Appropriation of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya 23
the very same mechanism is of course applied if we take Wood’s essay
as the founding event.^95 This attitude has long been questioned in arts
and music – with DaDa collages and ready-mades to Street Art and
digital music – as they are practised, and should likewise be ques-
tioned not only in studies of music, literature, and arts but also in
such “alien” subjects as Islamic Studies. However, these “alien” fields
have hitherto shown a certain predilection for innovators who pres-
ent themselves with the air of novelty and give the impression that
they are not indebted to others – so as to leave other competitors
behind.
Although Ibn Taymiyya does not claim creatio ex nihilo creativ-
ity for himself, he greatly devalues recent and older competitors. He
presents himself as being committed to the salaf ṣāliḥ as the first three
generations of Islam, and this move functionally allows him to brush
aside and devalue what so many generations of scholars had gathered.
Distancing himself from those closer to his own time in favour of
earlier referees thereby enhances his legitimacy. With his salaf ṣāliḥ
formula, Ibn Taymiyya offered a thorough and effective clean-up pro-
gram. No wonder, then, that this has become and is regularly used as a
powerful tool by “reformed” Muslim scholars and/or activists around
the globe, especially when they return to their local communities with
the impetus to tidy up the deviations of lived Islam in the name of the
holy sources and the knowledgeable early forefathers. The West – of
which Oriental and later Islamic Studies in its different variants are
part – has for some time fostered and socially rewarded the encour-
agement and applauding of ostentatious self-posing, the by-passing of
traditions or predecessors, and even the ignoring of those who have
lent a helping hand, and this has affected reception of such behaviour
in Western contexts. Against such a background, a figure like Ibn al-
Qayyim, combining some general Muslim notions of a sober habitus,
respect towards elders, courtesy, immersion in pious practices, and
so forth, appears as the complete antithesis of well-deserved stardom.
His status is greatly aggravated by his endless quotations and extraor-
95 For a more thorough account of “when imitation became plagiarism” see Bue-
low, Originality, and Jaffe, Kineret S.: The Concept of Genius. Its Changing
Role in Eighteenth-century French Aesthetics, in: Journal of the History of
Ideas 41 (1980), pp. 579–599. Compare Brunner, Anette: Der zum Himmel
erhobene Blick als Ausdruck enthusiastischen Schöpfertums. Die Darstellung
der Invention im Künstlerbildnis der Goethezeit, in: Paragrana. Internationale
Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie, suppl. 2 (2006), pp. 57–72.
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