Divine command theory in Islam
Sunni orthodoxy under the Ash'ari school adopted one of the most thoroughgoing divine command theories in any religious tradition — God's commands constitute the moral law, full stop — against the rationalist Mu'tazila who held that good and evil are intelligible to reason independently of revelation.
The Islamic dispute over the metaphysics of morality is older and sharper than its Christian counterpart, and the dominant outcome is more thoroughly voluntarist. Two schools defined the medieval debate. The Mu'tazila, rationalists who flourished in ninth-century Baghdad, held that moral properties are objective features of acts that human reason can discern independently of revelation: justice is just because it is just, and God commands it because of that. The Ash'ariyya, founded by al-Ash'ari (d. 936), rejected this. Acts are good or evil only because God designates them so. To say otherwise, the Ash'aris argued, is to subject God to a standard above himself.
Ash'ari ethics — which became the dominant Sunni position — is therefore a strong divine command theory by any taxonomy. Al-Ghazali defended this position eloquently in al-Mustasfa: reason can recognize prudential good (what serves human interests) but cannot determine moral obligation, which depends entirely on the Lawgiver's command transmitted through the Qur'an, the Sunna, and the consensus (ijma) of the community. The Maturidi school, prominent in Central Asia and South Asia, took an intermediate position: reason can grasp the broad goodness of acts like honesty and the wrongness of acts like injustice, but specific obligations require revelation.
Contemporary Muslim ethicists work in this inheritance. Reformist thinkers like Fazlur Rahman and Khaled Abou El Fadl have pressed for a more substantive role for moral reason within Islamic jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh), partly to address modern human-rights concerns the Ash'ari framework handles awkwardly. Conservative scholarship maintains the classical position that reason serves revelation rather than judging it. The Shi'a Twelver tradition is closer to the Mu'tazila on this question, holding that God acts according to objective justice — a doctrinal divergence with real consequences for legal reasoning.
- al-Ash'ari— Founder of Ash'arism; divine command voluntarism
- al-Ghazali— Al-Mustasfa; reason limited to prudential, not moral, judgment
- Mu'tazila— Rationalist objectivism (Abd al-Jabbar et al.)
- al-Maturidi— Intermediate position on reason and revelation
- Fazlur Rahman— Modern reformist ethics within Islamic jurisprudence
“Allah commands justice, the doing of good, and liberality to kith and kin, and He forbids all shameful deeds, and injustice and rebellion.”
“There is no judge but Allah; whoever judges by other than what Allah has revealed, those are the disbelievers.”
“Reason is incapable of perceiving the goodness or badness of acts in themselves; goodness and badness are predicated of acts only in relation to the Law.”