I wonder if I can get any of my esteemed readers to swallow the following suggestion. Ten years or so ago it came into my head that Hume's analysis of causation in terms of (i) temporal precedence, (ii) spatiotemporal contiguity, and (iii) constant conjunction can be reasonably viewed as occasionalism without God.
For what is the essence of occasionalism if not the view that no natural or 'secondary' cause is a true cause, and that there is only one true cause, namely, God the 'primary' cause? Although occasionalism is often discussed as an ad hoc solution to the problem of mind-body interaction 'occasioned' by Cartesian dualism, occasionalism is a general theory of causation, and there was occasionalism long before Descartes. The doctrine can be traced back at least to al-Ghazali. Here is a good little article by William Hasker that fills in some of the details.
It is easy to see why occasionalism would be found attractive by Muslim thinkers. For the occasionalist, God is omnipotent not only in the sense that he can do anything (subject to certain logical and non-logical restrictions that I have discussed elsewhere); he is also omnipotent in the far stronger sense that anything that gets done gets done by God. He has not only the power to do all; he has and exercises all the power.
Of course, Hume does not bring God into his theory of causation. But for Hume, as for the occasionalist, no natural cause is a true cause since no such cause produces, or brings into existence, its effect. The relata of the causal relation are events, and the latter are Humean "distinct existences." To say that e1 causes e2 is just to say that (i) e1 temporally precedes e2; (ii) e1 and e2 are spatiotemporally contiguous, and that (iii) whenever an event of e1's type occurs, an event of e2's type occurs. That's all there is to it. There is no producing, no bringing about. Good empiricist that he is, Hume denies what he does not see. More precisely: he doubts the existence of that for which there is no corroboration in sensory impressions. Hume operates with a Principle of Significance according to which the validation of any idea requires tracing it back to sensory impressions; but such ideas as causal power, causal production, and causal necessity cannot be cashed out in terms of sense impressions.
These three conditions in Hume's empiricist analysis can be satisfied by events between which there is no real-world connection such as a transfer of energy or momentum. On the Humean scheme, all there is in the world is regular succession. This is tanatamount to saying that e1's occurrence is merely the occasion, not the true (productive) cause, of e2's occurrence.
Now common sense and Miss Anscombe both insist that the root idea of causation is that the cause is the source of its effect, that "Effects derive from, arise out of, come of, their causes." (Anscombe in Sosa and Tooley, eds. p. 92) Now if you accept Anscombe's point, and I do, then it seems accurate to say that Hume's regularity theory of causation is occasionalism without God. (David Lewis and others have noticed that there is also a counterfactual analysis of causation in Hume's texts; but let's not worry about that now.)
Surely there must be more to causation 'in the objects' than regular succession. If so, then perhaps theists would be within their epistemic rights in putting God to work in the theory of causation. As I once heard J. N. Findlay say, "God has his uses." If you have reason to believe in God, then you may have reason to put him to work in your theory of causation, especially if you cannot find in causation any more than what Hume found.