The mihna — the inquisition of 833 to 848 — is the ugliest episode in Sunni intellectual history and the one that settled the question by exhausting everyone. Al-Ma'mun made the createdness of the Quran a loyalty test for judges, and Ahmad ibn Hanbal was imprisoned and flogged for refusing to affirm it. When the policy was abandoned, the scholars who had held out had won a permanent kind of authority and the caliphate had lost its claim to define doctrine. The doctrinal residue is that Sunnis hold the Quran uncreated, with the careful distinction that the ink and paper are made and the speech is not. Twelver Shia theology, which absorbed Mu'tazili method, generally calls it originated and considers the whole quarrel a Sunni one.