Jahmiyya

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Jahmiyya is a term used by Islamic scholars to refer to the followers of the doctrines of Jahm bin Safwan (d. 128/746).^[1] The Jahmiyya particularly came to be remembered for advocating for the denial or negation of God's divine attributes (known as the doctrine of taʿṭīl)^[2] as a product of their extreme beliefs regarding affirming God's transcendentness from limits, potentially following late antique Neoplatonist currents.^[3]

Jahm and those associated with his theological creed appear as prominent heretics in Sunni heresiography, and to be called a Jahmi became an insult or polemic,^[4] especially with respect to proponents of Ash'arism, who were called Jahmiyya on account of the accusation of fatalism and denial of God's attributes by Ibn Taymiyya and his followers, positions they say originated with Jahm.^[5][6][7] The term has also been used to pejoratively label Mu'tazilites.^[3]

The views of Jahm and his followers are rejected by the four schools of thought in Sunni Islam^[8] and are not accepted across the spectrum of views in medieval Muslim theology, from the Ahl al-Hadith to the Mutazilites.^[9]

The eponymous figure behind the Jahmiyya was Jahm ibn Safwan. Jahm was born in Samarkand. He lived and taught in northeastern Iran and it is possibly that he did not ever leave the region of Greater Khorasan. The second figure most commonly associated with the Jahmis was the Kufan Ḍirār ibn ʻAmr. However, despite his association with the Jahmiyya, he may have never met Jahm and even criticized him in one of his works. No writings from either authors have survived, and information about their views relies on short summaries produced by other authors, primarily their opponents.^[10]

Another famous preacher of Jahmi views was Bishr al-Marisi (d. 833), at the beginning of the 9th century, Jahmites acted in Nehavend, but some of them were forced to accept the teachings of the Asharites.^[11]

Jahm's understating of basic physics and ontology were predicated on his distinction between the corporeal, bodies, and the incorporeal, that which is not a body.^[12] According to Jahm, God is incorporeal, and that which is incorporeal and does not have a body is present everywhere and in everything, and that which corporeal and has a body is present in a single location and in its own body.^[12] According to Jahm, God, who is uncreated and necessarily exists, is the only incorporeal and immaterial cause. Furthermore, according to Jahm, composite incorporeal and immaterial things do not exist.^[12]

In the matter of predestination, the Jahmis adhere to the belief that a person does not have free will and is forced into their actions.^[13] The Jahmiyya believed this because they thought that human free will would entail a limitation on God's power, and so must be rejected.^[13] On the question of the location of God, the Jahmis are pantheists and say that he is everywhere and inside all things.^[14] In addition, they deny the possibility of righteous Muslims seeing Allah in paradise.^[15]

Jahm and the Jahmiyya also argued that God was not a ''thing'', this was not to say that God does not exist, but instead that God cannot be logically predicated on anything else or be described by a reference to a set of attributes.^[16] The Jahmiyya believed that God was incomparable to anything, and so people should avoid ascribing any properties or qualities to God since this was beyond human knowledge and such claims, in fact, constitute innovation in religious matters (Bid'ah) and so should be rejected.^[17]

Since the advent of Jahmiyya, this tendency has been the subject of criticism by many prominent representatives of Sunni Islam. Some of the most prominent critics included Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Ibn Qutayba, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani and Ibn Taymiyyah. For example, Ahmad ibn Hanbal composed a treatise titled the al-Radd ʿalā al-zanādiqa wa-l-jahmiyya ("Refutation of the heretics and the Jahmiyya").^[18]

Yasir Qadhi wrote a lengthy dissertation (in Arabic) entitled "The Theological Opinions of Jahm b. Ṣafwān and Their Effects on the Other Islamic Sects."^[19]

Ibn al-Mubarak criticized the Jahmiyya rejection of free will in his poetry, and his anti-Jahmi poetry was cited by al-Bukhari.^[13] In particular, he argued that this rejection would imply that evil figures could not be blamed for the actions that they performed. Therefore, the actions of Pharaoh and Haman could not really be imputed onto them. Not only this, but their moral character and actions would have to be placed alongside figures such as Moses, since all of their actions have been predetermined.

The label "Jahmiyya" came to be used as an insult due to its negative connotations. For example, Abu Hanifa and Muhammad al-Shaybani were derogatorily labelled as Jahmis by their opponents.^[20] Ibn Taymiyya assigned the term to the Ash'ari Mutakallimun (professionals in the field of Kalam) of his time.^[21] Ibn Taymiyyah accused Ash'aris of having adopted doctrines of the Jahmiyya and instead advocated for a theology based on what he considered as returning to the views of the Salaf as-Salihin (the first three generations of Muslims).^[5] In later periods, Wahhabis also adopted the term as a derogatory reference to practitioners of Kalam theology, in order to contumely suggest that they, like Jahm, denied God's attributes.^[7] In particular, this accusation was used by early Wahhabis against Maliki Muslims living in eastern Arabia, sometimes singled out as being located in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, who they believed to interpret some of the attributes of God in a purely metaphorical sense.^[7]

• Jahm bin Safwan
• Mu'tazila
• Murji'ah

• Brown, Jonathan (2007). The Canonization of al-Bukhārī and Muslim. Brill.
• Bunzel, Cole (2023). Wahhābism: The History of a Militant Islamic Movement. Princeton University Press.
• Crone, Patricia (2016). "Al-Jāḥiẓ on Aṣḥāb al-Jahālāt and the Jahmiyya". The Iranian Reception of Islam: The Non-Traditionalist Strands. Brill. pp. 196–211.
• Holtzman, Livnat (2016). "Accused of Anthropomorphism: Ibn Taymiyya's Miḥan as Reflected in Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya's al-Kāfiya al-Shāfiya". The Muslim World. 106 (3): 561–587. doi:10.1111/muwo.12153.
• McLaren, Andrew G. (2020). "Ibn Ḥanbal's Refutation of the Jahmiyya: A Textual History". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 140 (4): 901–926. doi:10.7817/jameroriesoci.140.4.0901. JSTOR 10.7817/jameroriesoci.140.4.0901.
• Mehregan, Abbas (2017). "Tashbih (Anthropomorphism)". In Çakmak, Cenap (ed.). Islam: A Worldwide Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO.
• Salem, Feryal (2016). The Emergence of Early Sufi Piety and Sunnī Scholasticism. Brill.
• Schock, Cornelia (2016). "Jahm b. Ṣafwān (d. 128/745–6) and the 'Jahmiyya' and Ḍirār b. ʿAmr (d. 200/815)". In Schmidtke, Sabine (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology. Oxford University Press. pp. 55–80.
• Suleiman, Farid (2024). Ibn Taymiyya and the Attributes of God. Brill.