Divine Decree & Free Will
The concept of Al-Qadr (Divine Decree) is well established in the Quran and Sunnah. It is one of the six pillars of Iman (belief), as established by the hadith of Jibreel (PBUH) in which the prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) is reported to have said
“That you affirm your faith in God, in His angels, in His Books, in His Apostles, in the Day of Judgment, and you affirm your faith in the Divine Decree about good and evil. ” (Sahih Muslim 8a)
The essentiality of belief in the Divine Decree is also well established in the Quran in the following verse
Indeed, all things We created with predestination [Quran 54:49]
Thus anyone who rejects belief in Al Qadr, altogether, is not considered a Muslim by unanimous consensus of scholars of Islam. However, groups within the Muslim ummah have differed over the understanding of Al Qadr. Let us first try to understand the concept of Devine Decree as established by the clear text of Quran and Sunnah and how because of a lack of understanding led certain groups to misinterpret the concept of Al Qadr.
The correct understanding of Al Qadr is also well established in the Quran and Sunnah. These can be categorized in four aspects
The Knowledge of God. This entails that God has knowledge of everything that has happened and that is going to happen. The evidence for this is found in the Quran
Do you not know that God knows what is in the heaven and earth? Indeed, that is in a Record. Indeed that, for God, is easy. [Quran 22:70]
The fact that God ordered everything to be written. This entails that all that is going to happen is pre-recorded in al-Lawh al-Mahfooz. This is also well established from the Quranic verse quoted above as well as the following hadith
Ubadah b. al Samit said to his son :
Son! You will not get the taste of the reality of faith until you know that what has come to you could not miss you, and that what has missed you could not come to you. I heard the Messenger of God (ﷺ) say: The first thing God created was the pen. He said to it: Write. It asked: What should I write, my Lord? He said: Write what was decreed about everything till the Last Hour comes. Son! I heard the Messenger of God (ﷺ) say : He who dies on something other than this does not belong to me. (Sunan Abi Dawud 4700)
The Will of God. This entails that whatever happens, it happens by the Will of God. This is established by a number of verses of the Quran including 14:27, 3:6, 4:90 and 6:137.
The fact that God creates everything. This entails the belief that God creates everything that exists. This includes not only our own creation but also our actions. This is very clear from the following verse of the Quran
While God created you and that which you do? [Quran 37:96]
This however does not reject the fact that humans have been given free will, which is also well established by Quran and Sunnah. God says in the Quran
so he who wills may take to his Lord a [way of] return. [Quran 78:39]
God also informs us that we will be held accountable for our actions in many verses of the Quran including 7:42 and 67:8-10
The fact that a belief in both of these is a requirement beautifully presented in the words of the prophet (ﷺ) in the hadith of Sahih Muslim when he was asked
why should we perform good deeds, why not depend upon our destiny? Thereupon he (ﷺ) said. No, do perform good deeds, for everyone is facilitated in that for which he has been created (Sahih Muslim 2647c)
In this hadith, we note that the prophet (ﷺ) affirmed both the Qadr of God as well as the free will of humans. It should also be noted that although we have free will, it is subservient to God’s will as the following verse of the Quran mentions this fact
For whoever wills among you to take a right course. And you do not will except that God wills – Lord of the worlds.” [Quran 81:28-29]
Now, on the face of it, this may appear contradictory to some people. How can everything be divinely decreed and yet humans are held responsible for their actions?
So, let us use our rational faculties and try to understand how both, the fact that we have free will, and the fact that everything is Divinely Decreed, are possible together. But, before we do so, we must acknowledge the limitations of our rational faculties. While we may try to rationalize these two facts in order to have a better understanding of the subject matter, the conclusions that we may reach about the mechanism of how this works cannot be definitive as the actual mechanism is only known to God and has not been communicated to us.
With that disclaimer out of the way, now let us try to understand how these could possibly work together. The way this is possible is when the Divine Decree and our decisions are harmonized and synchronized together. Let me explain this with an example.
Imagine there are two trains. Both these trains are moving together on two different tracks at the exact same speed. They are perfectly synchronized in a way that they seemed to be connected, but they are not. Each one is acting independently, yet they are perfectly synchronized.
When I take a glass of water to drink, my decision to drink water is perfectly synchronized with my actions of moving my hand forward and picking up the glass of water, which have been Divinely Decreed to act at this moment in time.
This, of course, only happens, when our will is in agreement with the Will of God because as it has been previously mentioned, our will is subservient to God’s will. However, if our will is not in agreement to God’s will, then the action will not be performed. Let us understand this with an example. So imagine, if I wanted to kill someone, and I took out a gun and shot, but due to some technical defect, the gun does not fire. Here my will to kill someone was not in conformity with the Will of God, and so the Will of God superseded my will, and the action of killing was not performed.
Thus we see that we have been given an independent free will that works in subservient to God’s will and we would be held accountable for our decisions, even though the actions were Decreed and Created by God.
The Ahle Sunnah wal Jammah took the evidence from the Quran and Sunnah and affirmed faith in both, the above-described aspects of Al Qadr as well the free will of humans, and have left the actual exact mechanism of how this works as a matter of the unseen.
However certain deviant groups have deviated from the correct understanding of Al Qadr and have gone to two different extremes.
The pioneer among them was a group known as Al Qadariya. They were a ‘rationalist group’, who, based on their subjective reasoning, and the influence of foreign ideologies, felt that Al Qadr as described above contradicted the concept of free will. They also believed that ‘evil’ cannot come from God, and so it must have human origins. Therefore they believed that human actions are a result of their own volition. In this way, they rejected a major part of God’s Divine Decree.
The origin of the group is reported to be Maʿbad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿUkaym alJuhanī, who is reportedly ‘the first to speak about qadar in Baṣra’ (Ibn Abī Ḥātim, Jarḥ, 8: 280). It is reported that he argued that Usman (RA) could not have been killed by God and that the one who killed Usman (RA) acted independently against God’s Will (al-Balādhurī, Ansāb, 2: 256). He was later tried and punished for his deviant beliefs by the Islamic government of the time.
One of his students, Ghaylān, took the cause further and propagated his beliefs. He is reported to have written a number of treatises and gained followers. He was also punished for his beliefs and a group of the Qadariyya were later exiled by the government of the time (al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh, 2: 1777).
The group was thoroughly refuted by the scholars of the sunnah based on the Quranic ayats and hadith presented above and slowly fizzled out.
There was another group that went to the other extreme. They were known as Al-Jabariyah. This group rejected human free will altogether and believed that even our decisions are a result of God’s Qadr, over which we have no control and therefore are not responsible for the way we act.
This group was from among the followers of Jahm ibn Safwan, who was influenced by Neoplotonic Greek philosophical ideas and had started denying the attributes of God. Being from among his followers, the Jabariyah gave precedence to philosophical thinking over explicit text from Quran and Hadith. This group was also refuted by the scholars of the sunnah.
Thus, we see that the groups who gave priority to philosophy, foreign ideologies, and their own subjected reasoning over the clear text of revelation, deviated from the correct understanding because of their own arrogance and failure to understand their own limitations. The people of the sunnah, on the other hand, stuck with the revelation of God and teachings of the prophet (ﷺ) and continued the balanced approach with regard to Qadr.
In conclusion, I would like to say that the correct belief in the Divine Decree gives us both patience, hope, and relief. We know that whatever challenges we face in our life have been Decreed by the One who Created us and knows us better than even we know ourselves. These challenges are a part of the tests of life that we are capable of handling and would only make us use the full potential that we have been created with. This has been described beautifully by the prophet (ﷺ) himself in the following hadith
“How wonderful the affair of the believer is! Indeed, all of his affairs are good for him. This is for no one but the believer. If something good happens to him, he is grateful to God, which is good for him. And if something bad happens to him, he has patience, which is good for him.” [Muslim]
