Reverting to an-Nazzam, the great leader of the middle age of the Mu`tazilites, we find his teaching continued by his pupils _Ahmad b. Habit_, _Fadl al-Hudabi_, and _`Amr b. Bahr al-Jahiz_. On the theological side all the Mu`tazilites admitted the eternal salvation of good Muslims, and most agreed that unbelievers would receive eternal punishment: but there were differences of view as to those who were believers but died unrepentant in sin. For the most part the Mu`tazilites took the lax view that these would be favourably treated as against the rigorist opinion which reserved eternal salvation to good Muslims, an opinion which appeared amongst the stricter believers during the `Umayyad period. The two first named of an-Nazzam’s pupils, however, introduced a new theory entirely repugnant to orthodox Islam, though familiar to the extremer Shi`ite sects, that those neither decisively good nor absolutely bad, pass by transmigration into other bodies until they finally deserve either salvation or damnation. With these two thinkers also we are brought into contact with another problem which now began to present itself to Islam, the doctrine of the “beatific vision.” Islam generally had expected the vision of God to be the chief of the rewards enjoyed in paradise, but the treatment of the attributes of God had been so definitely against the anthropomorphic ideas expressed in the Qur´an that it became difficult to explain what could be meant by “seeing God.” Ahmad and Fadl dealing with this subject deny that men ever will or can see God; the beatific vision can at most mean that they are brought face to face with the “Agent Intellect” which is an emanation from the First Cause, and “seeing” in such a connection must of course mean something quite different from what we understand as vision. _`Amr b. Bahr al-Jahiz_ (d. 255), the third of an-Nazzam’s pupils mentioned above, may be regarded as the last of the middle period of the Mu`tazilites. He was an encyclopædic writer according to the fashion of the time and wrote on literature, theology, logic, philosophy, geography, natural history, and other subjects (cf. Masudi viii. 33, etc.) To free will he gives rather a new bearing. The will he regards as simply a manner of knowing and so as an accident of knowledge; a voluntary act he defines as one known to its agent. Those who are condemned to the fire of hell do not suffer eternally by it, but are changed by its purification. The term “Muslim” must be taken to include all who believe that God has neither form or body, since the attribution of a human form to God is the essential mark of the idolater, that he is just and wills no evil, and that Muhammad is his prophet. Substance he treats as eternal, accidents are created and variable.