Divine knowledge of particulars
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 6 anchored passages
His knowledge of particulars · the encompassing by the knowledge of the First · the encompassing knowledge · the relation of knowledge · ʻilmuhu bi-l-juzʼiyyāt · علمه بالجزئيات
in the texts
Kitāb al-Zawrāʼ wa-al-taʻlīqāt ʻalayhi
All events being present to God without order, succession, pastness or futurity, He knows each at its own time and knows their temporal relations to us without any alteration in His knowledge.
(His words, ‘among them is the manner of the encompassing by the knowledge of the First’, etc.
Among them is the manner of the encompassing, by the knowledge of the First, exalted be He, of the past and the future and the present, in a manner that transcends and is hallowed
so much so that the theologians (*al-mutakallimūn*) said that the knowledge is eternal and the relation originated.
Risālat al-Wāridāt
The classical problem of whether God knows particulars and, if so, under what description: ʻAbduh sets out the Ashʻarī, philosophical and Sufi answers, shows that each either denies God knowledge before the thing exists or lodges forms in His essence, and answers that His knowledge is His essence and that all particulars are the self-disclosure of what lies in it.
Now if His knowledge of that sort is pre-eternal, then (first) it follows that all originated particulars are existent in pre-eternity, which is void;
You must therefore say that His knowledge is identical with His essence, and that it is identical with His knowledge of His essence, and that it is knowledge of all His modes and phases;
And if he passes over all of this and says that His knowledge is not by impression, then he has affirmed an essential knowledge identical with His essence, which is His knowledge of His own essence — and he himself has demonstrated its falsity.