But without faith in this One Will, What Happens is experienced as inscrutable, foreign, and intrusive, as fate. Under fate, we are no longer finding GOD’s Will, nor even seeking to rediscover it, but simply asserting our independence from it. Freedom has become not what we need to return to GOD, but what we claim as ours that we may turn away from Him. As our choices open up to the ever-growing world of our desires and start to feel arbitrary and uninformed by any higher purposes, we need to consult with the one who first sought freedom for its own sake – Iblis (Chapter 7). It is he who will tell us that our freedom is not in the service of knowledge, whose ultimate source is GOD, but for the sake of power, which we must wrest from Him. And we have a reason for doing so.
The standard objection to the supremacy of GOD’s Will is that it transforms us into puppets or robots and thus negates accountability for our actions. Since moral responsibility is an indispensable foundation of civilization, how can we maintain human freedom and continue to believe in God’s sovereignty? How can we be held to account on the Day of Judgement if we are not independent, the rightful owners and ultimate causes of our acts?
In the Western tradition, belief in free will has taken root mainly because there seems to be no credible response to this rhetorical question. Most philosophers and theologians go to great lengths to show how God’s omnipotence and/or omniscience are compatible, or incompatible, with human free will, which is a ‘given’. The case appears closed, and even Islamic scholars seem largely convinced that ‘free will’ is absolutely necessary as a pillar of law and morality.*
* The judicial term for someone who is legally responsible is ‘aqil baligh, meaning ‘intelligent [and] adult’. ‘Adult’ refers to one’s biological maturity, since baligh means to have arrived, i.e. at puberty. ‘Aqil means ‘rational’ or ‘capable of telling right from wrong’, hence intellectually mature. Having a will or a free will is not up for discussion. Anyone with young children can attest that they have an abundance of ‘free’ will, but that does not in any sense make them responsible individuals.
But in the Qur’an, ‘will’ as a noun does not appear. How strange it is that something thought to be so essential to morality and law is not even given the minimal recognition of its own noun in Scripture! One word that approximates our notion of will, namely choice, does make two entries in the Qur’an – fatefully so:
It is not right that a believing man or woman have a choice in something if AL-LAH and His Apostle have decided it for them. Whoever disobeys AL-LAH and His Apostle has quite clearly gone astray. (Q33:36)
وَمَا كَانَ لِمُؤْمِنٍ وَلاَ مُؤْمِنَةٍ إِذَا قَضَى اللَّهُ وَرَسُولُهُ أَمْرًا أَنْ يَكُونَ لَهُمْ الْخِيَرَةُ مِنْ أَمْرِهِمْ وَمَنْ يَعْصِ اللَّهَ وَرَسُولَهُ فَقَدْ ضَلَّ ضَلاَلاً مُبِينًا
And what your Master wills and chooses He creates; it was not theirs by right to choose. Transcendent is AL-LAH and High beyond what they associate [with Him]! (Q28:68)
وَرَبُّكَ يَخْلُقُ مَا يَشَاءُ وَيَخْتَارُ مَا كَانَ لَهُمُ الْخِيَرَةُ سُبْحَانَ اللَّهِ وَتَعَالَى عَمَّا يُشْرِكُونَ
We have in these two verses the outlines of a demarcation between human freedom and Absolute Freedom. In the former verse, qada (decided) refers to religious law and obligation – the realm of amr (command) in which believers are expected to accept the authority of GOD and His Messenger, but where disobedience is a possibility. In the latter verse, however, the key word is yakhluq (creates). This is the realm of khalq (creation) or qadr (power) where reality in the form of hard facts prevails. The hardest fact of all is that nothing happens except What Happens – in other words, Divine Predestination.
The GOD You Already Know 