452 Dominik Schlosser
3.5. Authenticity of the GospelsThe charge that the Christians were guilty of the alteration (tabdīl)
and modification (taghyīr) of the “true religion of Jesus” by deviat-
ing from the forms of religious practice that Jesus observed and from
the doctrines he proclaimed is coupled in the Hidāyat al-ḥayārā
with the accusation that the Christians had falsified the divine revela-
tion given to Jesus, i. e., the Gospel (Injīl). This verdict entered the
canon of the themes treated in Muslim anti-Christian polemics with
Ibn Ḥazm’s Kitāb al-Fiṣal at the latest,^154 but is already implicit in the
Koran. Accordingly, Ibn al-Qayyim’s elucidations on the question of
the taḥrīf of the Torah and the Gospels also point out that God had
reproved the ahl al-kitāb for falsifying their respective divine scrip-
tures and concealing the real truth of God’s revelation; he supports this
assertion with Suras (2:159 and 3:171).^155
It is noteworthy that Ibn al-Qayyim tries to grasp the theme of
scripture falsification fundamentally by distinguishing among vari-
ous kinds of the People of the Book’s unsuitable dealings with the
wording of the genuine divine revelation: concealing the truth of the
revelation (ikhfāʾ al-ḥaqq) and keeping it secret (kitmān), darkening
it with lies and deception (labs al-ḥaqq bil-bāṭil), falsifying the word-
ing (taḥrīf lafẓ al-kalim), falsely interpreting the text (taḥrīf maʿnā
al-kalim), and, finally, twisting the words (lit.: layy al-lisān).^156 But
he does not take up this differentiation in the further progress of his
depiction and, in addition, refrains from providing some examples of
these kinds of falsifications of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, so that
the terminology for scripture falsification retains a certain fuzziness
in the Hidāyat al-ḥayārā, which is reinforced by the fact that Ibn al-
Qayyim also makes use of the terms tabdīl, elimination (izāla), and
taghyīr without defining them. Remarkably enough, contrary to what
might be expected, there is no trace in the Hidāyat al-ḥayārā of Ibn
Taymiyya’s view, which undertakes a differentiation between the his-
torical (khabariyyāt) and the preceptive statements (amriyyāt) in the
154 See along with Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds, p. 13; idem: Taḥrīf, in: EI^2 ,
vol. 10 (1998), pp. 111–112; also Waardenburg, Muslim Studies of Other Reli-
gions, p. 24; and Accad, Martin: Corruption and/or Misinterpretation of the
Bible. The Story of the Islāmic Usage of Taḥrīf, in: The Near East School of
Theology Theological Review 24 (2003), pp. 67–97.
155 Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Hidāyat al-ḥayārā, pp. 311–312.
156 Ibid., p. 312.
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