502 Martin Riexinger
rial support for the publication of Ibn Taymiyya’s works in the Mid-
dle East and the acquisition of manuscripts of his writings played a
considerable role in this process.^34 Moreover it is noteworthy that
the first published translation into Urdu of a work by Ibn Taymiyya
was the treatise al-ʿAqīda al-ḥamawiyya al-kubrā.^35
2. The Controversies about Thanāʾ Allāh Amritsarī’s tafsīr
Soon after the theological ideas of Ibn Taymiyya had been widely
accepted by the Ahl-i Ḥadīth scholars one of them dared to disagree
again. From 1898 onwards Thanāʾ Allāh Amritsarī, a young religious
scholar (mawlwī) from a modest Kashmiri background published an
eight-volume Urdu tafsīr (completed in 1938) and an Arabic commen-
tary on the Koran in 1902. Especially the latter stirred a major contro-
versy because Thanāʾ Allāh had dared to paraphrase the sentence thum-
ma istawā ʿalā al-ʿarsh in (7:54) as “he executed his decisions (naffaẓa
aḥkāmahu) with regard to what he had created and administered his
orders (dabbara amrahu)”. In a footnote he justified his interpretation:
The first of these verses [i. e. Koran 7:54, 10:3 and 32:4] hints at the
impossibility of istiwāʾ [in the literal sense] with regard to God because
he is the creator of everything but himself. And that what is below him
is something that has emerged in time on which he can not come to a
rest (lā yumkinu an yastaqirra ʿalayhi). In the case of the second and
the first verse there are indications in the context which corroborate
our interpretation, because God mentions istiwāʾ in connection with the
terms administration (tadbīr) and government (ḥukūma) and the non-34 See Preckel in this volume; Commins, David Dean: Islamic Reform. Politics and
Social Change in the Late Ottoman Syria, Oxford 1990, pp. 24–28, 40, 60; the
autograph of al-Radd ʿalā al-manṭiqiyyīn is in the library at Bhopal: Hallaq,
Wael B.: Introduction, in: idem (ed.): Ibn Taymiyya Against the Greek Logi-
cians, Translated with Introduction and Notes, Oxford 1993, pp. xi–lviii, here
pp. lv–lvi. However, the cosmological concepts Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān (or rather
his ghost-writers) expresses in his writings are rather inconsistent. Especially
in Abjad al-ʿulūm (vol. 1, pp. 437–440) he offers rationalizing explanations for
astronomical and meteorological phenomena.
35 According to an advertisement (in: Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān , Muḥammad: al-Iḥtiwāʾ
ʿalā masʾalat al-istiwāʾ, Lahore 1291/1874–75, p. 36) it was published in Amrit-
sar by Ghulām al-ʿAlī in 1872. It is noteworthy that at that point of time Ibn
Taymiyya had to be introduced to the Indian Muslim audience as the teacher of
the teacher (i. e. Ibn Kathīr) of the lexicographer al-Fīrūzābādī.
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