The Poison of Philosophy
Ibn Taymiyya’s Struggle For and Against Reason^1
Anke von Kügelgen
Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) lived in a period in which the claim of the
priority of reason/intellect (ʿaql) over religious tradition (naql) in the
case of their contradiction was prevailing in scholarly circles reading
and commenting on philosophical texts in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and
the Maghreb. Representatives of these circles were scholars with dif-
ferent intellectual interests and opinions, such as Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī
(d. 606/1209), Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī (d. 663/1264), Ibn Sabʿīn (d. 668
or 669/1269–71), Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274) and Najm al-Dīn
al-Kātibī (d. 657/1276), who saw Aristotelian logic as a neutral and
infallible instrument of reason,^2 in fact, al-Abharī’s^3 summary of logic
1 I would like to thank Caterina Bori, Kurt Flasch, Dimitri Gutas, Jon Hoover,
Birgit Krawietz and Georges Tamer for their very helpful comments on drafts of
this paper. It benefited as well from the careful readings of some parts by Stephan
Reichmuth and Jan-Peter Hartung and supportive criticisms of the participants
at the Workshop “Neo-Hanbalism Reconsidered: The Impact of Ibn Taymiyya
and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya”. Moreover I am much obliged to Kata Moser who
proofread several versions of the article, adjusted the transliteration and helped
me in preparing the bibliography, and express my gratitude also to Florian Zem-
min for his assistance with the last text editing. The composing deadline was
spring 2008. All publications after that date were not taken into account except
the contributions of Caterina Bori, Livnat Holtzmann, Sait Özervarli and Yossef
Rapoport to Ibn Taymiyya and His Times, ed. by Yossef Rapoport and Shahab
Ahmed in 2010, and Caterina Bori’s contribution to The Mamlūk Studies Review
13 (2009), with which the authors or editors kindly provided me when they were
still in press.
2 Street, Tony: Arabic Logic, in: Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor (eds.): The
Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, Cambridge 2005, pp. 572–579; see
also below, chapters 2 and 5.
3 Atademir, Hamdi R.: Porphyrios ve Ebherî’nin Isagoci’leri, in: Ankara Üniversi-
tesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi 6 (1948), p. 468 (according to Gutas,
Dimitri: Aspects of Literary Form and Genre in Arabic Logical Works, in:
Brought to you by | Nanyang Technological University
Authenticated