The Ash`arite system thus described was completed by al-Baqilani (d. 403), but it did not become general until it was popularised by al-Ghazali in the East and by Ibn Tumart in the West.
Al-Mataridi, of Samarqand was a contemporary of al-Ash`ari, and reached very similar results. Amongst the points peculiar to al-Mataridi we may note (_a_) the attribute of _creating_ has been an attribute of God from all eternity, but this attribute is distinct from the thing created; (_b_) Creatures have certain choice of action, and for the things done by this choice they are rewarded or punished; good actions are only done by the pleasure (_rida_) of God, but bad actions are not always by His pleasure; (_c_) Ability to do the action goes with the will and the act, so that the creature cannot have an action imposed on him as a task which is not in his power.
He agrees with al-Ash`ari in holding that the world and all it contains have been created by God from nothing: it consists of substances and attributes. The substances exist in themselves, either as compounds, such as bodies, or as non-compounds, as essences which are indivisible. Attributes have no separate existence, but depend for their existence on bodies or essences. God is not essence, nor attribute, nor body, nor anything formed, bounded, numbered, limited, nor compounded. He cannot be described by _mahiya_ (quiddity), nor _kayfiya_ (modality); He does not exist in time or place, and nothing resembles Him or is outside His knowledge or power. He has qualities from all eternity existing in His essence; they are not He nor is He other than they.
For some time the Ash`arites had to meet keen opposition and even persecution, and it was not until the middle of the 5th cent. that they came to be admitted generally as orthodox Muslims. Their triumph was assured in 459 A.H., when Nizam al-Mulk, the wazir of Alp Arslan, founded at Baghdad the Nizamite academy as a theological college of Ash`arite teaching. Still the Hanbalites raised occasional riots, and demonstrated against those whom they regarded as free thinkers; but these were put down by authority, and in 516 the Khalif himself attended the Ash`arite lectures. The Mu`tazilites were now merely a survival; as broad church theologians they had fallen into general disrepute in the eyes of the orthodox, and they were equally disliked by the philosophers as defective in their adherence to the Aristotelian system. The educated fell now into three broad groups: on the one hand were the orthodox, who came under the influence of al-Ash`ari or al-Mataridi; on the other were those who accepted the doctrines of the philosophers, and in the third place were those who rejected all philosophy, and confined their attention solely to Qur´an tradition and the canon law, and who should not be excluded from the ranks of the educated, although their studies ran in somewhat narrow lines.