ON May 22, 2003, 10 days after a series of suicide bombings in Riyadh, a leading Saudi newspaper published an article entitled 'The individual and the homeland are more valuable than Ibn Taymiyya.' The author, Khaled al-Ghanami, placed ultimate responsibility for the terrorist attacks on the medieval theologian and jurist Taqi al Din Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328). For al-Ghanami, it was the blind adherence to Ibn Taymiyya, and his long posthumous shadow, that stimulated violence and intolerance

'How did these murderers justify the shedding of the blood of Muslims and children? They did this based on a fatwa of Ibn Taymiyya on jihad, in which he rules that if infidels take shelter behind Muslims, and these Muslims become a shield for the infidels, it is permitted to kill the Muslims in order to get at the infidels. Ibn Taymiyya did not base his fatwa on any verse in the Quran, nor on any saying of the Prophet.'

'I don't see this fatwa as bringing about the ultimate goals of the Shariah, but rather it is a mistaken legal opinion, that goes against the way of the Prophet. Let us say this honestly Our problem today is with Ibn Taymiyya himself.

Some of our jurists have taken Ibn Taymiyya to be their sole yardstick, and elevated him to a position he never enjoyed in his own lifetime, in his own land.'

It is not for the first time that Ibn Taymiyya had been identified as the ultimate trouble-maker. A refugee from a city in northern Syria that had been devastated by the Mongols, and a member of the minority Hanbali community in

Damascus, Ibn Taymiyya rose to public prominence during the brief Mongol occupation of Syria in 1300 CE.

While most of the civilian and military elite fled, Ibn Taymiyya stayed put, bravely representing the ravaged city in front of the Mongol generals. When the Mongols withdrew and the authority of the Cairo-based Mamluk sultans was restored, he set out to preach an increasingly radicalised programme of religious reform.

Committed to direct action, on a few occasions he even led bands of disciples against what he perceived to be un-Islamic practices.

But it was mostly his words that his contemporaries found inspiring or, more often, unsettling. He was put on trial three times, first for supporting a literal interpretation of God's attributes, then for undermining the power of
legal oaths, and finally for denouncing the popular practice of tomb visitation.

Criticism also came from the direction of fellow scholars. His disciple and colleague al-Dhahabi thought he was cantankerous, arrogant and tactless, and the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, when passing through Damascus, noted in his journal that Ibn Taymiyya 'had a screw loose'.

Today, few figures from the medieval Islamic period can claim such a hold on modern Islamic discourses. Revered by the 18-century Wahhabi movement in the Arabian Peninsula, Ibn Taymiyya also inspired like-minded reformers, as near as Iraq and as far away as Indonesia.

Later on, Ibn Taymiyya was hailed as the architect of Salafism, the concept espoused by revivalist movements calling for a return to the pristine golden age of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

For these modern groups, Ibn Taymiyya stands out not only because he claimed to be following the footsteps of the salaf, the first three generations of Islam, but also because of his active involvement in society and his defiant stand against foreign occupation.

In the last few decades Ibn Taymiyya's name has become associated with political violence and terror, especially since his works were cited by the radical group responsible for the assassination of the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981.

A recent book on Islamic extremism, The Age of Sacred Terror, treats the entire history of modern Islamic movements; from the Syrian reformer Rashid Rida (d.1935) through the Pakistani al-Mawdudi (d.1979), the radicalism of the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb (d.1966) and, eventually, Al Qaeda, in a single narrative improbably, yet significantly, entitled 'Ibn Taymiyya and his children'.

Yet Ibn Taymiyya is more often cited than understood, constantly evoked and not sufficiently studied. This is partly due to the wide scope of his interests and his immense scholarly output — the modern incomplete edition of his works spans 35 volumes, which are written in a characteristically digressive, disjointed style that bears the marks of brilliant insights hastily jotted down.

Both friends and foes acknowledged that Ibn Taymiyya had a breathtaking mastery of the Islamic intellectual tradition.

The combination of rationalism and traditionalism is perhaps the most distinctive trait of Ibn Taymiyya's religious thought, and it is the focus of the contribution of Mehmet Sait Ozervarli, who terms Ibn Taymiyya's theology

'Quranic rationalism'.

For Ibn Taymiyya, rational and traditional proof exist together as two complimentary components of knowledge that are not truly separate from each other.

Reason ('aql) does not and could not contradict revelation (naql), because revelation, all-inclusive and faultless, contains within itself perfect and complete rational foundations.

Excerpted with permission from
Ibn Taymiyya and His Times
(islamic philosophy)
Edited by Yossef Rapoport and Shahab Ahmed
Oxford University Press, Karachi
ISBN 978-0-19-547834-1
400pp. Rs595