398 Jon Hoover
al-ʿalīl. In both books, however, Ibn al-Qayyim backed away from the
force of his arguments in the end and took an agnostic position on the
question. At about the same time, the powerful Damascene chief judge
Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī began to harass Ibn al-Qayyim. In 1345 al-Subkī
took Ibn al-Qayyim to task over legal matters pertaining to horse rac-
ing, and Ibn al-Qayyim had to back down. In the meantime Ibn al-
Qayyim continued his theological reflection on the Fire in al-Ṣawāʿiq
al-mursala. There he abandoned his earlier agnostic view on the dura-
tion of the Fire and affirmed that indeed chastisement in the Fire will
end. This is likely what prompted al-Subkī to write a refutation of Ibn
Taymiyya’s Fanāʾ al-nār in 1348. That is, al-Subkī refuted Ibn Taymiy-
ya’s tract in order to make clear to Ibn al-Qayyim that he must stop
his speculation and believe in the eternity of the Fire. This appears to
have worked, with Ibn al-Qayyim again backing down. Ibn al-Qayyim
stopped speculating on the duration of the Fire in his latest works, and
he wrote as if the Fire were eternal in his last work Zād al-maʿād, as
well as in two other works that may also be late: Ṭarīq al-hijratayn and
al-Wābil al-ṣayyib. Further disagreement between al-Subkī and Ibn al-
Qayyim in 1349 over divorce procedures confirms that tension between
al-Subkī and Ibn al-Qayyim was ongoing through the late 1340s.
Conclusion
In conclusion we return to ʿAlī al-Ḥarbī’s mission. His aim is to show
that Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya uphold the eternity of
the Fire so that they conform to classical Sunni doctrine and thereby to
his, that is, al-Ḥarbī’s, preconceived notion of what such great Muslim
scholars and rejuvenators of the faith should believe. In the case of
Ibn Taymiyya, al-Ḥarbī’s efforts fall short in the view of the fact that
the Shaykh’s last work Fanāʾ al-nār argues for the passing away of the
Fire. With respect to Ibn al-Qayyim, al-Ḥarbī draws our attention to
the distinct possibility of a late-life turn in the Ḥanbalī scholar’s writ-
ing toward affirming the eternity of the Fire. Al-Ḥarbī’s case remains
very weak on its own because he fails to provide concrete evidence
that Ibn al-Qayyim’s works upholding the Fire’s eternity are later than
those that do not. However, two things add considerably to the cred-
ibility of al-Ḥarbī’s hypothesis: first the fact that some of these texts
do indeed appear to be later – especially Zād al-maʿād – and second
the late-life difficulties that Ibn al-Qayyim suffered at the hands of
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