Against Islamic Universalism 399
Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī. These factors lead us to conclude that after Ibn
al-Qayyim withheld judgment on the duration of the Fire in Ḥādī
al-arwāḥ and Shifāʾ al-ʿalīl and then argued for the passing away of
the Fire in Mukhtaṣar al-Ṣawāʿiq he stopped discussing this issue and
unassumingly affirmed the eternity of the Fire in his latest works in
order to evade al-Subkī’s wrath.
One wonders what similar contextual factors might lie behind
al-Ḥarbī’s own passion to get his theological exemplars to uphold cer-
tain doctrines? Is this simply a religious and intellectual crisis faced by
a particular individual, or is it part of the wider contemporary politi-
cization of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim? I am not in position
to answer these questions, but perhaps research into the 1980s social
and intellectual environment of the Umm al-Qurā University in Mecca
would yield further insight. At the least, al-Ḥarbī’s travail supplies not
only an intriguing episode in contemporary Islamic theological dis-
course that draws inspiration from Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya and his
teacher Ibn Taymiyya. Al-Ḥarbī’s pains also stir us to better under-
stand these two figures themselves.
Addendum
Clear evidence of specifically theological conflict between Ibn Qay-
yim al-Jawziyya and Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī in the late 1340s came to
my attention too late to include in the body of this article. In 1348
or 1349, soon after al-Subkī wrote his refutation of Ibn Taymiyya’s
Fanāʾ al-nār, he wrote another refutation against Ibn al-Qayyim’s anti-
Ashʿarī theological poem al-Kāfiya al-shāfiya (also known as al-Qaṣīda
al-nūniyya). This strongly suggests that Ibn al-Qayyim’s poem and his
theological ideas more generally had become sufficiently popular that
al-Subki saw need to halt their spread, and it further supports the the-
sis that al-Subkī’s real target in his refutation of Ibn Taymiyya’s Fanāʾ
al-nār was Ibn al-Qayyim.^70
70 For further details, see the editors’ introduction in Bori, Caterina and Holtzman,
Livnat (eds.): A Scholar in the Shadow: Essays in the Legal and Theologi-
cal Thought in Ibn Qayyim al-Ğawziyyah, Oriente Moderno 90:1 (2010),
pp. 22–26.
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