From: Nuh Keller: Reliance of the Traveller
Ibn Taymiya is Ahmad Ibn Abd al-Salaam ibn Abdullah, Abu al-Abbas Taqi
al-Din ibn Taymiya al-Harrani, born in Harran, east of Damascus, in
661/1263. A famous Hanbali scholar in Qur'anic exegesis (tafsir),
hadith and jurisprudence, Ibn Taymiya was a voracious reader and
author of great personal courage who was endowed with a compelling
writing style and a keen memory. Dhahabi wrote of him, "I never saw
anyone faster at recalling the Qur'anic verses dealing with subjects
he was discussing, or anyone who could remember hadith texts more
vividly." Dhahabi estimates that his legal opinions on various
subjects amount to three-hundred or more volumes.
He was imprisoned during much of his life in Cairo, Alexandria, and
Damascus for his writings, scholars of his time accusing him of
believing Allah to be a corporeal entity because of what he mentioned
in his al-aqida al-Hamawiyya and al-Wasitiyya and other works, such as
that Allah's 'hand', 'foot', 'shin' and 'face' are literal (haqiqi)
attributes, and that He is upon the Throne in person. The error in
this is suggesting such attributes are literal is an innovation and
unjustifiable inferance from the Qur'anic and hadith texts that
mention them, for the way of early Muslims was mere acceptance of such
expressions on faith without saying how they are meant, and without
additions, subtractions, or substituting meanings imagined to be
synonyms, while acknowledging Allah's absolute transcedence beyond the
characteristics of created things, in conformity with the Qur'anic
verse "There is nothing whatsoever like unto him" [Qur'an 42:11]. As
for figurative interpretations that preserve the divine transcendence,
scholars of tenents of faith have only had recourse to them in times
when men of reprehensible innovation (bid'a), quoting hadiths and
Qur'anic verses, have caused confusion in the minds of common Muslims
as to whether Allah has attributes like those of His creation or
whether He is transcendently beyond any image conceivable to the minds
of men. Scholars' firmness in condemning those who have raised such
confusions has traditionally been very uncompromising, and this is no
doubt the reason that a number of the Imams of the Shafi'i school,
among them Taqi al-Din Subki, Ibn Hajar Haytami and al-Izz ibn Jama'a,
gave formal legal opinions (fatawa) that Ibn Taymiya was misguided and
misguiding in tenents of faith, and warned people from accepting his
theories. The Hanafi scholar Muhammad Zahid al-Kawthari has written
"Whoever thinks that all the scholars of his time joined in a single
conspiracy against him from personal envy should rather impugn their
own intelligence and understanding, after studying the repugnance of
his deviations in beliefs and works, for which he was asked to repent
time after time and moved from prison to prison until he passed on to
what he'd sent ahead."
While few deny that Ibn Taymiya was a copious and eloquent writer and
hadith scholar, his career, like that of others, demonstrates that a
man may be outstanding in one field and yet suffer from radical
deficiencies in another, the most reliable index of which is how a
field's Imams regard his work in it. By this measure, indeed, by the
standards of all previous Ahl al-Sunnah scholars, it is clear that
despite voluminous and influential written legacy, Ibn Taymiya cannot
be considered an authority on tenents of faith (aqueeda), a field in
which he made mistakes profoundly incompatible with the beliefs of
Islam, as also with a number of his legal views that violated the
scholarly consensus (ijma) of Sunni Muslims. It should be remembered
that such matters are not the province of personal reasoning (ijtihad),
whether Ibn Taymiya considered them to be so out of sincere conviction,
or whether simply because, as Imam Subki said, "his learning exceeded
his intelligence." He died in Damascus in 728/1328.Statistik: Postat av b — mån apr 04, 2011 9:12
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