Moral Agents and Their Deserts: The Character of Mu'tazilite Ethics.

• Author: Zysow, Aron
• Position: Book review

Moral Agents and Their Deserts: The Character of Mu'tazilite Ethics. By SOPHIA VASALOU. Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008. Pp. xiii + 252. $39.50.

Sophia Vasalou has written an unusually intelligent inquiry into a number of questions in Mu'tazilite ethics, those centered around the concept of istihqaq, a term that she renders as "desert." This translation is one that she is at pains to defend, as her study is heavily informed by contemporary philosophical interest in what would she would want us to regard as the very same topic of desert. Her focus is primarily on the relationship between humans and God as the parties joined by the relationship of desert, at the expense of other elements in the desert complex. Thus she presents the specific types of action, both human and divine, that ground assertions of desert largely as necessary background to her study, and she shows even less interest in the actions that are rendered as desert: most importantly, praise and blame, reward and punishment. In addition to her exploration of the nature of the desert nexus, she is primarily intent on minutely examining two issues: what is the mechanism that leads from action to desert (she takes it as causal), and what, for the Mu'tazilites, constitutes the moral self that figures in the various ascriptions of desert that accumulate over a lifetime and that, according to Islamic opinion, somehow survives death. Along the way she makes forays into metaphysics, the basic Mu'tazilite ontology of substances and their accidents, and causation, and she even delves into matters usually assigned to Islamic law, viz., rights/claims (huquq) and legal capacity (dhinuma).

Vasalou is concerned with the Basran Mu'tazilites, as it is their writings that have survived in sufficient number to form the basis for the kind of study she has in mind. The most important figure in the book is al-qadi 'Abd al-Jabbar (d. 415/1025), whose extensive work al-Mughni is one of Vasalou's main sources, but the difficulties involved in using this enormous work are well known and persuasively presented by Vasalou herself (pp. 8-9). She wisely made extensive use of shorter and more accessible works in the generation following that of 'Abd al-Jabbar--the Majmu' of 'Abd al-Jabbar's student Ibn Mattawayh (II. first half fifth/eleventh century), of which three parts of four have been published, and the by now well-known Sharh al-usul al-khamsa of the Caspian Zaydi Mankdim (d. 425/1034). References to these works abound in the body of her work and rather inconveniently in the extensive endnotes, but the book incorporates relatively few translated passages, an omission that Vasalou defends as directed at achieving clarity of exposition (p. 11). As a sort of compensation, she provides an appendix of some fifteen pages in which pertinent portions of Mankdim's Sharh are translated. The translation is probably as readable as one could hope for, with only a few minor errors, but it is provided with virtually no explanatory notes, a notable drawback as Mankdim's relatively brief discussion already raises matters not explained anywhere in the book (e.g., "joy" mentioned on p. 185).

Inasmuch as according to the book's preface, Vasalou has in mind a readership unfamiliar with Mu'tazilite thought (but apparently versed in modem moral theory), the first chapter seeks to introduce the reader to this theological tradition. As an Islamicist I find this effort unsuccessful. The Ash'arites, according to Vasalou "arguably the most prominent theological tradition in medieval Islam," are introduced before the Mu'tazilites, whose theology is thus presented as the background for al-Ash'ari's famous defection. The exposition of the leading Mu'tazilite principles is diffuse, and I suspect that a novice would be thoroughly lost within the first few pages. Mankdim first appears on p. 5, but no explanation, other than a brief reference to an...