The Relation of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya 147
Ḥanafiyya (adherents of the Ḥanafī school) raise their hands only at
the beginning of the ritual prayer, adherents of the other Sunni schools
at multiple other points in the course of it as well. More often, there
will be disagreement within the school; for example, at those points of
the prayer where one needs to recite the Koran aloud, the Ḥanafiyya
disagree whether it suffices to recite loudly enough to hear oneself or
only if someone else can hear, too. A full treatment of the rules of
Islamic law (a book of many volumes) will normally provide argu-
ments in favour of the rules identified by the author’s own school,
also review disagreement within that school, sometimes expressing a
preference for one or another position but sometimes leaving internal
disagreements unresolved. Being Ḥanbalī also meant, then, that^ Ibn
Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim wrote books identifying the range of
opinion within the Ḥanbalī school and expressing their preferences.^3
To judge by how often he is cited in an encyclopaedia of Ḥanbalī
opinions from the late fifteenth century, it appears that the Ḥanbalī
school after him regarded Ibn Taymiyya as a significant figure but less
than some others. Numerous other Ḥanbalī jurisprudents, both earlier
and later than he, effectively did more to shape the peculiar range of
opinions that defined the school. By contrast, Ibn al-Qayyim attract-
ed little attention from later Ḥanbalī jurisprudents, even with regard
to juridical problems that he treated at length with special stress on
Ḥanbalī positions. The reason for the difference in their effects on the
Ḥanbalī tradition, respectively modest and negligible, seems to be that
Ibn Taymiyya made a greater show of respecting the Ḥanbalī discur-
sive tradition, whereas Ibn al-Qayyim too often ignored it in favour
of what he took to be the positions of the school’s eponym, Aḥmad b.
Ḥanbal (d. 241/855).
The chief means I propose to measure the importance of Ibn Taymiyya
and Ibn al-Qayyim to the Ḥanbalī school is to count citations of earli-
er Ḥanābila (adherents of that school) in an encyclopaedia of disagree-
3 For certain and uncertain questions in Islamic law, see Weiss, Bernard G.: The
Spirit of Islamic Law. The Spirit of the Laws, Athens 1998. For the schools of law
as discursive traditions, see Calder, Norman: The Law (in History of Islamic Phi-
losophy), in: Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman (eds.): History of Islamic
Philosophy, London 1996, vol. 2, pp. 979–998, and Hallaq, Wael B.: Authority,
Continuity and Change in Islamic Law, Cambridge 2001, chapter 2; also, for
adherence to schools in Damascus a century or two before Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn
al-Qayyim, Talmon-Heller, Daniella: Fidelity, Cohesion and Conformity within
Madhhabs in Zangid and Ayyubid Syria, in: Peri Bearman, Rudolph Peters and
Frank E. Vogel (eds.): The Islamic School of Law, Cambridge 2005, pp. 94–116.
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