ʿAqīdah

What ʿAqīdah is العقيدة

ʿAqīdah is the science of what a Muslim is required to believe concerning Allāh, His Names and Attributes, the unseen realities, and the obligations of faith.

The word ʿaqīdah derives from the root ʿ-q-d, meaning to bind or tie firmly. It refers to what one’s heart is bound to in certainty: the foundations of faith that every Muslim holds without doubt. In its technical sense, it is the science that establishes, through transmitted evidence, what is obligatory, possible and impossible to believe regarding Allāh, His Messengers, the angels, the revealed scriptures, the Last Day, and the divine decree.

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Muslim theology has more than one school, each with its own method. The Ḥanbalī-Atharī position holds to what the text says, and to what the early generations understood it to mean. It does not resort to the interpretive re-readings (taʾwīl) that other schools employ, and it does not attribute modality or likeness to Allāh’s Attributes. Imām Ibn Qudāmah expressed this in Lumʿah al-Iʿtiqād: Allāh is described with what He has attributed to Himself in His Book and upon the tongue of His Prophet, neither adding to that nor subtracting from it.

The Atharī ʿAqīdah is not synonymous with the contemporary Salafī position, as is sometimes assumed. The Ḥanbalī-Atharī creed has its own textual canon, its own chain of scholars, and its own settled positions, several of which differ from what is presented in modern Salafī literature under the same name. Here, the Atharī ʿAqīdah is taught as it was transmitted through the Ḥanbalī scholarly chain, from Ibn Qudāmah through the later Ḥanbalī imāms to Shaykh Yūsuf b. Ṣādiq al-Ḥanbalī, who holds a connected chain to this text.