Jahmism

Jahmism (Arabic: الجهمية, romanized: al-Jahmiyya), is an early Islamic denomination following the doctrines of Jahm bin Safwan (d. 128/746). The Jahmiyya particularly came to be remembered as advocates for the negation of God's divine attributes as part of God's essence (known as the doctrine of taʿṭīl) and have been described as a form of natural theology. The Jahmites hold that God is utterly unique and the sole cause behind the created world. They denied the presence of essence within things and rejected theories of causation and propose that every moment is created by God anew, giving rise to the illusion of causation by association. The Jahmites were empiricists, and held the opinion that only the immediately perceived reality is real. Since the Jahmites reject eternity and reality of all of creation, the Jahmites also advocated that paradise and hell will eventually perish. Some doctrines of the Jahmites – such as God's transcendence and their insistence on the impermanence of creation – may be comparable to Buddhism. Jahm and those associated with his creed are criticized for atheism by Hanbalites and Salafis.