448 Dominik Schlosser
actions (aʿmāl).^131 Considering this judgment, it is no wonder that, in
the Hidāyat al-ḥayārā, the Damascene theologian does not stop at
his critique of Christian doctrines, but also takes umbrage at certain
Christian rituals and practices. In his striving to denigrate them, Ibn
al-Qayyim makes no effort to reflect on their meaning, nor does his
depiction aim to provide more evidence of the intra-Christian diver-
gence he notes^132 in the area of everyday religious practices. Rather,
Ibn al-Qayyim aims to construe a discrepancy between a number of
Christian religious practices and the forms of practicing faith that Jesus
cultivated and thereby to make the Christians appear as a community
that is guilty of corrupting the “true religion of Jesus” and of an obvi-
ous violation of his directives. In order to argue in accordance with
this intention that the religious conduct of Jesus was norm-setting for
Christians in directly analogy to the Sunna and that it was a behavior
that corresponded in every way to the example of the earlier prophets
and the precepts of the Torah, Ibn al-Qayyim cites the view, which he
presents as the Christian consensus, that Jesus had called for the reten-
tion of the precepts of the Torah and of his predecessors in the role of
prophet. Without providing a legitimation for this statement, he also
underscores that Jesus explicitly told the apostles not only to emulate
his own behavior, but also to make the precepts he imposed upon them
into obligations for all human beings. Along with the relinquishing of
circumcision, a practice that Jesus, in agreement with Moses, Aaron,
and the other prophets before him, had explicitly prescribed,^133 and the
celebration of Sundays instead of the Sabbath, which he had kept as long
as he lived,^134 Ibn al-Qayyim here names three other points that display
the divergence between the precepts of the preceding prophets, which
Jesus adhered to, and the usage of the Christians. As an especially obvi-
ous deviance, he pillories the Christian approach to bodily-cultic puri-
ty. In his view, Jesus propounded ritual purity (ṭahāra), always carried
out a complete washing (ghusl) under conditions of major ritual impu-
rity (janāba), and prescribed purification after menstruation, whereas
the Christians do not regard these ordinances as obligatory. Indeed,
they even believe, as he claims, that a prayer spoken after relieving one-
self without washing and while excrements still adhere to certain parts
of the body does not lose its validity and – so Ibn al-Qayyim’s visibly
131 Ibid., pp. 255–256.
132 Ibid., p. 533.
133 Ibid., p. 484.
134 Ibid., p. 485.
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