424 Dominik Schlosser
as points of repulsion and as control factors for its own operations. But
they have this function not as something solid by nature or as a resisting
core of reality; they fulfill this function only because they are constituted
in the system for this function.^6To mention the second tendency, this is true also of the medieval
Islamic anti-Christian polemics, because when the authors of the writ-
ings in this genre refute the Christian religion, they are interested in far
more than merely proving its implausibility and insubstantiation. The
reference to and debate with Christianity serves not least to display
the plausibility and especially the superiority of their own religious
convictions and thus fulfills the purpose of clarifying and solidifying
a Muslim identity, of whatever kind, which can be directly deduced
from the fact that hardly any of the Muslim anti-Christian polemicists
of the Middle Ages neglects to provide a favorable depiction of his
own religious convictions.
These tendencies appear not latently, but very explicitly, in the exam-
ple of a treatise apparently composed in the 730s/1330s,^7 the Hidāyat
al-ḥayārā fī ajwibat al-yahūd wal-naṣārā (The Guidance for the
Confused in Answering the Jews and Christians)^8 by Ibn Taymiyya’s
leading student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350). Despite indi-
6 Luhmann, Niklas: Identitätsgebrauch in selbstsubstitutiven Ordnungen, beson-
ders Gesellschaften, in: Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle (eds.): Identität, 2nd
ed., Munich 1979, pp. 315–345, here pp. 337–338.
7 See Hoover, Jon: The Apologetic and Pastoral Intentions of Ibn Qayyim al-
Jawziyya’s Polemic against Jews and Christians, in: Muslim World 100 (2010),
pp. 476–489, here p. 477. It cannot be said with certainty when the Hidāyat
al-ḥayārā was composed, because Ibn al-Qayyim undertook no clear dating
and contemporaneous events are not mentioned in his treatise. An aid to dat-
ing is offered, however, by the knowledge that Ibn al-Qayyim is supposed to
have compiled all of his works after his teacher’s death in 728/1328 (see Bell,
Joseph Norment: Love Theory in Later Ḥanbalite Islam, Albany 1979, p. 95;
Holtzman, Livnat: Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, in: Joseph E. Lowry and Devin J.
Stewart (eds.): Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 1350–1850, Wiesbaden 2009,
pp. 202–223, here p. 206). This year can therefore be considered a terminus post
quem. The Hidāyat al-ḥayārā is named in another work of Ibn al-Qayyim, the
Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma (Regulations for the People of the Convenant) (see Ibn
al-Qayyim: Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, edited by Ṭāha ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Saʿd, Beirut
1415/1995, part 1, p. 204), but since its date of composition is equally indeter-
minable, this mention provides no indication of the terminus ante quem.
8 In the following, this will be abbreviated as Hidāyat al-ḥayārā in the text. The
1417/1996 edition of Muḥammad Aḥmad al-Ḥājj is used for the present paper.
On the manuscripts al-Ḥājj used for his edition of the Hidāyat al-ḥayārā, see his
Dirāsa ḥawla al-kitāb, in: Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr b. Qayyim
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