Ibn al-Rawandi

Some time in the ninth century, in Baghdad, a theologian met another on the bridge over the Tigris. The older man was Abu Ali al-Jubbai, a master of the rationalist school of Islamic theology called the Mu'tazila. The younger was Ibn al-Rawandi, who had once been the brightest student of that school and had since written a book meant to rival the Qur'an. He offered to read it aloud. Al-Jubbai declined, and asked him one question instead: did he find in his own composition the sweetness, the grace and the order of the Qur'an's words? "No, by God," Ibn al-Rawandi said. "Then you have settled it for me," al-Jubbai answered. "Go where you please."¹²

The story was told by his enemies, like every story about him. None of his books survives. What we know of the man who argued that prophets were unnecessary comes from the men who wrote to refute him, and from the passages of his own they copied out in order to answer them. This chapter asks what can be known of why a gifted theologian turned against revelation itself, and how much of it is only what his opponents said.

A youth among their youth

His name was Abu'l-Husayn Ahmad ibn Yahya ibn Ishaq al-Rawandi.³ The family name points to a village called Rawand, which one medieval writer placed near Kashan in Persia; the same writer also called him a man of Marw al-Rudh, further east, and accounts differ.⁴ He was born, by every account, in the first decades of the ninth century, between about 820 and 831, and he lived in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid caliphs.⁵⁴

He came up among the Mu'tazila, the school of theologians who taught that God is just and one, and that human reason can judge questions of faith. His chief refuter, the Mu'tazili al-Khayyat, remembered him as "one of their followers, a youth among their youth, attending their sessions and learning from their elders."⁶⁷ Another Mu'tazili, al-Balkhi, who had no reason to flatter him, said that in his day "none was more skilled in kalam," the art of theological argument, and that at the start of his career he was "of good conduct and praiseworthy doctrine and very modest."⁸⁹ His early books were the ordinary work of a rising theologian: on the creation of the Qur'an, on the beginning and return of things, on the nature of motion. Al-Balkhi called them "books of his righteousness."¹⁰

No childhood faith or early crisis is recorded. On the belief timeline, his faith stands for these Mu'tazili years, and like every mark in this life it carries no date, because the sources give none.

The break

Then, in al-Balkhi's words, "he stripped himself of all this for reasons that befell him."⁹ Al-Khayyat said simply that he "turned to unbelief in his religion and denied his Creator," and that the Mu'tazila cast him out.⁶⁷ Already, by al-Khayyat's account, he was afraid: he wrote a book on the unity of God "to win favour with the people of Islam when he feared for himself and a watch was set for him."¹¹

Why he turned is the oldest question about him, and only his enemies answered it. Al-Balkhi said that his knowledge "was greater than his intellect."⁹ Al-Khayyat said the Mu'tazila were "the hardest of people on him," that most of them cut him off, and that he was left "an outcast, alone," until rage carried him to the Shi'a, "since he found no sect of the community that would take him."¹²¹³ Ibn al-Murtada, a much later chronicler of the school, wrote that he took thirty dinars from the Shi'a for a book on the imamate.¹⁴ One report gives an answer in his own voice. When he was blamed for keeping company with unbelievers, he is said to have replied, "I only want to know their doctrines."¹⁵ Since none of his books survives, no one can now say for certain which of these is true, or whether his later books were the work of a convinced unbeliever or of a brilliant debater testing how far an argument would go. The sources reached for this book do not settle it.

The first book of the break was an attack on his old school. The Mu'tazili writer al-Jahiz had written The Excellence of the Mu'tazila; Ibn al-Rawandi answered it with The Disgrace of the Mu'tazila.¹⁶ It was a damaging book. The school's other enemies drew on it for centuries, and much of what later heresy-hunters said about the Mu'tazila came from it.¹⁶ It survives only because al-Khayyat, writing around the turn of the tenth century, quoted it section by section in order to refute it, and from his reply the Uppsala scholar H. S. Nyberg, who printed it at Cairo in 1925, could reconstruct long passages.¹⁷¹⁸¹⁹ On the timeline, his doubt is placed at this break.

Against the prophets

Then came the books that made his name a byword. The medieval reports list The Crown, arguing that the world is eternal; The Emerald, against the prophets; The Unique, against the Prophet Muhammad; and The Refutation, against the Qur'an; about 114 books in all, one biographer said.²⁰²¹ At the end of his reply al-Khayyat put the charge to him directly: "your doctrine is dahr and the eternity of the world," the doctrine that the world was never created.²² His declaration is placed with these books.

The fragments that survive come through his opponents, and they are sharp. He explained, by al-Balkhi's account, why he called his book The Emerald: "it is a property of the emerald that when snakes look at it they melt and run; so too with this book, when an adversary reads it he melts away."²³ In it, al-Balkhi reported, he wrote that "we find in the speech of Aktham ibn Sayfi," a sage of Arabia before Islam, "something better than 'We have given you the Kawthar,'" a short chapter of the Qur'an.²⁴ He said the prophets had worked on people with talismans; the printed word is uncertain, and Nyberg thought it meant that they performed conjuring tricks.²⁵ Al-Balkhi also reported his argument that a God whose only remedy is killing, like an enraged enemy, has no need of a book or a messenger.²⁶ And he pointed to what he called contradictions in the Qur'an, setting the verse that says God knows every leaf that falls beside one in which God says He changed the direction of prayer "only that We might know" who would follow.²⁷

The Refutation went furthest. By the account of the Fihrist, Ibn al-Nadim's catalogue of Arabic books, its purpose was to prove, by writing better, that the Qur'an's style was not the miracle Muslims held it to be.²⁸ That is the book he offered to read to al-Jubbai on the bridge, and on the bridge, by al-Jubbai's account, he admitted that it fell short.¹²

His old school had lost its standing too. The caliph al-Mutawakkil, who came to power in 847, ended the official favour the Mu'tazila had enjoyed under his predecessors.²⁹ Several reports say that Ibn al-Rawandi himself was hunted by the authorities.³⁰

Flight

How he ended is told several ways. Al-Jubbai said the authorities sought both Ibn al-Rawandi and the freethinker Abu Isa al-Warraq; Abu Isa was imprisoned until he died, and Ibn al-Rawandi fled to a Jewish patron, wrote The Refutation for him, and died a few days later. Al-Balkhi said he died in the house of Abu Isa the Jew at Ahwaz, in south-western Persia, and that most of his books were written for that man. Another chronicler put the Jewish patron at Kufa. A hostile reporter said he wrote a book for the Jews for a few dirhams and agreed to stop refuting it only when they paid him a hundred more.²¹³⁰ Another report said his father had been a Jew who converted to Islam.¹⁵

The date of his death is just as uncertain. The historian al-Masudi placed it in 245 of the Islamic calendar, about 860, when he would have been about forty; others gave 250, and others 298 or 301, about 910 to 914. Nyberg argued that he must have lived into the later period, since he answered al-Jahiz, who died in 868, but the question is not closed.³¹³²

The repentance

A story was told that he repented. Al-Balkhi wrote that "a group have related that at his death he repented of what he had done, showed regret and admitted that he had arrived at it out of pique and pride at the harshness of his companions."³³³⁴ Other reports recorded that al-Khayyat denied it.³³ On the timeline, his revision stands for this dispute, not for a known change of mind.

The poet's verdict

More than a century after his death, the blind poet Abu al-Ala al-Maarri, himself suspected of unbelief, wrote an epistle about heaven and hell and gave Ibn al-Rawandi a place among the heretics.³⁵ Al-Maarri said that "heretic and churchman, conformist and nonconformist, are agreed" that the Qur'an "overcame and disabled and caused his enemies to shiver when confronted with it."³⁶ He had heard that some of Ibn al-Rawandi's followers called him "the abode of deity," "divinely inspired with knowledge," and he dismissed it: "for all this, he is an infidel."³⁷³⁸ Then he quoted a couplet attributed to him, addressed to God: "Thou didst apportion the means of livelihood to Thy creatures like a drunkard who shows himself churlish."³⁹

Nicholson, the poet's English translator, found the rebuke hard to take at face value, since al-Maarri had written an imitation of the Qur'an himself. He wondered whether the poet had used Ibn al-Rawandi as a scapegoat to turn suspicion away from himself.⁴⁰ Even the condemnation, then, may have been a disguise.

What is left

Ibn al-Rawandi's arguments outlived his books because his enemies could not stop answering them. Al-Khayyat, al-Jubbai, Abu Hashim, and the Shi'i theologian al-Nawbakhti each wrote refutations, and he is said to have written one of his own Refutation.²⁰ A biographer of the thirteenth century, Ibn Khallikan, who did not share his views, still called him "one of the learned men of his age."⁴¹ What made him stop believing, if he did, is known only in his opponents' words: wounded pride, ambition, money, or the plain pursuit of an argument. What he argued is clearer. A God who can do anything has no need of messengers, and a book is not proved divine by its style. He made both arguments in Baghdad more than a thousand years ago, and they survive only because other men copied them out in order to refute them.

Ajita Kesakambali, another unbeliever known only through the opponents who recorded his teaching, has his own chapter in this book.