Appropriation of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya 17
ers, but rather filled with extraordinary humbleness and piety.^66 At any
rate, it is hardly imaginable that Ibn Taymiyya would have put up with
someone as noisy and uncompromising as himself. Among his group
of followers it was him who was undoubtedly in charge,^67 while Ibn
al-Qayyim ranks regularly as his most famous disciple.^68 The habitus
of subordination to Ibn Taymiyya may have curbed Ibn al-Qayyim’s
individual ambition and caused a sort of writer’s block even when he
was no longer juvenile, as is insinuated. For instance, the translators
Michael Abdurrahman Fitzgerald and Moulay Youssef Sitine com-
ment, it “appears that only after his teacher’s death did Ibn al-Qayyim
begin his own prolific period as a writer.” At this point Ibn al-Qayyim
must have had a coming out of sorts: “This stage of his life was also
marked by much travel, learning and teaching, as well as several pil-
grimages to Mecca, where he even lived for some time.”^69 By the time
of Ibn Taymiyya’s death in 1328, Ibn al-Qayyim was already at the age
of 37 or 38. He wrote the overwhelming majority of his contributions
after this date;^70 one wonders with what exactly he had been occupied
before then^71 and why his own scholarly production witnessed such a
large incubation period before the extraordinary amount of text pro-
duction of his later decades. We do not know whether he might have
written parts of his work already during Ibn Taymiyya’s lifetime and
refrained for whatever reason from publishing them. It has long been
assumed that Ibn al-Qayyim played the central role in the collection
and arrangement of Ibn Taymiyya’s works, although exactly how and
by whom the widely scattered pieces were assembled still needs more
investigation.^72 Ibn Taymiyya is one of those scholars who brilliantly
mastered various genres of the religious sciences.^73 He himself, how-
66 Holtzman, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, pp. 210–211.
67 Bori, Caterina: Ibn Taymiyya wa-Jamāʿatuhu. Authority, Conflict and Consen-
sus in Ibn Taymiyya’s Circle, in: Rapoport and Ahmed, Ibn Taymiyya and His
Times, pp. 23–52, here 25, 28, 30 et passim.
68 One hesitates to call the others famous. This applies only to some traditionalist
Shāfīʿīs who somehow sympathized with Ibn Taymiyya; ibid, p. 37.
69 Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya on the Invocation of God. Al-Wābil al-Ṣayyib min al-
Kalim al-Ṭayyib, translated by Michael Abdurrahman Fitzgerald and Moulay
Youssef Sitine, Cambridge 2000, p. xi.
70 Holtzman, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, p. 206.
71 On his occupations and pursuits, see Abdul-Mawjûd, Biography, pp. 69–71.
72 Bori, Collection, p. 58 et passim.
73 Weismann, Itzhak: Taste of Modernity. Sufism, Salafiyya, and Arabism in Late
Ottoman Damascus, Leiden and Boston 2001, p. 263.
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