Mutawatir : Jurnal Keilmuan Tafsir Hadith
Vol. 15 No. 2 (2025): DECEMBER

Human Autonomy and Divine Sovereignty: Negotiating Moral Freedom and Predestination in the Qur’an

Fakhri Afif (Unknown)
Irma Riyani (Unknown)



Article Info

Publish Date
20 Dec 2025

Abstract

This article pursues a philosophical reading of the Qur’an’s moral discourse on human freedom and divine sovereignty. Through an ethical close reading of Qur’anic verses and a semantic-conceptual analysis of mashī’ah, istiṭā‘ah, mas’ūliyyah, qadr, qaḍā’, and ‘adl, the study brings the philosophical category of relational freedom as a heuristic to the text, demonstrating that the Qur’an’s conceptual architecture actively enriches it. Methodologically, the inquiry draws on Abou El Fadl’s negotiative hermeneutics to navigate the author-text-reader dialectic and to assess the ethical stakes of competing interpretations. The findings establish that the Qur’an presupposes genuine moral agency through its idioms of non-coercion, taklīf, ḥisāb, and the moral evaluation of intention, while situating this agency within a divinely ordered structure of measure and decree grounded in ‘adl. Qadr is construed as a principle of causal measurability, and qaḍā’ as the moment of decisive actualization. The reading rejects predestination as a moral alibi while refusing to inflate human agency into a sovereignty that fractures the tawḥīdic horizon. This study contributes a philosophically rigorous framework for reading Qur’anic moral theology beyond the fatalism-autonomy impasse, and opens a constructive dialogue between Islamic moral thought and contemporary philosophy of agency that neither domesticates the Qur’anic account nor insulates it from critical engagement.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

mutawatir

Publisher

Subject

Religion Humanities

Description

The Mutawatir: Jurnal Keilmuan Tafsir Hadith is published twice a year by the Department of Al-Quran and Hadith, Faculty of Ushuluddin and Philosophy, Sunan Ampel State Islamic University (UIN) Surabaya Indonesia. The journal aims at publishing an original academic research on the main topic of the ...