The Curse of Philosophy 365
his books – some of which bear a philosophical touch – as well as in
fatwas and in isolated statements. Despite this enticing trail of clues,
however, there are “substantial” (dhātiyya) obstacles that make a
philosophical reading of his work difficult. These impediments are the
fragmented nature of Ibn Taymiyya’s philosophical writing and his
“practical” interest in calumniating the arguments of his opponents
without systematically discussing their positions. These hurdles cause,
furthermore, two “accidental” (ʿāriḍa) deterrents: 1) that the Islamic
institutions of some countries have employed Ibn Taymiyya’s thought
to abolish true theoretical religious and philosophical thinking; and 2)
that Islamic opposition movements fighting against secular ideas use
only negative aspects of his thought. Therefore, a penetrating reading
of Ibn Taymiyya’s works must first eliminate all of these hindrances in
order to extract the philosophical essence that reveals Ibn Taymiyya’s
identity as “a great philosopher”.
Indeed, Ibn Taymiyya’s writings contain “the project of a philo-
sophical revolution which, had it been realized, would have saved Ara-
bic-Islamic thought from the theoretical and practical dilemmas which
deactivated its scientific creativity.” Indeed, this very lack of creativity
affected Muslims’ reactions to natural and historical phenomena. The
modern interpreter has to define the “necessary and sufficient condi-
tions” (al-shurūṭ al-ḍarūriyya wal-kāfiya) of the normative critique
Ibn Taymiyya applied against the philosophical and religious thought
predominant in his age, as presented in the works of Ibn Rushd,
al-Suhrawardī, Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), and al-Rāzī, on the other.
Al-Marzūqī connects these Muslim thinkers to dilemmas caused in
Islamic philosophical and religious thought on a theoretical and practi-
cal level. These dilemmas led to Ibn Taymiyya’s critique of their ideas,
through which he attempted to revive the “Muhammedan Reforma-
tion” (al-iṣlāḥ al-muḥammadī) in its rejection of the religious distor-
tion that had happened in the Torah and the Gospels. Analogously, Ibn
Taymiyya campaigned, as abovementioned, against the philosophical
distortion of the philosophy of Plato by Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, and against
the deformation of the philosophy of Aristotle by Peripatetics such
as Ibn Rushd. In opposition, Ibn Taymiyya endeavored to develop an
alternative metaphysics and an alternative meta-history, deriving their
sources from the reinterpretation of the Koran and the prophetic tradi-
Abʿāduhu al-falsafiyya, available online: http://www.alfalsafa.com/fikr ibn
taymia.html, accessed on August 16, 2011.Brought to you by | Nanyang Technological University
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