The Ash`arite denial of Aristotle's Prima Materia, and their views concerning the nature of space, time and causation, awakened that irrepressible spirit of controversy which, for centuries, divided the camp of Muhammedan thinkers, and eventually exhausted its vigor in the merely verbal subtleties of schools. The publication of Najm al-Din Al-Katibi's (a follower of Aristotle whose disciples were called Philosophers as distinguished from scholastic theologians) Hikmat al-`Ain - "Philosophy of Essence", greatly intensified the intellectual conflict, and invoked keen criticism from a host of Ash`arite as well as other idealist thinkers. I shall consider in order the principal points on which the two schools differed from each other.
We have seen that the Ash`arite theory of knowledge drove them to hold that individual essences, of various things are quite different from each other, and are determined in each case by the ultimate cause God. They denied the existence of an ever-changing. primary stuff common to all things, and maintained against the Rationalists that existence constitutes the