2 Alina Kokoschka and Birgit Krawietz
studies and so forth, but also by general Western outlooks that have
meanwhile changed. As such, appropriation both counteracts the per-
suasiveness of prior creatio ex nihilo narratives and stresses the impor-
tant role of imaginative cultural brokers.
The phrase “appropriation of” in the main title of this introduction
points in different directions: Ibn al-Qayyim is tremendously influ-
enced by the ideas and enactments of Ibn Taymiyya, yet also selec-
tively reshapes them; further, he creatively integrates countless manu-
scripts from his own voluminous library. Beyond this, Ibn Taymiyya
himself owes a great deal to his predecessors, to the scholars of his
time and even to his opponents – a fact that may have been blurred to
a considerable degree both by his harsh vituperations and his tendency
to conceal quotations and borrowings as such. A strong case in point
is Anke von Kügelgen’s demonstration, in this edited volume, of how
much Ibn Taymiyya actually absorbed from philosophy. He shares
this strategy with many other Ḥanbalī and later Salafi authors, all of
whom are very anxious to acquit themselves of any trace of recent
influence and to re-root or transplant their message in early Islamic
times. Likewise, the overall feature of productive appropriation char-
acterizes negotiation with Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim by other
scholars up to (post-)modern times, notably, but not exclusively by
Salafis; even the negotiations of semi-scholars and all sorts of laypeople
share this characteristic. In his article “Appropriating the Past. Twenti-
eth Century Reconstruction of Premodern Islamic Thought”, Ahmad
Dallal discusses his understanding of such a “reconstruction” as “not
intended to carry any negative or pejorative connotation”. He tries to
“avoid the equation of reconstruction and distortion” and suggests it
would be better “to shift the focus of examination from the assumed
absolute origins of this tradition to the continuous process through
which it is regenerated”.^1 In this sense, we perceive Ibn Taymiyya and
Ibn al-Qayyim as the twin peaks of Ḥanbalī/Salafi literary output that
currently enjoys the greatest popularity, for whatever reasons; yet, we
propose to distinguish between the very different circumstances of the
productivity of these two – and consequently also other – scholars.
This does not ignore scholarly findings like those of El-Rouayheb,
1 Dallal, Ahmad: Appropriating the Past. Twentieth Century Reconstruction of
Premodern Islamic Thought, in: Islamic Law and Society 7 (2000), pp. 325–358,
here p. 326, where Dallal encourages us to “identify the mechanisms through
which a tradition is endowed with different meanings at different historical
moments”.
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