Well you know how it is, you open up those old ‘Aqeedah books and you read all these terms.. Mu’tazilah, Qadariyyah, Khawaarij, Murji’ah, Jabariyyah, Raafidhah, Jahmiyyah… It seems like a whole lot of jibberish, but in trying to understand this I found a trick: many of them actually have some type of reason why they are called as such.

Some are called as such because of their ‘founder’: Jahmiyyah for example, was derived from Jahm bin Safwan.

Others were from descriptions about the group, whether they’re famous or not: Khawaarij did Khurooj unto the Muslims for example.

One peculiar one is the Qadariyyah: they were the ones who used to deny the Qadr of Allah, believing that it was all their own free will completely - why then were they called the Qadariyyah? Isn’t that contradictory?

In fact, the Qadariyyah were called as such because they were the ‘Qaadir’ of their own actions ie they believed in absolute free will and that they were the ‘creators of their own actions’

Funnily enough, Abdullah ibn ‘Umar said about them that: “let them know that they are completely free from me and I am completely free from them. And if they were to spend as much as Uhud in charity it wouldn’t be accepted from them.”