Matn al-Muqaddimat (Arabic text of al-Sanusi)

Overview

This document is a short set of Muqaddimat—foundational premises—for studying Ash‘ari theology. It functions like a technical glossary and conceptual map: before proving doctrines about Allah, prophecy, and accountability, it defines the kinds of judgments, the limits of causality, the meaning of rational necessity and impossibility, and key divine attributes.

Structure

1. Hukm (judgment) is introduced as affirming or negating something, then divided into three kinds: shar‘i revealed/legal judgment, ‘adi customary/empirical judgment, and ‘aqli rational judgment.
2. Shar‘i judgment is explained through legal categories: obligation, recommendation, prohibition, dislikedness, permissibility, and legal designations such as cause, condition, and preventer.
3. ‘Adi judgment explains empirical regularity: things are connected through repeated experience, but not by intrinsic causal power.
4. ‘Aqli judgment explains what the intellect judges as necessary, impossible, or possible.
5. The text then addresses human action: Jabriyya, Qadariyya, and Ahl al-Sunna, with the Ash‘ari doctrine of kasb acquisition.
6. It classifies types of shirk, roots of unbelief and innovation, and errors concerning causality and interpretation.
7. It gives a brief ontology of existing things: Allah’s Essence, divine attributes, bodies, and accidents.
8. It closes with definitions of major divine attributes such as power, will, knowledge, life, hearing, sight, and speech, then defines truth, falsehood, trustworthiness, and betrayal.

How to read it

Read this as a toolkit of technical terms, not as a full argument. Many definitions are compressed and assume later explanation. Pay close attention to the difference between:

• rational necessity and empirical regularity;
• legal causation in Sacred Law and ordinary causation in the created world;
• Allah’s pre-eternal attributes and created, changing human attributes.

A key Ash‘ari theme throughout is that repeated patterns in the world are real as habits or customs, but created things do not possess independent causal power. Allah alone creates effects.