Divine Wisdom, Human Agency and the fiṭra in Ibn Taymiyya’s Thought 49
tence of God is also regarded as the highest level of existence, in con-
trast to the contingent spheres of other existences. All sort of existences
depend on His existence in order to come into being. The Koran cites
the existence of God as an undeniable truth and more often emphasizes
His unity and unshared authority in order to reject polytheistic beliefs.
In Islamic thought and medieval philosophy in general, thinkers
employed various ontological, cosmological, and teleological argu-
ments to prove the existence of God. Among these arguments, the cos-
mological one is based on the idea of the Prime Mover (Causa Prima)
of the ancient philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, in order to
explain motion in the universe. In Islamic intellectual history there is
a special emphasis on cosmological arguments, which were applied
to Muslim theological thought with their specific terms ḥudūth and
imkān. In addition, teleological forms of arguments were also used
under titles such as design (niẓām) and providence (ʿināya) to explain
the universal system. The existence of God, however, is not like any
other physical existence, because it eludes direct perception. His exis-
tence can only be understood through an acknowledgment of creation
and traces of His signs in the world. The employment of these argu-
ments helped to raise the level of the belief from an imitation of others
to a serious personal conviction. In addition, the argumentation pro-
cess aimed at removing doubts about the existence of God that could
come to the mind of believers.
Ibn Taymiyya, however, followed an alternative path. He spent his
efforts to highlight the sufficiency of human nature and persistently
criticize the ḥudūth of Muslim theologians. The Koran and the Sunna,
Ibn Taymiyya argues, offer a cognitive unity through both knowledge
and practice, in order to reach a point of contact with His wise and
infinite qualities; the method of the theologians, however, leads only
to abstract knowledge.^43 Moreover, the divine message is indicated in a
manner that is harmonious with innate human reality, and its proof is
direct. The logical instructions of the theologians, on the other hand,
use only deductive or analogical reasoning, and therefore their efforts
do not convince all aspects of the human being. To put it in his words:
In the distinction of the Koranic theological method, God commands
worship of Him, which provides perfection of the soul and its righteous-
ness. Its aim and end is not limited to mere affirmation of Him, which is
the purpose of the kalām method. These two [approaches] do not cor-43 Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql wal-naql, vol. 1, pp. 201–208.
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