What were the beliefs of Mu'tazilites?

Answer 1

The Mu'tazilites were a sect of Islam independent of Sunnis, Shiites, Khawarajites, and Ibadis. They had significant power in the middle and later days of the Abbassid Dynasty, but were never the majority sect within the Abbassid Dynasty. After the Abbassid Dynasty was destroyed by the Mongols, the Mu'tazilites vanished into history.

The Mu'tazilites were a hyper-rational sect of Islam, holding that reason and faith could be reconciled within Islam. (Sunni Orthodox belief is that faith is superior to reason in Islam.) One of the fundamental beliefs of the Mu'tazilites was that the Qur'an was a holy book created by God at a specific point in time (Muhammad's life), which compares to Sunni Orthodox belief that the Qur'an and all of the Divine Holy Books are Co-Eternal with God.

Most Sunnis and Shiites, however, remember the Mu'tazilites for their creation of the largest Islamic Religious Inquisition. Similar to the Spanish Inquisition, where supposed Catholics were tortured and brutally treated in order to "fix" their theological beliefs, the Mu'tazilites made it their job to hunt down the Shiite Infallible Imams and the Sunni Orthodox leaders (like Ahmad ibn Hanbal, the founder of the Hanbali School of Jurisprudence) and punish them for their defiance. This violence perpetrated by the Mu'tazilites against their fellow Muslims is one of the many reasons why the embrace of rationality in the Islamic World is very badly seen.