Ibn Taymiyya’s Worldview and the Challenge of Modernity 517
Whether Ibn Taymiyya would have tolerated such a selective
approach is highly doubtful. He considered Islam as one coherent sys-
tem combining a worldview and a legal system based on the revela-
tion, that means the Sunna in particular,^86 and he tended to attack his
opponents harshly and not to show reluctance to denounce opponents
as unbelievers (takfīr). Whenever modernists want to liberate Islam-
ic law from the boundaries imposed by the Hadith in order to make
Islamic law more flexible or to overcome a literalist interpretation of the
Koran and praise Ibn Taymiyya as well, their adulation should rather be
regarded as a sign of naiveté than as proof for their intellectual affinity.
86 Nagel, Tilman: Staat und Glaubensgemeinschaft im Islam, Zürich 1981, vol. 2,
pp. 109–140.
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