MOTAZILITES, or MIITAZ ALITES. a " heretical " Mohammedan sect, dating a few generations after Mohammed, of which brief mention has been made under the beading MoumstmEnAN SECTS. Their name is derived from an Arabic word, denoting to "sepa rate one's self," and originally applied to any special sect or union of men, but the Motazilites becoming the most important and dangerous in Islam, they received this denomination by way of eminence. They were also called Moattalites—i. e., those who divest God of his attributes—and Kadarija, i. e., " those who hold that man has a free will, and deny the strict doctrine of predestination." The first beginnings of this sect are traced to Mabad, who, in the time of Mohammed himself, already began to question predestination, by pointing out how kings carry on Unjust wars, kill men, and steal their goods, and all the while pretend to be merely executing God's decrees. The real founder of the sect, as such, however, is Wasil, b. Ata. He denied God's "qualities," such as knowledge, power, will, life, as leading to, if not directly implying, polytheism. As to predestination itself, this he only allowed to exist with regard to the outward good or evil that befalls man, such as illness or recovery, death or life, but man's actions he held to be entirely in his own hands. God, he said, had given commandments to man kind, and it was not to be supposed that he had, at the same time, preordained that some should disobey these commandments, and that, further, they should be punished for it. Man alone was the agent in his good or evil actions, in his belief or unbelief, obedience or disobedience, and he is rewarded according to his deeds. These doctrines were further developed by his disciple, Abu-l-Hudail, who did not deny so absolutely God's " qualities," but modified their meaning in the manner of the Greek philosophers, viz., that every quality was also God's essence. The attributes are thus not without but within him, and so far from being a multiplicity. they merely designate the various ways of the manifestations of the Godhead. God's will lie declared to be n peculiar kind of knowledge, through which God did what he foresaw to be salutary in the end. Man's freedom of action is only possibly in this world. In the next. all will be accord ing to necessary laws immutably preordained. The righteous will enjoy everlasting bliss; and for the wicked, everlasting punishment will be decreed. Another very dan gerous doctrine of his system was the assumption that, before the Koran had been revealed, man had already come to the conclusion of right and wrong. By his inner intellect, he held, everybody must and does know—even without the aid of the divinely given commandments—whether the thing he is doing be right or wrong, just or unjust, true or false. He is further supposed to have held, that unless a man be killed by violent means, his life would neither be prolonged nor shortened by " supernatural " agencies. His belief in the traditichns was also by no means an absolute one. There was no spe cial security, he said, in a long, unbroken chain of witnesses, considering that one falli ble man among them could corrupt the whole truth.
Many were the branches of these Motazilites. There were, apart- from the disciples of Abu-l-Hudail, of whom we have just spOken, the who adopted Abu All Ai-Wahhab's ) opinion, to the effect, that the knowledge ascribed to God was not an - attribute; " nor was his knowledge " necessary; " nor did sin prove any thing as to the belief or unbelief of him who committed it, who would anyhow be sub jected to eternal punishment if he died in it, etc.—Besides these, there were the disciples of Abu Ilashem—the Hashemites, who held that an infidel was not the creation of God, who could not produce evil. Another branch of the Motazilites were the disciples of Ahmed Ibn Hayet, who held that Christ was the eternal word incarnate, and assumed a real body; that there were two gods, or creators, one eternal, viz., the Most High God, and the other not eternal, viz., Christ—not unlike the Socinian and Arian theories on this subject ; that there is a successive transmigration of the soul from one body into another, and that the last body will enjoy the reward or suffer the punishments due to each soul: and that God will be seen at the resurrection with the eyes of understanding, not of the body.
Four more divisions of this sect are mentioned, viz., the ,Ethedhians, whose master's notion about the Koran was, that it was " a body that might grow into a man, and sometimes into a beast, or to have, as others put it, two faces—one human, the other that of an animal, according to the different interpretations." He further taught them, that the damned would become fire, and thus be attracted by hell; also, that the mere belief in God and the Prophet constituted a "faithful." Of rather different tendencies was Al-Mozdar, the founder of the branch of the Mozdarians. He not only held the Koran to be uncreated and eternal, but so far from denying God the power of doing evil, he declared it to be possible for God to be a liar and unjust.—Another branch was formed by the Pasharians, who, while they carried man's free agency rather to excess, yet held that God might doom even an infant to eternal punishment—all the while granting that lie would be unjust in so doing.—The last of these Motazilite sectarians we shall mention are the Thamarnians, who held, after their master, ThamRina, that sinners would undergo eternal damnation and punishment; that free actions have no producing author; and that, at the resurrection, all infidels, atheists, Jews, Christians, Magians, and heretics should be returned to dust. We cannot, in this place, enlarge upon the different schools founded by the Motazilites, nor upon the subsequent fate. The vast scientific development, however, which their doctrines begot, and which resulted in the encyclopedic labors called " The Treatises of the Sincere Brethren and True Friends," are touched upon under SINCERE v.). See Weil, Geschichte der laudifen; Sale's Koran; Steiner, Mutaziliten; Dieterici, Transactions of the Gel-man Oriental Society, etc.