Abū al-Muʿīn al-Nasafī

d. 1115also al-Nasafī, al-Nasafi, Nasafī, Nasafi, Abū al-Muʿīn

The systematizer of the Māturīdī school after its founder. His al-Tamhīd and Baḥr al-kalām give the school’s worked positions on created acts, divine wisdom, and why withholding beneficence is not injustice — the texts the victim-harm and selector tests actually read.

Abū al-Muʿīn al-Nasafī (d. 1115) is the great systematizer of the Māturīdī school after its founder. His two reference works — al-Tamhīd fī uṣūl al-dīn and Baḥr al-kalām — are where the school's positions stop being slogans and become argued theses, and they are the texts this corpus's victim-harm and selector tests actually read.

What Debby reads him for: a substantive wisdom account of created bad acts (their contrariety manifests unrestricted power; their creation in the qualities proper to them is wise; their occurrence can have praiseworthy outcomes beyond human enumeration; guilt belongs to the servant's acquisition); recognition of selective extraordinary interventions (miracles authenticating prophets, saintly charisms interrupting ordinary effects); and the no-prior-right rule that makes withholding beneficence not injustice.

The open crux his texts leave: neither work states a general, non-ad-hoc criterion distinguishing an ordinary foreknown harmful token that God creates from an otherwise feasible token that God prevents. The strongest prevention cases are extraordinary; the ordinary policy is asserted, not derived.

The mistaken everyday reading is "a mere compiler of al-Māturīdī." The victim-harm apparatus in al-Tamhīd is his own systematic construction, and it is the version the school downstream actually used.

Where this comes up

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Atlas entries are written from sources Debby has read, not from memory. They explain a thing; they do not settle an argument. The arguments are in the Library.