If God creates everything, does He create human acts too, and if so, how can He justly reward and punish? The Muʿtazila (called Qadariyya by their opponents) answered that humans truly originate their own acts, for otherwise divine justice collapses. The Ashʿaris answered that God creates every act, including human ones, and that the human merely 'acquires' (kasb) the act and so bears responsibility, since to exempt human acts from God's creation would limit His omnipotence. The Jabriyya pressed determinism to the end. The map holds the dispute over the meeting of God's power and man's responsibility.
Mainstream Sunni theology settled on the Ashʿari kasb: God creates all acts, the human acquires his own and is answerable for it. The Muʿtazila held that only genuine human origination preserves God's justice, and the Jabriyya that the decree leaves no human agency at all. The settlement saves both omnipotence and responsibility by a doctrine, acquisition, that its critics call a word for the problem rather than a solution. No reading is adjudicated here.
humans originate their own acts -- required for God to be just
Human beings truly originate (create) their own voluntary acts; God does not decree them. This is demanded by divine justice (ʿadl): God commands and forbids, rewards and punishes, and it would be unjust to punish a person for an act God Himself created in him. To preserve God's justice and wisdom, human freedom must be real and the act must be genuinely the human's own. God's decree governs the order of nature, not the free deeds for which we are answerable.
The Muʿtazili/Qadari free-will-for-justice position is documented in Watt 1948 (web-verified) and Wolfson 1976. (SUGYA-ENGINE.md §11)
God creates the act; the human 'acquires' (kasb) it and so is responsible
God creates all things, including the acts of His servants; nothing comes to be outside His creative power. Yet the human is not a mere instrument: at the moment of acting, God creates in him both the act and a power to act, and the human 'acquires' (kasb) the act by that power, becoming its responsible agent. Acquisition is the narrow seam between an omnipotence that creates everything and a justice that holds the creature answerable. To make man a co-creator of his deeds, as the Muʿtazila do, is to set up other creators beside God.
The Ashʿari kasb (acquisition) doctrine, God creating act and power, is documented in Watt 1948 and Wolfson 1976. (§11)
humans are compelled; there is no real human agency, only God's
Human beings have no real power over their acts at all; they are compelled (majbur), and what looks like choice is God's determination working through them as the wind moves a leaf. Omnipotence and the decree are total: to ascribe any genuine origination to the creature is to detract from God's sole agency. Reward and punishment, on the strong version, are themselves simply what God wills, owing nothing to a freedom the human does not possess.
lens The hard-determinist pole, against which the Ashʿari kasb defined itself as a middle way.
The Jabri compulsionist position is documented in Watt 1948 as the determinist pole of the early qadar debate. (§11)
Do humans originate their own acts, so that divine justice in reward and punishment is secured (Muʿtazila), or does God create every act while the human 'acquires' it (Ashʿari kasb), so that omnipotence is preserved and responsibility salvaged at the seam of acquisition? The Islamic form of the fork between human freedom and the divine decree.
Staged in: Watt, W. Montgomery (1948); Wolfson, Harry Austryn (1976)
Is 'acquisition' (kasb) a real third thing between creating an act and merely undergoing it, or a name placed over the gap where omnipotence and justice fail to meet?
Contribute to the open questions →Provenance 3 engine-verified (sourced by the refinement engine, adversarially verified) . Every source is verified once and reused across the graph; each engine-verified node carries its audit basis above.
Every position rests on a real source; export the bibliography below. A citable Zenodo DOI per passage is on the roadmap.
@book{watt-1948-free-will,
author = {Watt, W. Montgomery},
title = {Free Will and Predestination in Early Islam},
year = {1948},
url = {https://books.google.com/books/about/Free_Will_and_Predestination_in_Early_Is.html?id=092uSrBSq2sC},
note = {copyright-characterize-only; via Hekhal Sugya}
}
@book{wolfson-1976-kalam,
author = {Wolfson, Harry Austryn},
title = {The Philosophy of the Kalam},
year = {1976},
note = {copyright-characterize-only; via Hekhal Sugya}
}3 positions and 1 contention. Watt 1948 web-verified (the classic study); Wolfson 1976 in the registry. Engine-verified, not yet editor-signed. The freedom-vs-decree contention instantiates the free-will-and-the-decree chakira on the Islamic side.