When I was away in Makkah and Madinah for the recent Umrah and spiritual getaway, I finally managed to return to some good reading of the Quran and I came across this confusing, crazy, fascinating section in my Study Quran about the eternal philosophical issue of free will:
Truly We have created everything according to a measure.-- 54:49
This verse can be understood as a straightforward affirmation of God's creation of all things. In relation to the preceding verses, it can also be understood as a simple statement that God decreed or "measured" a punishment for the disbelievers and cast them into Saqar. But due to the Prophet's own debate with those who denied God's qadar, or Decree, this verse became a focal point for discussing the relation between Divine determinism and human choice. Qadar, or "measuring out", is also said to be one of the tenets of faith, regarding which the Prophet s.a.w. said, "No servant of God truly believes until he believes in qadar, its good and evil, and until he realizes that what has befallen him was not going to miss him and what missed him was not going to befall him."
The earliest determinists, known as the Jabriyyah (lit. "Compulsionists"), held that all human acts were determined by God, including acts of belief, disbelief, good, and evil. From their perspective, 54:49 supports the position that God has predetermined all events...
The Qadarites held that human beings are free and are the authors of their own acts, but this does not contravene God's Omnipotence. The Mu'tazilites held that human beings are fully responsible for the creation of their evil deeds and God simple punishes them accordingly, a position that seeks to absolve a just and merciful God from the apparent injustice of creating the very acts for which He then punishes their perpetrators. The Ash'arite school of theology finds both of these positions abhorrent, because each would posit a creative agent outside of God. At the same time, they find the Jabrite position to be monstrously fatalistic, reducing human beings to passive agents with no will of their own. Ash'arite theologians thus sought to explain that God is Just and Merciful and does not punish people for things for which they are not responsible, and that human beings bear responsibility for their actions but are not the creators of these actions, since from their perspective God must be the Creator of all human acts, as He is the Creator of all things (40:62).
There are so many opinions about free will within Islam alone, and although we've been told from as young as 7 years old that one of the pillars of faith is Qada and Qadar (believing in Destiny and the decree of God), what did we understand of it? What do most of us understand of it? What does believing in it imply that one must do in behaviour and action? (No teacher ever elucidated on this topic for me, ever.) I feel like if there's anything that causes such philosophical and psychological pain in me, it is trying to decide how much of something is a fault of mine or to be taken as a decree of God; how much should be still worked at and fought for or resigned to and swallowed as a bitter pill of reality. Where is the balance between accepting your destiny and when there's a will, there's a way? Where is the stop sign? Where is the boundary that tells me, beyond here, it is God's control? LET GO. But wait, isn't it all God? What if God means for me to fix it? Because if God made me such-and-such way, then of course, I'm going to do such-and-such thing... right? Or not? Was the point the choice I was supposed to make? Did I make the wrong choice? Is there even a wrong choice? And even if I did make the wrong choice then, does realising it now mean I should do something else to fix it? Do I get to pick the right choice now? What.
Questions like this can plague me for hours on end, haha. Please tell me I'm not the only nutso like this.
After reading that whole confusing bit, I finally settled on this being the best takeaway for me at this point in life:
Rather than seeing the question of human free will as a question merely of choices between options on a particular plane of reality, Sufis have seen free will ultimately as a characteristic pertaining to a particular state of being. Only insofar as human beings rise above their egotistical desires and submit the will that pertains to their own individuality to God do they realise true freedom in God. But those who attain this true freedom only will what God wills, because they exist in a state of perfect submission to the good and thus also display the attributes of something that is, as it were, totally determined. This is exemplified in a paradox discussed by Ibn Arabi, who says that those saints (awliya) most capable of performing miracles are the least likely to do so, since they are most content with God's Will for the world and themselves. Moreover, qadar, or one's "lot", is seen, in the ultimate sense, as a manifestation of one's own nature or essence as known by God before one's creation.
In other words...
the only freedom is in God.
Free will is a misnomer...?
Just choose what you think will please God
(or in secular terms, you could say just do the right thing),
because that way... what you choose and your destiny...
start to align, I think.
Rendering the whole destiny-free will tension moot.
Maybe that's the whole point.
God knows.
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