Al-Māturīdī’s Divine Action Model

Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī (d. 333/944) is the eponym of the Māturīdī tradition of kalām, one of the recognized theological schools of Sunnī Islam. This article proposes that whereas the classical Māturīdī tradition adopted an occasionalist divine action model (DAM), al-Māturīdī’s own works indicate a distinctive DAM that can best be described as concurrentist. It is grounded in his concept of God’s nature, particularly His attributes of existentiation (takwīn) and wisdom (ḥikma), and in an ontological theory by which he advocates a bundle theory of dispositional accidents to account for objects. We reconstruct the resultant DAM in detail, arguing that it is robust and avoids the objections of overdetermination and instability that typically plague other concurrentist models. We then explore its implications for key theological themes: the origin of the world, human free will, miracles, and modern science.