The Poison of Philosophy 257
Yet they did not dismiss divine revelation, but confirmed its truth
and its social necessity.^14
Among those who condemned falsafa as such or were suspicious
of the main metaphysical tenets, only few stood against it with a
deep knowledge of the rejected concepts. None of the latter, howev-
er, remained untouched by what he refuted. Ibn Taymiyya was not
exempt from that rule. The historian and well renowned Shāfiʿī schol-
ar Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348) had attended some of Ibn
Taymiyya’s courses and expressed both positive and negative impres-
sions of his character and knowledge in several of his writings.^15 In a
letter, he addressed him with the following accusation:
By God, we have become the laughing stock of creation! How long will
you dig up intricate philosophical blasphemies for us to refute with our
brains? You have repeatedly swallowed the poison of the philosophers24.2–8 (the pagination refers to the one of Mueller given by Hourani at the
margin); van den Bergh, Simon: Averroes’ Tahafut Al-Tahafut (The Incoher-
ence of the Incoherence), Cambridge 1987 (reprints, London 1954 and 1969),
pp. 409.1–410.1 et passim; Averroès: Tafsīr mā baʿd al-ṭabīʿa, ed. by Maurice
Bouyges, Beirut 1967–1973, vol. 1, p. 192.1–5 et passim; see Galston, Miriam:
al-Fārābī on Aristotle’s Theory of Demonstration, in: Parviz Morewedge (ed.):
Islamic Philosophy and Mysticism, Delmar and New York 1981, pp. 23–34. Ibn
Sīnā also holds the Aristotelian apodictic syllogism to be the method of veri-
fication (Ibn Sīnā, Abū ʿAlī: al-Ishārāt wal-tanbīhāt, maʿa sharḥ Naṣīr al-Dīn
al-Ṭūsī, ed. by Sulaymān Dunyā, Cairo 1971, vol. 1, p. 460; Avicenna: Remarks
and Admonitions, part 1: Logic, transl. by Shams Constantine Inati, Toronto
1984, p. 148; Gutas, Dimitri: Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition. Introduc-
tion to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works, Leiden 1988, pp. 311–318), and
states that the middle term can be acquired spontanously through “intuition”
(ḥads) (Gutas, Dimitri: Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition, pp. 159–176;
Endress, Gerhard: The Defense of Reason. The Plea for Philosophy in the Reli-
gious Community, in: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wis-
senschaften 6 (1990), pp. 1–49, here p. 32).
14 See for instance al-Fārābī, Abū Naṣr: Mabādiʾ ārāʾ ahl al-madīna al-fāḍila. Al-
Farabi on the Perfect State; a Revised Text with Introduction, Translation and
Commentary by Richard Walzer, Oxford 1985, pp. 276–285; Ibn Sīnā: Ithbāt
al-nubuwwāt (Proof of Prophecies), ed. by Michael E. Marmura, Beirut 1968;
Ibn Rushd, Kitāb Faṣl al-maqāl; Endress, The Defense of Reason, pp. 20–23,
30–33.
15 See Bori, Ibn Taymiyya, s. v. Ḏahabī (al-); idem: A New Source for the Biogra-
phy of Ibn Taymiyya, in: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Stud-
ies 67 (2004), pp. 324, 326–328, 331–348; idem: Ibn Taymiyya wa-Jamāʿatuhu.
Authority, Conflict and Consensus in Ibn Taymiyya’s Milieu, in: Shahab
Ahmad and Yossef Rapoport (eds.): Ibn Taymiyya and His Times, Karachi
2010, pp. 23–52.
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