Kismet

When John Piper preached at our church two weeks ago, he talked about the very high view Muslims have of the sovereignty of God. They believe in a God who ordains whatsoever comes to pass. They believe in a God who knows the hairs on our heads. They believe in a God who can do as he pleases.So is there any difference between a sovereign Allah and the sovereign God of the Bible? Piper argued that in Islam the sovereignty of God operates independently of his other attributes, such that Allah can be capricious and arbitrary in his exercise of divine power. This is, no doubt, how some Christians see the Reformed view of God and why they reject it so strenuously. 

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/2013/12/20/something-better-than-sovereignty/

i) I agree with the overall point that Piper and DeYoung are making. Sovereignty all by itself is not a good thing. Calvin led the way in that respect when he attacked theological voluntarism. To isolate God's will from his other attributes results in an amoral sovereignty. Unlike Allah's sheer will, Yahweh's sovereign will is characterized by his wisdom and goodness. 

ii) However, I think both men oversimplify Islam. In my younger days I did a lot of reading on Islam, so I may be rusty, but as I recall, we need to consider a number of issues:

iii) When we talk about Islamic theology, what are the sources? The Koran? The Hadith? Traditional commentaries on the Koran? Muslim jurisprudence? Islamic Kalam?

What about contemporary Islam, which interacts with medieval and modern philosophy? 

iv) We need to draw further distinctions:

a) Fatalism. No matter what happens, the outcome is the same. That's consistent with libertarian freedom. There could be alternate routes, but they all lead to the same destination.

b) Determinism. This takes different forms. From what I've read, the Asharites espouse a roughhewn version of compatibilism. 

By contrast, Al-Ghazali propounded occasionalism. There are no second-causes. Every event is the direct effect of Allah's immediate causation. 

c) Predeterminism. That can take the form of a master plan. Everything happens according to plan.

Something can be determined without being predetermined. 

d) Or it can involve physical determinism, where the present is the inevitable result of prior states. A chain of cause and effect. That's different from occasionalism, where the present is causally discontinuous with the past.

e) Providence

A plan requires something over and above the plan itself to implement the plan. Primary or secondary causality.

iv) Some Muslims (e.g. Asharites) were determinists while other Muslims (e.g. Mutazilites) were indeterminists. 

The Koran has a references to a divine tablet. On one interpretation, that suggests a script or blueprint. Everything that happens is scripted. That would be a predestinarian metaphor. It's all written out in advance. 

However, the Mutazilites turned that around. Allah sees the future, and writes down what he foresees. He's writing history ahead of time. He's writing history before it happens. Writing about the future as if already lies in the past. But the future is not scripted. Rather, the tablet transcribes the future.

I think the predestinarian interpretation is more plausible, but we're just dealing with a few passing references in the Koran.

v) The Koran also talks about God guiding some people and leading others astray. That's deterministic, but not necessarily predeterministic. Indeed, that's consistent with fatalism.

One interpretive difficulty is knowing where Muhammad got his ideas. I suspect fatalism often personifies the apparent randomness of life. There often seems to be no rhyme or reason to who lives and who dies, who propers and who suffers. You can do all the right things, and still come to a horrible end. So it seems like you were doomed all along. Conversely, some people seem to be lucky. Or they get away with things. That may lie behind many Koranic passages. 

You also have astrology or astrological fatalism in folk Islam.