Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Attitude Toward Christianity 431
on the loss of the original text of the Torah in Babylonian exile and
on its reconstitution by the biblical Ezra^35 differs only slightly from
the parallel passage in Ibn al-Maghribī’s anti-Jewish treatise.^36 Another
source for the Hidāyat al-ḥayārā that Ibn al-Qayyim cites in the text
as little as he does Ibn Ḥazm’s Kitāb al-Fiṣal and Ifḥām al-yahūd, is
Tathbīt dalāʾil al-nubuwwa (The Establishment of the Proofs of the
Prophethood) by the Muʿtazilī theologian ʿAbd al-Jabbār b. Aḥmad
al-Hamadhānī (d. 415/1025),^37 from which he has evidently worked
into his own text among other things both the section on the so-called
Council of Jerusalem (in about 50 A. D.) and the supposed discrepancy
between Jesus’ religious practices and those of Christians.^38
It is not clear whether Ibn al-Qayyim had access to an Arabic trans-
lation of the Old and New Testament scriptures^39 or if the Bible quo-
tations in the Hidāyat al-ḥayārā^40 are taken from the writings of his
predecessors in the field of Muslim anti-Christian polemics such as
Naṣr b. Yaḥyā b. ʿĪsā b. Saʿīd al-Mutaṭabbib’s (588/589/1193) al-Naṣīḥa
al-īmāniyya fī faḍīḥat al-milla al-naṣrāniyya (Faithful Advice about
Corruption of the Christian Religion).^41 The conclusion that Ibn al-
Qayyim’s at least passing knowledge of the biblical writings is based
on his reception of such works of his predecessors, as Alphonse Min-
35 Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Hidāyat al-ḥayārā, pp. 420–422.
36 The passages reproduced by Ibn al-Qayyim are found in Perlmann, Ifḥām
al-yahūd, pp. 48–52 (Arabic text).
37 About this work see especially Reynolds, Gabriel Said: A Muslim Theologian
in the Sectarian Milieu. ʿAbd al-Jabbār and the Critique of Christian Origins,
Leiden 2004; al-Hamadhānī, ʿAbd al-Jabbār b. Aḥmad: Critique of Christian
Origins. A Parallel English-Arabic Text; edited, translated, and annotated by
Gabriel Said Reynolds and Samir Khalil Samir, Provo 2010, pp. xxi–lxxv.
38 Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Hidāyat al-ḥayārā, pp. 483–487. See the note in Stern,
Samuel M.: ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s Account of How Christ’s Religion was Falsified by
the Adoption of Roman Customs, in: Journal of Theological Studies 19 (1968),
pp. 128–185, here p. 131, n. 1. This essay also contains a translation of the cor-
responding passages; see ibid., pp. 131–133. On other passages Ibn al-Qayyim
lifted from the Tathbīt dalāʾil al-nubuwwa, see idem: Quotations from Apoc-
ryphal Gospels in ʿAbd al-Jabbār, in: Journal of Theological Studies 18 (1967),
pp. 34–57, here pp. 35, 38. See also Reynolds, A Muslim Theologian, pp. 77–79.
39 On this, see, for example, Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds, p. 126.
40 The term “quotation” here does not mean to imply that Ibn al-Qayyim repro-
duces biblical pericopes absolutely faithfully; rather, I use the expression to
designate passages whose wording and/or structure deviates from the biblical
original, but nonetheless presents the content of the passage in question.
41 See Accad, Muḥammad’s Advent, pp. 229–230.
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