Political Consequences of Ayn al-Qudat Al-Hamadani’s Conceptualization of “Predestination and Free Will”

The issues of “predestination and free will” have long been among the contentious topics in the history of Iranian-Islamic thought. The conducted studies have chiefly showcased the dominance of fatalistic ideology in the political and mystical history of Iran. Ayn al-Qudat Al-Hamadani is one of the prominent thinkers of mysticism in medieval period of Islam as well as one of the dauntless critics of Seljuq government who paid particular attention to predestination and free will topic. One of the most important epistemological foundations that can be deployed for scrutinizing the political thought of thinkers is their conceptualization of predestination and will—as an important anthropological aspect. In this article, adopting an implication-based approach, the researchers examined and analyzed anthropology of Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani with the aim of discovering and understanding the political implications of his conceptualization of predestination and free will. The main question of the article is what the political consequences of Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani’s conceptualization of predestination and free will are. The findings of the study reveal that Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani, upon determining a predestined nature for the world of divinity and detaching the nature of the human world from it, has criticized and condemned the dominant and exclusively deterministic ideology of his time by laying emphasis on the inherent nature of free will in human beings. The finding of the study can be a counterexample to the narratives that have assessed the whole history of Iranian political thought and culture as believing in fatalism.