508 Martin Riexinger
of seven heavens at the top of which Paradise, the Footstool and the
Throne are located “above everything created”, just above an ocean
(baḥr). Earth itself is a sphere, but surrounded for the largest part by
water, which implies that God can be considered to reside literally
“high above” all mankind (ʿuluww, fawqiyya). This holds true even if
Ibn Taymiyya did not subscribe to concepts like the origin of rain in an
ocean in the heavens, or that the Earth rests on the mountain Qāf and
even though his explanation for the angel Raʿd’s voice is ambiguous:
thunder may be his voice but the idea that it is generated in the clouds
themselves is no contradiction, because every movement in the upper
and the lower world is brought about by angels.^56 However, such ideas
were propagated by Thanāʾ Allāh’s opponents as Ibn Taymiyya’s posi-
tion and propagated under the label tafsīr al-salaf 57 whereas he wanted
to avoid an embarrassment for Islam in the age of expanding secu-
lar education. Unlike the aggressive reactions of his opponents make
believe Thanāʾ Allāh was far from radical in this respect. He did not
accept that Earth orbits around the sun before the 1940s although he
always disputed that this issue was a matter of belief and unbelief.^58
Furthermore he devoted extensive space to polemics against the much
more radical interpretations of certain āyas by the necharī Sayyid
Aḥmad Khān.^59
56 Ibn Taymiyya, Majmūʿ al-Fatāwā, vol. 6, pp. 550–559, 586, 596–597 (cosmol-
ogy in general); vol. 24, pp. 262–262 (raʿd, rain). Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī pres-
ents the spherical nature of Earth as the 13th (and shortest) reason to reject the
literal interpretation of istiwāʾ (Tafsīr al-kabīr, vol. 14, p. 109, ll. 13–14). On
Sunna-cosmology in general see Heinen, Anton: Islamic Cosmology. A Study of
as-Suyūṭī’s al-Hayʾa as-Saniyya fī l-hayʾa as-sunniyya, Stuttgart 1982; Radtke,
Bernd: Weltgeschichte und Weltbeschreibung im mittelalterlichen Islam, Stutt-
gart 1992.
57 An illustrative example of extremely conservative attitudes is a controversy in
the magazine Haft Roza Ahl-i Ḥadīth lasting from February 1938 until July
- For his opponents see Riexinger, Sanāʾullāh Amritsarī, pp. 381–384.
58 Ibid., pp. 375–378.
59 Christian W. Troll who is unaware of the controversy stirred by Thanāʾ Allāh’s
Tafsīr al-qurʾān stresses exclusively this aspect, see Christian W. Troll: A Note
on the Tafsīr-i Thanāʾī of Thanā Allāh Amritsārī and His Criticism of Sayyid
Aḥmad Khān’s Tafsīr-i Aḥmadī, in: Islamic Culture 59 (1984), pp. 29–44; necharī
is the common term for Sayyid Aḥmad Khān because he taught that there is no
difference between the “Work of God” and the “Word of God” and that the
Koran should hence be interpreted in accordance with the laws of nature. His
terminology (he uses the English words in Urdu texts) betrays the influence of
English deism: Riexinger, Martin: South Asian Muslim Responses to the Theory
of Evolution, in: Die Welt des Islams 49 (2009), pp. 212–247, here p. 217.
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