Banter/Off-topic Thread & Community Stoning Platform

[Thomas Talus]

I can't remember the proper Arabic term off of the top of my head, but Islamic metaphysics began to take a view that reality is wholly predestined by God, destroyed and recreated anew every instant to progress time, so therefore what purpose is there in trying to dig into the nature of reality when it's already working as divinely ordained? This view became dominant around the time that the Arab and Persian mathematicians, natural philosophers, and astrologers began to recede in their output and quality of work and there's a likely correlation between the two. It gets brought up from time to time, academically, but this most simple of observations that would be trivial with respect to any other religious or social system just triggered the Islamophobia Alarm and now you're out of a teaching position (if adjunct) or are now a departmental pariah (if tenured) and the university press won't publish your monograph.

I think the term you're looking for in western philosophical terms is "occasionalism". I don't know the arabic rendition, but it was expounded by the Ash‘arite school of philosophers.