Appropriation of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya 7
exploration of the tension between the rigid posture of Ibn al-Qayyim
as a religious scholar and the juiciness of the stories of this antholo-
gy.^15 It is an oddity that, of all things, Western 20th-century scholar-
ship chose for translation a single monograph that Ibn al-Qayyim not
only did not write, but that also runs highly contrary to his concerns.
Nevertheless, one could perhaps take this incident as symptomatic of
the fact that, for a long time, Western publications could hardly make
sense of Ibn al-Qayyim at all, whereas – in contrast – research on Ibn
Taymiyya has, for decades now, followed clearly defined interests,
however political, polemical, or not strictly scholarly they might be.
When we reckon the number of articles, book chapters and the like in
Western research on Ibn al-Qayyim, we cannot come up with more than
about a dozen contributions throughout the 20th century.^16 It becomes
obvious that few people involved in Western Islamic Studies have
examined Ibn al-Qayyim in even a minor way. Of these examinations,
Joseph Normant Bell’s book Love Theory in Later Hanbalite Islam is
highly important, inasmuch as it not only provides a chapter on Ibn
Taymiyya^17 but also devotes two chapters to Ibn al-Qayyim’s relevant
writings,^18 furthermore undertaking the first Western attempt of chro-
nologizing some of the latter’s work. One also has to note Livingston’s
article on “Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah. A Fourteenth Century Defense
2009, pp. 202–223, here p. 206, clarifies: “Ibn al-Jawzī composed a work enti-
tled Aḥkām al-nisāʾ (Laws regarding Women), whose content is different from
Akhbār al-nisāʾ. Nevertheless, Akhbār al-nisāʾ appears in a list of Ibn al-Jawzī’s
works in several biographies, which leads to the conclusion that it is indeed his
work.” It is not the first time that people have confused these two Ḥanbalīs
with similar names; see Ḥijāzī, ʿIwaḍ Allāh Jād: Ibn al-Qayyim wa-maw-
qifuhu min al-tafkīr al-islāmī, Cairo 1960, pp. 26–27; Abū Zayd, Bakr b. ʿAbd
Allāh: Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya. Ḥayātuhu, āthāruhu, mawāriduhu, Riyadh
1412/1991/92, pp. 24–29, 202–208.
15 [Pseudo-] Ibn Qayyim al-Ǧauziyya, Über die Frauen, pp. 448–450, 465.
16 It is probable that we have missed a publication or two, but the ones we have
mentioned are those that usually resurface in the discourse of Islamic Studies.
We exclude from this counting the laudatory accounts of Abdul Azim Islahi:
Economic Thought of Ibn al Qayyim (1292–1350 A. D.), Jeddah (International
Center for Research in Islamic Economics, King Abdulaziz University) 1984
(Research series in English; p. 20), and Saiyed Ahsan’s very short general article
Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyah, in: Islam and the Modern Age 12 (1981), pp. 244–249.
17 Albany, New York 1979, pp. 74–91.
18 Bell, Love Theory, pp. 92–124 et passim. [Pseudo-] Ibn Qayyim al-Ǧauziyya,
Über die Frauen, pp. 456–459, only enumerates and quickly comments on some
of Ibn al-Qayyim’s most important works without any footnotes or references
to time; his afterword, therefore, cannot count as such an attempt.
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