Māturīdism
The classical Sunni theological school founded in Samarqand by Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī. On God it affirms real eternal attributes and an eternal attribute of creating (takwīn); on action, God creates the act while the servant’s choice (ikhtiyār) makes it his. Steelmanned here as the strongest developed non-Trinitarian theism in the corpus, not a generic monotheism.
Named for Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī (d. 944), of Samarqand.
Māturīdism is the classical Sunni kalām school founded by Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī (d. 944) in Samarqand, systematized a century and a half later by Abū al-Muʿīn al-Nasafī (al-Tamhīd, Baḥr al-kalām) and debated in the commentary tradition of Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa and al-Taftāzānī. Alongside Ashʿarism it is one of the two surviving classical Sunni theological schools — a distinct, earlier system, not a footnote to al-Ashʿarī.
The positions that matter to Debby: real eternal attributes; takwīn, an eternal attribute of creating whose effects are temporal; human acts created by God yet genuinely chosen (ikhtiyār), so that guilt belongs to the servant's acquisition; and no aṣlaḥ obligation — God is not bound to do what is best for creatures, and withholding gratuitous beneficence (luṭf) is not injustice, because creatures have no prior claim to it.
Why it is load-bearing here: it is the strongest developed non-Trinitarian theism in the corpus. The open question "can a non-Trinitarian theism do the same work?" is largely the question of whether this system — with its own accounts of love, will, action, and goodness — can match what Trinitarian theology says requires three persons, without borrowing.
The mistaken everyday reading is "generic unitarian monotheism with Arabic vocabulary." The school has its own worked metaphysics of action and value, and the corpus tests that system, not a stand-in.