Abstract

The article begins with a philosophical question: If cosmic order implies the unity of God, does the corrosion of heaven and earth imply the plurality of gods? Although many would readily give an affirmative answer to this question, the Māturīdī theologian Saʿd al-Dīn al- Taftāzānī’s (d. 792/1390) explanation of the concept using Qurʾan 21: 22 (‘If there were other gods [in heaven and earth] besides Allāh, they would both dissolve into chaos’) sparked considerable and often heated debate among fellow Sunnī thinkers and continued to trigger controversy in later scholarship down to Maḥmūd al- Ālūsī (d. 1270/1854) and Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qāsimī (d. 1332/1914). Arif examines this issue of the burhān al-tamānuʿ and explores this debate and the controversies it engendered by exploring the meaning of the counterfactual conditional statement used by the Qurʾan.