120 Gino Schallenbergh
Conclusion
Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya had tried to incorporate elements of the Sufi
lexicon in a broader Islamic spiritual enterprise, that envisaged to instil
the values of the sharia in the hearts and minds of the believers, not
only as an obligation that is imposed from a transcendent authority,
but as elements of a piety that are heartfelt and experienced on a sen-
timental level as well. In this process he painstakingly shifted through
the mass of terms that were employed in al-Anṣārī’s Manāzil al-sāʾirīn
and tried to give the words a new sense that stripped the terms of its
particular Sufi meaning and reintegrated them in an Islamic lexicon
of spirituality that makes sense for all the believers. Throughout the
Madārij al-sālikīn we see that he employs an overall strategy. In his
discussion of the Sufi terminology, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya has done
three things. He dismantled the Sufi terms and brought them back to
conventional language, where they could serve in the elaboration of
an alternative spirituality; he promoted a sense of awareness for the
Koranic context of the terms and disqualified the elitist structure of
the Sufi path of spiritual self-perfection. First of all, he gave most
importance to these words that are found in a Koranic context and he
scanned carefully how these words were used in the Sufi lexicon. When
he thought that the original meaning of these terms was distorted he
did not fail to criticise the Sufi authors. In a second phase, Ibn Qayyim
al-Jawziyya dissected the conventional Sufi theories of spiritual prog-
ress that were represented by the metaphor of the mystic travel along
stations and spiritual states towards God. He learned his disciples that
the path to God is common to all believers without distinction. To
all likelihood Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya saw it as his task to offer an
alternative spirituality to Sufism, that is a generalised Sunni spiritu-
ality aimed at the internalising of religious precepts and obligations.
Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya defended a practical doctrine that offers the
believers a set of alternative possible works in religious and social life
that are all meritorious and necessary in their own right and on their
due time; prayer, dhikr, pilgrimage, contemplation, etc. It is possibly
this practical sense of integrating the religious sentiment in prescribed
Sunni devotional practice that makes that Ibn al-Qayyim’s works are
still so popular today.
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