The Curse of Philosophy 353
According to Ajhar, Ibn Taymiyya dealt with the complicated rela-
tionship between God’s attributes and His essence in a “unique and cou-
rageous way” which deserves to be considered not only as a contribution
“to the formulation of the original philosophical problem; it also breaks
with intellectual premises which remained untouched throughout a
long period of Islamic thought.” In regards to the topics he treated, Ibn
Taymiyya was clearly concerned with developing a logical justification
of his opinions. Dealing critically with former philosophers and kalām-
theologians on this topic, he rejected some of their views while adopting
many others. This philosophical act of selection makes it difficult for
the reader to discover which philosophical views he “put in a different
philosophical framework” and adopted, especially since his views are
scattered throughout several books. As “his new concepts and ideas”
demonstrate, however, Ibn Taymiyya remains both “a mutakallim and a
philosopher” deeply immersed in both kalām and falsafa.^120
Ibn Taymiyya considers God’s essence and attributes to be one,
forming together “God’s oneness and objective existence”. In order to
define the nature of the divine attributes and their relation to the divine
essence, he utilized a philosophical rather than a philological approach,
declaring God an inseparable unity consisting of both the essence and
the attributes. In this sense, God’s attributes, such as His omniscience,
omnipotence, life, hearing, seeing etc., are actually not additions (zāʾida)
to His essence nor different from it (ghayr). They possess a “conceptual
being” (al-kaynūna al-mafhūmiyya)^121 and, as such, they are univer-
sals, both genera and species. Together with God’s essence, these con-
stitute a unified one being. In this regard, Ibn Taymiy ya’s teaching that
“God and the attributes are one” appears to be very close to the teach-
ing developed by the Muʿtazilī theologian Abū al-Hudhayl al-ʿAllāf
(d. 841), stating that the attributes are God Himself (hiya huwa).^122 For
the Ḥanbalī scholar, however, God’s oneness is not merely imagined
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, Beirut 1417/1997, vol. 3, pp. 277–293. See in general the illu-
minating study by Jan Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Opti-
mism, Leiden 2007.
120 Ajhar, Ibn Taymiyya, p. 83. See on this Özervarli, M. Sait: The Qurʾānic Ratio-
nal Theology of Ibn Taymiyya and His Criticism of the Mutakallimūn, in:
Yossef Rapoport and Shahab Ahmad (eds.): Ibn Taymiyya and His Times,
Oxford 2010, pp. 78–100.
121 Ajhar, Ibn Taymiyya, p. 85.
122 Ibid., pp. 86–88. See Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ, edited by ʿAbd al-Laṭīf ʿAbd
al-Raḥmān, vol. 5, pp. 328–329; Nyberg, Henrik Samuel: Abu’l-Hudhayl
al-ʿAllāf, in: EI2, vol. 1 (1960), pp. 127–129; see Ibn Rushd’s critique of the
Brought to you by | Nanyang Technological University
Authenticated