The Relation of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya 161
he worked extensively in the field of Hadith and continually discusses
the reliability of particular Hadith reports in his Koran commentary;
however, his solution was largely to assume that the great ninth-cen-
tury Hadith collectors had effectively culled the correct versions of
what the Prophet had said from the mass of incorrect. The comparable
problem for modern Salafiyya is similarly to know what the Prophet
said and to interpret the Koran without depending on the very medi-
eval scholarly tradition that they try to go behind when it comes to
the schools of law. Like Ibn Kathīr but probably less excusably, they
tend to assume that the great ninth-century Hadith collectors, above
all al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870), were not men of their time with accord-
ingly limited horizons, similarly to Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal and al-Shāfiʿī
(d. 204/820) and their followers, but somehow transcended it, offering
us directly what the Prophet said, not just what various later Muslims
thought the Prophet must have said.)
As Ibn al-Qayyim largely skipped over the Ḥanbalī tradition
between himself and Aḥmad, so the ongoing Ḥanbalī tradition largely,
with some justice, ignored him. Ḥanābila of the following centuries
paid much more attention to Ibn Taymiyya than to Ibn al-Qayyim in
the field of positive law (furūʿ). The reason is probably that he seemed
more engaged with the tradition, which is to say he seemed to think
the same way they did. He did cite previous Ḥanbalī jurisprudents;
he propounded original opinions so as to keep them within the spec-
trum of Ḥanbalī opinion, not so as to make it his evident intention to
supersede all earlier Ḥanbalī opinion. However, Ḥanābila of the fol-
lowing centuries paid yet more attention to numerous other Ḥanbalī
jurisprudents: men such as Ibn Ḥamdān and Ibn Abī ʿUmar before
Ibn Taymiyya, ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Maqdisī and Ibn Qādī al-Jabal after him.
Insofar as the Ḥanbalī school constituted a peculiar set of answers to
juridical problems, Ibn Taymiyya had a significant but limited effect
on it. It was when the plundering of waqf foundations, the rise of
technical education in engineering, medicine, and other fields, mass
literacy, and other developments had debilitated the system of schools
that Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim came to the forefront in the
20 th century.
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