Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Attitude Toward Christianity 427
Altered Christ’s Religion),^18 which has sometimes even led to the
remark that large parts of its content can be regarded as a plagiarism
of Ibn Taymiyya’s polemical treatise, at best.^19 It can be considered
certain that Ibn al-Qayyim used his master’s anti-Christian polemic
for his refutation of Christianity in the Hidāyat al-ḥayārā, but the
judgment that the Hidāyat al-ḥayārā is a mere plagiarism of al-Jawāb
al-ṣaḥīḥ is already problematic because large parts of the Hidāyat
al-ḥayārā are devoted to a polemic against Judaism, thus going beyond
the content of Ibn al-Qayyim’s principal teacher’s exhaustive writing.
The idea that the Hidāyat al-ḥayārā is a plagiarism implies not only
that its substantive and argumentative breadth and depth does not
essentially go beyond al-Jawāb al-ṣaḥīḥ of Ibn al-Qayyim’s master
Ibn Taymiyya and thus, in a certain way, can be regarded as a con-
tribution to the history of the latter’s reception. At the same time, it
underscores that in this work Ibn al-Qayyim does not show himself to
be an original thinker, but rather (and not least because some passages
of al-Jawāb al-ṣaḥīḥ are adopted verbatim – usually without being
labeled as such) moves within the framework of the field of Muslim
anti-Christian polemics already surveyed by his predecessors, which in
turn entails two consequences. First, a priori prejudgments are adopted
by Ibn al-Qayyim; and second, a good part of the themes, arguments,
18 For details about this work, see especially Michel, Thomas F.: A Muslim Theo-
logian’s Response to Christianity. Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Jawab al-Sahih, Del-
mar 1984, pp. 99–135; Roberts, Nancy N.: Reopening the Muslim-Christian
Dialogue of the 13–14th Centuries. Critical Reflections on Ibn Taymiyyah’s
Response to Christianity in al-Jawāb al-ṣaḥīḥ li man baddala dīn al-Masīḥ, in:
Muslim World 84 (1996), pp. 342–366; Thomas, David: Apologetic and Polemic
in the Letter from Cyprus and Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Jawāb al-ṣaḥīḥ li man bad-
dala dīn al-Masīḥ, in: Yossef Rapoport and Shahab Ahmed (eds.): Ibn Taymiyya
and His Times, Karachi 2010, pp. 247–265, here pp. 255–262; Hoover, Jon: Ibn
Taymiyya, in: David Thomas and Alex Mallett (eds.): Christian-Muslim Rela-
tions. A Bibliographical History; Vol. 4 (1200–1350), Leiden and Boston 2012,
pp. 824–878, here 834–844.
19 Proponents of this view include besides Ignazio di Matteo, Erdmann Fritsch,
Carl Brockelmann, and Abdelmajid Charfi, whereby none of these went to the
trouble to adduce evidence to support this judgment. See di Matteo, Ignazio:
Tahrif or the Alteration of the Bible According to the Moslems, in: Muslim
World 14 (1924), pp. 61–84, here p. 80; Fritsch, Islam und Christentum, p. 33;
Brockelmann, Carl: Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, 2nd ed., Leiden 1996,
suppl. vol. 2, p. 126; Charfi, Bibliographie du dialogue islamo-chrétien, p. 259.
In this regard, see also Ljamai, Abdelilah: Ibn Ḥazm et la polémique islamo-
chrétienne dans l’histoire de l’islam, Leiden and Boston 2003, pp. 183–184.
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