Praise belongs to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds, and peace and blessings be upon our master Muhammad

Commanding the Right and Forbidding the Wrong
 
It is an obligation for all believers to disseminate the call of Islam, guide the misguided, and direct those in 
error as much as they can by means of both exposition and the sword. 
The Mu‘tazilites’ method of deriving their doctrine
 
In explaining their doctrine the Mu‘tazilites relied on reason and not transmission. They relied on the 
intellect, restricting its scope only when it was a question of the commands of the 
Shari‘a.
Every question was 
logically examined and they accepted what was logical and rejected what was not logical. 
This rationalistic approach was the result of several factors: their residence in Iraq and Persia which were 
influenced by ancient religions and civilisations, their descent from non-Arabs, their clashes with opponents, 
the spread of translations of the ancient philosophers in these places, and their mixing with Jews and 
Christians and others who translated these ideas into Arabic. 
One of the effects of their reliance on logic was that they judged that things were good or abhorrent by 
reason. They used to say: “All things are intelligible to the intellect and must be examined by the intellect. 
Beauty and ugliness are two essential qualities of good and evil.” Al-Jubba’i stated, “Any act of disobedience 
which Allah can permit to happen is ugly because of its prohibition and any act of disobedience which He 
never permits is ugly in itself: like ignorance of Him and believing the opposite of that.” They based on this 
the idea of the existence of the best of all possible worlds. They said that only good issues from Allah. 
The Mu‘tazilites’ defence of Islam 

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Groups of Magians, Sabaeans, Jews and Christians and others entered Islam, their minds still full of the 
teachings of those religions, and their understanding of Islam necessarily being filtered through them. Some 
pretended to have faith out of fear of the ruler, concealing their old belief, and began to try to corrupt the 
Muslims’ 
deen
, to make them doubt their own beliefs, and to introduce ideas and opinions for which Allah 
had given no authority. The fruits of their efforts appeared: there were anthropomorphists, 
zindiqs
and many 
other groups. The Mu‘tazilites tried to defend Islam, and their Five Tenets were the result of their sharp 
debates with their opponents. The tenet of 
Tawhid 
was formulated to refute the anthropomorphists; Justice 
was to refute the Jahmites; the Promise and Threat was to refute the Murji’ites; and the Position between the 
Two Positions was to refute the Kharijites who said that anyone who commits a sin was unbeliever.