DR. GHULAM SHABBIR
DOI: https://doi.org/Against all medieval Muslim thinkers’ speculative thought Ibn Taimiyya’s statement of Islam is kneaded in the scientific world-view of the Quran and the Sunna. He judged his tradition by the normativity of the Quran to resurrect normative Islam from beneath the debris of history. The Quranic viewpoint impelled him to undertake systematic refutation of the Greek Logic which had tainted the intellect of Muslim philosophers, scientists, theologians and Sufis. Swayed by the Hellenism, they including al-Ghazali termed the attainment of knowledge as an ultimate goal of life. Ibn Taimiyya refuted their theses. He categorized the Islamic disciplines developed by the 4th A.H as classical Islam while the later as “educated conjectures”. Though he thoroughly flays the works of latter scholars yet his critique extends to the Companions and Successors as well. He is adamant to accept their errors in the early civil political wars as judicial error which under the cover of the “infallibility of ethical judgement” not only absolves them of their misconduct but bestows a single reward on them, whose position was right deserve to be doubly awarded. Ibn Taimiyya here instead of Ijtihad calls it a “misinterpretation” which far from resulting in a reward may at best be forgiven. These wars render the community rollercoaster stumbling from one extreme to the other. So long as the community was on straight [i.e., the middle] path, its unity and integrity remained intact; as soon as innovations [bidas i.e., deviations] began to take root it splits into sects. In turn, theology, law and Sufism lost organic link with the nucleus [primary principles] they had differentiated from. Al-Ghazali brought these together as basic components of Islam, however, it was mechanical juxtaposition not genuine integration. Ibn Taimiyya took a comprehensive intellectual venture to reform Islam. He realize that Muslims as “people of the middle” were tasked to remove extremities from the globe while they have become prisoners of their own extremes. As a man of the middle he judged “intellectual heritage” on the basis of the “principle of mean” and purged it of all aberrations, deviations and innovations to put the community back on the track. Marvelous was the diagnosis and so was the remedy. He smoothed out the extremes of kharijism and murijism, Asharism and Mutazila, orthodoxy and Sufism, theology and law etc., with creative integrated intellectual prowess that defies description. At the level of universal creative will of God [irada kauwnya] he accepts determinism, on the level of moral will of God he emphasizes on human will to make conscious choice between good and evil; and in his final analysis both wills are highly integrated rather than mechanically juxtaposed Some of his intellectual postures like his unexamined acceptance of all Sunni deterministic, political, futuristic and intercessional hadiths, excessive emphasis on political obedience, failure to accommodate the Quranic principle of Shura in his political doctrine etc., are questionable still he stands tall of all medieval thinkers. He proved trail-blazer for generations to come and pulsates in the veins of modern Islam. This paper intends to explore Ibn Taimiyya’s contribution to Islamic reforms.
