The Poison of Philosophy 289
them as disbelievers, sometimes on the same level as the Christians
and Jews – since they believe in some part of the Sharia and disbelieve
in other parts of it^150 – or sometimes even classifies them as inferior
to the Christians and Jews,^151 predicting that their future residence
will be hell.^152 Yet “the people of distortion and interpretation” (I. 2),
namely the majority of the kalām theologians and the Twelver Shiites,
ferd: Mulḥid, in: EI^2 , vol. 7 (1993), p. 546). Ibn Taymiyya denies that the phi-
losophers have proven God to be the Creator of the world (see below, n. 152)
and thereby that they have found what he considers the only valuable proof
of God. Ibn Taymiyya’s denial could thus be interpreted as a case of “ascrip-
tion of atheism,” although the philosophers themselves are far from professing
atheism. I owe the distinction between “attributed atheism” and “professed
atheism” to Kurt Flasch (Attributionsatheismus in Boccaccios Decameron VI
9: Guido Cavalcanti, in: Friedrich Niewöhner and Olaf Pluta (eds.): Atheis-
mus im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance, Wiesbaden 1999, pp. 115–127, here
115–116).
150 Ibn Taymiyya in his famous fatwa against the Mongols (Majmūʿat al-Fatāwā,
al-mujallad 28, Cairo, vol. 14, part 28, p. 285; also in: al-ʿAẓma, ʿAzīz: Ibn
Taymiyya, Beirut 2000, p. 99); see Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql, where he
also counts the mutakallimūn among them (vol. 1, pp. 134–137, 177–178).
151 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Radd, p. 133. Michel cites a similar statement of Ibn Taymi-
yya’s Risāla fī Lafẓ al-sunna fī al-Qurʾān (Ibn Taymiyya’s Critique of Falsafa,
pp. 4, 13, n. 3).
152 Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql, vol. 1, pp. 371–372. The tenet that Ibn
Taymiyya ascribes to “the people of delusion and suggestion” corresponds
to what was officially condemned by the Church in Medieval Europe as the
“two contradictory truths,” a religious and a philosophical, which were main-
ly attributed to the so-called Averroists, i. e., true and falsely alleged follow-
ers of Ibn Rushd. Ibn Taymiyya was, of course, not aware of the uproar the
“double truth theory” caused in Europe, but also takes Ibn Rushd as one of his
main targets to fight it, though proceeding from the latter’s theologico-phil-
osophical treatises and not his commentaries on Aristotle (see von Kügelgen,
Dialogpartner). His fight against the “double truth” and philosophy, and Aris-
totelism as the worst of the philosophical theories (Ibn Taymiyya, al-Radd,
pp. 395–396; idem, Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql, vol. 1, pp. 151–152; vol. 8, pp. 181, 186,
189, 233; vol. 9, pp. 398–399 et passim), however, did not hinder Ibn Taymiyya
from respecting Ibn Rushd as a thinker. Thus, he characterizes Ibn Rushd as
one of the most intelligent philosophers (ḥudhdhāq al-falāsifa) (Ibn Taymiyya,
Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql, vol. 10, p. 317; he does not call the philosophers by name,
but from the context it is obvious that he counts Ibn Rushd among them; see
vol. 3, p. 413; vol. 8, p. 181; vol. 9, pp. 69, 332–333). In a tract concerning the
philosophers’ proof of God as the first cause, he qualifies Ibn Rushd as “the
nearest of them [the philosophers] to Islam” (Majmūʿat al-Fatāwā, al-mujallad
17, Cairo, vol. 9, p. 163; Hoover, Perpetual Creativity, p. 295). There and else-
where, however, Ibn Taymiyya severely criticizes that Ibn Rushd only proves
God as a condition (sharṭ) for the existence of the world, but not as its Creator
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