12 Alina Kokoschka and Birgit Krawietz
theologians.”^39 It tends to be overlooked, however, that Ibn Taymiyya
himself also severely criticized the Khārijīs, stressing that no Compan-
ion of the Prophet was among them and that no ṣaḥābī had ever for-
bidden anyone to fight them.^40 Stubbornness and unwavering defence
of his peculiar convictions have become the trademark of this scholar
cum activist. And hence, Brunschvig, too, qualifies Ibn Taymiyya as “a
la vez intransigente y anticonformista.”^41 It is stated that contempo-
raries must already have perceived the singlemindedness with which
he was “completely dedicated to a cause”, so much that Donald Little
in 1975 asked the famous – and not completely ironically intended –
question “Did Ibn Taymiyya have a Screw Loose?”^42 Though Ibn
Taymiyya’s “intransigence led to repeated imprisonment”,^43 the related
multiple inquisitions (miḥan) – in the hallowed tradition modelled by
the eponym of the Ḥanbalī school of law, Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (d. 855) –
contributed to Ibn Taymiyya’s halo. Indeed, the latter appears as the
natural heir par excellence to this imagined typically Ḥanbalī trait:
“Ibn Ḥanbal’s rigor and personal courage were most spectacularly
emulated by the Damascene jurist Taqī al-Dīn b. Taymiya.”^44 What
captivates contemporaries and later admirers of Ibn Taymiyya is the
paradigmatic situation of wholehearted insistence on and standing up
for one’s beliefs. It is no surprise, then, that Ibn Taymiyya has become
the most famous prison inmate of Islamic history, appropriated as
an icon of reference for political prisoners. While some cherish Ibn
Taymiyya for his “unsurpassed moral courage, intensity, and intellec-
39 Watt, W. Montgomery: Khārijite Thought in the Umayyad Period, in: Der
Islam 36 (1961), pp. 215–231, here p. 218.
40 Jansen, Johannes J. G.: Ibn Taymiyyah and the Thirteenth Century. A Forma-
tive Period of Modern Muslim Radicalism, in: Quaderni di Studi Arabi 5–
(1987–88), pp. 391–396, here p. 392.
41 Brunschvig, Robert: Los teólogos-juristas del islam en pro o en contra de la
lógica griega, Ibn Ḥazm, al-Ġazālī, Ibn Taymiyya, in: al-Andalus 35 (1970),
pp. 143–177, here p. 169.
42 Little, Donald: Did Ibn Taymiyya have a Screw Loose?, in: Studia Islamica 41
(1975), pp. 93–111, here p. 105.
43 Schallenbergh, Gino: Ibn Taymīya on the ‘ahl al-bayt, in: Urbain Vermeulen
and Jo van Steenbergen (eds.): Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and
Mamluk Eras, vol. 3 (Proceedings of the 6th, 7th and 8th International Collo-
quium organized at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in May 1997, 1998 and
1999), Leuven 2001, pp. 407–420, here p. 408.
44 Cooperson, Michael: Classical Arabic Biography. The Heirs of the Prophets in
the Age of al-Maʾmūn, Cambridge 2000, p. 109.
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