Sa'adiah al-Fayyūmi II
The Caliph al-Muktadir, and his dignitaries, did not have the time, nor were they in the mood to deal with this issue.
They had a more serious problem to deal with.
A rebellion had broken out in the capital of Caliphate Baghdad and they were trying to keep the throne and save their lives.
Caliph al-Muktadir was eventually murdered, being stabbed by his killer, and his throne captured in October 932, by the self-appointed ruler al-Kahirin.
This self-appointed ruler, al-Kahir, was so poor that he had no suitable clothes in which he could come in front of the people to hear their oath of loyalty.
The poverty of this self-appointed Caliph was misused by Sa'adiah's enemy Aaron.
He filled the pockets of the self-appointed ruler, and his courtiers, with the gold and with bribes, turning this conflict in his favour.
This self-appointed Caliph ordered David ben Zakkai installed on the throne of the Exilarch.
After Sa'adiah lost the conflict with the Exilarch, he closed himself off in his
loneliness.
He turned his anger, wrath and malice towards Annan's doctrine which he
hated so much.
Sa'adiah wrote almost all of his works after this event.
It was precisely at this time that Sa'adiah wrote his core work, האמונות והדעות.
This philosophical-ethical work is divided into ten chapters, each chapter devoted to one ethical obligation.
All of what the theologian and philosopher explained regarding the relationship to God, the religion, the state, the community, and the family, can be found in this book.
In the preface Sa'adiah mentions the reasons that led him to write this book, and clearly defines there his theological and philosophical views.
In order to familiarize the reader with the nature of Sa'adiah's work, I must interrupt my narration to present some excerpts from the preface of the book האמונות והדעות.
If someone asks me what led me to write this work, I will answer; I noticed that people are divided according to their religious beliefs and thinking into several groups.
The first group walks on the straight way; they wilfully strive to reach the truth and enjoying it.
This group of people has the prophet in mind when he says: Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and Thy words were unto me a joy and the rejoicing of my heart. (Jeremiah 15:16)
They doubt, and at the end they completely reject the truth.
The Holy Scripture says about these people: Though I write for him never so many things of My Law, they are accounted as a stranger's. (Hosea 8:12)
They identify the lie as a truth and the truth as a lie; that is the reason they are eternally lost.
The prophet says about these lightweight people: Let him not trust in vanity, deceiving himself; for vanity shall be his recompense. (Job 15:31)
Today they believe in something, but if they encounter an issue that they do not understand, they do not add it to their limited intellect.
They strive to find fault in the faith and they change this faith for other one.
The wise Solomon says about these people: The wisdom of the prudent is to look well to his way; but the folly of fools is deceit. (Proverbs 14:8)
It will also be necessary to do so in the future because the belief of many of those who identify themselves as believers is not sincere and their ideas are not pure.
The unbelievers mock the believers, sneering at them.
It is a disaster!
They are drowning in the depths of their mistakes and there is no wise swimmer here who would be able to go down for them, to grab and pull them out, thus saving them from destruction.
Their way of education, in his words, forced the minds of the young people to believe in chimeras and fairy tales.
He also saw a huge problem with the accumulation and memorization of enormous amounts of information during the youth age, done without any analysis of this information.
He supported his own words with the following examples of everyday life:
The owner of a manufacturing business cannot just use the spinning machines if he also wants to produce fabrics.
The builder cannot just bind the building material.
Ideas he wrote in his youth were rethought and changed in the texts he wrote in his advanced years.
In other words, after he realized the short sightedness of the thoughts and ideas of his youth, he undertook a thorough analysis of them.
In this book, Sa’adiah described the relationship of God to the material world as follows:
God penetrates, through the zephyr, into all their parts, as well as penetrating, through the zephyr, the air contained in all bodies.
Through this zephyr, God has control over the whole universe and, in this way, causes the movement of the heavenly bodies. 1)
The Biblical word, כבוד, as well as the Talmudic word, שכינה, he understands as the spirit of the living God, and more precisely as the zephyr described above.
He distanced himself from his mistake in the book, אמונות ודעות, in which he understood the word, כבוד, to be the glory.
Sa’adiah, like the supporters of the (Islamic) philosophical-religious school of Mu'tazilites, believed in the free will of man. 2)
The conservative Muslims regarded this connection of revelation and reason as a heresy and identified the followers of this faith, Mu'tazilites, as apostates.
In the Qur'an we find verses that can be understood as manifestations of the will of Allah, but other verses which could be interpreted as a manifestation of the free will of man.
The Mu'tazilites marked the places in the Qur'an, which can be understood as the manifestation of the will of Allah, as allegorical, and have come to learn about the free will of man. a)
The teachings of the Mu'tazilites, with which People of Israel came in contact with, were more compatible with the sense of the Holy Scriptures, than were the teachings of al-Ashʿarī الشعري, which had influenced Anan ben David ha-nasi and Ananites.
b) See the book, עץ חיים, by Aaron ben Eliyahu of Nicomedia