382 Jon Hoover
al-arwāḥ as the main sources of the difficulties.^18 Al-Ḥarbī suspects
that Ibn al-Wazīr and others who attribute the passing away of the Fire
to Ibn Taymiyya rely on Ibn al-Qayyim for their judgments but have
no evidence from Ibn Taymiyya himself. He cites as an obvious exam-
ple the 18th century Yemenite scholar Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl al-Ṣanʿānī
(d. 1182/1768) who quotes Ibn al-Qayyim’s Ḥādī al-arwāḥ extensively
in his Rafʿ al-astār but attributes the ideas that he found there directly
to Ibn Taymiyya. This problem had been observed earlier in 1984 by
Muḥammad Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī, the editor of al-Ṣanʿānī’s work.^19
As I indicated above, Ibn al-Qayyim does not make entirely clear in
Ḥādī al-arwāḥ what position Ibn Taymiyya holds.
The task that al-Ḥarbī sets for himself in writing Kashf al-astār is
replacing widespread belief that Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim say
that the Fire will pass away with solid evidence that these two Ḥanbalīs
affirm the Fire’s eternity.^20 Al-Ḥarbī bemoans how difficult it was to
extricate the pertinent material from his thesis on Ibn al-Wazīr. He
tells how he immersed himself in the sea of Ibn Taymiyya’s knowl-
edge – he who was not accustomed to waves and diving – and how
God rescued him when he called out just as God saved the Prophet
Jonah.^21 This bit of melodrama provides the clue to al-Ḥarbī’s strategy.
He searches for texts from Ibn Taymiyya and his disciple affirming the
eternity of the Fire and tries to show that these represent their most
mature views. Before proceeding to those passages, we will first exam-
ine what al-Ḥarbī does with those texts that clearly do not support his
argument, namely, Ibn al-Qayyim’s Ḥādī al-arwāḥ, Shifāʾ al-ʿalīl and
Mukhtaṣar al-Ṣawāʾiq.
2. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Passages that
Do Not Affirm the Eternity of the Fire
Al-Ḥarbī begins with an overview of Ibn al-Qayyim’s discussion of
the duration of the Fire in Ḥādī al-arwāḥ. His aim is not so much to
18 Ibid., pp. 9, 15, 24–25, 34, 78.
19 Ibid., pp. 29–30; al-Ṣanʿānī, Rafʿ al-astār, p. 63, n. 7. For an introduction to the
life and thought of the controversial Hadith scholar al-Albānī (d. 1999), see
Brown, Jonathan: The Canonization of al-Bukhārī and Muslim. The Formation
and Function of the Sunnī Ḥadīth Canon, Leiden 2007, pp. 321–334.
20 Al-Ḥarbī, Kashf al-astār, pp. 10–11.
21 Ibid., p. 8.
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