Ibn Taymiyya’s Worldview
and the Challenge of Modernity
A Conflict Among the Ahl-i Ḥadīth in British India
Martin Riexinger
Considered an – albeit brilliant – eccentric, Ibn Taymiyya was a fig-
ure at the margin of Islamic intellectual life for centuries until his
ideas became a major source of inspiration for a number of political
cum religious movements from the 18th century onwards. In the 20th
century he finally emerged as one of the most important intellectual
authorities in the Islamic world.^1 The fact that the rediscovery of Ibn
Taymiyya coincided with the increasing dominance of European pow-
ers over the Muslim World and the ensuing radical social change lent
support to the idea that his religious ideas were positively affiliated to
“modernity”. This concept was reinforced by the fact that his puritan
thought seemed to appear as Islamic parallel to Protestantism which
allegedly set in motion the development toward a rational moder-
nity in the West. Do his polemics against saint worship and popular
cults not resemble the attacks against the Catholic Church in the age
of Re formation? Does his insistence on the importance of proof texts
from the primary sources Koran and Hadith not correspond to the
Protestant principle of sola scriptura? This idea was not promoted by
Western scholars in the first instance. Already the educationist and
1 Already early contemporary Western observers have perceived this development:
Goldziher, Ignaz: Die Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslegung, Leiden 1920,
pp. 339–340; and Laoust, Henri: Essai sur les doctrines sociales et politiques de
Takī-d-dīn Aḥmad Ibn Taimīya, canoniste Ḥanbalite. Né à Ḥarrān en 661/1262,
mort à Damas en 728/1328; thèse pour le doctorat, Cairo 1939, pp. 557–575. For
a recent assessment see Krawietz, Birgit: Ibn Taymiyya. Vater des islamischen
Fundamentalismus? Zur westlichen Rezeption eines mittelalterlichen Schari-
atsgelehrten, in: Enrico Pattaro, Martin Schulte, Boris Topornin and Dieter
Wyduckel (eds.): Theorie des Rechts und der Gesellschaft. Festschrift für Werner
Krawietz zum 70. Geburtstag, Berlin 2003, pp. 39–62, here pp. 41–42.
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