Among the letters which Michael Cook presented in Early Muslim Dogma was a risala against the free-will doctrine espoused among the Mutazila. This was ascribed to no less than 'Umar al-Thani the caliph. If we wanted the full text, we of little Deutsch had to find van Ess' German (somewhere) and run it through Google Translate. Belatedly, Sean Anthony has supplied us with a new translation into English.
The letter is a faaake. It is at least falsely ascribed; it quotes a Kufan hadith from al-A'mash which 'Umar shouldn't have known, and four (out of seven) also transmitted by al-Awza'i (AD 707-74). One tradition looks like something Awza'i cooked up himself, given it is first heard from his lips.
My suspicions were already raised by the letter's citations from suras like 23 and 44, which I deem late.
Awza'i happened to be an Umayyad diehard. It's within possibility that something like this Letter went out from caliph Hisham's court or maybe by authoritarian dissidents against al-Walid II or Yazid III. Awza'i would have been in his middle thirties, which is young, but not too much so for a "young-turk" intellect (especially if he left his own name off it!). And I don't have a problem with a full Quran, even an "'Uthmanic" text, in Hisham's time.
But this letter is not 'Umar's. The ascription to him would have suggested itself to one appealing to a wider audience, 'Umar being more popular than Hisham and also from an earlier time.
BACKDATE 3/21.
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