above works, emphasised the love and goodness of God, and held that no Moslem would be damned everlastingly. Some, like Jahm b. Ṣafwán, went so far as to declare that faith (_ímán_) was merely an inward conviction: a man might openly profess Christianity or Judaism or any form of unbelief without ceasing to be a good Moslem, provided only that he acknowledged Allah with his heart.[417] The moderate school found their most illustrious representative in Abú Ḥanífa († 767 A.D.), and through this great divine--whose followers to-day are counted by millions--their liberal doctrines were diffused and perpetuated. [Sidenote: The Mu‘tazilites.] During the Umayyad period Baṣra was the intellectual capital of Islam, and in that city we find the first traces of a sect which maintained the principle that thought must be free in the search for truth. The origin of the Mu‘tazilites (_al-Mu‘tazila_), as they are generally called, takes us back to the famous divine and ascetic, Ḥasan of Baṣra (†728 A.D.). One day he was asked to give his opinion on a point regarding which the Murjites and the Khárijites held opposite views, namely, whether those who had committed a great sin should be deemed believers or unbelievers. While Ḥasan was considering the question, one of his pupils, Wáṣil b. ‘Aṭá (according to another tradition, ‘Amr b. ‘Ubayd) replied that such persons were neither believers nor unbelievers, but should be ranked in an intermediate state. He then turned aside and began to explain the grounds of his assertion to a group which gathered about him in a different part of the mosque. Ḥasan said: "Wáṣil has separated himself from us" (_i‘tazala ‘anná_); and on this account the followers of Wáṣil were named 'Mu‘tazilites,' _i.e._, Schismatics. Although the story may not be literally true, it is probably safe to assume that the new sect originated in Baṣra among the pupils of Ḥasan,[418] who was the life and soul of the religious movement of the first century A.H. The Mu‘tazilite heresy, in its earliest form, is connected with the doctrine of Predestination. On this subject the Koran speaks with two voices. Muḥammad was anything but a logically exact and consistent thinker. He was guided by the impulse of the moment, and neither he nor his hearers perceived, as later Moslems did, that the language of the Koran is often contradictory. Thus in the present instance texts which imply the moral responsibility of man for his actions--_e.g._, "_Every soul is in pledge_ (with God) _for what it hath wrought_"[419]; "_Whoso does good benefits himself, and whoso does evil does it against himself_"[420]--stand side by side with others which declare that God leads men aright or astray, as He pleases; that the hearts of the wicked are sealed and their ears made deaf to the truth; and that they are certainly doomed to perdition. This fatalistic view prevailed in the first century of Islam, and the dogma of Predestination was almost universally accepted.