284 Anke von Kügelgen
Moroccan scholar Muḥammad Yatīm (b. 1956) praises him as “one of
the most eminent philosophers of our history” for having created an
“Islamic theory of knowledge.”^129 The Egyptian professor of Islamic
philosophy ʿAbd al-Qādir Maḥmūd labels Ibn Taymiyya’s critique a
“philosophical revolution,”^130 and his compatriot Muḥammad ʿAmāra
characterizes him as “the philosopher of the salafiyya.”^131 The term
“philosophy” obviously has different meanings for them, but seems
to have lost the former connotations of “unbelief” and “heresy”
although they clearly agree with Ibn Taymiyya in his critique of the
falāsifa.
9. The Addressees of Ibn Taymiyya’s Critique
of Logic and Rationalism
9.1. Falāsifa and mutafalsifaIbn Taymiyya himself would, without a doubt, have vigorously object-
ed to being called a philosopher. In his view, philosophy (falsafa) taught
heresy and contaminated almost every Muslim school of thought, caus-
ing Muslims to trivialize God’s message and His messengers seriously
- the exception being the followers of the “pious forefathers” (al-salaf
al-ṣāliḥ), among whom he counted himself. Logic was, in his eyes,
the main cause of false teaching about metaphysics: all theories about
the divine world (al-ilāhiyyāt) entirely or partly based on philosophy
inevitably led people astray. Ibn Taymiyya asserted that not only the
teachings of the Greek philosophers, their Muslim followers,^132 and the
Empiricist’s theories of cognition. Seen in the wider theoretical and ideological
frame of the respective thinkers, their concepts of universals, particulars, and
definitions, however, have fundamentally different purposes (see von Kügel-
gen, Ibn Taymīyas Kritik, pp. 215–218). Furthermore, Ibn Taymiyya’s own
epistemological assumptions deviate considerably from his critique (see below,
chapters 11.2 and 11.3).
129 Yatīm, Ibn Taymiyya, pp. 18 (2nd column), 17 (1st column), 24, n. 6.
130 Maḥmūd, ʿAbd al-Qādir: al-Fikr al-islāmī wal-falsafāt al-muʿāriḍa fī al-qadīm
wal-ḥadīth, Cairo 1986, pp. 350–355.
131 ʿAmāra, Muḥammad: Faylasūf al-salafiyya, in: al-Miṣriyyūn (Oct. 25, 2007),
online: http://www.almesryoon.com. I owe this information to Lutz Rogler.
132 He refers to Aristotle, Plato, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Proklus, Themisti-
us, Plotin, al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, and Ibn Rushd, among others. For them and
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