Soon afterwards Ash‘arí made a public recantation. One Friday, while sitting (as his biographer relates) in the chair from which he taught in the great mosque of Baṣra, he cried out at the top of his voice: "They who know me know who I am: as for those who do not know me I will tell them. I am ‘Alí b. Ismá‘íl al-Ash‘arí, and I used to hold that the Koran was created, that the eyes of men shall not see God, and that we ourselves are the authors of our evil deeds. Now I have returned to the truth; I renounce these opinions, and I undertake to refute the Mu‘tazilites and expose their infamy and turpitude."[712] [Sidenote: Ash‘arí as the founder of Scholastic Theology.] These anecdotes possess little or no historical value, but illustrate the fact that Ash‘arí, having learned all that the Mu‘tazilites could teach him and having thoroughly mastered their dialectic, turned against them with deadly force the weapons which they had put in his hands. His doctrine on the subject of free-will may serve to exemplify the method of _Kalám_ (Disputation) by which he propped up the orthodox creed.[713] Here, as in other instances, Ash‘arí took the central path--_medio tutissimus_--between two extremes. It was the view of the early Moslem Church--a view justified by the Koran and the Apostolic Traditions--that everything was determined in advance and inscribed, from all eternity, on the Guarded Tablet (_al-Lawḥ al-Maḥfúẓ_), so that men had no choice but to commit the actions decreed by destiny. The Mu‘tazilites, on the contrary, denied that God could be the author of evil and insisted that men's actions were free. Ash‘arí, on his part, declared that all actions are created and predestined by God, but that men have a certain subordinate power which enables them to acquire the actions previously created, although it produces no effect on the actions themselves. Human agency, therefore, was confined to this process of acquisition (_kasb_). With regard to the anthropomorphic passages in the Koran, Ash‘arí laid down the rule that such expressions as "_The Merciful has settled himself upon His throne_," "_Both His hands are spread out_," &c., must be taken in their obvious sense without asking 'How?' (_bilá kayfa_). Spitta saw in the system of Ash‘arí a successful revolt of the Arabian national spirit against the foreign ideas which were threatening to overwhelm Islam,[714] a theory which does not agree with the fact that most of the leading Ash‘arites were Persians.[715] Von Kremer came nearer the mark when he said "Ash‘arí's victory was simply a clerical triumph,"[716] but it was also, as Schreiner has observed, "a victory of reflection over unthinking faith."