Jahm bin Safwan

Jahm bin Safwan was an Islamic theologian active during the Umayyad period, and his name became the basis for the label "Jahmiyya." He linked up with the rebel leader Al-Harith ibn Surayj, who was stirring up dissent in Khurasan. In 745, Salm ibn Ahwaz put him to death. What we know about Jahm comes from later sources that were hostile to him, so reliable details are thin.

He was born in Samarkand, possibly of Persian descent or as a non-Persian client of the Banu Rāseb tribe, and eventually settled in Khorāsān, specifically Merv. His teacher was al-Ja'd b. Dirham, who taught the last Umayyad caliph, Marwan II. Ja'd was branded a heretic (a Dahrī and Zindīq) for being the first to claim that God does not speak, meaning the Quran is created. He was also the first Muslim reported to reject that Abraham was God's friend or that Moses spoke with Him. The name Jahm b. Ṣafwān was later attached—perhaps wrongly—to the theological movement called Jahmism.

Jahm worked as an assistant to al-Harith ibn Surayj during his revolt against the Umayyad governor Nasr ibn Sayyar. He was killed in 746 during the first attempt to seize Merv, though the uprising seriously weakened Umayyad power and indirectly helped pave the way for the Abbasid Revolution.

Figuring out exactly what Jahm taught is tough, since his ideas only survive in shortened form in later polemical works that can't be checked. Still, it's said he believed only a few attributes—like creation, power, and action—could be applied to God, while others, such as speech, could not. So he thought it was wrong to talk about the Quran as an eternal word, because God, in his view, isn't a speaker at all. He also pushed an extreme determinism: humans only act in a metaphorical sense, much like saying the sun sets—it's really just a way of speaking, since God makes the sun set.

Jahm's views on God and His attributes were later used to criticize the Mu'tazila, who were sometimes called Jahmites by their opponents. The Mu'tazila did agree with Jahm that the Quran was created. Jahm left no writings, but many Muslim scholars wrote about his doctrines, and a few modern scholars have studied him.

Among his contemporaries, Muqatil ibn Sulayman, an early Quran commentator, was especially critical. The two had a heated theological and political debate in the mosque of Marw over divine attributes and two political figures they were both tied to. Each wrote a book refuting the other, and Muqatil used his political connections to get Jahm kicked out of Balkh and sent to Termez. Still, Muqatil himself was condemned by scholars like Abu Hanifah and Makki ibn Ibrahim (al-Bukhari's teacher). Abu Hanifah reportedly called Jahm a disbeliever.

Later, the theologian Uthman ibn Sa'id al-Darimi wrote refutations of Jahm and a detailed rebuttal of a prominent Jahmite named Bishr al-Marisi, declaring him a kafir. The Sunni Hadith scholar and ascetic al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi also responded to him. Many Hadith scholars—notably Ahmad ibn Hanbal and his students al-Bukhari and Abu Dawud as-Sijistani—wrote refutations of Jahm's doctrines. Later Sunni Kalam theologians like Abu Hasan al-Ash'ari and Abu Mansur al-Maturidi kept up the criticism, and Jahm continued to pop up in later Ash'ari and Maturidi heresiology works.