Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Attitude Toward Christianity 437
diction, the tark dīn al-masīḥ wal-insilāḥ minhu jumlatan,^72 the idea of
a not unintentional, but variously motivated distortion of the “true reli-
gion of Jesus”,^73 i. e., of the religion that is to be equated with the reli-
gion revealed in the Koran.^74 Ibn al-Qayyim’s claim is that the divinely
commanded doctrines, which Jesus and his predecessors in the office of
prophet tirelessly propounded, and the forms of practicing faith directed
by God, strict adherence to which Jesus repeatedly inculcated in his apos-
tles, were replaced by doctrines and practices deviating from them.^75 Ibn
al-Qayyim does not place the responsibility for this solely on the partici-
pants at the councils.^76 He also blames, first, the Christian clergy,^77 whom
he accuses of and arbitrarily – as if claiming divine authority – replacing
God’s commandments to human beings with their own commandments
and prohibitions, which the faithful in turn regard as binding, and, sec-
ond, the Christians per se, who, he contends, reject in toto the divine com-
mandments contained in the revelatory scriptures and instead orient their
actions toward the directives of the clergy.^78
The verdict that the Christians had willfully corrupted Jesus’ prom-
ulgations and had thus deviated from the “true religion of Jesus” and
that Christianity in its current form is therefore nothing but a degen-
eration – a verdict that many of Ibn al-Qayyim’s predecessors in the
intellectual debates with Christianity had asserted in various degrees
of intensity^79 – shapes not only Ibn al-Qayyim’s condensed depiction
of the first centuries of Christianity; it also functions as the basis of his
critique of the substance and practices of Christian belief. As the basic
theme underlying the Hidāyat al-ḥayārā would have it and as shown
not least by many passages in which Ibn al-Qayyim calls the Chris-
tians ummat al-ḍalāl, the history of the first centuries of Christianity
appears almost exclusively as the history of the “Christians’ deviation
from the right path”: according to Ibn Qayyim’s depiction, the distor-
tion of Jesus’ promulgations began already in “pre-Constantine” times,
for example with the 3rd-century theologian and patriarch of Antioch,
72 Ibid., p. 486.
73 Ibid., p. 487.
74 Ibid., p. 338; see also pp. 425, 577.
75 Ibid., pp. 486–488.
76 Ibid., p. 539; see also p. 584.
77 Ibid., p. 574.
78 Ibid., p. 228.
79 In this context, Erdmann Fritsch speaks of the “common denominator of all
individual polemics”; see Fritsch, Islam und Christentum, p. 46.
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