310 Anke von Kügelgen
because of its genus (murād jinsahu), namely the dispelling of hunger.
Not everything, Ibn Taymiyya argues, can be wanted for something
else, since that would lead to “an infinite regress of formal causes, and
that is as impossible as an infinite regress of efficient causes, nay the
more so.”^239 Hence, there has to be something wanted and loved for
itself and not as a genus and “this cannot be anything but a particular”
(lā yakūnu illā muʿayyanan), and this particular is God. While God
does not share anything with something or someone else, the other
particulars have common, universal features. The universal feature,
however, does not exist separately, but as a particular in rebus (al-kullī
lā wujūda lahu fī al-aʿyān illā muʿayyanan).^240 Ibn Taymiyya could
hardly have expressed more clearly in terminology and as a concept
the congruity between the Peripatetics and himself.
Natural causality is a tenet Ibn Taymiyya upholds also in other
writings, indeed, in a great number of his works, as Jon Hoover has
recently shown in his eminent monograph on Ibn Taymiyya’s concept
of theodicy.^241 Hoover convincingly argues that this constitutes one
side of the coin of Ibn Taymiyya’s theodicy, that of the “human per-
spective.” The other side is the “divine perspective,” from which cre-
ation looks different, fully displaying God’s omnipotence. Likewise,
Ibn Taymiyya views human acts as a result of man’s own will, power,
and free choice, on the one hand, and as bound to God’s will, on the
other hand.^242 Hoover therefore regards Ibn Taymiyya’s approach as
“compatibilism.”^243 To ensure “the responsibility of humans for their
destiny,” Ibn Taymiyya presents the visible world from the “human
perspective” as organized in accordance with secondary causality
that looks “natural.”^244 Yet Ibn Taymiyya views secondary causality
as instrumental from the “divine perspective.” Though things behave
in accordance with the causes God created, everything depends solely
on His will. He is perpetually creating and willing from eternity for
239 Tasalsul fī al-ʿilal al-ghāʾiyya wa-huwa mumtaniʿ ka-imtināʿ al-tasalsul fī al-ʿilal
al-fāʿiliyya bal awlā, Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql, vol. 8, p. 465; see Ibn
Taymiyya, al-Radd, pp. 147–148; al-Suyūṭī, Jahd al-qarīḥa, pp. 249–250; Hal-
laq, Ibn Taymiyya, pp. 68–70.
240 Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql, vol. 8, pp. 464–467.
241 Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy, pp. 133–134, 147, 156–165 et passim (see
index, s. v. cause).
242 Ibid., pp. 136–156, 173–176 et passim (see index, s. v. act).
243 Ibid., pp. 154, 173 et passim (see index, s. v. compatibilism).
244 Ibid., p. 163.
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