396 Jon Hoover
in his later years. This narrative of Ibn al-Qayyim’s development per-
mits al-Ḥarbī to supplant three long and sophisticated discussions of
the duration of the Fire with a few short indications of the Fire’s eter-
nity elsewhere that have not been independently dated. It also enables
him to reconcile Ibn al-Qayyim’s prestige as a rejuvenator of Sunni
doctrine with the fact that a number of the Ḥanbalī scholar’s books
contain material that does not agree with what al-Ḥarbī believes that
doctrine teaches.
5. Further Consideration of the Possibility that
Ibn al-Qayyim Upholds the Eternity of the Fire
Al-Ḥarbī’s overall argumentation is weak insofar as he first projects
how the great Muslim scholar Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya must turn out
and then dates the texts on that basis. If, by some other means, Zād
al-maʿād, Ijtimāʿ al-juyūsh, Ṭarīq al-hijratayn and al-Wābil al-ṣayyib
could be dated prior to Ḥādī al-arwāḥ, Shifāʾ al-ʿalīl and al-Ṣawāʿiq al-
mursala, al-Ḥarbī’s thesis would fall flat and we could posit develop-
ment in Ibn al-Qayyim’s thought from belief in the Fire’s eternity to
belief that God’s mercy and wise purpose will bring the Fire to an end.
However, that scenario would be just as arbitrary as al-Ḥarbī’s in the
absence of an adequate chronology of Ibn al-Qayyim’s works. Such a
chronology remains a desideratum in the field, but enough work has
been done by Joseph Bell and later Livnat Holtzman to give al-Ḥarbī’s
hypothesis another chance.^66
Ijtimāʿ al-juyūsh may be safely excluded from the present discus-
sion because it does not provide serious evidence for Ibn al-Qayyim’s
belief in the eternity of the Fire. According to both Bell and Holtzman,
Ijtimāʿ al-juyūsh is also a fairly early work. Holtzman includes al-Wābil
al-ṣayyib and Ḥādī al-arwāḥ among Ibn al-Qayyim’s middle works.
In my view al-Wābil al-ṣayyib is difficult to place, and it could be a
bit later. As noted above, Ḥādī al-arwāḥ may date to 745/1344–45.
Holtzman assigns Shifāʾ al-ʿalīl and al-Ṣawāʿiq al-mursala to the later
66 Bell, Joseph Norment: Love Theory in Later Ḥanbalite Islam, Albany 1979,
pp. 95–103; and Holtzman, Livnat: Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, in: Devin Stew-
art and Joseph Lowry (eds.): Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 1350–1850,
Wiesbaden 2009, pp. 202–223.
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