260 Anke von Kügelgen
Ibn Taymiyya’s theories have been disclosed.^22 How far Ibn Taymiy-
ya borrowed these or other tenets from the philosophers cannot be
answered with certainty. The high degree of similarity, however, sug-
gests that Ibn Taymiyya was at least inspired by his enemies, although
he never openly adopts their tenets and always embeds them in broader
theories that do not correspond with the philosopher’s views of man,
God and the universe. The present paper will identify a few striking
resemblances between Ibn Taymiyya and the philosophers, especially
in regard to key epistemological concepts.
2. The Status of Logic up to Ibn Taymiyya’s Times
With his rebuttal of logic, Ibn Taymiyya deviated from the mainstream
of Muslim theologians.^23 After al-Ghazālī’s (d. 505/1111) skillfull plead-
ing for the innocence of logic and its successful introduction into kalām
theology,^24 many Muslim “speculative theologians” (mutakallimūn)
22 Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy, pp. 70–72 et passim. Husâm Muhî Eldin al-
Alousî describes Ibn Taymiyya’s thinking as a melange of “elements of theo-
logical origin, elements derived from Ibn Sīnā, and elements attributable to Abū
Barakāt al-Baghdādī” (al-Alousî, Husâm Muhî Eldîn: The Problem of Creation
in Islamic Thought. Qurʾan, Hadith, Commentaries, and Kalam, Baghdad 1968
(Ph. D. thesis, Cambridge University 1965), p. 262; see Hoover, Perpetual Cre-
ativity, pp. 289–290.
23 For an excellent overview of the state of the study of Peripatetic logic in the
Islamic world and an exposition of the main changes regarding Aristotelian
logic upto 1300, see Street, Arabic Logic.
24 Similar attempts by other scholars, like the one of the Andalusian Ibn Ḥazm
(383/993–456/1064) were less successful (Brunschvig, Robert: Pour ou contre la
logique grecque chez les théologiens juristes de l’Islām. Ibn Ḥazm, al-Ghazālī,
Ibn Taymiyya, in: Etudes d’Islamologie, Paris 1979, pp. 303–327, here 304–313;
Chejne, Anwar G.: Ibn Ḥazm of Cordova on Logic, in: The Journal of the
American Oriental Society 104 (1984), pp. 52–72; Yāfūt, Sālim: Ibn Ḥazm wal-
fikr al-falsafī bil-maghrib wal-andalus, Casablanca 1986, especially pp. 200–
227). Recently, Cornelia Schöck has shown that major elements of Aristotelian
logic have been discussed and used for Koran exegesis by mutakallimūn already
before the eleventh century (Schöck, Cornelia: Koranexegese, Grammatik und
Logik. Zum Verhältnis von arabischer und aristotelischer Urteils-, Konsequenz-
und Schlusslehre, Leiden and Boston 2006). For a new assessment of al-Ghazālī’s
attitude towards Aristotelian logic and his own use of it, see Rudolph, Ulrich:
Die Neubewertung der Logik durch al-Ġazālī, in: Dominik Perler and Ulrich
Rudolph (eds.): Logik und Theologie. Das Organon im arabischen und lateini-
schen Mittelalter, Leiden and Boston 2005, pp. 73–97.
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