10 Alina Kokoschka and Birgit Krawietz
publications on Ibn Taymiyya on the one hand and the high demand
from Arabic readers on the other. Ibn al-Qayyim’s works are reprint-
ed again and again;^30 the main and growing bulk consists of mostly
uncritical Salafi editions that flood the book market, which has simul-
taneously been injected with an increasing amount of translations. Ibn
al-Qayyim’s monographs pile up in bookshops from Berlin to Jakarta;
they have become – in various forms – a pervasive feature especially
on the Internet.^31 Many Muslim authors quote and have appropriated
not only Ibn Taymiyya but also Ibn al-Qayyim; hence, there is also a
considerable number of academic publications on Ibn al-Qayyim in
Arabic that unfortunately cannot be reviewed here for lack of space.
However, with this high level of activity in mind, it seems all the more
necessary to look back in astonishment. Why, for a whole century, has
Western scholarship nearly unanimously avoided paying attention to
Ibn al-Qayyim, especially at a time when his (re)invented relevance
was already generally known? One might argue that Ibn al-Qayyim’s
Arabic is not easily accessible to the average reader, especially because
of his frequent quotations from Koran and Hadith. Furthermore, Ibn
al-Qayyim hardly ever manages to keep his story short, most of his
monographs being greatly repetitive, meandering, multi-layered and
spread over more than one book volume. Although these factors may
represent certain impediments to quickly accessing Ibn al-Qayyim
and to continuing to read him, we surmise that such a lasting blind-
ness may rather have deeper, structural reasons. Our fourth section
will unpack these and suggest them for discussion. Beforehand, we
must revisit the fact that both our authors met not only considerable
resistance in their own period and negligence in later centuries, but –
for distinctive and only partly overlapping reasons – have had remark-
ably bad press in modern Western scholarship.
ies, then painstakingly hunt for more references to Ibn al-Qayyim mainly in
works dedicated to Ibn Taymiyyah”, Bori and Holtzman, Introduction, p. 15.
30 Detailed studies of such printing patterns over time that also include publishing
locations, the involved publishing houses and key figures, as well as the chang-
ing emphasis on various topics, are still desiderata.
31 On this, see for example the article by Annabelle Böttcher in the present vol-
ume.
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