This audio is brought to you by Muslimcentral.com.

Today we are going to continue our topic of last class, which was the trying to understand theodicy,

trying to understand the existence of evil. And what our class will aim to do today is to go over

the some of the classical doctrines of Islam,

some of the schools of theology

that have already attempted to answer this issue

in the last 14 centuries.

Now, before we even begin,

I wanna teach you the methodology of research, which is, you all know this from your own

high school and undergraduate years.

When you have a problem, we have a problem of trying to understand evil, you always begin

by seeing how previous intellectuals, previous scholars, attempted to solve that problem.

Because generally speaking, almost every issue that you're going to be asking, you're not the first human being to ask.

And so rather than start from scratch, rather than reinvent the wheel, you should see what the literature already says, see what previous

groups have said, and then after you have done a survey, you can assess, has enough research

been done that satisfies you, or do you think there's still more that needs to be done?

So the question of evil, the question of theodicy is not a new question as I've explained.

In fact, it goes back as I explained thousands of years.

Therefore, various Muslim groups have attempted to solve this problem throughout their writings.

So today I'm going to give you a quick crash course about three of the earlier groups.

And when I give these three, obviously many caveats, firstly there's many other groups.

Obviously in the history of Islam, there's many groups.

...