360 Georges Tamer
His agency are for him “a continuous force pushing the beings so that
they do not stop and maintain their efficiency.”^149
Maintaining a position close to Ibn Rushd’s conception of dou-
ble causality, Ibn Taymiyya believes that every existent “is a condi-
tion or an instrument for the divine activity (sharṭ aw āla lil-fāʿiliyya
al-ilāhiyya)”. Each caused existent results from two things: “the exis-
tent which precedes it and is a condition for its existence, and the divine
action which occurred in God’s essence for the sake of bringing that
existent into being.”^150 Through His actions, God operates as the caus-
al core of “an infinite chain of causes [...] due to the fact that each exis-
tent has necessarily to be conditioned through another existent which
has, again, to be conditioned through another existent ad infinitum.”
Ibn Taymiyya attempts, thus, to reconcile God’s role as creator of the
world with natural causality. This attempt, properly considered, is also
an effort to reconcile theology with philosophy.^151
Ibn Taymiyya’s theory of God’s eternal and continuous creation
of the world offers, so Ajhar, a major contribution to the explanation
of important dogmatic and philosophical questions in Islam. In most
cases, Ibn Taymiyya avoids employing terminology used by the phi-
losophers in order to distinguish himself from them; in other cases, he
attacks the philosophers vigorously. Sometimes he agrees with them;
suddenly he changes his attitude and opposes them. He obviously was
convinced that “clear reason” corresponded with the majority of the
philosophers’ ideas. He, however, was also aware of the bad reputation
philosophers had among Muslims; this led him to articulate, within his
own works, the accumulated historical animosity against philosophy
found in Islamic thought. Yet, this side of his writings, adopted and
further developed by his students, is merely the external one. Exam-
becomes sated upon (ʿinda) eating bread and quenches his thirst upon (ʿinda)
drinking water. It is God, however, who causes the state of being sated and
quenched. Ibn Taymiyya, in contrast, rejects this idea, substituting the prepo-
sition ʿinda by the preposition bi- which expresses a causal relationship. Thus,
man becomes sated through eating bread and quenched through drinking
water: ibid., p. 222; Ibn Taymiyya, Majmūʿat al-rasāʾil, vol. 1, p. 100; vol. 5,
p. 330. See el Omari, Racha: Ibn Taymiyya’s “Theology of the Sunna” and His
Polemics with the Ashʿarites, in: Yossef Rapoport and Shahab Ahmad (eds.):
Ibn Taymiyya and His Times, pp. 101–119.
149 Ajhar, Ibn Taymiyya, p. 223.
150 Ibid., p. 209. For Ibn Rushd’s “double causality” see Arnaldez, Roger: Ibn
Rushd, in: EI2, vol. 3 (1971), pp. 909–920.
151 Ajhar, Ibn Taymiyya, pp. 210, 219.
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