Human Capacity: Power, Action, and Conditions

1. Two meanings of istiṭāʿah

والاستطاعة مع الفعل خلافا للمعتزلة
Capacity accompanies the act, contrary to the Muʿtazilī position.

Istiṭāʿah (capacity) can denote two things: (1) the particular power in connection with which a voluntary act takes place, or (2) the soundness of bodily faculties, instruments, and means that makes an act practicable.

In the first sense it accompanies the act; in the second, it can be present beforehand. Conflating the two creates an apparent conflict between the condition of performing an act and the fact that an obligation may apply before the act is performed.

2. Effective power and the act

وهي حقيقة القدرة التي يكون بها الفعل
It is the reality of the power in association with which the act occurs.

Power related to the actual deed is not identical with general good health. It is capacity considered in its specific connection with the deed's occurrence. In the theological account being presented, God creates the power in the servant, and the servant acquires the deed through intention and choice.

A healthy hand is one condition for lifting a pen. Actually lifting it by choice at a particular moment is another matter. The claim that power accompanies the act concerns the latter relationship, not every everyday use of the word “able.”

3. Before the act or with it?

In the commonly reported Muʿtazilī account, capacity exists before an act, allowing a person to choose between acting and refraining. For that account, pre-existing power is important to explaining responsibility and obligation.

The position defended here instead locates the specific power of an act alongside that act. This does not imply that a human being is wholly helpless in every respect before acting.

One source of the disagreement is terminological: one account calls the previously available ability to act 'capacity,' while the other reserves the relevant technical term for power connected to the actual occurrence.

4. Created power and acquisition

Human intention and choice remain meaningful in a voluntary act, but the servant's capacity is not an independent creator. In the position under discussion, both capacity and deed are under God's creation, while the moral attribution of the deed to the person rests on intention and acquisition.

Acknowledging human capacity is different from asserting that the person independently originates the act outside divine creation. The latter does not follow from the former.

Thus, affirming created capacity does not deny choice, while affirming genuine choice does not confer autonomous creative power upon the servant.

5. Cause versus condition

وهي علة للفعل، والجمهور على أنها شرط لأداء الفعل لا علة
One account calls it a cause of the act, whereas the majority call it a condition for performance, not a cause.

A cause is not the same as a condition. In some theological descriptions, the former is understood as productive of the effect, while a condition is something whose absence prevents the effect but whose presence does not, by itself, produce it.

For comparison, a burning process and the presence of suitable fuel have different explanatory roles. The analogy clarifies the logical distinction; it does not make human action or divine power simply identical to natural combustion.

6. Customary means and autonomous efficacy

The presence of means and instruments is ordinarily associated with the occurrence of an act, but it does not follow that these things possess productive efficacy independent of God.

A customary condition accompanies an outcome in the normal order of events. Combustion in the presence of fire, or performance through a suitable instrument, can illustrate this relation. An exception to a customary pattern is not necessarily a logical contradiction.

Healthy faculties and usable instruments matter to human performance; they should not automatically be equated with the specific power concurrent with the act.

7. Intention, good and evil, and recompense

فإن قصد فعل الخير خلق الله تعالى قدرة فعل الخير ... وإن قصد فعل الشر خلق الله تعالى قدرة فعل الشر
When a person intends good, God creates the power associated with that good action; when the person intends evil, He creates the power associated with that evil action.

The point is not to make human intention irrelevant. An intention to worship and an intention to sin are morally different even though both events remain within divine creation.

Reward and punishment concern the servant's intention, choice, and acquisition, not an independent power to create existence. Nor does an evil deed's occurrence imply that it is religiously approved.

8. The negation of the ability to hear

Scriptural statements sometimes deny disbelievers the ability to hear. In this theological discussion, such language is not read as an absolute denial of physical ears, since they could hear ordinary sounds.

It is explained instead with reference to the reception of truth and the particular capacity or enablement connected with accepting and acting upon it. A person may possess a functioning organ of hearing without the acceptance of truth actually taking place.

This helps distinguish ability understood as the availability of instruments from ability understood in relation to the occurrence of a particular action.

9. The objection of power preceding action

An objection runs as follows: if power is an accident and does not persist from an earlier time, on what basis does the deed occur? If earlier power has ceased and later power has not yet appeared, the act seems to occur without power.

The objection assumes that the relevant power must be temporally prior to what it concerns. The answer allows temporal concurrence: the power associated with the action exists at the moment the action occurs.

The argument distinguishes chronological order from explanatory dependence. 'Not existing earlier' does not mean 'not existing at the relevant moment.'

10. Can accidents persist?

A crucial premise here is the non-persistence of accidents: in this classical theological account, one and the same individual accident does not remain unchanged across successive moments.

If power is an accident, identifying the power present earlier as numerically the same power later accompanying the act becomes controversial. Merely saying that 'the earlier power is still there' does not settle the dispute.

This is a premise of classical kalām, not an experimental law of modern physics. The debate over it directly affects the argument about when capacity and action coincide.

11. Renewal of similar instances

One response says that the earlier power need not persist numerically; a similar instance may be created again. This is described as the renewal of similars (*tajaddud al-amthāl*).

Granting that possibility gives a sense in which capacity existed earlier, but the particular power associated with the deed may still be the instance occurring at the time of the deed. The argument shifts from persistence of one numerically identical power to successive, similar powers.

The issue is whether renewal establishes the actual effective power before the deed or only a prior capacity of a different description.

12. Can earlier power weaken?

Suppose that a previously existing capacity is gradually weakened. The question becomes when the deed could occur through it. If action requires sufficient power, why should an earlier weaker capacity be regarded as a complete productive cause?

This is why the earlier capacity may be described as a condition or potential readiness rather than being equated without qualification with the particular power through which the deed actually takes place.

The key distinction is between an enabling condition existing in advance and a determinate relation of power to an act as it occurs.

13. Preference between action and nonaction

A further objection asks: if capacity already existed and nothing changed, what preferred performance to nonperformance? Why did one outcome occur without an explanatory preference?

The answer points to other conditions, the removal of impediments, and the person’s particular intention. Assuming two states are identical in all relevant respects while assigning an act to one and inaction to the other is itself part of what needs justification.

The reasoning does not deny ordinary human ability; it challenges the claim that prior ability alone completely explains why an act occurs at a given moment.

14. Capacity with all conditions fulfilled

A more qualified account speaks of power with all its relevant conditions fulfilled: a power considered together with the requirements of its operation and the absence of impediments. By contrast, mere muscular strength or general readiness may also be called 'power.'

On the first definition concurrence with the act becomes central; on the second, the availability of an ability before the act is understandable.

Merely introducing two names does not solve the debate. One must check which definition each proof establishes and whether an argument silently shifts from one meaning to the other.

15. Muscular strength and operative ability

Healthy limbs, bodily strength, and available tools provide a general capacity. A healthy person being able to write is different from that person actually writing at this moment.

Muscular strength is a helpful example of readiness before the act. It cannot simply be identified with every specific relation of power involved at the instant of performing the act.

A healthy person may choose not to act, or an impediment may intervene despite an intention to act. These cases distinguish general fitness, intention, and actual performance as three different aspects.

16. Two premises in the persistence dispute

The objection concerning persistence of accidents rests on distinct premises:
1. The persistence of an accident is treated as something additional to its initial existence.
2. An accident cannot subsist independently of its subject or as an accident inhering in another accident.

Together these premises create difficulties for claiming that numerically the same power survives across two moments. The strength of the argument depends on those premises; someone who rejects them requires a differently formulated proof.

Persistence, renewal, and inherence should not be treated as vague synonyms. Each indicates a particular ontological relation in this classical debate.

17. Why does obligation precede performance?

An objection notes that religious obligation often applies before performance. If capacity exists only during the act, would the person already addressed by the command be incapable? For instance, the obligation to pray arises when its time begins, before a person starts praying.

The answer is that valid obligation takes account of the soundness of the relevant faculties, means, and instruments, not the particular power accompanying an act that has not yet occurred.

Being addressed by a command, having the ordinary means to respond to it, and actually performing the specific deed are distinct stages. Their occurring at different times does not by itself imply an obligation imposed on someone who is incapable.

18. What counts as imposing the impossible?

Obligating the incapable would mean demanding an act when the relevant ability or necessary means are unavailable. The argument does not concede that someone who is not presently performing an act is therefore incapable in this sense.

For example, bodily ability and the applicable conditions matter for the obligation of prayer. The command need not first become binding at the exact instant the person begins praying.

The distinction is between means available before action and the determinate capacity accompanying a particular action. Confusing these yields the mistaken impression that obligation and concurrence of capacity contradict one another.

19. Capacity in the obligation of pilgrimage

وَلِلَّهِ عَلَى النَّاسِ حِجُّ الْبَيْتِ مَنِ اسْتَطَاعَ إِلَيْهِ سَبِيلًا
Pilgrimage to the House is owed to Allah by those people who are able to find a way to it. (Āl ʿImrān 3:97)

For pilgrimage, the ability to travel, physical fitness, and access to the route matter as available means of compliance before the journey begins. Here 'capacity' is not being used only for the particular power accompanying each individual movement of the pilgrimage.

The example demonstrates that religious language may separately consider the possession of the necessary means and the actual occurrence of performance.

20. A systematic distinction between two capacities

First capacity: soundness of means and instruments
This is the possession of sound faculties and adequate means. It concerns general eligibility to perform a deed and the applicability of obligation.

Second capacity: the particular power of the act
This is the capacity in its specific connection to the deed occurring, and it relates to the time of actual performance.

Someone who affirms the first capacity before action need not affirm that the second exists beforehand. Equally, locating the second alongside the deed does not deny the earlier availability of the first.

This classification resolves much of the apparent difficulty concerning the timing of obligation and performance.

21. Power relating to faith and disbelief

A question arises whether a person’s capacity is fit for two contrary acts, such as belief and disbelief, considered as possible choices.

The discussion affirms a common suitability for opposites at the level of underlying ability, while distinguishing the particular relation of power to the act that occurs. Someone’s choice of disbelief does not establish that they were utterly devoid of the ordinary means to choose belief.

When capacity is spoken of as directed to a particular act at a particular moment, that does not require treating the very essence of capacity as two unrelated substances, one for belief and another for disbelief.

22. Direction of capacity and responsibility

الكافر قادر على الإيمان المكلف به، إلا أنه صرف قدرته إلى الكفر
The disbeliever has the capacity relevant to the belief commanded of him but has directed his ability toward disbelief.

In this explanation, being subject to the command and the use of choice are connected. If the person who chooses disbelief had no prior capacity for faith in the first sense, the address requiring faith and the blame for rejecting it would be difficult to account for.

This does not make the servant an independent creator. The question concerns human selection and the relation of capacity to what is chosen, not a separate divine-like power of origination.

23. Absolute capacity and its specific relation

Capacity may be considered as an underlying ability or in its particular relation to one act. A person having the general possibility of choosing good or evil does not mean that two contradictory acts are both occurring at once.

Choosing disbelief rather than belief concerns the direction of the capacity’s relation. It does not automatically show the loss of every prior capacity for the alternative. This is why a difference in the essence of power must be distinguished from a difference in the act toward which it is directed.

To clarify the debate, first ask whether the claim concerns general eligibility or the specific occurrence of an act.

24. Testing each argument by its premise

Arguments for and against pre-action capacity repeatedly turn on three premises:
1. If power is an accident, does that accident persist or recur in similar instances?
2. Is power being described as a productive cause or as a condition?
3. Does valid religious obligation require the particular power concurrent with action, or the soundness of faculties and means?

A conclusion must be read in light of its premises. An argument based on the non-persistence of accidents does not automatically convince someone with a different ontology of accidents. Likewise, the existence of an obligation does not prove that the specific concurrent power already existed.

These distinctions stop arguments addressing different meanings from being mistaken for direct contradictions.

25. The resulting framework

Three questions must remain distinct throughout this discussion:
1. When can general health and practical means be present? — Before an act, as well as during it.
2. When is the specific power through which the deed occurs? — Concurrent with it, in the account defended here.
3. What grounds reward, punishment, and the address of religious obligation? — The person’s intention, choice, and the applicable conditions of obligation.

This framework prevents two errors: equating concurrent power with sheer compulsion, and treating pre-existing sound means as proof of independent human creative power.

The next discussion examines taklīf—the addressee of a command and the conditions of responsibility—in greater detail.