The Fate of Others in Fourteenth-Century Ḥanbalism. Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328/728) – Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah (d. 1350/750) and the Fanā’ an-Nār

Abstract

In a recent publication entitled Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics, Sophia Vasalou tackles the moral objectivism that Ibn Taymiyya would reworked inspired to the unorthodox thought of Mu‘tazilite school. The importance of this comparison not only clarifies the relationship between these two actors of the Islamic Kalām, but points out that the neo-Hanbali reformist had to recognize a via media between Mu‘tazilite logical rationalism and Ash‘arite orthodoxy. In the last fifty years Ibn Taymiyya was perhaps one of the most analyzed Muslim theologians, but also one of the least understood because crushed by the ideological embrace of those who identified him as the main inspiration behind current Neo-Wahhabi ideology. This article delves into the eschatological vision of Ibn Taymiyyah and of his main student, Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya (d. 1350/750), emphasizing the attention, despite of what it might imagine, on the heterodox theory of Fanā’ an -Nār, the annihilation of Hell: there will be a time known only by God, where the hell will no longer exist because no longer inhabited. A survey that emphasizes not only the difficulty in exploiting the thought of Ibn Taymiyya, but also in making it conform to contemporary ideological interests.