This study is conceived to carry two interrelated aims. Firstly, through the lens of one of the most important—and perhaps most contested of all—theological problems, ruʾyat Allāh, I hope to bring to light the systematic character of the classical Ashʿarī school. ‘Systematic’ is here meant to convey the idea that the theologians under consideration built an architectonic of knowledge with comprehensive and integrated categories of understanding the world, taking in the ontology of the cosmos, its metaphysics, its logical thought structure, its semantic categories and additionally for the purposes of this study, the science of optics. Importantly, such an understanding saw these disciplines not as mutually exclusive or siloed categories but as continuous fields of inquiry that contributed towards building a complete and wholistic worldview. In constructing such a worldview, Ashʿarī thinkers did not see speculation about the world as something removed from understanding God’s word as revealed in the Qur’an. Here, the importance of the science referred to as uṣūl al-fiqh as a method to interpret and understand Scripture, as well as the manner in which this science complements broader theological method, will be explored. In relation to the science of optics, the study will explore the extent to which classical-period Ashʿarīs such as Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī (d. 478/1085) and Abū al-Qāsim al-Anṣārī (d. 512/1118) were drawing from Avicenna’s (d. 428/1037) theory of optics in their own objections against the Muʿtazilī extramission theory of vision. Part of this study will, therefore, also include previously unstudied aspects of the Muʿtazilī extramission theory of vision. The second aim has a methodological focus, which is to say that through the lens of ruʾyat Allāh the study will explore the logico-epistemological development of the classical Ashʿarī school, and how, through this totemic theological question (and others like it) it came to reject its earlier logical methods, thus paving the way for its subsequent move towards a more robust epistemological base in the form of Avicennan logic.
The interplay between the two aims will be to show how the logico-epistemological developments ultimately came to affect the manner—and the grounds upon which—the case for ruʾyat Allāh was made by the classical Ashʿarī school. Ruʾyat Allāh is thus the anchor through which the aims of the study hope to be realized.