Ibn Taymiyya’s Worldview and the Challenge of Modernity 507
educational gap separating the Muslims from the Sikhs and the Hindus
in particular as well as the resulting under-representation of Muslims
in the civil service, the professions and the business community. For
this reason they propagated secular education among the Muslims and
they collected funds for the establishment of educational institutions
which would end the dependence on schools and colleges operated by
Christian missionaries or Āryā Samāj, a Hindu reform movement (see
below). Against this the party of his opponents consisted mainly of
scholars who were reinforced by a few lay figures with a high social
standing. For them secular learning was not a major concern.^54
The fact that Thanāʾ Allāh and his opponents addressed two differ-
ent audiences is the main clue to understanding the ambivalent rela-
tionship between the modernization of Islamic societies and the rising
influence of Ibn Taymiyya in the intellectual field. In his introduction
to Ibn Taymiyya’s refutation of the Greek logicians Hallaq argues that
Ibn Taymiyya’s argument that logical conclusions can never gener-
ate content resembles the intellectual foundation of Western empiri-
cism. Although Hallaq misses the decisive point completely, his argu-
ment contains a kernel of truth. For Hume and his ilk the alternative
to deductive reasoning is empirical, for Ibn Taymiyya it is scriptural
evidence. But insofar Ibn Taymiyya and al-Shawkānī insist that any
legal ruling has to be justified before the laymen with a proof text,
their position strengthens the laymen with regard to the scholar who
can no longer claim authority based on conclusions comprehensible
exclusively to a learned elite. In this respect one might indeed see paral-
lels with the development of a meritocratic understanding of religious
office during the Reformation.^55
Whereas in the field of law the insistence on proof texts appealed to
those claiming intellectual maturity due to their secular education, in
the field of theology and tafsīr the application of the same scripturalist
principle would imply the rejection of fundamental scientific findings,
not only such that have been made in the West since 1500, because the
corporeal concept of God implies elements of the Sunna-cosmology,
especially the notion of seven worlds layered one above the other, and
54 On the social background of the dispute see Riexinger, Martin: How Favour-
able is Puritan Islam to Modernity. A Case Study on the Ahl-i Hadis in Brit-
ish India, in: Gwilym Beckerlegge (ed.): Colonialism, Modernity and Religious
Identities. Religious Reform Movements in South Asia, New Delhi and New
York 2008, pp. 147–165.
55 See Reinhardt, Tyrannei der Tugend, pp. 255–256.
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