s text but was inserted into it at some point in the manuscript tradition, a phenomenon known in Arabic textual scholarship as dass (clandestine insertion).
For example, Ibn Nājī al-Tanūkhī (d. 837/1433), in what is one of the most authoritative classical commentaries on the Risāla, states:
This is among what has been criticized against the Sheikh [Ibn Abī Zayd], may God have mercy on him, regarding his saying bi-dhātih, for it is an addition beyond the scriptural text (ziyāda ʿalā al-naṣṣ). Some consider him to have erred, and others offer an excuse for him. Al-Fākihānī [d. 734/1334] said: I heard our teacher Abū ʿAlī al-Bajāʾī [a Mālikī scholar of Bijāya, death date uncertain] say that this expression was inserted into the author’s text (dussat ʿalā al-muʾallif); if this is verified, there is no objection against the Sheikh. [2]
For those who accept the authenticity of bi-dhātih but deny the anthropomorphist reading, the most philologically rigorous response belongs to Ibn Abī Jamra (d. 699/1300). In his Bahjat al-nufūs (Delight of Souls), a commentary on an abridgment of al-Bukhārī’s (d. 256/870) Ṣaḥīḥ, he directly addresses the uses anthropomorphist polemicists (mujassima) made of the phrase. His response is syntactic:
They have no proof in it because they have read al-majīd (the Glorious/the glorious) in the genitive case as a description of the Throne and have misattributed this reading to the Imām (the master) [Ibn Abī Zayd]. The correct reading (al-wajh fīhi) is to put al-majīd in the nominative case as a second predicate, because the statement is complete with fawqa ʿarshih, and al-majīdu bi-dhātih is a new, independent clause (kalām mustaʾnaf). [3]
In the same passage, Ibn Abī Jamra goes further, stating that anthropomorphist polemicists slandered Ibn Abī Zayd by attributing to him statements he never made.
On this reading, the phrase decomposes into two entirely separate theological assertions: (a) God is above His Throne (fawqa ʿarshih), understood in the non-spatial sense of dominion; (b) God is Majestic in His essence (al-majīdu bi-dhātih), meaning His majesty is intrinsic and essential. Neither statement implies spatial localization. Both are impeccably orthodox on Ashʿarī terms.
Furthermore, the phrase fawqa ʿarshihī l-majīd bi-dhātih contains a precise Qurʾānic echo: dhū al-ʿarshi al-majīd (“Lord of the Glorious Throne”). This verse exhibits the same syntactic ambiguity: is al-majīd an attribute of the Throne or of God?[4] Among the qurrāʾ (canonical Qurʾān reciters), Nāfiʿ al-Madanī (d. 169/785) reads al-majīdu in the nominative case, making it unambiguously an attribute of God rather than the Throne.
Nāfiʿ was no peripheral figure in the Mālikī world: Mālik (d. 179/795) himself declared his recitation to be sunna (normative practice). Nāfiʿ’s two principal transmitters, Warsh (d. 197/812) and Qālūn (d. 220/835), remain the normative references for Qurʾānic recitation across the Maghrib to this day. Recent scholarship strongly suggests that this tradition was already dominant in Kairouan during Ibn Abī Zayd’s lifetime.[5] It is therefore historically plausible, and may be the most informed hypothesis available, that when Ibn Abī Zayd wrote al-majīd bi-dhātih, he was echoing Nāfiʿ’s reading.
This hypothesis finds a further, if later, confirmation in the recitation practice prescribed by al-Ḥabṭī (d. 930/1524), the celebrated Moroccan authority on waqf (pausal recitation) whose system became a standard reference across the Maghrib.[6] Regarding the recitation of Qurʾān 85:15, al-Ḥabṭī recommends pausing at al-ʿarsh and resuming at al-majīd, thereby making it aurally unambiguous that al-majīd belongs to God rather than to the Throne.[7] Whatever his explicit theological motivations, al-Ḥabṭī’s prescriptive pause enacts aurally precisely what Ibn Abī Jamra had argued grammatically: al-majīd is not an attribute of the Throne. The convergence of Nāfiʿ’s canonical reading, the historical likelihood that it was normative in Ibn Abī Zayd’s Kairouan, and al-Ḥabṭī’s later pausal prescription all point in the same direction.
Together they constitute an observation that, to my knowledge, has not previously been made in the commentary literature on the Risāla.
The accumulated weight of these considerations does not allow certainty about Ibn Abī Zayd’s exact meaning. What it does allow, with considerable confidence, is the conclusion that the simple literalist reading those contemporary Salafī commentators offer is neither the only possible reading nor the most philologically and historically informed one. To present it as self-evident is to mistake a polemically useful interpretation for a scholarly one.
Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr: The Real Counterpoint
One figure remains to be faced before this series closes: the one most available to those who argue for a strand of Mālikī traditionalism actually resistant to kalām (speculative theology) and Ashʿarism: Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr (d. 463/1071).
A near-contemporary of Ibn Abī Zayd, Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr is a figure of immense stature in the Mālikī tradition, often described as “the Bukhārī of the West” for his command of ḥadīth (prophetic tradition) scholarship.[8] He is the author of the two great Mālikī commentaries on Mālik’s Muwaṭṭaʾ (The Well-Trodden Path): al-Tamhīd (The Groundwork), which treats the work’s traditions ḥadīth by ḥadīth, and al-Istidhkār (The Recollection), which reorders the same material as a running juridical commentary.
Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr did not embrace kalām and does not appear to have been an Ashʿarī. He transmitted, in his Jāmiʿ bayān al-ʿilm wa-faḍlih (Compendium on Knowledge and Its Merit),[9] passages asserting that practitioners of kalām were to be classified among the people of innovation (ahl al-bidʿa) whose legal testimony was inadmissible. Salafī authors have made extensive use of this passage as evidence for a deeply rooted anti-Ashʿarī current within Mālikism.[10]
Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr presents a genuinely puzzling theological profile, one that makes him, for all his towering authority in ḥadīth, a deeply problematic figure in Ashʿarī eyes. Several features of his profile converge here: He had a past association with Ẓāhirism and an intellectual proximity to Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064); He was consistently hostile to kalām, as his Jāmiʿ bayān al-ʿilm shows; He never travelled to the Islamic East. These traits combine with a series of passages in his Tamhīd that strike Ashʿarī readers as either naively literalist or tendentiously ambiguous in their treatment of the anthropomorphic ḥadīths; he is neither a convinced mujassim nor a straightforwardly orthodox muʾawwil (one who reads such texts figuratively). He occasionally refuses to attribute physical movement (intiqāl) to God, gesturing toward the tanzīh (divine transcendence) that Ashʿarīs and Muʿtazilīs share. Yet elsewhere he offers formulations that sit uncomfortably close to the kind of literalism he officially condemns.[11] The cumulative paradox was not lost on later Sunnī scholarship: the Ḥanbalī Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201), himself a fierce opponent of tajsīm (anthropomorphism), wrote of Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr with barely concealed contempt: “This is the speech of one ignorant of the knowledge of God,” after finding in the Tamhīd the claim that the ḥadīth al-nuzūl (the Descent report) proves God is literally upon the Throne.[12] The traditionist ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-ʿIrāqī (d. 806/1403) was still more blunt, warning his readers to “beware of him!”[13]
Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr was, in short, a great authority in ḥaddith and a great Mālikī jurist, but he was not a theologian. This may explain his resistance to kalām. Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr is an important scholar who occupied a minority position on a specific question; he is not a reliable guide to the whole of early Mālikī thought on theology.
Conclusion: History as Mirror
The four essays in this series have traced an arc from Baghdad to Kairouan to Fez, following the earliest documented encounters between Mālikism and Ashʿarism in the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries. What emerges is a picture fundamentally at odds with the narrative of original separation that certain contemporary discourses have labored to construct.
From the very first generation of al-Ashʿarī’s (d. 324/936) disciples, a Mālikī jurist, Ibn Mujāhid (d. ca. 370/980), incarnated the alliance. Al-Bāqillānī (d. 403/1012), the architect of Ashʿarism as an organized school, was himself Mālikī. Al-Darrās (d. 357/968) introduced the Mudawwana to Fez and defended al-Ashʿarī. Al-Qābisī (d. 403/1012) was classified as an Ashʿarī by eastern biographers. Abū ʿImrān al-Fāsī (d. 430/1038) received al-Bāqillānī’s ijāza (teaching license) and transmitted the tradition that would shape the Almoravid movement. And Ibn Abī Zayd al-Qayrawānī, the “Little Mālik,” corresponded with Ashʿarī scholars, defended al-Ashʿarī in writing, and consulted al-Bāqillānī on theological questions.
The contemporary effort to supplant this history in favor of a clean, original separation between Mālikism and kalām is a project of identity formation that uses the authority of the past to adjudicate present-day debates about the proper character of Sunnī Islam. As a historiographical project, it is marked by anachronism, the imposition of later, rigid categories onto an earlier, fluid intellectual environment, and selectivity in its use of sources. Naming these features is a methodological observation rather than a polemical one, and each can be tested against the biographical and commentarial record.
What the evidence of the formative period actually shows is a tradition in the process of self-construction, in which the boundaries between law and theology, between fiqh (law) and kalām, between the transmitted and the rational, were negotiated case by case, scholar by scholar, ijāza by ijāza, through networks of human relationship that crisscrossed the Islamic world along the routes of pilgrimage, commerce, and the tireless quest for knowledge. That tradition deserves to be understood on its own terms and in its full complexity, not refracted through the simplifying lens of later polemical necessity.
Notes:
[1] 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).
[2] Ibn Nājī, Sharḥ Ibn Nājī ʿalā matn al-Risāla (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2007), 1:24.
[3] Ibn Abī Jamra, Bahjat al-nufūs wa-taḥallīhā bi-maʿrifat mā lahā wa-mā ʿalayhā (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Ṣidq al-khayriyya, 1930), 36.
[4] Qurʾān 85:15.
[5] Abū Bakr al-Mālikī, Riyāḍ al-Nufūs fī ṭabaqāt ʿulamāʾ al-Qayrawān wa-Ifrīqiya, ed. Bashīr al-Bakkūsh (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1994), 1:364. I received this information from Muḥammad al-Ṭabarānī’s conference, “Min manāṭāt al-irtibāṭ al-tārīkhī bayn qirāʾat Nāfiʿ wa-madhhab Mālik,” held in Fes, Morocco, July 25–26, 2022.
[6] Al-Ḥabṭī’s system of waqf (pausal notation) has governed Qurʾānic recitation in Morocco for centuries; it was adopted as the reference for the muṣḥaf printed by the Mohammed VI Foundation for the Publication of the Holy Qurʾān.
[7] See the muṣḥaf printed by the Mohammed VI Foundation for the Publication of the Holy Qurʾān, Q 85:15, which follows al-Ḥabṭī’s pausal notation.
[8] On Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr’s standing as a traditionist, see al-Dhahabī, Siyar aʿlām al-nubalāʾ (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 2001), 18:157, where he is described as “an imām, devout, trustworthy, exacting, vastly learned,” and noted as having been an Atharī-Ẓāhirī before turning Mālikī; 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 (De Gruyter, 2026), 66.
[9] See, for example, Abū ʿUmar Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, Jāmiʿ bayān al-ʿilm wa-faḍlih (Dammam: Dār Ibn al-Jawzī, 1994), 2:931 (no. 1770).
[10] Amharar, Faire revivre l’ashʿarisme chez les Mālikites, 66.
[11] Amharar, Faire revivre l’ashʿarisme chez les Mālikites, 66.
[12] Ibn al-Jawzī, Ṣayd al-khāṭir (Damascus: Dār al-Qalam, 2004), 99.
[13] Al-ʿIrāqī, Ṭarḥ al-tathrīb (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-ʿarabī, n.d.), 2:383.
Suggested Bluebook citation: Ilyass Amharar, The Commentators’ Answer to the Controversial Sentence of the Risāla: How the Mālikī Tradition Read Fawqa ʿArshihī al-Majīd bi-Dhātih, Islamic Law Blog (Aug. 27, 2026), https://islamiclaw.blog/2026/08/27/the-commentators-answer-to-the-controversial-sentence-of-the-risala-how-the-maliki-tradition-read-fawqa-%ca%bfarshihi-al-majid-bi-dhatih/.
Suggested Chicago citation: Ilyass Amharar, “The Commentators’ Answer to the Controversial Sentence of the Risāla: How the Mālikī Tradition Read Fawqa ʿArshihī al-Majīd bi-Dhātih,” Islamic Law Blog, August 27, 2026, https://islamiclaw.blog/2026/08/27/the-commentators-answer-to-the-controversial-sentence-of-the-risala-how-the-maliki-tradition-read-fawqa-%ca%bfarshihi-al-majid-bi-dhatih/.
