Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Attitude Toward Christianity 433
lims of his time and at the same time to provide them with an argumenta-
tive toolbox for discursive debate with Christians and Jews, and second,
by a separate section of the extensive prolegomenon of the Hidāyat
al-ḥayārā in which the Damascene scholar goes into his motives for
writing. This section makes it clear that Ibn al-Qayyim regards it as
God’s unchanging right, and thus his own duty as a Muslim before God,
to refute those who denigrate the Koran, the Prophet Muḥammad, and
Islam and to combat them with words as well as with force of arms.^49
Along with the motive of providing his co-religionists with material
for possible disputations with Christians and Jews, here I would like to
focus attention also on at least one other impulse that could have moved
Ibn al-Qayyim to compose the Hidāyat al-ḥayārā. First, it should be
considered that, from the Muslim viewpoint, the debate with Christians
and Jews in the theological-dogmatic area in the time when the Hidāyat
al-ḥayārā was written was not a virulent and immediate challenge, as
it was for example in the early Abbasid period, but rather a theoretical
issue. Another aspect joins this: despite the backdrop of certain histori-
cal events like the Crusades, the brief Mongol occupation of Damascus
in 699/1300, in which both Armenian and Georgian auxiliary troops
took part,^50 the Cypriot military expeditions against the Syro-Pales-
tinian littoral,^51 and the fact that, in his Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, Ibn al-
Qayyim accuses Oriental Christians of collaborating with the Frankish
Crusaders,^52 it is incorrect to assume that the Hidāyat al-ḥayārā also
49 Ibid., p. 232.
50 See, for instance, Raff, Thomas: Das Sendschreiben nach Zypern. Ar-Risāla
al-Qubruṣīya von Taqī al-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn Taymiyya (661–728 A. H. = 1263–
1328 A. D.); Edition, Übersetzung und Kommentar, Ph. D. thesis (Bonn) 1971,
pp. 42–49 and the literature named in its footnotes; Spuler, Bertold: Die Mon-
golen im Iran, 4th ed., Leiden 1985, pp. 84–85; Holt, Peter M.: The Age of the
Crusades, London and New York 1986, pp. 110–111; Pouzet, Louis: Damas
au VIIIe/XIIIe siècle. Vie et structure religieuse d’une métropole islamique, 2nd
ed., Beirut 1991, pp. 290–303; and Degeorge, Gérard: Damas. Des origines aux
Mamluks, Paris 1997, pp. 258–260. For this occupation see also Amitai, Reuven:
The Mongol Occupation of Damascus in 1300. A Study of Mamluk Loyalities,
in: Michael Winter and Amalia Levanoni (eds.): The Mamluks in Egyptian and
Syrian Politics and Society, Leiden 2004, pp. 21–41.
51 On this, see Fuess, Albrecht: Verbranntes Ufer. Auswirkungen mamlukischer
Seepolitik auf Beirut und die syro-palästinensische Küste (1250–1517), Leiden
2001, pp. 160–166.
52 See Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma, part 1, pp. 187–188, in
which the Damascene theologian argues that Christian writers stood in cor-
respondence with the Crusaders in hopes that the latter would annihilate Islam
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