Debate Mutazilah to Ibn Khaldun on God's Attributes

'Jewish and Islamic Philosophy: Crosspollinations in the Classic Age', 'Free will and predestination in early Islam', 'God and His Attributes: Lessons on Islamic Doctrine (Foundations of Islamic Doctrine)', 'Doctrines & Dogmas of the Mutazilites: The Rationalists of Islam', 'Ibn Khaldun: An Essay in Reinterpretation (Medievalia Series)', 'Suffering in Mutazilite Theology: Abd Al-Jabbar's Teaching on Pain and Divine Justice (Islamic Philosophy, Theology, and Science)', 'The Epistemology of Ibn Khaldun (Culture and Civilization in the Middle East)', 'Religious Philosophy: A Group of Essays', 'Muslim-Christian Polemic During the Crusades: The Letter From the People of Cyprus and Ibn Abi Talib Al-Dimashqi's Response (The History of Christian-Muslim ... (The History of Christian-Muslim Relations)', 'Lectures in divinity: Delivered in the Wesleyan Theological Institution, Richmond : volume first, containing the attributes of God, and the doctrine of the Holy Trinity',

Kalam, Science of Debate:
Ilm al-Kalam is a branch of Islamic thought generally referred to as Fiquhe. The Kalam philosophic discipline, which evolved from religious debates and political controversies that engulfed the Islamic state in its formative theocratic years, deals with interpretations of religious doctrine and its interpretation and defence by discursive arguments.
The rise of kalam was closely associated with the Mu'tazila, a rationalist school that emerged at the beginning of the second century seventh century AD, and became prominent in the next century. The Mu'tazila failed to follow up their intellectual and political position by imposing their views as official state doctrine lead to a resurgence of traditionalism and the emergence of the Ash'ariyya school, which attempted to present itself as a compromise between the two opposing extremes. However, kalam's problem was not so much its fusion with philosophy as its failure to evolve into a fully-fledged philosophical system with its own complete frame of reference.

Unity and Justice of God:
Mu'tazilism sought to valorize, under the attacks of the zanadiqa (Heretics), the absolute Unity and the absolute Justice of God; but this valorization quite quickly becomes, thanks to the arguments advanced to bring conviction, a 'justification': the divine Essence and Action become justified before and through human reason ('aql). It is to counter this reduction of the mystery that the Ash'aris take their stand, proclaiming the Omnipotence and the Omniscience of God, rejecting any ontological basis for human freedom of action, but seeking to refute the Mu'tazilis (using the same weapons as they) and at the same time, on the other flank, anthropomorphists of every shade.

God's Eternal Attributes:
The first principle denied the distinction between God's eternal attributes and His essence.This raised a question concerning the concept of divine will in
relation to the doctrine of the world's temporal creation. Most of the Mu`tazilites rejected Aristotle's theory of the potentially infinite divisibility of substance, adopting atomism as the only view consistent with the Qur'anic statement that God knows the determinate number of all things. Its principal dogmas were three:
a. God is an absolute unity, and no attribute can be ascribed to Him.
b. Man is a free agent. It is on account of these two principles that the Motazilites designate themselves the "Partisans of Justice and Unity".
c. All knowledge necessary for the salvation of man emanates from his reason; humans could acquire knowledge before, as well as after, Revelation, by the sole light of reason. This fact makes knowledge obligatory upon all men, at all times, and in all places.

Attributes and Trinity:
As far as the Sunni Muslim concept of Attributes is concerned, it can be shown that their position is almost like the orthodox Christian position. If one is to put the Muslim Attributes in place of the second and third persons of the Trinity, the doctrine of the Trinity is transformed into Muslim Attributism. However, unlike the second and third persons of the Trinity, which are intradeical and extradeical by unification, that is, they were at once the same as God and other than He, these orthodox Muslim attributes were intradeical and extradeical by location, that is, they were in God but other than He. Whereas the unorthodox position of the Anti-attributists in Islam corresponds to Sabellianism in Christianity.

Mutazilah on causality:
The doctrine of the world's eternity, the Mutazili maintained, deprived God of will. It meant the simultaneity of cause and effect which only obtains, as in natural causes, when the effect is necessitated by the agent's nature or essence. Here, however, their principle of divine unity faced a major difficulty: if the divine will is conceived as an eternal attribute and hence not distinct from the divine essence, God's acts become in reality essential, not voluntary. This led many Mu`tazilites to argue that the divine will itself is created—a doctrine vulnerable to the Ash`arite criticism that such a will requires another created will to create it and so on ad infinitum.

Last of Mu'tazilah:
Abu Hashim 'Abd al-Salam, d. 933 AD, was a contemporary of al-Ash'ari, and one of the very last Mu'tazila to exercise a direct influence on Sunni thought.
He was known chiefly for his theories of modes (Alahwal), a sort of conceptualism which was to exert great influence on philosophy on the one hand, and on the later kalam on the other. It was on the question of the relationship between the divine attributes and the divine essence that the problem was raised. Anxiety to safeguard the absolute Unity of God led the Mu'tazila, and even al-Jubba'i, to 'extenuate' the reality of the attributes to the point of turning them into simple denominations.

Ibn Khaldun's Life & culture:
Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun was born in Tunisia in 1332 AD. Ibn Khaldun lived at a time when it was possible to reflect upon a long and profound period of Islamic thought, and he seems to have felt that part of his function as a writer was to sum up this period, with the further aim of pointing towards the future of Islamic intellectual enquiry. As one would expect, he used the terms and concepts of his time, and some have argued that he was a culturally-specific phenomenon so that any attempt at interpreting his thought in Western terms must distort it fatally.
Ibn Khaldun's fourteenth century, was dominated by 'neo-Hanbalism', which aired strong suspicion of both mysticism and philosophy. He refers to the intellect as like a balance which is meant for gold, but which is sometimes used for weighing mountains. Logic cannot be applied to this area of enquiry, and must be restricted to non-theological topics