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Further reading: Hammudah Abdalati, Islam in Focus
(Indianapolis: Islamic Trust Publications, 1996); Marjo
Buitelaar, Fasting and Feasting in Morocco: Women’s Par-
ticipation in Ramadan (Oxford: Berg, 1993).
fate
Fate is a power or force that is thought to deter-
mine in advance what happens in the world, par-
ticularly to human beings. It is opposed to pure
accident or chance and is often equated with the
idea of fortune or destiny in this world and in the
aFterliFe
. Fatalism is a worldview that upholds
the belief that all events are predetermined and
that it is useless for anyone to try to change them.
In ancient Mesopotamia, fate was believed to be in
the hands of the gods, whom human beings were
created to serve. In ancient Greece, it was personi-
fied in the form of three women or was said to be
something controlled by the god Zeus. Christian
thinkers reinterpreted ancient beliefs about fate
by associating it with Divine Providence, which
they qualified by also asserting a human capac-
ity for choosing between good and evil. Christian
theology has struggled, therefore, with reconciling
belief in God’s omnipotence with human free will.
Although Islam is often represented as a
fatalistic religion, two different trends of thought
developed within the Muslim community in
regard to the issue of God’s predetermination of
events and human freedom. The competing Mus-
lim theological discussions of this topic all quote
quranic verses to support the positions they have
taken. Speaking of God’s incomparable majesty
and power, the q
Uran
states, “God guides to
truth whom he wills and leads astray whom he
wills” (Q 14:4), and “When he decrees a thing,
he says to it ‘Be’ and it is” (for example, Q 2:117).
Verses such as these have been used by those
who argued that God determines all that hap-
pens to people, whether good or evil. This view
is also reflected in the popular Arabic expression,
“In sha Allah” (If God wills it so), which people
often say when planning a future activity. In a
similar vein, the Quran declares, “Nothing will
happen to us except what God has written for us”
(Q 9:51), implying that human destiny has been
preordained in a divine book or tablet. Moreover,
the Quran states that all created things have been
assigned a fixed term of existence (ajal). Even a
person’s
death
was thought to be predetermined
(see Q 6:2, 39:42, 40:68). God’s power to deter-
mine everything that happens became a formal
aspect of Sunni
theology
, especially in the a
shari
s
chool
, and it had the approval of early Muslim
rulers, who sought to protect their own power by
arguing that it was God-given, despite their own
moral failures as Muslims.
Nonfatalist advocates of free will sought to
give human beings more responsibility in decid-
ing how to conduct their lives and shape their
own destinies. They pointed to the many verses
in the Quran that spoke of the Final Judgment
and maintained that God’s judgment would be
just only if humans were righteous or sinful by
choice rather than by fate. According to one such
verse, “Truth is from your Lord, so whoever wills,
let him believe, and whoever wills, let him dis-
believe. Indeed, we have prepared a Fire for the
disbelievers . . . and for those who believe and do
K 228
fate
good works, we will not let go astray the reward
of those who do beautiful things” (Q 18:29–30).
al
-h
asan
al
-b
asri
(d. 728), remembered in part
for being an early free will advocate, tried unsuc-
cessfully to explain to the Umayyad
caliph
Abd
al-Malik (r. 685–705) the correctness of this
belief. In developing his argument, he maintained
that God commanded only the good and that evil
was caused by humans or s
atan
. He and others
like him in i
raq
, s
yria
, Arabia, and y
emen
were
called the Qadariyya (the party favoring human
self-determination). This early trend in Islamic
religious thought developed into the Mutazili tra-
dition of Islamic theology and contributed signifi-
cantly to the formation of the rationalist school of
thought in Shii theology, as opposed to the Ashari
school of the Sunnis.
Since the 19th century, Orientalists, missionar-
ies, and travelers from Europe and North America
have attributed fatalistic beliefs to ordinary Mus-
lims, particularly in regard to their explanations
of illness and misfortune. Some have reported that
critical medical care was refused out of a belief that
the fate of the patient was in God’s hands. However,
Muslims have indeed sought out remedies and cures
for illnesses when they were available, and fatalistic
acceptance is only one option, used when hope is
lost. This is true even where conservative prede-
terminist Islamic doctrines prevail, such as among
Wahhabis in s
aUdi
a
rabia
. One should remember
that medicine was one of the foremost applied
sciences in medieval Islamicate civilization. In a
different regard, modern Islamic reformers in many
Muslim lands have been incorporating notions of
free will into their thinking, further loosening the
hold of the Ashari brand of predeterminism and
promoting progressive change among Muslims.
See also a
llah
; J
Udgment
d
ay
; m
Utazili
s
chool
.
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