Could Sufism Have Been a Means of Spreading Ibn Taymiyya's Thought in the Ottoman Empire?

Abstract

AbstractCurrent studies on Ibn Taymiyya's influence on the intellectual life of the Ottoman Empire focus on the mid‐sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. In this paper, I argue that Ibn Taymiyya's influence on some aspects of Ottoman intellectual life can be traced, indirectly, to the beginning of the fifteenth century. Through studying the attitudes of some scholars toward Ibn ʿArabī and his ideas, I argue that these attitudes were affected by the outflow of Ibn Taymiyya's ideas. How did these ideas leak into the Ottoman intellectual milieu? Unexpectedly, it seems that Sufism played an important role in spreading some of Ibn Taymiyya's ideas in an indirect way. This paper discusses three possible ways through which Ibn Taymiyya's thought may have circulated in the Ottoman Empire as early as the fifteenth century: a scholar, a book, and a Sufi order.