20 Alina Kokoschka and Birgit Krawietz
absorbed by catering immediately to the demands of Ibn Taymiyya
and later to the ordering of the latter’s legacy of scattered writings – to
scratch out a little corner for himself. In view of such perceptions, we
deem it no longer sufficient – especially on the part of Ibn al-Qayyim
connoisseurs – to join the “yes-he-can” mantra while it remains some-
how tainted both by the impression that he was basically spellbound
by Ibn Taymiyya and that he was caught in eclecticism of sorts. Bori
and Holtzman deplore that Ibn al-Qayyim’s “broad literary corpus
remains almost unexplored” and diagnose: “Although some of Ibn
Qayyim al-Ǧawziyyah’s works were recognized as unique and, in
some cases, were used as the almost exclusive source for research, Ibn
al-Qayyim was almost never credited for them as an independent and
substantial thinker.” The crux is that his framing as a “diligent pupil of
Ibn Taymiyyah (...) implies a lack of originality on Ibn al-Qayyim’s
part that makes him unworthy of proper scientific research.”^80 Yet, is
independence really the precondition of originality? What exactly is
independence supposed to mean? Relativizing the validity of such a
claim by unpacking its historical influences and cultural constructed-
ness, the idea of creative independence will be challenged in the next
section. And, if originality proves not to be an absolute criterion, what
could be more viable criteria?
4. Challenging Expectations of Ingenuity
via Appropriation
In their introduction to Ibn Taymiyya and His Times, the editors
Yossef Rapoport and Shahab Ahmed assert: “Ibn Taymiyya was, by
almost universal consensus, one of the most original and systematic
thinkers in the history of Islam.”^81 The nearly “universal consensus”
they have in mind here is at most a modern, academic one brought
about by Sunni revivalism after half a millennium of negligence in
Arabic sources.^82 As for the last part of the statement, the systematic
character attributed to Ibn Taymiyya has to be relativized, since he
usually did not produce structured overviews – even less so in the
80 Bori and Holtzman, Introduction, p. 15.
81 Rapoport and Ahmed, Introduction, p. 19.
82 This has been demonstrated in the same volume; see El-Rouayheb, Changing
Views, pp. 270, 311. A study comparable to his is lacking for Ibn al-Qayyim.
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