Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Attitude Toward Christianity 423
tive political-social and religious situation in which they were com-
posed.^3 If one tries to determine their function as generally as possible,
i. e., without reference to their concrete historical circumstances, then,
taking recourse to Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, we can name
two tendencies that can be made out in almost every medieval Muslim
polemical script directed against Christianity:^4 first, we can note that
the Muslim anti-Christian polemicists of the Middle Ages integrate the
other religion in the specific worldview of their own religion, for the
purpose of cognitive coping: they do not generally grasp and depict
Christianity as an independent religion. Asserting a claim for the exclu-
sive truth of Islam as the last of the revelatory religions, they instead
classify it within Islamic salvatory history by declaring that, in its cur-
rent form, the Christian religion is a corrupted version of the religion
revealed by God, a version that, in a way, has been abrogated by the
Koranic revelation. This procedure can be described, with Luhmann,
as a self-referential operation of a system, i. e., as a systemic activity in
which the system refers to itself, thereby seeking to preserve itself as
such.^5 According to Luhmann, a self-generating and self-maintaining
system must therefore find identities in its environment that serve
3 This is the case, for example, in the two essays by Charfi, Abdelmajid: La fonc-
tion historique de la polémique islamochrétienne à l’époque abbaside, in: Samir
Khalil Samir and Jørgen S. Nielsen (eds.): Christian Arabic Apologetics During
the Abbasid Period, Leiden 1994, pp. 44–56, and Charfi, Abdelmajid: Polémiques
islamo-chrétiennes à l’époque médiévale, in: Jacques Waardenburg (ed.): Schol-
arly Approaches to Religion, Interreligious Perspectives and Islam, Bern, Berlin
and Frankfurt a. M. 1995, pp. 261–274.
4 The following train of thought is owed to the article by Schmid, Hansjörg: Geg-
ner werden gemacht. Neutestamentliche, religionsgeschichtliche und aktuelle
Perspektiven, in: Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 124 (2002), pp. 385–396,
here in particular pp. 386–390.
5 The fundamental distinction between system and environment is constitutive
of Niklas Luhmann’s functional-structural systems theory. The system – which
Luhmann understands as a regulated relation among elements (see Luhmann,
Niklas: Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie, 5th ed., Frankfurt
a. M. 1994, p. 44) – is characterized by being separate from its environment; see
ibid., p. 35. According to Luhmann – greatly simplified – the system acts in its
elementary operations in such a way that it system-immanently registers and
processes the system/environment difference it produces, thereby referring to
itself; the environment is thus integrated in the system’s world of language; see
ibid., p. 64. Luhmann uses the term “self-reference” for the system’s constant
referring to itself; ibid., p. 58.
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