164 DESTINY DISRUPTED
actual points disputed will strike non-Muslims as minutely technical: for
example, was a divorce uttered three times merely final or irrevocably final?
The establishment said it was irrevocable; Ibn Taymiyah said final but not
irrevocable. In this instance, the authorities settled the argument by clap-
ping Ibn Taymiyah in prison. He spent a lot of time in prison. In fact, he
died there.
Ibn Taymiyah does not sum up what Islam is, nor even what it was in
the thirteenth century-there are so many schools of thought, so many
approaches-but the very attitudes that made so many clerics and officials
angry with Ibn Taymiyah led many others to admire him. Ibn Taymiyah
belonged to the school of Muslim jurisprudence founded by Ibn Hanbal,
that Abbasid-era scholar who took a bulldog stand against the primacy and
sufficiency of reason. Ibn Hanbal had favored the most literal reading of
the Qur'an and the most literalist methods for applying it, for the most
part rejecting even analogical reasoning as a way of expanding the doc-
trines, and so did Ibn Taymiyah. Both men had flinty, combative, un-
bending temperaments. The fact that both went to prison for their ideas
tended to ennoble their legacy quite apart from whatever intellectual mer-
its their ideas may have had.
The identification of courage with truth pops up often in history, even
in our day: talk-show host Bill Maher was kicked off network TV for sug-
gesting that the suicide hijackers of9/ll were brave. Common decency de-
mands that no positive character traits be associated with someone whose
actions and ideas are vicious. Unfortunately, this equation enables people
to validate questionable ideas by defending them with courage, as if a
coward cannot say something that is true or a brave man something that
is false. Ibn Hanbal had benefited from this syndrome and, now, so did
Ibn Taymiyah.
Ibn Taymiyah reputedly wrote about four thousand pamphlets and five
hundred books. With these, he planted a seed. The seed didn't flourish at
once, but it never died out, either. It just lay there, under the surface ofls-
lamic culture, ready to bud if circumstances should ever favor it. Four and
a half centuries later, circumstances did.
There was another response to the centuries of breakdown that climaxed
with the Mongol holocaust, a more popular and gentler response than