Born in Basra
Born in Basra and trained among the rationalist Mu'tazila theologians.
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Al-Ash'ari trained among the Mu'tazila, the rationalist theologians who made reason the measure of faith, then broke with them at forty in a public reversal. God's will, he argued, is not bound by our logic; the world holds together only because God recreates it at every instant, so that fire does not burn by its own nature but because God wills the burning. Reason has its place, but as the servant of revelation, not its judge. His middle path between blind literalism and unchecked rationalism became the dominant theology of Sunni Islam.
