Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Attitude Toward Christianity 457
as Ibn al-Qayyim explains by invoking both Sura 3:49 and Matthew
10:5–6, Jesus’ proclamation addressed solely the Jewish people^178 )
Muḥammad proclaims the divine revelation to the entirety of human-
kind, i. e., also to the Jews and Christians, as well as to the jinn^179 – a
statement that is to be understood as an implicit presentation of Islam’s
claim to universal validity. According to this view of the history of
revelation, Islam (as the one divinely revealed religion, annunciated by
all prophets and envoys, and solely valid) stands in contrast to the non-
Islamic religions – in principle and without any limitation. Accord-
ingly, for Ibn al-Qayyim, the question of the meaning and value of the
Christian religion is superfluous. As he sees it, Christianity as it actu-
ally exists is nothing but a distorted form of Jesus’ original religion,^180
and the revelation of God given to Muḥammad and fixed in writing in
the Koran has proven its obvious baselessness.^181
That Islam forms the matrix upon which Ibn al-Qayyim reads
Christian faith is also manifested in the fact that, in the framework
of his doubting of the genuineness of the Gospels, which ultimately
insinuates that they are partially falsified, he notes that neither Luke
nor Mark were among Jesus’ apostles and thus cannot have been eye-
witnesses to the events they narrate in their Gospels; this is a critique
based upon the idea familiar to Hadith science that an interrupted
chain of tradition (isnād munqaṭiʿ) is not sufficient to ensure an accu-
rate transmission. Ibn al-Qayyim’s Islamic interpretation of Christi-
anity is expressed even more conspicuously in the fact that his argu-
mentation involves Jesus’ alleged practice in the sense of a counterpart
to the Sunna, in that he applies it as a criterion for judging Christian
religious practice. To be considered in this context is also the parallel
he draws between the “original” Gospel and the Koran, which enables
him to deny a priori the integrity of the canonical Gospels, since they
are writings that originated from a human hand.
The Hidāyat al-ḥayārā resembles other medieval Muslim polem-
ics against Christianity not least in that – to come to the second ten-
dency – Ibn al-Qayyim ties his refutation of Christian belief and rites
to a positive presentation of his own religious convictions and in that
Christianity thereby functions as a negative contrast to Islam, i. e., as
the system’s repulsion point in Luhmann’s sense. Thus, embedded in
178 Ibid., p. 381.
179 Ibid., p. 222; see also pp. 381, 385.
180 Ibid., p. 487.
181 Ibid., p. 388.
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