298 Anke von Kügelgen
not a result of serious doubts about man’s rational capacity. On the
contrary, Ibn Taymiyya is convinced that man can reach true knowl-
edge of particulars, and this conviction is the key to his affirmation
that “clear reason” (ṣarīḥ al-ʿaql) congrues with sound religious tradi-
tion (ṣaḥīḥ al-naql).^197 He thus posits a faculty of true reasoning shared
by all healthy human beings.^198 Ibn Taymiyya nowhere systematically
exposes his own epistemology or explains what he categorizes under
“clear reason,” and this subject has not yet been exhaustively stud-
ied.^199 The following presentation is but an attempt to shed new light
on some of its main features.
From Ibn Taymiyya’s repeated comparison of ṣarīḥ al-ʿaql with the
reasoning of his enemies, it is apparent that he sees his enemies’ reason
as contaminated by logic in most of its elements. Therefore, I render
ṣarīḥ al-ʿaql as “uncontaminated reason.” To translate it as “common
sense,” as is often done, is somewhat misleading, because it suggests
a restriction of reason to what everyone is able to grasp and excludes
what one usually would consider as a knowledge gained through infer-
ence or, in the terms of the theologians and philosophers, as an acquired
(muktasab) knowledge. For Ibn Taymiyya, however, the spectrum of
what a person endowed with sound reason might understand immedi-
ately is broader than “common sense,” and the range of knowledge he
considers necessary (ḍarūrī) in the sense of certain is wide. His view
is based on two main epistemological assumptions, that of an inborn
intelligence (fiṭra) whose soundness differs from individual to individ-
ual and that of two modes of knowledge.
197 Concerning the criteria and methodology Ibn Taymiyya uses to assess the
soundness of reports from the prophet Muḥammad and his companions, see
Ahmed: Ibn Taymiyyah and the Satanic Verses, pp. 78–86.
198 Abrahamov, in a footnote, already pointed out the similarity between the phi-
losophers and Ibn Taymiyya in asserting “one kind of true reasoning” (Ibn
Taymiyya, p. 272, n. 102). Yet, he wondered about this, since he understood Ibn
Taymiyya’s acceptance of reason as solely bound to revelation. In a later work,
however, Abrahamov corrected his view, stating that Ibn Taymiyya apparently
“also maintains the independent status of rational proofs” (Islamic Theology,
Traditionalism and Rationalism, Edinburgh 1998, p. 51); see Hoover, to whom
I owe the information on Abrahamov’s change of view (Ibn Taymiyya’s Theo-
dicy, p. 30).
199 The case is similar to Ibn Taymiyya’s assertion of God’s existence, which he
obviously considered so evident that his proofs have to be sought mainly in his
refutations (Hallaq, Ibn Taymiyya on the Existence of God).
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