 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net, today's episode, By the Book, Ibn Taymiyyah. It's a thankless job being a critic of philosophy. The anti-philosopher typically winds up getting sucked into the whole business they want to attack. After all, anyone who mounts a serious case against philosophy is bound to give what amounts to a philosophical argument, which is a bit self-defeating. And in a bitter irony, the really sophisticated and interesting opponents of philosophy are simply absorbed into the annals of the subject they so detest. Haters gonna hate, and historians gonna say, gosh those arguments you gave are really interesting and in fact we'd like to devote a podcast to you. So it is that we've covered numerous thinkers who positioned themselves against the philosophical systems of their day, from ancient skeptics like Carnaides and Sextus, to Christian theologians hostile to Hellenic philosophy like Irenaeus and Tertullian, to opponents of philosophical rationalism and Judaism, think of those who instigated the Maimonides controversy. Among Muslims, Al-Ghazali is the most famous critic on the strength of his incoherence of the philosophers. But as we saw, his attitude towards philosophy, as embodied above all by Avicenna, was rather subtle. For one thing, he had a great appreciation for logic. Not so with the subject of this episode. You'll find no more strident detractor of philosophy in the Islamic world than Ibn Taymiyya. We've cast a broad net in our history of philosophy in the Islamic world, considering not just logic and a recitilianism but also rational theology or kalam, the theory of justification underlying Islamic law, and philosophical Sufism. Ibn Taymiyya railed against all of these. He advocated a return to the original teachings of the Qur'an and the first generations of Muslims, those who lived close to the time of the Prophet Muhammad and thus had privileged access to his teachings and their meaning. His appeal for Islam to go back to its roots is directly relevant to political issues in the Islamic world today. A villain to some and hero to others, Ibn Taymiyya has been blamed or praised for launching an anti-rationalist traditionalism which became a dominant force in Islamic culture and which inspires radical Islamists today. Of course, I never mention the popular conception of a historical thinker without going on to say that it is misleading, and Ibn Taymiyya is no exception. For one thing, recent research has suggested that, although Ibn Taymiyya had a close-knit circle of admirers and followers, he did not exert widespread influence within the Islamic world in subsequent centuries. His cultural resonance is a more recent phenomenon. Also, despite his opposition to philosophy and kalam, it is inaccurate to describe him as an anti-rationalist. To the contrary, he insisted that the deliverances of reason are necessarily in harmony with the Qur'an and prophetic traditions. His basis for this claim was the same as the one given by that arch-rationalist Averroes. Revelation is true, whatever is proven by reason is true, and there can be no contradiction between two truths. Of course, Ibn Taymiyya did not agree with Averroes that we should therefore use Aristotle to understand the teachings of the Qur'an. Instead, he urged us to dispense with the pretentious subtleties of the philosophers and theologians. We should rather accept the deliverances of natural reasoning and the straightforward Islam of the earliest generations, who in Arabic are called the salaf, meaning predecessors or forebears. It is for this reason that Ibn Taymiyya is credited with laying down the template for the salafist movement in Islam. But we need to be careful here. If you have heard the term salafism before, it may conjure up for you modern-day Islamic extremism and violent jihad. You may also connect it to the Wahhabi movement. These groups, and in fact the founder of Wahhabism, the 18th century figure Muhammad ibn Abd Wahhab, have certainly been influenced by Ibn Taymiyya. But Ibn Taymiyya lived in a different era, and the forces he saw as threatening Islam were not those of the 18th or 21st centuries. The chief historical factor in his thought was the Mongol invasion, which had penetrated far into the Islamic world before Ibn Taymiyya even came along. He was born in Syria in 1263, about a decade after the Mongols laid waste to Baghdad and deposed the last of the Abbasid caliphs. He left Syria at a young age, as the Mongols advanced still further, and spent the rest of his life in the domain of the Mamluks. Based in Egypt, the Mamluks were the last redoubt of Islam as Ibn Taymiyya knew it. So, by the time of his death in 1328, Ibn Taymiyya had been witness to what he would have seen as an existential battle to preserve Islam. With his fiery rhetoric calling on fellow Muslims to go back to basics, Ibn Taymiyya sought to be a standard-bearer in that battle, but he waged his war mostly within the context of jurisprudence. In fact, we should see him not primarily as an ideologue, or for that matter as an anti-philosopher, but as a jurist with a new set of ideas about how to reach correct verdicts within Islamic law. These verdicts have often been used, and abused, in modern invocations of Ibn Taymiyya. To take just one example, Ibn Taymiyya judged that it was licit for Muslims to kill the soldiers of the Mongol army, even though the Mongol forces had by this time converted to Islam. This has been taken by some as a rationale for jihad against foreign religions or peoples, but in fact Ibn Taymiyya defended his judgment by classifying the Mongols as a rebel group within Islam who were trying to topple the legitimate authority of the Mamluks. Not that Ibn Taymiyya specialized in the legal niceties of warfare. Many of his rulings concern property and contract issues, and aspects of Islamic ritual observance. An often discussed case is his ban on making trips specifically to visit the tombs of Muslim saints. In this respect, he resembles the other jurists we discussed back in episode 147, the one on Sunni legal theories. But in one fundamental way, he was very different. Much like American legal theorists nowadays who try to interpret the constitution strictly in accordance with the intention of the founding fathers, Ibn Taymiyya restricted the basis of correct legal judgment to the Qur'an, prophetic hadith, and reports about the early generations or salaf. He thus dispensed with much of the apparatus of legal opinion that had been built up in the previous centuries. He associated himself closely with one of the main Sunni schools, the Hanbalis, who were the best fit for his originalist brand of jurisprudence. Yet he rejected or reinvented such basic legal concepts as consensus. For him, the only consensus that mattered was that of the first generations. The opinions of legal scholars since that time carry no weight. The same goes for the idea, widespread in Islamic jurisprudence, that all else being equal, legal rulings should seek the optimal practical result. For Ibn Taymiyya, any truly advantageous consideration is always to be found in the Qur'an and other literature from the prophetic time. Jurists who expand on this, no matter how well intentioned they may be, are just making it up as they go along. Which as it happens is exactly what some other jurists accused Ibn Taymiyya of doing. Just as today's American constitutional originalists are charged with foisting their own political views on the founding fathers, so Ibn Taymiyya had trouble convincing everyone that he was merely following the judgments of the salaf. As one contemporary critic put it, for several years now he has been giving legal opinions not according to any particular legal school, but according to what evidence he finds convincing. Even some of his fellow Hanbalis scholars often found his judgments and methods arbitrary. But he was at least willing to engage in the juridical enterprise even if he refused to play by the normal rules. By contrast, the traditions of philosophical Sufism, Kalam, and philosophy earned nothing but scorn from Ibn Taymiyya. Although he was himself an adherent of moderate Sufism, his most ferocious invective was directed towards the thinkers he called philosophical Sufis. He interpreted their doctrine of the unity of existence as implying that God and his creation would become one and the same thing. This made them a threat even more pernicious than the Mongols. The Sufis' supporters got their revenge, prevailing upon the Mamluk Sultan to imprison Ibn Taymiyya for several years in that ancient city of philosophy, Alexandria. As for Kalam, Ibn Taymiyya saw the various theological schools in much the same light as the jurists. They went beyond the prophetic teachings, and in doing so went astray. Yet, as in law, he had no hesitation in invoking the authority of the salaf to adopt what look suspiciously like distinctive and innovative positions within standard Kalam debates. A good example is his remarks on the classic problem of God's attribute of will. There are basically two positions that had been taken here. First, the view of the Asharite theologians, who had made God's will unrestricted and tied it to events arising in the created universe. Indeed, when God decides to create the universe in the first place, He wills to do so. Then there is the philosopher's opinion, by which I of course mean Avicenna's opinion. He agrees that God has a will, but thinks that like everything else about God this will is eternal and necessary. It doesn't look like there is any room to steer between these two positions, but Ibn Taymiyya manages it. He agrees with Avicenna that the divine will is eternal, but builds into this the more Asharite notion that God's will is constantly God is no motionless intellect, as Aristotle had claimed, but an ever-active, ever-transforming and willing agent. His perfection consists not in remaining always the same, but in always willing something new and willing the best thing for that moment. As Ibn Taymiyya says, it is no deficiency to will the right thing at the right time. So Avicenna and the other philosophers were just wrong to think that God's divinity would be compromised if He were to change. As this example shows, Ibn Taymiyya's reputation as an anti-rationalist is largely misleading. He was willing and able to meet the theologians and philosophers on their turf, to engage in argument against them and to develop distinctive theological ideas of his own, even if he would have insisted that those ideas were already to be found in the earliest teachings of Islam. Ibn Taymiyya also understood that in attacking the theologians and the philosophers, he was not really taking on two separate groups. What the historian Ibn Khaldun will remark upon later in the 14th century was already true in Ibn Taymiyya's lifetime around the beginning of that same century. Avicennan philosophy had wormed its way into kalam to the point where the two were hardly distinguishable anymore. Both Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Khaldun see expertise in logic in particular as the marker distinguishing the later kalam of their time from the early kalam which we looked at in the episodes on the Mo'atazilite and Asharite schools. Logic's role in the education of religious scholars alarmed Ibn Taymiyya. He spoke out against numerous aspects of philosophy, rejecting for instance the avicennan theory that celestial intellects serve as an intermediary between God and our earthly realm, but it was the philosopher's logic and its attendant theory of knowledge that provoked his most interesting and detailed critique. Whereas the earlier critic of philosophy Alhazali welcomed the study of logic by religious scholars, Ibn Taymiyya thought logic was at best a waste of time and at worst incoherent. He was not alone in this. One forerunner was the hadith scholar Ibn al-Salah, who in the first half of the 13th century had issued a legal ruling prohibiting the study of logic. He condemned it as the first step towards the study of philosophy, describing its greatest exponent Avicenna as the devil of the human devils. Echoing Alhazali's opinion that Avicenna's theories made him an apostate, Ibn al-Salah urged that the death sentence would be appropriate for anyone who refuses to give up on the study of logic and philosophy. As for Ibn Taymiyya, I already mentioned in a previous episode his comparison of logical expertise to camel meat at the top of a mountain, hard to reach and not worth the effort. He also says that using logic is like being told to point at your left ear and reaching all the way around your head with your right hand to do it, instead of just using your left hand. Both comparisons appear in his enormous treatise The Refutation of the Logicians, which was provoked by his meeting with a philosophy enthusiast in Alexandria. Ibn Taymiyya's extensive knowledge of authors like Abul Barakat al-Baghdadi, Suhrabadi, and Fakhradina Razi meant that he was well acquainted not only with logical theory, but also with doubts that had been raised concerning this theory. Taking a leaf out of Suhrabadi's book, he begins by questioning the philosopher's claim that knowing something presupposes being able to define it. This idea had a long pedigree, of course. It played a central role in Socrates' relentless questioning of his fellow Athenians and again in Aristotle's epistemology. But, in Ibn Taymiyya's opinion, definitions do nothing at all to bring us to knowledge. Rather, it is your knowledge of something that allows you to recognize a definition as correct. If anything gives us knowledge, it is a demonstrative proof, not a definition. Here too, though, the philosophers stand on shaky ground. They have rather restrictive rules for what counts as a demonstration. It must be a syllogism with exactly two premises which are universal in scope. You won't be surprised to hear that Ibn Taymiyya disagrees. The number of premises you need, he argues, will depend on how much background knowledge you have. If someone learns that the prophet forbids the drinking of intoxicating beverages, he might immediately infer that he shouldn't drink wine. Someone else might first need to learn that wine is an intoxicating beverage. A third person might understand both the prohibition and the intoxicating nature of wine, but remain unmoved because he isn't a Muslim and so doesn't accept the authority of the prophet. Ibn Taymiyya uses the same example to argue that legal judgments don't need to involve syllogistic arguments at all. If you should learn that the prophet prohibited intoxicating beverages, then so long as you are Muslim and know what an intoxicating beverage is, you have knowledge with no need for any argument. It's telling that Ibn Taymiyya uses legal examples to make these points about logic. This confirms our suspicion that he is alarmed at the way logic was being integrated into juridical education. With these criticisms, Ibn Taymiyya is not so much proposing a different way of doing logic as trying to show that logic is pointless. Exhibitions and syllogisms presuppose, or come along in the wake of, our direct knowledge of things. In much the same way, he dismisses the premium that Aristotelians place on universal knowledge. In the first instance, argues Ibn Taymiyya, we always know particular things. Our universal knowledge is just a generalization from our experience of particulars and is always liable to be trumped by a novel encounter that will overturn the generalization. How then can universal understanding be better than particular experience? Ibn Taymiyya even goes so far as to say on this basis that sensation is better than intellect. That would be a heresy from the philosopher's point of view, but it's an obvious fact for Ibn Taymiyya, given that sense perception of particular things is the sole basis for the universal generalities of the mind. All of this helps him to show that the philosopher's logic is no better than the kind of reasoning used in Islamic jurisprudence. Legal judgments, as we know, were frequently reached on the basis of analogy, and analogy means transferring a judgment from one particular case to other particular cases that are similar to it. With its emphasis on particulars, Ibn Taymiyya's epistemology is, not coincidentally, custom made to make sense of this kind of reasoning. He makes a further clever point against the philosophers by observing that, as even they would agree, the best thing of all to know is God, or as they would put it, the necessary existent. But God is a particular thing, not a universal thing. So the best knowledge possible is not universal in nature. Worse still, the philosophers must admit that there can be no proof of God, since they think we can only demonstrate universal truths, and God is not a universal. As Ibn Taymiyya enumerates the weak points of logic, it becomes clear that however pointless this science is, he has mastered it fairly well. In this he is unlike previous critics, notably the grammarian As-Sirafi. You may remember that he trounced the Baghdad Aristotelian philosopher Abu Bishr Matah in a debate over the relative merits of logic and grammar, but without getting much into the details of logical theory. Ibn Taymiyya is a more dangerous kind of opponent, the kind that knows his enemy. He mentions such technical points as the reduction of all syllogistic forms to the first figure and the merely mental existence of universals. He also has a good eye for the embarrassing anecdote. He tells us that the logician al-khunajiyi admitted on his deathbed that he knew nothing apart from the fact that a contingent thing needs an external cause to exist, but the contingent thing's lack of a cause is nonexistent, so in fact he wound up knowing nothing at all. This is not to say that Ibn Taymiyya's critique of logic is always well-grounded. His complaint that the efficacy of an argument depends on the listener's background knowledge was actually well understood by Aristotle and his heirs. This is why they routinely distinguish between what is absolutely primary, in an explanation, and what is primary for a given person who is seeking that explanation. The philosophers could use this same point to answer Ibn Taymiyya's criticism about particulars and universals. Sure, sensible, particular things are primary to us, but they are not primary in scientific explanation. Ibn Taymiyya did offer a significant challenge to the logicians, but they seemed to have felt that they could answer his criticisms or get away with ignoring them. They were probably right about that. In modern times, Ibn Taymiyya's radical agenda has won him great cultural currency. Among the Muslim thinkers we've covered so far, only al-Ghazali and Rumi equal his prominence in the contemporary world. But in his own time, and for some centuries thereafter, Ibn Taymiyya's legal radicalism made him a relatively marginal figure. His criticisms did not put a stop to philosophical Sufism in the mold of Ibn Arabi or derail the process by which logic and other philosophical disciplines were integrated into religious education. But, to be fair to him, stopping the development of Abasenid philosophy and kalam, or for that matter philosophical Sufism, was proving to be a difficult task indeed. As we'll see next time, even the Mongol invasions couldn't manage it. In fact, there was so much intellectual activity in this period of supposed decline that we may wonder, Is it even possible to provide a general overview of philosophy and science under the Mongol dynasties? Join me as I say, yes we can, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.