In his works of history and tafsīr, Abū’l-Fidāʾ Ismāʿīl b. ʿUmar b. Kathīr (d. 773/1373) argues in favor of his teacher, Ibn Taymiyya’s, program of reform, what Walid Saleh terms the older man’s “radical hermeneutics.” Ibn Kathīr argues in favor of the strict reliance upon the Qurʾān and authoritative ḥadīth – especially those found in the Six Books and Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal’s Musnad. And yet, as Saleh points out, Ibn Kathīr’s Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-Aẓīm does not strictly follow this methodology. Instead, he focuses on philology and an encyclopedic approach that aligns him more closely with one of his major sources, the tenth century Baghdadi scholar, al-Ṭabarī. I argue that Ibn Kathīr’s failure to follow Ibn Taymiyya’s program extends to his sīra of the Prophet Muḥammad as well (as found in his larger work of history, Al-Bidāya wa’l-Nihāya). To this end, I compare Ibn Kathīr’s treatment of two events in the life of Muḥammad, the story of a letter sent by one of Muḥammad’s Companions to warn the Meccans of his impending attack and the story of the attempted assassination of Muḥammad by ʿĀmir b. al-Tufayl and Arbad b. Qays and its aftermath, and the Qurʾān verses associated with them (Q. 60:1-4, 13:9-13) across the genres of sīra and tafsīr. In both cases, Ibn Kathīr does use authoritative reports and Qurʾān quotations. And yet, he also includes reports that are not authoritative (although he is careful to point out their flaws), and puts forward his own interpretation of events without any supporting evidence whatsoever. But why would Ibn Kathīr fail to follow Ibn Taymiyya’s and his own professed methodology, one that he vehemently and quite defensively supports in both works? I propose that Ibn Kathīr uses questionable sources and includes his own interpretation as a sort of pragmatic compromise between Ibn Taymiyya’s “radical hermeneutics” and his own need to insure that his audience receives the correct interpretation of the significance of these events in the life of Muḥammad and the explanation of the Qurʾān. Thus, Ibn Kathīr’s works should not be viewed as a reflection of the stultification of the Islamic intellectual tradition, as they often are by modern scholars, but rather as a reflection of his attempt to insure that the Muslim community was properly guided during a period of immense change, even if it meant compromising his methodological principles.

My paper examines the content and reception of a disputed treatise on jihad attributed to the Syrian Ḥanbalī scholar Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), a text that has drawn considerable attention from both Wahhabi and modernist Muslim thinkers alike appealing to the latter’s authority. The work, called Qāʿida fī qitāl al-kuffār (“A Principle Concerning Fighting the Unbelievers”), is essentially a fatwa arguing that unbelief alone does not suffice to justify fighting the unbelievers but rather that they must pose a belligerent threat to warrant engagement. Beginning in the early twentieth century, the leading Wahhabi scholars of Najd dismissed the work as a forgery, leading to its effective prohibition in Saudi Arabia and subsequent exclusion from the Saudi-sponsored collection of Ibn Taymiyya’s writings, Majmūʿ al-fatāwā. Nonetheless, a network of Wahhabi or pro-Wahhabi scholars, from Egypt to the Ḥijāz to Qāṣīm, found nothing objectionable about Qāʿida fī qitāl al-kuffār and continued copying it into the 1940s, when if was finally published in Cairo under the auspices of the prominent Egyptian Salafī scholar Muḥammad Hāmid al-Fiqī. (I have gathered all extant manuscript and published copies of the text.) Most recently, modernists like Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī have seized on the work as evidence of the modernist interpretation of jihad as exclusively defensive warfare. To give some sense of the meaning of this controversy, my paper takes the following approach. First, I examine carefully what exactly the author of the treatise in question is arguing; namely, is he saying, (i) “Do not invade infidel countries unless they attack you,” or is he saying, (ii) “Invade infidel countries, but do not fight unbelievers unless they fight you first”? Second, having concluded that the author’s argument is likely the second of these, I evaluate the work’s attribution to Ibn Taymiyya in light of this argument’s correspondence to Ibn Taymiyya’s statements elsewhere, as well as those of his pupil Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350). I furthermore examine the work’s premodern scholarly reception, particularly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Yemen. Third, having determined that the work is almost certainly genuine, I turn to its Wahhabi refutations, penned by no less than two grand muftis of the Saudi kingdom, and the contending works favoring the attribution. The discussion here points up variant readings of Ibn Taymiyya between Wahhabi and modernist circles, as well as variant readings between Wahhabis themselves, too often seen as forming a homogeneous religious community.

Ibn Taymiyya (661/1263-728/1328), perhaps the best known medieval Muslim scholar nowadays, is invariably referred to as theologian, jurisconsult or jurist, mufti, polemicist, political activist, political thinker, and gate keeper of Muslim orthodoxy. He is not known as an historian. Regarding Ibn Taymiyya's education, as presented in the authoritative Encyclopaedia of Islam (second edition) by Henri Laoust, he was deeply erudite not only in the fields of law and theology, but also in heresiography, falsafa, ethics and Sufism. Laoust does not mention history. Yet, Ibn Taymiyya's fatwas on the veneration of saints and shrines include a surprisingly elaborate and sophisticated historical narrative. It is woven into his reasoning against the authenticity of so-called tombs of prophets and members of Ahl al-Bayt, and against the wide spread belief that pilgrimage (ziyara) to such sites is commendable. Ibn Taymiyya analyzes the origins and history of tomb veneration in Islam to reveal their Shi`i, hence illegitimate source. He also emphasizes lacunas, contradictions and unreasonable assertions in the accepted narratives about the whereabouts of the bodies of venerated figures (prophets and saints). Finally, he stresses the temporality of territorial definitions and their dependence on historical context. I will present my claim based on Ibn Taymiyyas fatwas on pilgrimage to Ascalon (one of the erstwhile thughur, frontier garrison towns) and to the shrines dedicated to Ra's Husayn (the severed head of the martyred grandson of the Prophet) in Ascalon, Damascus and Cairo. In order to better appreciate Ibn Taymiyya's historical discourse, I intend to compare his history of Ra's Husayn to those written by late Ayyubid and early Mamluk historians such as Sibt ibn al-Jawzi, Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri, Ibn Fadl Allah al-`Umari, and Shams al-Din Dhahabi. Ultimately, I hope to contribute to the already rich but still growing study of Mamluk historiography both by adding Ibn Taymiyya and his highly interesting discourse into the discussion, and by highlighting the ways by which history was put into the service of the mufti.

Most discussions on 14th century Ḥanbalī scholar Ibn Taymīya summarize his thought as the call to a primitivist “return” to a pristine Islamic doctrine. However, such a representation of Ibn Taymīya’s thought is an inadequate assessment of the thousands of pages on theology he wrote over the course of his life. A reengagement with his major works in fact provides us with rare insights into his unique accomplishments as a keen documentarian, or even intellectual historian of Islamic thought. Throughout his works, Ibn Taymīya expertly demonstrates the contingent nature of Islamic orthodoxies as they are constructed within history. This paper aims to shed light on this underappreciated aspect of his thought. Illustrative examples will be presented in this paper from Ibn Taymīya’s work al-Tisʿīnīya, a book on the temporal nature of the Qurʾān, a seminal doctrine for the development of rivaling Islamic orthodoxies by the Muʿtazilite, Ashʿarite, and Ḥanbalī schools. The text gives us an opportunity to witness his method in action and compare it with that of his contemporaries: Unlike the more commonly referenced books of dialectic theology (kalām) which tackle such topics on theoretical principles outside the purview of history, Ibn Taymīya situates the theological premises at stake within the history of Islamic thought, documenting doctrinal developments and changes over the course of time even within the Sunnī collective to which he belongs. From one perspective, Ibn Taymīya’s approach can be seen as the product of a general trend within Ḥanbalism and the ahl al-ḥadīth to critique doctrines by their “genealogy,” separating “authentic” doctrines from “innovated” ones by looking at them from the perspective of their transmission by “authoritative” or “heretical” figures respectively. However, Ibn Taymīya’s undoubtedly novel contribution is that he moves beyond genealogies of authority to something more akin to the “genealogy of ideas,” or what we now call “intellectual history.” This method does not limit the criterion of authenticity to chains of individuals, but extends the genealogical method to the navigation of philosophical first principles, which though contingent on their specific historical actors, can explain the development of ideas on a level that transcends sectarian affiliation. As this paper will show, It is this method that not only facilitates his critique of Muʿtazilite and Ashʿarite kalām, but explains his own admitted break with the self-styled traditionalist Ḥanbalī school of his time.