IBN TAYMIYYA ON REASON AND REVELATION

In the book under review, Carl Sharif el-Tobgui offers a painstaking study of the great seventh-/fourteenth century Muslim polymath Ibn Taymiyyah’s magnum opus, Dar’ ta[arud al-[aql wa’l-naql. This magisterial text centres on one of the thorniest questions in Islamic theology: How to interpret Qur’anic descriptions of God that are couched in anthropomorphic imagery? Responses to this question varied from assigning a literal meaning to such verses—and thus affirming bodily characteristics for God (tashbih)—to interpreting them completely in metaphorical terms (ta’wil) to denying any positive attributes to God (nafy).

Hadith scholars, the mutiaddithun, emphasized strict adherence to the path of the earliest generations (Salaf) who adhered to the plain meaning of these expressions but also resisted ascribing corporeality to God. However, the mutiaddithun were faced with a nagging dilemma: How to justify linguistically the refusal to metaphorize the verses in question and at the same time deny that God had human-like bodily characteristics? As Ibn Khaldun put it,

These people do not realize that it comes under the subject of anthropomorphism for them to affirm the attribute of sitting, because according to the lexicographer, the word “sitting” implies being firmly settled in a place, which is something corporeal. (Ibn Khladun, The Muqaddimah, Translated by Franz Rosenthal, vol.3, p. 66)