The Poison of Philosophy 311
wise purposes.^245 If God does not will something to happen that would
result from a cause or a combination of causes He created, He does
not perfect the combination of causes and conditions or He creates an
impediment.^246 However, God does not alter the order He has fixed
for the things, because otherwise He would undermine His own all-
embracing wise purpose. Thus, He cannot create “contraries simulta-
neously in one place, and He cannot create a son before his father.”^247
God’s wise purpose, thus, entails that his creatures follow a fixed order
and are bestowed with specific powers. The essences He bestowed
things with, for instance His bestowal on fire of the power to burn, are
their necessary concomitants and aren’t lost when God does not will
them to “act” or to “react,” but are rendered ineffective by impedi-
ments God creates.
On the epistemological level – as far as the way to knowledge of
causes and effects is concerned – Ibn Taymiyya does not deviate from
the Peripatetic method. He also tries to grasp the universals that are
shared by similar particulars. Even on the ontological level, there is
a great similarity, since Ibn Taymiyya does not deny the existence of
fixed essences and a fixed order of causes and effects. Furthermore,
philosophers also hold that an effect depends on numerous conditions,
i. e., other causes besides the main efficient cause, and can be hindered
by impediments.^248 Ibn Taymiyya’s harsh rebuttal of the existence of
universals in rebus can, therefore, be motivated only by the great dif-
ference between the philosophers’ and his own metaphysical theories.
Whereas the philosophers conceive God as an inactive first cause and
245 Ibid., pp. 80–95. The Tunesian Islamist Rāshid al-Ghannūshī came to a simi-
lar conclusion in his study of Ibn Taymiyya’s notion of predestination and
free will, mainly on the basis of Majmūʿ al-fatāwā (without indicating neither
the “title” of the writing nor the volume), al-Ḥasana wal-saʾya and Risālat fī
al-Iḥtijāj bil-qadar. He interprets Ibn Taymiyya as viewing “God’s will as an
active part in the divine order” creating by the causes He Himself bestowed
his creatures with (al-Qadar ʿind Ibn Taymiyya, London 1999, pp. 87, 91–92).
I am grateful to Lutz Rogler for having provided me with a copy of this work.
246 Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy, pp. 160–162.
247 Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj al-sunna, vol. 3, p. 103–104, here rendered in the con-
cise wording of Hoover (Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy, p. 133).
248 See, for instance, Ibn Sīnā, al-Shifāʾ, al-Ilāhiyyāt, ed. by Ibrāhīm Madkūr,
al-Ab Qanawātī and Saʿīd Zāyid, Cairo 1380/1960, vol. 1, p. 180; Marmura,
Michael E.: The Metaphysics of Efficient Causality in Avicenna (Ibn Sina), in:
idem (ed.): Islamic Theology and Philosophy. Studies in Honor of George F.
Hourani, Albany 1984, pp. pp. 172–187, here 181–182.
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