Ibn Taymiyya on the Incoherence of the Theologians’ Universal Law: Reframing the Debate between Reason and Revelation in Medieval Islam

Carl Sharif El-Tobgui

doi:10.5617/jais.6521

Abstract

This article analyzes the overarching themes and goals of Ibn Taymiyya’s roughly forty arguments against the philosophers’ and theologians’ “Universal Law” for the figurative interpretation of scripture, to which he dedicates approximately 500 pages of his 10-volume Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql wa’l-naql. While Ibn Taymiyya himself presents these arguments in a disjointed and seemingly random fashion, this study demonstrates that by carefully breaking down, regrouping, and reconstructing them, we can discern a coherent attempt on Ibn Taymiyya’s part to reconfigure the very terms of the debate between reason and revelation in medieval Islam in several important ways. Firstly, he deconstructs what it means for reason to “ground” our knowledge of revelation. Next, he redefines the opposition at stake not as one of “reason vs. revelation,” but as a purely epistemological question of certainty vs. conjecture, with both reason and revelation serving as potential sources of both kinds of knowledge. Finally, he builds on this insight to replace the dichotomy “sharʿī-ʿaqlī,” in the sense of “revelational vs. rational,” with the dichotomy “sharʿī-bidʿī” in the sense of “scripturally validated vs. scripturally non-validated,” arguing that revelation itself both commends and exemplifies the valid use of reason and rational argumentation. By this move, Ibn Taymiyya attempts to introduce a new paradigm in which it is the epistemic quality of a piece of knowledge alone that counts, simultaneously subsuming reason itself into the larger category of “sharʿī,” or revelationally validated, sources of knowledge.

Highlights

10-volume Dartaāruḍ al-ʿaql wa’l-naql, or “The Refutation of the Contradiction of Reason and Revelation,” Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) attempts to settle once and for all a central debate that had raged among Muslim theologians and philosophers for more than six centuries
Ibn Taymiyya begins his case against the Universal Law by observing that the principle according to which a person should give precedence to the deliverances of his own rational faculty over the obvious meaning of the revealed texts is a position not governed by a universally applicable rule, since each kalām theologian or philosopher—all of whom are in dispute with each other over what they call “rational knowledge”—claims that he knows by rational necessity, or through the process of rational investigation, a fact whose opposite his contender claims to be known by necessity or through rational investigation
Ibn Taymiyya contrasts the drastic agnostic pessimism expressed in the numerous quotations above with what he describes as the calm assuredness of those who know and who cling resolutely to the “original, pristine, orthodox, scripturally revealed prophetic method.”24 Such men are thoroughly familiar both with this method and with the doctrines that are claimed to be in contradiction with revelation—such as the claim of the createdness of the Qurān or the purely symbolic nature of the Divine Attributes—whereupon they can recognize the invalidity of such doctrines by virtue of the deliverances of what Ibn Taymiyya calls “pure natural reason”, which is always found to be in full conformity with what is affirmed by authentic revelation

Summary

Introduction

10-volume Dartaāruḍ al-ʿaql wa’l-naql, or “The Refutation of the Contradiction of Reason and Revelation,” Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) attempts to settle once and for all a central debate that had raged among Muslim theologians and philosophers for more than six centuries. Adherents of every doctrine have established for their school an analogous rule: they take as true and objective knowledge that which they deem reason has come to know, subordinate revelation to this alleged “knowledge” and (re)interpret it Such reinterpretation of scripture as prescribed by the Universal Law has conventionally been carried out in one of two principal ways: either through figurative interpretation (tawīl), normally defined as assigning to a revealed text a meaning other than its overt or obvious (ẓāhir) sense in accordance with a conclusion reached through reason, or through suspension of meaning (tafwīḍ), normally defined as declaring the obvious meaning invalid but refraining from providing any specific alternative interpretation, conferring (“tafwīḍ”) its true meaning unto God

Specious rationality and its discontents

Ibn Taymiyya’s project

On reason “grounding” our knowledge of revelation28

VIII. Concluding summary