282 Anke von Kügelgen
The prominent Shāfiʿī jurist and preacher Taj al-Dīn Abū Naṣr ʿAbd
al-Wahhāb al-Subkī (d. 771/1370), for instance, apparently accuses Ibn
Taymiyya and others of having unwarrantedly denounced al-Ghazālī
and al-Rāzī – this although al-Subkī was in no way a friend of Greek
rationalism; however, he only allowed the study of logic and philoso-
phy for the purpose of refuting them, and even in this case limited it to
those whose high degree of knowledge of the Koran, the Sunna, and
jurisprudence had been unshakably rooted in their hearts.^119
The fact that Ibn Taymiyya rejected not only falsafa, but also
logic, the “later” kalām theology, and other schools of thought may
have kept his substantial rebuttal from becoming an important point
of reference. Falsafa in the sense of an adherence to the teachings of
Plato, Aristotle, their Greek commentators, and their Muslim follow-
ers and thus the claim to reason about the human, the divine, and the
universe independently from revelation was instead predominantly
rejected with reference to al-Ghazālī and sometimes with reference
to al-Rāzī and to al-Suhrawardī.^120 Thus, it was the arguments of
al-Ghazālī’s Tahāfut al-falāsifa that, in the second half of the 15th cen-
tury, Mehmet II ordered weighed against those of the philosophers.^121
Again, it is Tahāfut al-falāsifa that the well-known bibliographer and
historiographer, the Ottoman state employee Ḥājjī Khalīfa (Kātib
119 Al-Subkī, Tāj al-Dīn Abū Naṣr ʿAbd al-Wahhāb: Kitāb Muʿīd al-niʿam
wa-mubīd al-niqam. The Restorer of Favours and the Restrainer of Chastise-
ments, ed. by David W. Myhrman, London 1968, pp. 110–112; he does not
explicitly mention Ibn Taymiyya’s name, but in all likelihood refers to him.
See al-Nashshār, Manāhij al-baḥth, p. 225; Tāj al-Dīn’s father, Taqī al-Dīn
al-Subkī, was an explicit enemy of Ibn Taymiyya and wrote several tracts
against juridical and theological tenets of Ibn Taymiyya and his followers,
see Bori, Ibn Taymiyya, pp. 155–169; al-Subkī, Tāj al-Dīn Abū Naṣr ʿAbd
al-Wahhāb: Tâj Eddîn Es-Subkî’s Muʿîd en-niʿam wa mubîd en-niqam. Über
die moralischen Pflichten der verschiedenen islamischen Bevölkerungsklassen,
mit Kürzungen aus dem Arabischen übersetzt von Oskar Rescher, in: idem:
Gesammelte Schriften, sect. II, vol. 2, Osnabrück 1980 (reprint, Constantino-
ple 1925), pp. 71–74.
120 Hartmann, Angelika: Bemerkungen zu Handschriften ʿUmar as-Suhrawardīs,
echten und vermeintlichen Autographen, in: Der Islam 60 (1983), pp. 112–142,
here p. 117; idem, Hartmann, al-Nāṣir li-dīn Allāh, p. 36; see also above, n. 95.
121 Ḥājjī Khalīfa (Kātib Çelebi): Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī al-kutub wal-funūn,
ed. by Şerefeddin Yaltakaya and K. Rifat Bilge, vol. 1, Istanbul 1941, p. 513;
Ṭāshköprü-Zāda: al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya fī ʿulamāʾ al-daula al-ʿuthmāniyya,
ed. by Aḥmad Ṣubḥī Furāt, Istanbul 1985, pp. 98–99; Türker, Mubahat: Üç
Tehāfüt Bakımından Felsefe ve Din Münasebeti, Ankara 1956, pp. 56–61.
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