Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

Ibn Taymiyya’s
Theological
Ethics
z
SOPHIA VASALOU

1
 1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vasalou, Sophia.
Ibn Taymiyya’s theological ethics / Sophia Vasalou.
  pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–939783–9 (hardback: alk. paper)
1.  Ibn Taymiyah, Ahmad ibn ‘Abd al-Halim, 1263–1328.  2.  Muslim scholars—Biography.
3. Islamic ethics.  I. Title.
BP80.I29V37 2016
297.5092—dc23
2015004821

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To my family
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1. Ethical Value between Deontology and Consequentialism 11

Framing Ibn Taymiyya’s Project  11

Ibn Taymiyya’s Moral Objectivism: A Revised Muʿtazilism?  21
What Can Our Love of Fine Acts Tell Us about the Nature
of Ethical Value?  34
The Ethical Primacy of Welfare  48

2. Ethical Knowledge between Human Self-guidance and the Revealed Law 56

Imagining Moral Judgments Away: A Philosophical Thought

Experiment  58
Reclaiming Certainty: Moral Judgments between Natural Desire
and Empirical Reason  65
Ibn Taymiyya’s Appeal to Nature in Context: Nature as a Foundation
for Ethics?  77
Reason and Its Ethical Content  93

3. Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its Ashʿarite Antecedents 106

Schematizing Ashʿarite Ethics: Reason, Natural Desire, Social

Convention  107
Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics: New Wineskins, (Mostly) Old Wine  119
What about Objectivity?  132
viii Contents

4. The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 137

The Wisdom of God’s Law: A Theological Rift and Its Internal

Ashʿarite Tensions  139
The Human Mind, the Mind of God: Ashʿarite Views of Welfare
between Theology and Law  148
Thematizing Wisdom: Why Does God Command?  164
Thematizing Justice: Why Does God Punish?  179

5. Broader Perspectives on Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethical Rationalism 197

Considerations of Welfare in Legal Reasoning: A Substantive

Engagement?  198
Textualism: The Engagement of Welfare in Its
Scriptural Framework  207
Ibn Taymiyya’s Claim of Ethical Reason against Its
Theological Aims  221
Reason and Revelation in Broader View  229
Before Revelation: Ethical Reason and Its Socioreligious Sediments  241

6. Return to the Present 251

Notes 263

Bibliography 321

Index 335
 Acknowledgments

This book’s biggest—literally life-giving—debt must be to Gregor

Schwarb, who nearly five years ago refused to take no for an answer when invit-
ing me to take part in a meeting of the ERC project Rediscovering Theological
Rationalism in the Medieval World of Islam and gave me a pretext for respond-
ing to the curiosity that my still cursory readings of Ibn Taymiyya had excited
in me. I  set sail for the Collected Fatwas and was soon hooked on the thread
that would lead me through its mazes. That meeting was one of several events
that would provide me with occasions for developing and refining my ideas,
and I am grateful to the organizers and participants of conferences in Istanbul,
Marburg, Göttingen, Edinburgh, and London for these opportunities over the
past few years. Materially, this book owes a debt to several sources. Begun dur-
ing my term as a teaching fellow at the European College of Liberal Arts in
Berlin and during the sunset of my junior research fellowship at Gonville and
Caius College in Cambridge, it was then made possible by a grant from the
Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst in 2011 and even more substantially
by a research fellowship at the Orient Institut in Beirut in 2012. The final stage
of the writing of this book took place during a research fellowship at Oxford
Brookes University in 2014. I am grateful for all these forms of support.
Among the conversations that stand in the background of this book, the one
that did the most to catalyze its reflections at an early stage was my exchange
with Frank Griffel, who generously shared his insights and his better knowledge
of many of the textual sources that entered my paper trail, and then also criti-
cally read an earlier draft of this manuscript from cover to cover. This book is
deeply indebted to his close reading, as well as to the invaluable criticisms of my
two readers for Oxford University Press, without which it simply would not have
assumed its current shape. (For its shortcomings, it goes without saying, they
stand absolved.) All other debts are to my close family, who have their own rea-
sons to be rejoicing that this book is finally complete. I would also like to thank
my editor, Theo Calderara, for his support and his efficiency in leading the book
through the Press.
Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics
 Introduction

Among the many messages Muslims have put out in engaging their religious
faith in the contemporary context, there is one that stands out with special tenac-
ity. Al-Islām dīn al-fiṭra, it runs. “Islam is the religion of our original nature.” It is a
catchphrase that has grown to be ubiquitous in the contemporary setting, appear-
ing in a broad spectrum of writings, particularly popular ones, among authors who
might otherwise be divided by important differences in intellectual orientation.
We hear it among stakeholders of more traditional educational environments. We
hear it among members of the broad Islamist movement and others who stand for
the new religious approaches spawned by the circumstances of modernity. And
when we hear it, its sound is that of a refrain whose presence has come to be so
pervasive in the acoustic field that it no longer invites pause. Take the tract by the
late Saudi cleric Muḥammad ibn Ṣāliḥ al-ʿUthaymīn, for example, running under
the title Ḥuqūq daʿat ilayhā al-fiṭra wa-qarrarathā al-sharīʿa (Rights Demanded by
Our Original Nature and Confirmed by the Shari’a), which offers an enumeration
of different kinds of rights filed under familiar headings: the rights of spouses, of
children, of neighbors; the rights of God. More remarkable than these contents is
the fact that the language of fiṭra, having appeared in the title, never once appears
in the body of the text itself, its function apparently complete in this elliptical
­gesture and wholly comprehensible (we may suppose) to its readers.
And toward what, one may ask, might this gesture be? Considered more closely,
the notion of fiṭra here and elsewhere would seem to point us to a particular matrix
of relationships or correspondences. At its heart, and most immediately, lies the
claim of a correspondence between the demands of our nature and the demands
and principles of the Islamic faith. It is a message of harmony that stands out,
for example, in the characteristic expression found in a recent popular work on
ethics by the prominent Damascene scholar of law Wahba al-Zuḥaylī: “Islam does
not conflict with human nature or innate desires because it is the religion of our
original nature [fiṭra] and the religion of moderation.”1 Yet joined to this first cor-
respondence as its implicit alter ego would seem to be another: the message of
a correspondence between the prescriptions of the faith and the nature of the
prescribed actions themselves. A good illustration of the latter is provided by a
2 Introduction

remark that appears in a highly popular work by the well-known Egyptian cleric
and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī. “Out of mercy for
His servants,” al-Qaraḍāwī writes in al-Ḥalāl waʾl-ḥarām, “God Almighty has
made permissibility and prohibition dependent upon intelligible grounds [jaʿala
al-taḥlīl waʾl-taḥrīm li-ʿilal maʿqūla], which relate to the welfare of human beings
themselves. It thus became known in Islam that the prohibition of something
follows upon [or depends on: yatbaʿu] its malignancy and harmfulness [al-khubth
waʾl-ḍarar].”2 We may notice that al-Qaraḍāwī here accentuates considerations of
utility in explaining this correspondence; al-ʿUthaymīn, on the other hand, had
sounded the deontological accent with the notion (ḥaqq) that figured as his orga-
nizing term.
It is this twofold correspondence—connecting the commands of the Islamic
faith with our own nature, on the one hand, and the nature of actions, on the
other—that would appear to underlie the pervasive catchphrase as we find it. And
with this matrix out in the open, now, those considering this intellectual scene
against the classical theological tradition might respond with a certain sense of
surprise. For certainly the notion of fiṭra as such had hardly been a foreign one in
the Islamic tradition, given the deep scriptural roots that grounded it. The notion
of fiṭra (“the natural disposition” or “constitution,” “our original nature”) makes a
key appearance in the Qur’an in the verse that reads: “So set your face to the reli-
gion, a man of pure faith [ḥanīfan]—the nature (framed) of God, in which He has
created man [fiṭrat Allāh allatī faṭara al-nās ʿalayhā].” This scriptural base had been
enriched by several prophetic traditions taking fiṭra as their central term, the most
familiar being the one that states: “Every child is born with the natural disposition
[ʿalaʾl-fiṭra], and it is its parents that render it a Jew, or a Christian, or a Magean.”
Picking up on the connection forged in the Qur’anic text between human nature
and the religion of the original monotheists (ḥunafāʾ), this hadith was part of a
pool of rich (though not uncontested) resources that had been used to theorize
about the positive religious impulses built into the material of human nature.
Drawing on these resources, the most important way in which the notion of fiṭra
had been developed by Muslim writers was as a base disposition for religious
belief, or indeed, as some would argue the point more thickly, for the Islamic faith.
Yet the conceptual matrix underlying modern usage would seem to go beyond
this intellectual tradition, bringing out a set of connections belonging to the evalu-
ative rather than the more narrowly theological field. And in doing so, it would stir
up old ghosts that our readings of Islamic theological history would appear to have
laid to rest. Because taken together, the series of correspondences just outlined
as the subtext of that well-worn catchphrase—al-Islām dīn al-fiṭra—point to an
understanding of the relationship between God’s command and human reason
that we regard as having been largely rejected by Sunni Muslim theologians in
the classical period, when questions about the nature of value and our epistemic
 Introduction 3

access to it had come up for heated debate. It was a debate that came to be known
as that of al-taḥsīn waʾl-taqbīḥ—literally, the determination of good and bad—and
one that, in the telling most familiar to us, was defined by a binary opposition
between the vantage point of Ashʿarite and Muʿtazilite theologians. Notions of
right and wrong, the latter had argued, are intuitively available to the human mind
and yield objective moral standards that apply across agents, as much to human
beings as to God. It is a position we have often understood through its contrary,
which was the Ashʿarite claim that God authors the values of actions by attach-
ing consequences—reward and punishment—to their performance or omission.
Right and wrong are constituted through God’s word; and it is through the same
means that they can be exclusively known.
In the classical debates, the notion of fiṭra was not known to have made an
appearance. It was rather the notion of reason (ʿaql) that figured as the central
term of dispute. Yet if we hold our hand over this change of register, the modern
notion of fiṭra—carrying with it the idea of a correspondence between what the
Shari’a commands and what is already present within us naturally or indepen-
dently of religious input—would seem to involve a semantic freight not at all far
removed from what the Muʿtazilites had been concerned to claim. In doing so, it
would reopen the door of a debate that had long ago appeared to close in the face
of Muʿtazilism and its rationalistic commitments. Whether we call it nature or
reason, Muʿtazilite moral rationalism would not lie far in the distance.
This study began as a desire to reopen that door and discover where it leads.
How to understand the historical origins of the characteristic turn of thinking cod-
ified in the notion of fiṭra? How seriously to take the message of moral rationalism
that appears to buoy it? How to relate this message to the premises and outcomes
of the theological discourse inherited from the classical period?3 As so often in
Islamic thought, however, questions about the present lead back to the past, and
they sometimes retain one there with a tenacity unanticipated by the searchlights
of one’s initial investigation. In this case, the return to the past took the form of
a return to the terms of the classical debate itself, to consider more directly the
contribution of one of its more maverick participants. For standing just outside
the familiar perimeter of this debate was a figure who has often been felt to cast a
particularly tenebrous shadow over contemporary Islamic thought: the Ḥanbalite
theologian Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyya.
And accosted with the uncertain curiosity of the present, his writings
seemed calculated to provoke a twofold reaction of recognition—and a new
surprise. Recognition, because it was soon clear that the notion of fiṭra so amply
attested in the contemporary scene was one that assumed critical dimensions
in his thought, including his writings on ethics. Surprise, because probed
more closely, Ibn Taymiyya turned out to articulate a view that appeared to
run cross-beam to the shape of the traditional debate on the nature of value
4 Introduction

as we have often narrated it. Disavowing the binary opposition of Muʿtazilism

and Ashʿarism that has supplied such narratives with their backbone, Ibn
Taymiyya called for a new position that would overcome it:  not Muʿtazilism,
not Ashʿarism, but something in between. Yet this via media was one that
Ibn Taymiyya appeared to spell out in explicitly rationalist terms. Right and
wrong, he claimed, are known by reason. And while the language of reason
would indeed be deployed in couching this claim, Ibn Taymiyya in many places
replaced it with another—that of fiṭra. The claim then became: We know what
is right and wrong by the human fiṭra.
Taken seriously, it is an intellectual development that would appear to subvert
everything we thought we knew about the shape of this theological debate and to
call for a brand new chapter in this well-rehearsed history. A new chapter, a new
answer, and one that holds out a double excitement to the reader of the classical
theological tradition: in offering a fresh synthesis in an old debate, and in offering
a synthesis distinctly framed in rationalist terms. Before us would seem to stand
nothing less than the promise of a new claim of moral reason.
It was this surprise that gave the present book its immediate impetus. As it
progressed, the historical questions that provided the original impetus quickly
transformed themselves into a deeper engagement with Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical
thought. Thus, while these questions continue to shadow the present study
as its distant framework, and while I  hope to be offering some of the mate-
rial needed for answering them, the study that follows is an effort to engage
directly and on his own terms a thinker that still remains—remarkably given
his wide influence in the contemporary context—understudied. At the heart of
this engagement stands a question about the claim of reason announcing itself
in Ibn Taymiyya’s works. How to understand the promise of this claim and how
to judge its fulfillment?
Questions about Ibn Taymiyya’s engagement of reason have formed a promi-
nent theme in scholarly appraisals of his intellectual legacy. Only until recently
Ibn Taymiyya appeared in narratives of the history of Islamic theological and
philosophical thought as the herald of a new era of decline and the augur of an
antirationalist retrenchment following several centuries of efflorescence in the
rationalist sciences. The new age of antirationalism, Majid Fakhry could write
in his recent introduction to the Islamic intellectual tradition, was marked by a
“return to the Ḥanbalite position which rejected all philosophical, and even theo-
logical, methods of discourse, and clung to the sacred text, literally interpreted.”4
And it was Ibn Taymiyya who was identified as one of the salient contributors
to this Ḥanbalite re-implosion. More recent writings on Ibn Taymiyya—notably
by Jon Hoover, Yahya Michot, and Ovamir Anjum—have sought to reverse this
facile judgment, emphasizing the significance of his engagement with the dis-
courses forming the object of his supposed rejection. Taking the question of Ibn
 Introduction 5

Taymiyya’s rationalism to one of its most important seats, the present study can
be read as a contribution to this larger debate concerning the nature of his legacy.
The focus of this study falls on Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical outlook relative to two
key questions that shaped classical theological debates about ethics:  a question
about the nature of ethical value and a related question about the nature of ethical
knowledge and the role of reason in achieving this. Piecing this account together
involves tackling several separate tasks. Given the long life such questions had
led within classical debates, and given the crucial significance of these histori-
cal debates in framing Ibn Taymiyya’s own enterprise, clarifying his ethical views
must in part be pursued as an effort to recount their relationship to preexisting
theological topography. This book is thus as much a window into classical theo-
logical debates about ethics—particularly Muʿtazilite and Ashʿarite approaches to
ethics—as it is a window into Ibn Taymiyya’s own thinking. Muʿtazilite theolo-
gians, of course, have often been celebrated for having pressed a bold claim of rea-
son in ethical matters. Yet what has received less attention among readers of this
region of Islamic theological history is the claim of reason that Ashʿarite thinkers
had articulated in both their theological and legal writings.
Shedding clearer light on Ashʿarite ethical thought is important in its own
right, giving us new resources for recalibrating our understanding of classical
debates. But it is equally important for telling the more specific story that forms
the subject of this book. For one of the things I hope to show is that the story of
Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical views can be told far more compellingly as a story about his
relationship to the Ashʿarites than as a story about his affinities to Muʿtazilism.
It is also a story, as I hope to show, that must partly be told as an account of Ibn
Taymiyya’s fraught engagement with the philosophy of Avicenna, the perception
of whose towering intellectual presence Ibn Taymiyya shared with late Ashʿarites
but was far more concerned to contest. It may seem both surprising and unsur-
prising, in this respect, to discover that it is Avicenna’s denial of the connection
between ethical judgments and human nature (fiṭra)—a denial that had made
deep inroads into Ashʿarite ethical thought—that provides Ibn Taymiyya with a
critical context for developing his own view of this connection and of ethical judg-
ments more broadly.
Probing Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical outlook thus involves engaging a wider series
of intellectual contexts, bringing into view the trajectory of key ethical ideas across
the fields of theology, philosophy, and indeed law. Yet classical debates about eth-
ics had always been profoundly anchored in an underlying structure of theological
concerns. Questions that on the surface revolved around matters of value as these
pertain to human existence—questions about what human beings know regarding
right and wrong or what is right and wrong for human beings to do—ultimately
pointed beyond human life and translated into fundamental questions about the
moral life of God himself. A fuller appraisal of Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical views must
6 Introduction

thus also involve transposing his views about human morality into their theo-
logical context and considering the understanding of God’s morality that comple-
ments them and lends them their significance.
Set against this nest of intellectual contexts, one of the conclusions of this book
can be stated simply: Ibn Taymiyya’s claim of moral reason, examined more closely,
turns out to be a rather misleading one. Reason, when it comes to determining
right and wrong, carries a far less substantive and far less substantially articulated
content than at first sight appears and than the prima facie resemblance between
Ibn Taymiyya’s position and the Muʿtazilites’ may lead one to anticipate. Restated
in terms of the theological possibilities as we know them, Ibn Taymiyya’s view of
moral reason in fact coincides with Ashʿarism in most of its basic features and
with the more limited brand of rationalism expounded by Ashʿarite writers.
I speak of stating conclusions “simply.” Yet one of the chief messages I hope
readers will take away from this book is that simple conclusions are not so easy
to wrest from Ibn Taymiyya’s work. If Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical view, upon closer
consideration, turns out to be different from what an initial consideration leads
us to expect—if “appearances” can be “misleading” and the realities can surprise
our expectations—this already suggests that something unusual must be afoot.
Interpretive work, of course, is often about digging more deeply beneath appear-
ances and ferreting out what is not immediately plain to view. Wonder has fre-
quently been thought of as the passion of intellectual inquiry; surprise seems to
me a good candidate for one of the main passions that move us not only to but
through the effort to reconstruct a thinker’s viewpoint. On one level, this simply
reflects the fact that interpretation is an activity that unfolds in time. The web of
interpretation begins to weave itself from the very first line of the very first page
(“Can it be … ?” “Does he really mean … ?” “It would be interesting if …”); and the
progress of interpretation as we pursue our journey through a body of extended
writing is partly a matter of partial impressions and early expectations ceding to
more holistic perspectives, as more and more of this body comes into view. At the
same time, what the notion of surprise seems to flag is our inescapable invest-
ment in a particular conception of what interpretation involves—a conception in
which the notion of discovery, and ideals of unity, occupy a central place. When
we ask “What does A think about … ?,” that part of us that remains untouched by
sophisticated literary scruples cherishes the prospect of discovering an answer
that we could present with reasonable coherence, telling it without being too
self-conscious about the act of telling and without needing to lay the nuts and
bolts on the table one by one to show how the story was pieced together, what was
accepted and what thrown out.
It is an ideal of discovery and self-effacing interpretive unity that comes under
special strain when one brings it to Ibn Taymiyya’s work. For his views—on the
topics that form the subject of this book certainly—turn out to require effort of a
 Introduction 7

particularly concerted kind to be pieced together. The journey into Ibn Taymiyya’s
account often has all the excitement, yet also all the precariousness, of detective
work undertaken under challenging conditions:  the conflict of testimonies, the
statement made only to be retracted, the circumstantial evidence here, the wit-
ness who unintentionally misleads the jury. Key positions (like the ethical posi-
tions of Muʿtazilite thinkers just referred to) are described in ways that appear like
mis-descriptions and have to be carefully winnowed apart. Central distinctions
are obscured and have to be dug up. Clear statements are made in one place that
appear to be contradicted by the clear implications of others, making the evidence
harder to unify. Theses are offered with promissory terseness but never exten-
sively developed, leaving one wondering how seriously they were intended to be
taken. Theses are voiced in polemical contexts, leaving one wondering whether
they would have been voiced in others. Sifting through these elements exacts a
high degree of textual focus and a far more self-conscious attention to the way one
relates the different pieces that enter the story one tells. If readers of texts might
sometimes be able to avoid dwelling too much on their own form-making activity,
the form of Ibn Taymiyya’s works places that self-forgetfulness out of reach and
often forces one to show one’s hand.
Such unselfconsciousness is of course never a virtue (if indeed it is even a
possibility), and thinkers who place our interpretive fantasies under strain pay
us a valuable service in forcing us to interrogate these fantasies and to reflect on
the standards and aims that drive our activity. Yet to the extent that certain think-
ers expose these fantasies to greater strain than others, this will be important to
bring out in limning the character of their intellectual contribution. I would thus
argue more strongly that those elements of the how of Ibn Taymiyya’s writing
that thematize the painter’s hand by hindering it are ones that, far from being
mere hindrances or disturbances to the what of his views, form an essential and
substantive lesson to be learned about his oeuvre. They certainly compel us to ask
a more pointed question regarding Ibn Taymiyya’s aims in pressing the claim of
ethical reason. They also provide us with resources for understanding why Ibn
Taymiyya’s legacy, speaking in elusive voices, may allow itself to be appropriated
in plural ways and play host to competing interpretations.
My own conclusions about the principal tendency of Ibn Taymiyya’s ethi-
cal thought and about the limited claim of reason that shapes it need to be read
against this more complex appreciation of what it means to form conclusions
about Ibn Taymiyya’s thought. Although several of the moments of surprise that
moved my own investigation forward have been filtered out of view in presenting
the story that follows—faithfully to the tradition of inquiry, in its characteristic
drive to purify the product of inquiry from the temporality of its process—I hope
these actuating surprises, and the way they thematize the act of storytelling, will
still be palpable.
8 Introduction

So let me say something about how the discussion unfolds. In c­ hapter 1 I set
the stage for the discussion by first isolating certain features of Ibn Taymiyya’s
intellectual outlook that are of special relevance for approaching his ethical
views—namely his advocacy of the via media, his engagement of rationalist meth-
ods, and his claim of harmony between reason and revelation—and by framing a
broad comment about the nature of his writing and the significance of this par-
ticular subject in the structure of his concerns. I then turn to my main topic, Ibn
Taymiyya’s understanding of the nature of ethical value. Ibn Taymiyya proposes
to carve a via media between Muʿtazilite and Ashʿarite approaches, but he appears
to draw far nearer to the Muʿtazilite pole of this intellectual field in espousing an
objectivist view of ethical value. Yet the Muʿtazilites, for their part, had given a
prominent place to deontological considerations in spelling out their ethical ontol-
ogy. A  closer study of a number of Taymiyyan texts, by contrast, suggests that
Ibn Taymiyya’s objectivism is construed in overwhelmingly consequentialist or
utilitarian terms. The central ethical concept for Ibn Taymiyya is utility (manfaʿa,
maṣlaḥa), and the value of seemingly deontological types of acts is reduced to
their utilitarian tendencies, not only for the individual but indeed for the social
community.
With this insight in place, in c­ hapter 2 I go on to address Ibn Taymiyya’s ethi-
cal epistemology, focusing on two salient epistemic notions that he appeals to
in his ethical remarks:  reason (ʿaql) and nature (fiṭra). I  begin by schematizing
the argument (or thought experiment) articulated by Avicenna against including
moral judgments in the perspective of human nature, an argument that can be
taken to mark a broad distinction between nature and convention. I then turn to
Ibn Taymiyya’s counterclaim. In his evaluative deployment of the notion of fiṭra,
I argue, Ibn Taymiyya primarily approaches fiṭra as a desiderative principle—as a
principle of natural desire, alternately construed as a desire for what is pleasurable
and as a desire for what is beneficial. Mined more carefully, this construal reveals
that nature cannot be taken to carry the positive status or constitute the source of
ethical guidance that Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks invite us to assume, reflecting the
positive scriptural connotations of the notion of fiṭra. Similar limitations attach to
the resources of reason. While in certain writings Ibn Taymiyya shows an inter-
est in developing the idea that moral judgments are the product of naturalistic
empirical reasoning (tajriba), elsewhere he lays strong emphasis on the limita-
tions of reason as a source for knowing the consequences of actions that constitute
their ultimate value. The evaluative guidance available to us through our natural
or internal epistemic resources thus turns out to be subject to serious limitations.
For the full criterion of ethical value, we instead need to look to the revealed Law.
In ­chapter  3 I  make an approach to Ibn Taymiyya’s elusive relationship to
Ashʿarite ethical thought. Ibn Taymiyya often appears to be locked in relations
of bitter conflict with Ashʿarite theology, and this extends to questions of ethics.
 Introduction 9

A closer scrutiny of the facts, however, paints a different picture. A more nuanced
survey of the evolving Ashʿarite view of ethics, particularly with regard to the ethi-
cal role of reason, and of the Ashʿarite assimilation of Avicenna’s ethical ideas
reveals Ibn Taymiyya’s relationship to Ashʿarism to be one of concealed indebted-
ness. Some of Ibn Taymiyya’s central contentions—not only his claim that right
and wrong are known by reason but also his claim that they are known by (desid-
erative) nature and indeed his claim that value comes down to utility—find their
immediate counterparts in Ashʿarite theology.
Turning away from questions about human morality, in c­ hapter 4 I turn to con-
sider what Ibn Taymiyya has to say about the morality of God. A positive emphasis
on God’s morality—on the fact that God’s action is responsive to reasons, that God
is just and indeed wise—is central to the ethical via media Ibn Taymiyya intends
to chart, as it is also crucial for appraising his chief point of friction with the
Ashʿarites. This friction expresses itself partly as a contestation of the notion of
God’s wisdom (ḥikma) and of the role of welfare (maṣlaḥa) among the aims of the
divine Law. While Ashʿarite theorists had foregrounded considerations of welfare
in their legal works, in doing so they had appeared to create tension for views
they had expressed in a theological context—notably their conservative view of the
evaluative grasp of human beings and their denial that concepts of purpose apply
to God. I begin by offering a closer reading of this apparent tension within the
Ashʿarite viewpoint and the strategies Ashʿarites devised to resolve it. I then detail
Ibn Taymiyya’s competing conception of God’s morality by investigating two ques-
tions that respectively thematize God’s wisdom and God’s justice: Why does God
command the actions He does? And why must God punish? Both topics reopen
questions about the nature of ethical value broached in earlier chapters in relation
to human morality and reinforce (but also problematize) the understanding of the
primacy of utility that emerged there.
Turning back to the domain of human morality, in the first part of c­ hapter 5
I seek to broaden the earlier inquiry into Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical epistemology
by transposing it to his legal writings and by addressing his understanding of
how considerations of welfare stand to be engaged within the legal context.
Examining Ibn Taymiyya’s stance as expressed on three main levels—in his
appeal to “pragmatic” grounds of need in his practical legal rulings, in his
emphasis on preponderant utility as a determinant of legal rulings, and in his
theoretical remarks about unattested interests (maṣāliḥ mursala) as a source
of Law—an initial reading bespeaks a robust embrace of the human mind’s
ability to engage considerations of welfare directly and substantively in isola-
tion from textual safeguards. Yet a closer reading holds up a different picture,
displaying the textualist commitments of Ibn Taymiyya’s thinking. This reading
is supported by an analysis of his position on a debate that forms the hidden
backbone of his legal appeal to pragmatic considerations, the debate about the
10 Introduction

value of actions prior to the advent of revelation (ḥukm al-afʿāl qabla wurūd
al-sharʿ). The conclusion reached here dovetails with the understanding of Ibn
Taymiyya’s limited rationalism articulated in c­ hapter 2. Having broadened the
bases for this understanding, in the second part of the chapter I seek to locate
it against two additional foils by raising a question about Ibn Taymiyya’s deeper
motivations for pressing the claim of moral reason and by raising a larger ques-
tion about the relation between reason and revelation within his thought. Once
again, there seem to be competing messages at work within Ibn Taymiyya’s
writings, but I argue that reason must be understood as possessing limited
independence and as largely conditioned by, and departing from, the vantage
point of religious revelation.
And while my aim in this book is not to effect the historical leap from past to
present, in c­ hapter 6 I conclude with some heuristic thoughts about how some of
the bridges between past and present might be built.
 1

Ethical Value between Deontology

and Consequentialism

Framing Ibn Taymiyya’s Project

“The best things are those that lie in the middle.” They are not the kind of words
that first come to mind when we open a discussion about that Ḥanbalite theolo-
gian whose legacy has cast such a long shadow on modern times.
Icon of extremist Islamist ideologues from Sadat to Bin Laden, revered spiri-
tual leader of Wahhabi and salafi movements known for their religious rigorism
and conservative bent, the Ibn Taymiyya we have come to know in our own times
is a thinker we associate with hard attitudes that would appear to be worlds away
from the message of moderation that stands out in these words.1 The Ibn Taymiyya
who looks back at us through the lens of history would seem to share in the spirit
of his epigones. A member of the Ḥanbalite community of Damascus, displaced
from Harran as a young boy as a result of the Mongol invasion, his life is full of
conflict and upheaval that mirror the upheaval of the Islamic world around him
as Mamluk rule comes under Mongol threat and betoken a thinker who does not
mince trenchant views. Looking across the sixty-five years of his life’s work from
1263 to 1328 ce in Syria and Egypt, we see the firebrand reformer and indefatigable
polemicist who launches himself on the dominant intellectual schools and spiri-
tual practices of his time in a spirit of tireless critique, antagonizing many of his
contemporaries with controversial positions that challenge prevailing views and
call for wide-ranging reform. He decries the visitation of saints’ tombs, antagoniz-
ing popular Sufi practice; he denounces legal stratagems and the common use
of divorce oaths, antagonizing widespread legal practice; he rallies to a literalist,
seemingly anthropomorphist view of God, exciting the animus of Ashʿarite theo-
logians. He composes polemics against the monistic theosophy of Ibn ʿArabī and
his followers, yet more polemics against the falāsifa, and still has energy left over
for the Ashʿarite mutakallimūn. Sidelining time-honored religious authorities, he
12 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

calls for a return to the purer sources of the faith: to the insight solely available
to the early generations of the Muslim community (salaf) who stood closest to the
age of prophetic inspiration, to the revealed text itself unmediated by artificial
interpretive accretions and school allegiances. His life a never-ending stream of
controversies, he is put on trial and imprisoned several times in his life in both
Syria and Egypt, eventually dying in prison in the citadel of Damascus, the fitting
end to a life of defiance that “opposed by word and deed almost every aspect of
religion practiced in the Mamluk Empire,” in the words of one commentator.2
Both as his image has been projected in the present and as it has often been
historically understood, Ibn Taymiyya has seemed to speak not for the middle
but for the extremes. And yet the notion of a balance, or a middle road, is one
that runs the length of his sprawling work and provides it with one of its organiz-
ing motifs. In his landmark study of Ibn Taymiyya in the middle of the twenti-
eth century, Henri Laoust was emphasizing the centrality of this notion when he
connected it to Ibn Taymiyya’s construction of the privileged religious grouping
designated as ahl al-sunna waʾl-jamāʿa, which represents the truest repository of
the thought of the Prophet and the salaf, albeit a repository less real than ideal.
On Laoust’s reading, it refers to “an ideal grouping whose doctrines, still wait-
ing to be created rather than already constituted, form a kind of mean between
diverse opinions.”3 It is this notion likewise that Yahya Michot recently sought to
highlight in a self-conscious effort to restore the image of a thinker tarnished by
his self-proclaimed disciples in the modern age, who have cast him as the patron
saint of everything modernity abhors—of an “opposition to reason and mysticism,
of fundamentalism and intolerance, of radical extremism”—and thereby blinded
us to his character as a “master of the via media, the middle way that is at the heart
of traditional Islam.”4
Ibn Taymiyya as a master of moderation—of what he himself refers to widely
in his works as al-wasaṭ or al-qawl al-mutawassiṭ. It is not the only revision of
popular perceptions or immediate impressions that a closer consideration of his
works would invite. Recent scholarship has slowly begun to prise loose a set of
earlier perceptions of Ibn Taymiyya not unrelated to the image of his extremism,
which, beguiled by the surface of his traditionalist commitments and his polem-
ics against the rational sciences, overlooked the subtler relationship in which he
places scripture and human reason and the depth of his engagement of the ratio-
nal sciences against which he wages his wars. Since its earliest history Ḥanbalism
has often been associated with a fideistic attachment to the text and a suspicion of
rationalist methods encapsulated in Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal’s famed motto that “we
do not ask how” (bilā kayfa) regarding scriptural descriptions of God. In the same
century that Ibn Taymiyya was born, the eminent Damascene Ḥanbalite scholar
Muwaffaq al-Dīn ibn Qudāma (d. 1223) would issue a book-length admonition
against perusing works of speculative or dialectical theology (kalām) typical of the
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 13

traditionalist stance.5 Ibn Taymiyya’s polemics against the philosophical mysti-

cism of Ibn ʿArabī, the views of the falāsifa and the mutakallimūn, by contrast,
attest to a depth of reading that flouts received commonplaces about traditional-
ist attitudes toward such works and point to the multiple ways in which their
resources seep into his own thought. It is not without justice that the Shāfiʿite
scholar Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī (d. 1348) would exclaim, in an oft-cited passage,
that Ibn Taymiyya had “repeatedly swallowed the poison of the philosophers and
their works.”6 This is, after all, one of the reasons, as has been recently suggested,
why Ibn Taymiyya—contrary, once again, to popular perceptions of his promi-
nence throughout Islamic religious history—had a troubled relationship to the
traditionalists of his time and was regarded with an attitude of “fluctuating scep-
ticism” within Damascene Ḥanbalite circles. Both during his life and after his
death, Ibn Taymiyya’s influence remained limited until the eighteenth century,
when his legacy witnessed a sea-change and he was catapulted from “a little-read
scholar with problematic and controversial views” to a central figure in the Islamic
religious tradition for both Ḥanbalite and non-Ḥanbalite Sunni scholars.7
For some, the aspects just outlined—Ibn Taymiyya’s emphasis on the via media
and his openness to rational methods of inquiry—are intrinsically linked. Ibn
Taymiyya’s notion of the via media, as Merlin Swartz suggested some time ago,
has to be understood less as a matter of what it excludes than what it includes. For
it “does not mean simply or primarily that truth (or the truth) somehow lies in the
middle ground between two opposing extremes. It means rather that truth has a
bi-polar character so that the two opposing extremes, instead of being excluded,
are actually included within the truth in something of a dialectical fashion… .
Wasaṭ means that doctrinal error or heresy results when one element of the truth
is elevated to the level of the whole.” This notion of the mean, Swartz continues,
provides the basis for Ibn Taymiyya’s polemical or critical confrontations with dif-
ferent movements. Yet what is more important is that it also provides the basis
for his more positive engagement with these movements. For it allows the rec-
ognition that “even though their systems of thought contained error, they also
contained elements of truth,” and to that extent “they were to be taken seriously,”
thereby justifying “at least a limited openness vis-à-vis the heterodox ideologies,
and … the incorporation of elements of their thought.”8
In thematizing the relationship between the negative and positive aspects of
Ibn Taymiyya’s task, Swartz’s remarks pick up on an important space of question-
ing that opens out from Ibn Taymiyya’s work. But what is more relevant here is
to connect this synthetic description to yet another facet of Ibn Taymiyya’s under-
standing of his task which ties in with the facets already highlighted. For Ibn
Taymiyya’s engagement with rationalist methods must be seen additionally in
light of a broader headline that stamps his entire work with its special character
and gives the content of his distinctive intellectual vocation. “The sound view,” he
14 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

writes in his creedal commentary Sharḥ al-ʿAqīda al-Iṣbahāniyya, “is the one that
agrees with sound revelation and plain reason [ṣaḥīḥ al-manqūl wa-ṣarīḥ al-maʿqūl],
which unites the elements of truth that different views contain and steers clear
from the error they contain.”9 The explicit theme of some of Ibn Taymiyya’s
best-known works, the constant refrain of almost all others, it is this claim of
harmony between reason and revelation that provides his readers with yet another
context for his engagement with rationalist methods and yet another hallmark of
his synthetic aims. For this claim cannot be held down without confronting the
competing ways in which other thinkers have proposed to relate the two terms of
the equation and the ways they have specified the content of reason.
It is this plexus of interconnecting headlines—Ibn Taymiyya’s espousal of a
via media, his positive engagement of rationalist methods, his claim of harmony
between human reason and the divine word—that provides the framework for the
particular questions that form the topic of this book. The task of this book will be
to follow these headlines to one of their most important theological lairs in order
to consider their significance more closely and to deepen the way we understand
them. For it is precisely under these headlines that Ibn Taymiyya invites us to
read his contribution to a debate that had sent up a high flame among Muslim
thinkers from the earliest days of kalām and whose heartland was constituted by
a set of interlinked questions about the standards of value that govern the actions
of human beings and the actions of God. Are there things that we can count on
God to do? Are there limits to what God can do? Can God, for example, punish
the innocent, fail to reward the virtuous? Can He determine our actions and then
punish us for them? What notion of justice do God’s actions answer to, and how
does this relate to the notion of justice we are familiar with from the ordinary
human world? Are there real, objective standards of action common to all intel-
ligent beings—standards universally accessible to human beings by reason? How
do these standards relate to the actions prescribed by scripture? How can God be
answerable to moral standards without this undermining His omnipotence? How
can our freedom to act, for that matter, be squared with God’s omnipotence?
The possibilities of response held out by these kinds of questions were riven
with difficult conflicts. This was a conflict between different demands generated
by the conception of God—His justice against His power. It was also, more implic-
itly, a conflict between the demands of God and the needs of human beings, for
whom the ability to have faith in a just God represents a deep-seated psychologi-
cal and spiritual need. Such conflicts would seem to be deeply inscribed in this
field of possibility, as attested by their frequent recurrence in other monotheistic
traditions of theological inquiry, notably in Christianity. As we often tell the his-
tory of these debates in the Islamic context, Muslim theologians responded to the
conflict by resolutely seizing the competing horns and pulling, producing the two
dominant factions that appear as ideal types in any reading of Islamic theological
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 15

history. Muʿtazilite theologians pulled in the direction of divine justice and the
primacy of human reason; Ashʿarite theologians in the direction of divine power
and the primacy of the divine word.
Sketched in broad brush strokes, the theological positions articulated by these
two sides have often seemed easy to capture in a few telling formulations. The
Muʿtazilites argued: certain kinds of actions—such as lying or injustice, gratitude
or ingratitude—are inherently good or bad and are known by reason to be so;
the divine Law merely confirms and particularizes that native knowledge. These
standards apply no less to divine than to human actions, and God, being wise,
never does evil and only does good, as these notions are commonly understood.
God, thus, does not punish the innocent; reward the undeserving; fail to reward
those who have deserved it through their works; impose obligations that people
cannot fulfill. In these and other ways, God is just in His dealings and never fails
in His moral obligations. Performing a volte-face against this view, the Ashʿarites
had responded: reason gives us no such information; actions are instead ren-
dered good or bad through the divine command or prohibition that attaches to
them. In legislating actions, God does not respond to values that are already in
the world—to intrinsic characteristics of actions—but rather creates value by the
very act of commanding. The answer to the question “Why does God command
the particular things He does?” comes down to God’s arbitrary will. God Himself
could never be subject to any Law. If God is just, it is not in a sense that would
place Him and human beings under a shared yoke. Neither obliged to reward nor
obliged to spare from punishment, His dealings with human beings are as free
as those of a master disposing his chattel.10 On this story of half-heard conversa-
tions and theological reversals, it is Ashʿarite voluntarism that became ascendant
in much of the Sunni world—though not the Shi’i world, where Muʿtazilism
continued to flourish—and Muʿtazilite ethical rationalism was by and large deci-
sively sidelined.
Either justice or power; either the demands of divinity or the needs of human
beings. Yet the conflict between these terms was too strong to be entirely expunged,
and this was particularly in evidence when it came to the question of the human
freedom to act. For while a robust acknowledgment of human freedom might
conflict with a robust assertion of God’s power, a thoroughgoing determinism
also conflicts with the demands implicit in God’s own promulgation of the Law. If
human acts are determined by God, what sense does it make for God to command
us to act in certain ways against others? Even those who pulled in the direction of
God’s power, such as the late Ashʿarite theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210),
would at times retreat before such questions and declare them a mystery (sirr)
inaccessible to a satisfying rational resolution.11
Reprising the debate, Ibn Taymiyya would describe it using several over-
lapping dichotomies:  as a conflict between God’s dominion (mulk) and God’s
16 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

praiseworthiness (ḥamd), between the Law (sharʿ) and divine determination (qadar),
and also between two types of monotheism: what he terms the acknowledgment
of God’s lordship (tawḥīd al-rubūbiyya) and the acknowledgment of His divinity
(tawḥīd al-ilāhiyya). Accusing both parties of failing to produce a fruitful concili-
ation between these conflicting demands and distancing himself from al-Rāzī ’s
surrender to mystery, he would call for a new, comprehensible conciliation.12
The focus of this book falls on a set of questions that formed one of the central
threads of the debate just outlined and that concern the nature of moral standards
and the nature of our epistemological access to them. Such questions were tradi-
tionally grouped under the rubric that came to be known as al-taḥsīn waʾl-taqbīḥ
or “the determination of good and bad” (or “right and wrong”).13 In revisiting
this strand of the debate, as in its conceptual partners, what is crucial is that Ibn
Taymiyya’s contribution presents itself as an affirmation of a via media and also
as a claim parsed in distinctively objectivist and rationalist terms. Good and bad
are objective qualities, and they can be known by reason, Ibn Taymiyya suggests,
articulating a position that had earlier counted the Muʿtazilites as its most vocal
exponents.
In this chapter my aim will be to present this moderating claim, focusing on
the first aspect—the nature of ethical value, or moral ontology—and deferring to
the next chapter the second aspect—our knowledge of ethical value, or moral epis-
temology. It is a task, as we will see, that turns out to confront an unusual set of
challenges deriving from Ibn Taymiyya’s own presentation of the issues. These
are challenges that have something significant to tell us about the character of Ibn
Taymiyya’s engagement with the topic and indeed of his writing as a whole and
about the difficulties of establishing a unified account of his views. Given these
difficulties, it is important to begin with some preliminary orienting comments on
the nature of his writing and what it means to look for his views; and by another
comment about the place of the topic in the structure of his concerns and written
output.

“From one day to the next,” al-Dhahabī tells us, “he would write four quires
or more of exegesis, jurisprudence, the principles of Islamic religion, and
refutation[s]‌of the philosophers and of the speculative sciences. It is no exaggera-
tion [to say] that up to now his writings have reached five hundred volumes.” This
description of Ibn Taymiyya’s writing habits may reflect a degree of hyperbole
that was common practice in scholarly biographies, with their peculiar mixture of
eulogy and fact.14 Yet in foregrounding the explosiveness of Ibn Taymiyya’s writ-
ing, it captures one of the familiar challenges faced by readers seeking to ascertain
his views on any given subject. It is not so much the explosiveness in the quantity
of his work, however, as of its quality that presents the gravest challenge.15 The
thirty-seven volumes of Ibn Taymiyya’s Collected Fatwas (Majmūʿ Fatāwā) may be
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 17

rather misleadingly titled, as it includes not only fatwas but also a number of lon-
ger and more autonomous works. Yet this choice of title appropriately reflects his
predilection for the literary format of short compositions—for what his foremost
biographer, Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī (d. 1343), classifies variously as principles (qawāʿid),
epistles (rasāʾil), and responsa (ajwiba), conveying a disciple’s mixture of eulogis-
tic intention and understandable helplessness when remarking that “it is hard to
fix with precision and enumerate” these works.16 It also reflects, more specifically,
his reliance on the fatwa—traditionally a response to laymen’s requests for legal
opinions about concrete situations—as a vehicle for the expression of his views,
using it to discuss not only legal topics but also a wider range of subjects, notably
theological ones. It is this expanded significance of the fatwa that Michot picks up
on when he describes Ibn Taymiyya as a “theologian-mufti.”17
In adopting the fatwa as a vehicle for the expression of theological views, Ibn
Taymiyya to a great extent transforms the genre. Practical legal fatwas are not liter-
ary productions in the first instance, as Bernard Weiss observes. Ibn Taymiyya’s
collection of fatwas, by contrast, displays him as “very much a writer of fatwas, a
writer who adopts the fatwa as a literary form.” His fatwas, similarly, often aban-
don the brevity typically associated with legal opinions and run to the length of
self-contained treatises. Yet however Ibn Taymiyya might transform the genre,
his use of it preserves some of its limitations, particularly its circumstantial
character—the compositional occasion is provided by a question that happens to
be posed by an interested party—and its unsuitability for systematically developed
reflection.18 The circumstantial nature of Ibn Taymiyya’s output posed barriers to
its efficient collection after his death and continues to impede efforts to produce a
reliable chronology for his works.19 Yet even more troubling for his readers is the
barrier this poses to the ambition of arriving at a coherent and unified understand-
ing of his thought.
There is much to suggest, however, that this barrier is not merely a construc-
tion of Ibn Taymiyya’s preferred literary format. His shorter works, including his
fatwas, after all take their place next to an impressive series of independent works
running into several volumes each. These include, notably, Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql
waʾl-naql (Averting the Conflict between Reason and Revelation), criticizing the
relationship between reason and scripture as viewed by mutakallimūn but also
falāsifa; Bayān talbīs al-jahmiyya (Exposing the Jahmite Deceit), confronting the
Ashʿarite view of the divine attributes; and the Minhāj al-sunna (The Way of the
Sunna), directed against the Shi’ites and more specifically the work of the Shi’ite
theologian al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī (d. 1325). Yet readers of these long works have often
found themselves faced with a separate set of challenges in trying to piece together
a cohesive understanding of Ibn Taymiyya’s views, this time deriving from his
style. For the forward-moving unfolding of these works may often be guided by a
certain general script, but the discussion often progresses like floodwater, bursting
18 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

into every available nook and cranny along the way before returning to its course
and engaging in multiple sideshows that weaken the cohesion of any argument
under way. As with Russian dolls (as Michot has suggested in a more vivid image)
or as in the 1001 Nights, one argument always pops open for another to appear
within it, and one plot always gives way to another and another.20 The reader’s
experience, already fractured by such digressiveness, is fractured again by what we
may call, as positively as possible, the responsiveness of Ibn Taymiyya’s writing.
Many of his texts bear the aspect of a mosaic of apostrophized words: bringing
up his subject, he proceeds to quote a head-spinning array of writers at length,
to then comment, question, and subject to critique. His own thinking takes place
in the interstices—interstices all the slimmer for the scriptural quotations with
which they are heavily laced. His positive views are often framed by a context
of doxographical report, commentary, and critique that sometimes makes it hard
to decisively tell apart what is in his own voice and what is in others’ or what is
positively as against dialectically affirmed, and that certainly makes for meager
pickings when it comes to isolating the direct expository discussion of any subject.
Those of Ibn Taymiyya’s readers who have remarked such features in the past
have wavered between whether to count them as signs of intellectual weakness
or as interpretive keys to his underlying intellectual program. Wael Hallaq, thus,
has suggested that the repetitiveness and lack of a “systematic and orderly mode
of exposition” in Ibn Taymiyya’s work reflect the negative act of dissuasion, as
against the positive act of persuasion, at which he fundamentally aims. For Ibn
Taymiyya, “a systematic and complete presentation of a body of thought was not a
significant concern.” More recently, Ovamir Anjum has contrasted Ibn Taymiyya’s
“deconstructive project” with the “synthetic impulse” of theologians like al-Ghazālī
(d. 1111) and al-Rāzī, whose project of harmonizing reason and revelation he other-
wise sees him as continuing.21 Michot, on his part, does not tie his characteriza-
tion of Ibn Taymiyya’s status as a “theologian-mufti” to an explicit statement of
Ibn Taymiyya’s intellectual program. Yet the effect of this designation is the same,
namely to interrogate the expectations of unity and systematicity with which we
approach Ibn Taymiyya’s work. “Influenced by/responsive to circumstances as
they are,” he writes, “the opinions of a theologian-mufti cannot be expected to
constitute a comprehensive, integrated system of thought. How can a road, even
a straight road, not be intimately connected to the contours of the landscape it is
traversing?”22
Such perspectives, and the features of Ibn Taymiyya’s work they respond to,
would seem to call into doubt the wisdom of aspiring to produce unified accounts
of Ibn Taymiyya’s views. The challenge seems far greater than is the case with
theologians who adopt more systematic, expository forms of writing, such as
al-Ghazālī or al-Rāzī, or prolific Muʿtazilite writers like ʿAbd al-Jabbār and his dis-
ciples. These contrasts, of course, are instructive precisely in reminding us of the
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 19

sheer pervasiveness of this type of interpretive challenge. Al-Ghazālī is a case in

point, his seemingly conflicting pronouncements about the nature of causality
across different works having given rise to vexed debates about the perspective
that could unify them. Similarly, for all their formidable literary production, as
I  have suggested elsewhere, the Baṣran Muʿtazilites present their readers with
no mean interpretive task, offering an exiguous amount of positive exposition as
against dialectical engagement and sending their readers hunting among the dia-
lectical sections of their work for evidence that can be forcibly marshaled together
to constitute what might then be self-consciously called “the Muʿtazilite view.”23
Here and elsewhere, the interpreter’s hand cannot be easily removed from the
painting. Yet even if we allow the contrast between Ibn Taymiyya and such think-
ers to stand—and there will be much in what follows to support that contrast—it
seems to me that it would be a mistake to exaggerate the fragmentation and nega-
tive character of Ibn Taymiyya’s thought. That his intellectual project must be read
in more positive terms, after all, is strongly suggested by the very headline of a via
media that organizes it, which architecturally demands a moment of thesis or (as
Swartz emphasizes) synthesis. Similarly, what prevents Ibn Taymiyya’s readers
from swooning when faced with the vertiginous plotlessness with which he often
proceeds is the fact that certain general plots recur with unfailing regularity, that
his writing keeps gravitating toward a set of thematic clusters and theses with dis-
tinct internal relations to one another. Taken together, these revisited theses add
up to a robust overall vision sustained with impressive consistency throughout his
work. The concern with the fruitfulness of looking for Ibn Taymiyya’s theologi-
cal views would partly play itself out in the question whether, peering closer to
such thematic clusters and theses, we find that he develops them with sufficient
unity and in sufficient detail—whether “theses” become sufficiently “theories”—
to make them the worthwhile subject of investigation. But as this last evaluative
accent (“a worthwhile subject”) betrays, our judgments of what counts as “suffi-
cient” detail or unity, like our sense of the general “fruitfulness” of the effort, may
also depend on broader judgments about the significance of the specific subject
at stake.
What can we say about the topic of ethics (“the determination of good and
bad”) in these terms? Taken narrowly, it is a topic to which Ibn Taymiyya does not
appear to have devoted a single independent text—none, at least, that survived.24
The most concentrated discussions of the topic include a short epistle in volume
8 of the Majmūʿ Fatāwā and an exchange with the falāsifa in his work against the
logicians, al-Radd ʿalaʾl-manṭiqiyyīn. Yet outside these texts it appears through-
out his work as a recurrent motif, revisited in a variety of thematic clusters and
argumentative contexts. The relative poverty of its independent textual appear-
ances cannot be translated into a sign of its marginality within the structure of Ibn
Taymiyya’s concerns. I have already mentioned one higher-level thesis with which
20 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

this topic is linked, the claim of concordance between reason and revelation. The
theological problematic with which it is more immediately linked is the thematic
cluster that concerns the relationship between God’s justice (or wisdom, in Ibn
Taymiyya’s more usual parlance) and God’s power, a theme of colossal signifi-
cance within his work. Thus, it is under the discussion of this tension, using the
dichotomous terms of sharʿ and qadar, that Ibn Taymiyya brings up the topic in
his creed al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya. It is in the same thematic vicinity that he brings
it up again in many of the short epistles and fatwas collected in volume 8 of his
Majmūʿ Fatāwā, which are notably organized by the theme of qadar. Construed
less narrowly, the question of ethics puts out a rich set of thematic feelers into top-
ics of crucial importance for Ibn Taymiyya’s outlook explored in a variety of textual
locations—his discussion of prophecy, his understanding of the natural human
constitution (fiṭra), his view of the role of welfare (maṣlaḥa) in the Law. These
richer thematic affinities will form a key print of the story that follows.
The topic of ethics and the conceptual filaments with which it is affiliated are
addressed with varying degrees of depth within Ibn Taymiyya’s work, and it must
be admitted that even in the best of times, the theses we receive do not rise to the
analytical rigor of fully developed theories. When one seeks to peer closer to the
detail of the views Ibn Taymiyya expresses in order to pull their weave into sharp
focus, the threads often begin to thin, and the burden of argument turns out to be
carried by solitary threads—by what scholars of hadith may have called āḥād—that
appear in unexpected locations and often fail to reappear. As I will also show, his
discussions of value are at times riven by textual tensions, and his ethical views are
obscured by the intellectual compass he himself offers for locating them within
the classical debates on the topic. The most immediate defense of nevertheless
striving for a unified narrative will seem psychological: where appearances are in
disaccord, or where what immediately meets the eye begins to suggest something
different, interpreters feel compelled to push the heuristic of interpretive coher-
ence as far as it can go and to follow through with their surprises.
Yet on the one hand, it is clear that this interpretive pursuit does not go unre-
warded. It reveals Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical understanding to be organized by a num-
ber of definite contours, even if some of its features could be the subject of debate.
In this respect, the balance of definite and indefinite, of detail and unity, within
his account—taken in combination with the centrality of the subject for his vision
as a whole, the interest of the contribution it appears to promise, and the contem-
porary influence of his ideas—seems sufficient to warrant a concerted interpretive
attention that pushes this account as far as it allows. At the same time, I would
suggest that the very interpretive tensions and indeterminacies carried by Ibn
Taymiyya’s work provide their own kind of warrant for such attention. If his work
invites conflicting interpretations, and if what meets the eye may demand digging
beyond the appearances, this is a point that is important to bring out in engaging
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 21

his legacy. This means, however, that the problems of form have to be kept in view
throughout the effort to determine the content, making the self-conscious the-
matization of the form of Ibn Taymiyya’s writing and the obstacles it sets to one’s
form-making activity integral to the interpretive task.

Ibn Taymiyya’s Moral Objectivism:

A Revised Muʿtazilism?
With these orienting remarks in place, we are ready to grab hold of the main
thread of our discussion in this chapter: What makes actions good? In considering
Ibn Taymiyya’s understanding of ethical value, I will seek to make a first approach
to his relationship to his interlocutors and more immediately to the views of the
Muʿtazilites with which his own views seem prima facie to be most closely part-
nered. My argument, to preview it here, will be that this initial similarity belies
fundamental underlying differences. The shape of Ibn Taymiyya’s conception of
value and the differences that separate him from Muʿtazilite ethics reveal them-
selves most starkly in a tension between the deontological and consequentialist
components of his account. This tension, I will suggest, resolves in favor of the lat-
ter: the primary notion that organizes Ibn Taymiyya’s conception of ethical value
is that of utility or welfare. In this section, I will begin by placing on display a key
passage in which Ibn Taymiyya outlines his ethical position. It is a position, as
already previewed, that arrives as an avowal of a via media. Taking my cues from
this passage, the task will then to be to flesh out his position more fully and, zoom-
ing out, to re-create some of his theological topography in order to determine
more accurately where he stands within it. Having brought out the main tension
at stake in Ibn Taymiyya’s conception of value, I  will devote the next section to
resolving it by bringing a wider range of his writings into the conversation.
“The question of whether reason determines what is good and bad,” states Ibn
Taymiyya, “is the subject of notorious controversy.” On this subject, people divide
into three positions: “two extremes and a middle” (ṭarafān wa-wasaṭ). Here they
are, in sequence:

One extreme is the position of those who affirm good and bad, and who
make these out to be essential attributes of acts that are inseparably attached
to them [ṣifāt dhātiyya liʾl-fiʿl lāzima lahu], and make out the Law to have the
sole task of revealing those attributes, not of causally producing any of them.
This is the view of the Muʿtazilites, and it is a weak one. And if in addition
to this one transfers to God what applies to His creation [qiyās al-rabb ʿalā
khalqihi]—thus saying that what is good for created beings to do is also good
for the Creator, and what is bad for created beings to do is also bad for the
22 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

Creator—one is led to the falsehoods of the [exponents of free will]25 and

what they have said regarding the determination of justice and injustice.
These are assimilationists with respect to acts [mushabbihāt al-afʿāl], assimi-
lating the Creator to His creatures and creatures to the Creator on the level
of their acts. This is a false view, just as it is false to liken the Creator to His
creatures and the creature to the Creator on the level of their attributes [ṣifāt].

A few lines down, the second extreme comes into view:

The other extreme in the question of the determination of good and bad
is the position of those who say that actions do not contain attributes that
constitute [evaluative] qualifications [aḥkām] nor attributes that constitute
the causes [ʿilal] of qualifications. Rather, [God] issued a command for one
of two [equally possible] similar actions [mutamāthilayn] out of sheer arbi-
trary will, not due to any wise purpose, and not in order to promote any
welfare [maṣlaḥa] in either the realm of creation [khalq] or command [amr].
And they say that it is possible that God might command one to polythe-
ism, or forbid one from worshipping Him alone, and it is possible that He
command injustice and foul deeds, and forbid righteousness and piety, and
that the qualifications that attach to acts26 are only a [contingent or extrin-
sic] relation and association [nisba wa-iḍāfa]. And what is right [maʿrūf] is
not right in itself [fī nafsihi], in their view, nor is what is wrong [munkar]
in itself wrong. Thus, when God says, “[The Prophet] commands them
that which is right and forbids them that which is wrong, he makes lawful
for them all good things and prohibits for them only the foul” [Q 7:157],27
the real meaning of that, for them, is that He commands them what He
commands them and forbids them what He forbids them, makes lawful
for them what He makes lawful for them and prohibits for them what He
prohibits for them. Command and prohibition, making lawful and prohib-
iting, are in their view not [about] what is right or wrong, good or foul in
itself [fī nafs al-amr], unless this is taken to refer to that which agrees with
people’s natural appetites [mā yulāʾimu al-ṭibāʿ], and this does not entail,
according to them, that God loves what is right and hates what is wrong.

This view too “is weak, and in conflict with the Qur’an and the Sunna, the consen-
sus of the salaf and the jurists, in addition to conflicting with plain reason [ṣarīḥ
al-maʿqūl].” Having outlined these two extremes, Ibn Taymiyya turns to articulate
the alternative:

The jurists and the majority of Muslims say: “God promulgated the prohibi-
tion of prohibited things,” and “they are prohibited”; and “God promulgated
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 23

the obligation to perform obligatory things,” and “they are obligatory.”28

Here we have two things:  the act of promulgating obligation and prohi-
bition, which is God’s act of speech and His address [khiṭāb]; and obliga-
tion and prohibition, which are attributes [ṣifa] of acts. God is knowing and
wise [ḥakīm], and knowing the benefits that qualifications comprise [mā
tataḍammanuhu al-aḥkām min al-maṣāliḥ], He issued commands and prohi-
bitions based on His knowledge of the benefits and harms that commands
and prohibitions, and the things commanded and forbidden, involve for
His servants. He established the qualification of an act; as for its attribute,
this might already have been actual [thābit] prior to the divine address.
There are then … three types of acts:

[1]‌  One is the case in which an act contains benefit or harm [maṣlaḥa
aw-mafsada], [and it would do so] even if the Law had not come
to report that, the way it is known that justice serves the good of
the world [maṣlaḥat al-ʿālam] and injustice tends to its harm. This
type is [in itself, respectively,] good and bad, and the fact that it is
bad may be known by reason and by revelation [al-sharʿ], without
meaning that an attribute was assigned to the act that had not
existed before. But from the fact that this is bad, it does not follow
that one who performs it will be punished in the hereafter if the Law
has not informed us of that. This is where the hard-line advocates
of [reason’s] determination of good and bad went wrong… . [For]
God said, “We never chastise, until We send forth a Messenger”
[Q 17:15]… .
[2]‌  The second type is the one in which the Lawgiver commands something
and it becomes good, and forbids something and it becomes bad,
and acts acquire the attributes of goodness and badness through the
Lawgiver’s address.
[3]‌  The third type is the one in which the Lawgiver commands something
in order to put His servant to the test, to see whether he will obey or
disobey Him, without it being [really] desired that the act commanded be
performed. An example is the way Abraham was commanded to sacrifice
his son.29

There will be much to take in in this long passage, even for those familiar
with the topic and its habitual turns of phrase and organizing distinctions. Yet the
best place to begin is the most rudimentary, by considering just how the identity
of the sides that frame Ibn Taymiyya’s via media on the topic should be filled
out. The most basic identification may seem obvious, and it is indicated clearly
in the first excerpt quoted (“the view of the Muʿtazilites”), which invokes a bifur-
cation of intellectual landscape that will be familiar to students of this region of
24 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

Islamic theological history. The two sides represent the views respectively adopted
by Muʿtazilite and Ashʿarite theologians. Yet the opening of the epistle adds fur-
ther texture to this bifurcation. The view that reason declares what is right and
wrong, Ibn Taymiyya states, has been taken by the Ḥanafites and by “many” of
the Mālikites, Shāfiʿites, and Ḥanbalites; and “it is the view of Muslims of most
stripes, of the Jews, the Christians, the Mageans and others.”30 The opposing view,
the Ashʿarite one, is likewise adopted by “many” of the Shāfiʿites, Mālikites, and
Ḥanbalites. This richer specification of the sides offers us an important reminder
of the diffusion of theological views among the legal schools and of the regu-
lar conjunction established between certain legal schools and certain theological
creeds, notably between Ḥanafism and Muʿtazilite theology, and Shāfiʿism and
Ashʿarite theology. And in doing so, it also invites a question about the relation-
ship of Ḥanbalism to such creeds, and thus a question about the genealogy of Ibn
Taymiyya’s own positioning.
The traditional hostility shown by Ḥanbalite scholars to the practice of kalām
would seem to close up the space for such questions in advance. Yet there had
been prominent scholars within Ḥanbalite history who had overcome this tra-
ditional suspicion to engage in more rationalistic forms of theological inquiry,
including the Qāḍī Abū Yaʿlā (d. 1066), whose al-Muʿtamad fī uṣūl al-dīn, as
Michael Cook suggests, followed “an intellectual style which is Muʿtazilite rather
than Ḥanbalite in inspiration.” In this work Abū Yaʿlā had in fact adopted an
Ashʿarite position, disavowing the view that reason offers ethical deliverances.31
His eminent student Ibn ʿAqīl (d. 1119) had followed in his footsteps, opening him-
self to this mode of theological inquiry with even greater gusto, and having put
his flirtation with Muʿtazilism behind him, he would later align himself with the
Ashʿarite view in claiming that value is determined by the Law and that “reason is
not ruler but subject [maḥkūm ʿalayhi lā ḥākim] when it comes to these [i.e., evalu-
ative] judgements.”32 In constructing his context, on the other hand, Ibn Taymiyya
calls attention to a number of Ḥanbalites who had adopted a rationalist view of
ethical judgments, including Abuʾl-Ḥasan al-Tamīmī (d. 982) and Abuʾl-Khaṭṭāb
al-Kalwadhānī (d. 1116), also a student of Abū Yaʿlā.33
More arresting than this particularization of the sides will be the bold claim
of majority that Ibn Taymiyya pins to the rationalist view (“Muslims of most
stripes”)—a claim of majority promoted to one of consensus in his later dismissal
of the Ashʿarite position as conflicting with “the consensus [ijmāʿ] of the salaf and
the jurists,” besides the dictates of “plain reason.” This claim, tirelessly repeated
throughout Ibn Taymiyya’s writings, may fall on our ears with some surprise. Ibn
Taymiyya is speaking to us, after all, from the end of the thirteenth century and
the beginning of the fourteenth, at a time when Ashʿarism had become a redoubt-
able force, and the rejection of ethical rationalism had been central to its theo-
logical program. Whence, then, these confident descriptions of the intellectual
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 25

demographic?34 One answer to this question will have to wait until a later stage of
our discussion to be considered, but the simplest may lie in recalling that claims
of such kind often have a rhetorical function distinct from their factual accuracy.
This is a point that Ibn Taymiyya’s own predecessors, al-Kalwadhānī and Ibn ʿAqīl,
had earlier brought home when each had claimed majority for their conflicting
positions on the topic.35 What is particularly significant for our context is to note
the even richer specification of the sides that Ibn Taymiyya contributes in dismiss-
ing the Ashʿarite view when he invokes the authority of the salaf, the support of
scripture, but also the congruence with reason—a congruence that can partly be
taken to interpret his reference to the views of non-Muslim communities.
And it is certainly a claim of reason, and a strong affirmation of the objective
reality of the values of actions, that stands out limpidly in this passage. The values
of certain acts “may be known by reason and by revelation [al-sharʿ]”; they may
be “actual [thābit] prior to the divine address” and actual “even if the Law had not
come to report that.” Reason can tell us what is right and wrong; right and wrong
exist independently, and revelation does not constitute them. The epistemology of
value and its ontology—two questions that had always been deeply intermeshed
in the classical debates yet which we will need to address in sequence, deferring
the first thesis to the next chapter and devoting this chapter to an investigation of
the second.
Now, approaching the subject with traditional theological divisions in mind,
Ibn Taymiyya’s view would immediately seem to lay down strong bridges to the
rationalism and (more relevantly here) the objectivism that we have come to asso-
ciate with the Muʿtazilite school. For this—to slowly begin conjuring the theo-
logical field into view—was a conception of value that had formed a distinctive
feature of the Muʿtazilite ethical outlook as this had been honed across many
generations of thinkers, from the early expressions of faith in divine justice to the
sophisticated theories of later members of the Baṣran school who often provide
us with the sharpest window into Muʿtazilite ethical thought. Looking through
that window, the moral universe we see described by the Baṣran Muʿtazilites is
one in which acts divided into two chief evaluative categories: good (ḥasan) and
bad (qabīḥ), the former subdividing again into the obligatory (wājib), the rec-
ommended or supererogatory (nadb and tafaḍḍul), and what we may call “plain
good” or permissible (mubāḥ). In articulating their view of these attributes, the
Muʿtazilites had made a point of highlighting the real ontological features of acts
that provide them with their anchor. Acts possess their qualifications (aḥkām),
Ibn Mattawayh (d. 1076?) would write, on account of “something to do with
them and an attribute that exclusively attaches to them [li-amr yarjiʿu ilayhā wa-li-
ṣifa takhuṣṣuhā].”36 When acts are seen to carry a certain value, his teacher ʿAbd
al-Jabbār (d. 1025) had earlier argued, there has to be a reason for this fact that
distinguishes them from other acts that lack this value. There must be a certain
26 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

something that “exclusively attaches to them” (amr yakhtaṣṣu bihi) and “necessarily
entails” (yaqtaḍī) their status—something, moreover, that constitutes an intelligi-
ble (maʿqūl) component.37 If the evaluative status of acts depends on their intrinsic
features, it is clear that it does not derive from God’s command and prohibition.
Ibn Mattawayh would again furnish a hallmark expression of this point when stat-
ing that God’s prohibition “reveals the badness of what is bad—it does not causally
necessitate it to be so; His command, likewise, reveals what is good—it does not
causally necessitate it.”38 The affirmation of the reality of value, couched in the
objectivist language of rationally apprehensible ṣifāt, was central to the Muʿtazilite
case that standards of value do not vary across agents and do not depend on their
particular features. The status of God as creator and master, and of human beings
as creatures and subjects, in particular, are morally irrelevant features. Moral stan-
dards apply as much to God as they do to human beings.
In responding to this view, Ashʿarites had offered two main proposals for
how the meaning of “good” and “bad”—and thus the nature of value—should be
understood. The proposal most familiar to their readers is the one that grounded
moral concepts in God’s command and prohibition. “Good” and “bad,” in the
definition offered by al-Ghazālī in his legal work al-Mustaṣfā min ʿilm al-uṣūl, are,
respectively, those acts that “the Law declared to be good by praising those who
perform them” and those acts that it declared to be bad by blaming those who per-
form them.39 One of al-Ghazālī ’s contemporaries, Abuʾl-Qāsim al-Anṣārī (d. 1118),
had brought out the ontological commitments of this stipulative proposal even
more clearly when stating: the qualifications of acts “do not derive from the acts
themselves nor from their attributes [lā tarjiʿu ilā anfusihā wa-lā ilā ṣifātihā] but
rather stem from God’s word [āyila ilā qawl Allāh].” He had then spelled out more
positively what this understanding excludes, in a stroke that brought into view the
close imbrication into which questions of epistemology and ontology were drawn
in such discussions: “A thing is not good on account of itself [li-nafsihi] or its class
or an intrinsic attribute that is inseparably attached to it [ṣifa nafsiyya lāzima lahu];
and this is why reason falls short of perceiving it.”40 Several Ashʿarites had fear-
lessly pressed this view to its natural conclusions and declared that God could
have issued an entirely different set of commands and prohibitions.41
Yet to this stipulative religious meaning of “good” and “bad,” later Ashʿarites
from al-Ghazālī onward had added another. Synthesizing in his Mustaṣfā many
of the elliptical notes that had appeared in the writings of his predecessors,
al-Ghazālī had offered an empirical and naturalistic account of ordinary usage
of evaluative vocabulary. “Good,” as people ordinarily use it, refers to “whatever
agrees with an agent’s purposes” (mā yuwāfiqu gharaḍ al-fāʿil), and obversely, “bad”
refers to whatever conflicts with these purposes.42 This definition reflected a con-
ceptual move that would come to play a seminal role in the Ashʿarite response
to the Muʿtazilite view, with its special imbrication of a rationalist epistemology
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 27

with an objectivist ontology. For the Muʿtazilites had insisted that reason gives us
access to the intrinsic values of actions: the grounds of value must be intelligible
(maʿqūl); the values of acts are known by every rational being (ʿāqil).43 Rejecting
these claims, the Ashʿarites had displaced the notion of reason with that of desire
or the appetitive self (ṭabʿ), in a manner—as Sherman Jackson glosses the point—
“similar to the development of Western ethical thinking after the egoistic natural-
ism of Hobbes.”44 The purposes that form the touchstone for our ordinary usage of
“good” and “bad” represent the egoistic, particular, ṭabʿ-based desires and interests
of individual subjects. These, of course, are desires that may often be in conflict, so
that what is deemed good by one person may be deemed bad by another. Crucially,
thus, both accounts of evaluative vocabulary—religious and naturalistic—reveal
evaluations to be merely relative (awṣāf iḍāfiyya) and to have no purchase in objec-
tive reality. Equally crucially, neither conception of evaluative standards allows us
to extend their application to God, who has neither self-interested purposes to pur-
sue nor commands to respond to. God, as the founder of the school Abuʾl-Ḥasan
al-Ashʿarī (d. 935) had proclaimed, is under no sharīʿa.
In openly embracing the objectivity of values, Ibn Taymiyya thus takes a deci-
sion that appears to place him in orthogonal opposition to the Ashʿarite viewpoint.
Most features of his critical documentation of the Ashʿarite view in this passage,
we may now notice, center on their contestation of this thesis. He highlights the
Ashʿarites’ denial that God’s command reflects the intrinsic qualities of acts (what
an act is “in itself”: fī nafsihi or fī nafs al-amr) as against their relative features (nisba
wa-iḍāfa). Having picked out the claim that God’s command attaches contingently
to its objects and the implication that God’s command could have been different—
recalling the Ashʿarites’ first semantic proposal—he picks out the claim that good
and bad are merely a matter of what agrees with people’s appetites (mā yulāʾimu
al-ṭibāʿ)—recalling the second semantic proposal.
By the same token, Ibn Taymiyya’s view may already appear to concede so much
to the objectivism we associate with the Muʿtazilites that we may be tempted to
pronounce it a revised Muʿtazilism at once and close the subject, discounting the
architectonic implications of a via media and declaring this a middle ground that
leans heavily toward one of its extremes. Yet this would be to overlook the radical
impact that revisions—even revisions in the spirit of a via media—can have on the
terms they seek to reconcile. And just how profoundly changed Ibn Taymiyya’s
revisions leave the Muʿtazilites’ view will become evident once we have adum-
brated more distinctly the points on which he distances himself from the latter,
taking our cue from the passage we have heard.
One point stands out clearly, and it may remind us of Swartz’s dialectical con-
strual of Ibn Taymiyya’s notion of the via media (“the sound view … unites the
elements of truth that different views contain”). While the value of acts may not
always depend on revelation, as the Ashʿarites claim, sometimes it will. On a more
28 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

inclusive view, some acts carry objective value, some depend on divine command,
and others test obedience; Ibn Taymiyya offers no examples of the second class
but elsewhere suggests he is thinking of ritual obligations.45 Yet besides this key
claim, Ibn Taymiyya outlines a number of points on which he dissociates himself
from the Muʿtazilites’ position. For the Muʿtazilites had coupled their view of ethi-
cal judgments to a claim that moral standards apply equally to God as to human
beings (“what is good for created beings to do is also good for the Creator,” as the
text frames this). Here and elsewhere, Ibn Taymiyya categorically condemns this
as a failure to respect God’s otherness and an unconscionable act of anthropomor-
phism or assimilation (tashbīh).46 To this he adds the distinguishing claim that
while acts may be good and bad, and known by reason to be such, God will not
punish people for them until revelation has arrived. The most critical affirmation,
however, through which Ibn Taymiyya distinguishes himself from the Muʿtazilite
view is not present in the translated passage but has appeared right before it: and
this is the affirmation of the divine determination of human acts (qadar).47
The foundation for each of these revisions is fully Qur’anic in origin and inspi-
ration: divine otherness, in the spirit of laysa ka-mithlihi shayʾ (“Like Him there
is naught,” Q 42:11); suspension of punishment until the advent of revelation:
wa-mā kunnā muʿadhdhibīn ḥattā nabʿatha rasūlan (“We never chastise, until We
send forth a Messenger,” Q 17:15); embrace of qadar, in the spirit of Allāhu ʿalā
kulli shayʾ qadīr (“God has power over all things,” Q 3:29). Among these claims,
it is Ibn Taymiyya’s insistence on God’s determination of human acts that bears
the most visible imprint of his intention to recalibrate the way the familiar conflict
between God’s power and God’s justice had been settled, honoring the former
term far more than the Muʿtazilites had done before him. The ahl al-sunna, as
Ibn Taymiyya states elsewhere, seek to affirm both sides of the equation, in doing
so affirming what God has said about Himself in scripture: “God has power over
everything”; “What God wills comes to pass, and what God does not will, does
not”—yet also “God is just in all He creates”; “He puts things in their proper
places.”48 The affirmation of God’s determination supplies the former term with
a backbone that the Muʿtazilites, in upholding human beings’ creative authorship
of their acts, had refused it.
Ibn Taymiyya thus takes the decision to sunder the question of the ethical qual-
ities of acts from the question of God’s determination of human acts.49 Yet the
latter was a thesis that Muʿtazilite theologians had taken to bear an internal and
not merely contingent relation to their ethical claims. A just God would not pun-
ish human beings for evil deeds He himself had creatively determined them to
perform. Faced with such action on the part of God, we would not call it just. What
this brings out more clearly, at the same time, is the significance of the second dis-
tinguishing move that Ibn Taymiyya has performed by driving a wedge between
the moral standards applicable to human action (what “we” would call “just”) and
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 29

the standards applicable to God. To claim that moral standards are objective, on
these terms, is not to claim they give us the standards of justice to which God
Himself must answer. To know right and wrong in the human domain is still to
know nothing about how God must act.
It takes little to see that, with these distinctions in place, Ibn Taymiyya’s claim
of objectivity has been prised free from the entire web of relations in which the
Muʿtazilites had embedded it; and one already has good reason to think that this
disembedding cannot have taken place without seismic shifts in its conceptual
content. Ibn Taymiyya himself provides us with what looks like a well-labeled map
of these shifts, nailing to the Muʿtazilites’ door a brisk catalogue of his counterthe-
ses and revisions. Yet the question to consider now is whether the map he has pro-
vided offers an entirely adequate account of the most telling differences that divide
him from the Muʿtazilite position, and thus a fully satisfactory description of his
location within the classical debates about value. Ibn Taymiyya’s own characteriza-
tion of these intellectual differences, I will argue, obscures differences that readers
of Muʿtazilite ethics will find rather more egregious. Bringing these into focus
has a far-reaching effect on the way we construe Ibn Taymiyya’s relationship not
only to the Muʿtazilites but also to the larger theological field he inhabits. And the
Ariadne’s thread that leads us to the heart of this alternative construal is a notion
with a linchpin role in Ibn Taymiyya’s ethics: that of utility or welfare (maṣlaḥa).
For turning back to the stage-setting passage that opened our discussion, let
us lend a closer ear to the content of Ibn Taymiyya’s positive arbitrating state-
ment. It was a via media: some acts have their value independently of revelation,
other acts do not. Ibn Taymiyya’s objectivism was vested in the first claim, which
he framed by referring us to the type of case “in which an act contains benefit or
harm [maṣlaḥa aw-mafsada], [and it would do so] even if the Law had not come to
report that, the way it is known that justice serves the good of the world and injus-
tice tends to its harm.”50 For certainly the language of objective attributes (ṣifāt) is
there; and so is a notion that had figured prominently in Muʿtazilite preoccupa-
tions, namely justice and injustice. Yet these appearances should not distract us
from certain other conceptual ingredients in this vicinity—ingredients that will be
easier to pick out once we have leaned a little more deeply into our earlier window
to sketch out more of the moral universe the (Baṣran) Muʿtazilites had envisaged.
My decision to focus on the Baṣran Muʿtazilites at this juncture may seem to
require defense. The Muʿtazilites, after all, had historically comprised not one
but two main schools, Baṣran and Baghdādī, and they had flourished across sev-
eral geographical regions and over a period of several centuries in which their
thought had undergone important developments, even if the fundamental theo-
logical tenets codified as God’s “unity and justice” remained constant.51 Abū
Hāshim al-Jubbāʾī ’s (d. 933) theory of states left Baṣran Muʿtazilism transformed;
Abuʾl-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī ’s (d. 1044) and his disciples’ engagement of philosophical
30 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

thought likewise. In crafting intellectual comparisons, it is important to ensure we

have the right terms. And this is partly a way of asking: Which thinkers was Ibn
Taymiyya himself engaging in conversation? It is a question that it will be more
fruitful to defer until we have run through the next stage of our discussion. The
decision to look through this particular window can be justified most immediately
by pointing to the prominent role the Baṣran Muʿtazilites had occupied as inter-
locutors in kalām debates about ethics, as also to their status as title holders to
one of the most richly developed ethical theories within the broader school—and
as one of the most serious contenders therefore to be engaged in criticizing the
Muʿtazilite ethical outlook.
And looking into this window, all we need to do is draw a little closer to the
objectivist language that already came before us to consider its larger environment
more acutely. For when ʿAbd al-Jabbār had insisted on the existence of something
that “exclusively attaches” to actions (amr yakhtaṣṣu bihi) and “necessarily entails”
(yaqtaḍī) their evaluative qualifications in an intelligible (maʿqūl) manner, what
he in fact had in mind was a certain ontological element termed wajh (pl. wujūh),
which we variously translate as “aspect,” “ground,” or “act-description.” “Ground”
captures the causal force attaching to this element, the way it serves to explain
value: it is due to their instantiation of these aspects that acts are rendered good or
bad. These aspects in fact act as “necessitating causes” (ʿilal mūjiba) of the evalu-
ative status of acts.52 “Act-description” captures the fact that explanation goes only
so far, for what is at stake is an intuitionist epistemology in which it is sufficient
to perceive that a given act instantiates one of these aspects in order to immedi-
ately know (by way of ʿilm ḍarūrī or “necessary knowledge”) the value of the act.53
The works of the Baṣran Muʿtazilites were replete with detailed tabulations of
the grounds that account for different types of values. Thus, the act-descriptions
that make acts bad (qabīḥ) include the fact that an act is a lie, that it constitutes
injustice (ẓulm)—understood as an act of harm that is undeserved or is not out-
weighed by greater benefit—or that it constitutes ingratitude (kufr al-niʿma). The
act-descriptions that make acts obligatory (wājib) include the fact that it is an act of
gratitude, that it is the act of returning a deposit or repaying a debt (acts of owed
justice or inṣāf, more broadly), or that it involves repelling harm from oneself (dafʿ
al-maḍarra).
These examples may seem an odd bag, reminding us of a complaint frequently
voiced against intuitionist theories in our own times. Such theories, critics have
argued, present us with a wild garden of plural and irreducible values without
structure or system—an “unconnected heap of duties with no underlying ratio-
nale.”54 There is certainly something of this list-like spirit of “heaping,” as I have
suggested elsewhere, that also clings to the Baṣran Muʿtazilite enterprise. There is
a terminus to the “Why?” questions that the Muʿtazilites admit in matters of eth-
ics. If someone asks “Why?,” all that can be done is to call their attention to the fact
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 31

that a certain action instantiates a certain description—and it can sometimes take

extra reflection for us to determine that a certain description is realized.55 Yet if,
having determined its presence, they go on to contest the value that attaches to the
act, they are contesting a self-evident truth, and nothing more can be done by way
of rational persuasion.
Despite these limitations, the Muʿtazilites provided one crucial way of sifting
the contents of this intuitive list of moral do’s and don’ts. For one of the most
important theoretical distinctions we would like to draw within this list is between
those of its act-descriptions that concern utility or consequences (like the pru-
dential obligation to repel harm from self or the prohibition of harm to others
unless outweighed by greater utility) and those that do not (like the prohibition of
lying or of undeserved harm). Settling on this distinction a more recognizable pair
of terms, we might call the first teleological or consequentialist considerations;
we might call the latter deontological. While the Baṣran Muʿtazilites’ own way of
labeling the distinction would never attain the terminological clarity of modern
usage, they would make several notable bids to signpost it throughout their writ-
ings. This was the distinction that ʿAbd al-Jabbār and Ibn Mattawayh would draw
in different locations when dividing actions into those that owe their value to their
intrinsic attribute, form, or class (ṣifa takhtaṣṣu bihi, ṣūra, jins) and those that owe
it to their instrumental relationship to benefit or harm (mafsada, maḍarra).56
Given the recognition that Muʿtazilite ethical theory offers to a number of ethi-
cal considerations, it would be a mistake to label it exclusively as “deontological” or
“consequentialist” in kind. Yet it is important—and it will be important for the later
stages of our story—to be clear on the seminal role played by deontological consid-
erations in this theory. This is already evidenced by the centrality of the notions of
justice and injustice within it. The deontological principle of desert (istiḥqāq) pro-
vides a moral limitation to—and conversely a moral justification for—the harm
one may justly do to others that is separate from utility.57 Digging more deeply into
the category of justice and injustice, in fact, one uncovers the once again deonto-
logical notion of ḥaqq (pl. ḥuqūq)—“right” or “claim”—which underlies many of
the obligations that the Baṣrans itemize as discrete act-descriptions. The return of
a deposit is a claim (ḥaqq) another person has upon me, as is the repayment of a
debt. This relationship is brought out plainly in certain definitions of justice (ʿadl),
such as the one provided by the Zaydī Muʿtazilite Mānkdīm Shashdīw (d. 1034),
who defines it as “rendering another his right, and exacting one’s right (or claim)
from another [tawfīr ḥaqq al-ghayr wa-istīfāʾ al-ḥaqq minhu].”58
Yet the deontological notion of desert has an even more fundamental role to
play within Baṣran Muʿtazilite theory, to the extent that it forms the defining term
for the moral attributes or ṣifāt mentioned earlier, such as “bad” (qabīḥ) and “good”
(ḥasan) in its different subdivisions. For an act to be bad is for the agent to deserve
blame for committing it and praise for omitting it; for an act to be obligatory is for
32 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

its agent to deserve blame for omitting it and praise for performing it; for super-
erogatory acts, to deserve praise for performing and no blame for omitting. To say
that these desert entailments (aḥkām) “define” moral concepts is to make a stron-
ger claim than may be immediately evident, for it means recognizing that these
entailments form the ultimate epistemological and ontological bedrock of the
moral world. It is these deserts that form the real object of our moral knowledge,
and also these deserts (to give this epistemological claim its ontological form) that
constitute the real “stuff” of moral reality. To know that an act is bad is to know
that its agent deserves a certain response on account of it. The words “bad” or
“good” are just that, words, about which people might disagree in a way that they
cannot disagree about the realities that define them. The primacy of desert in the
mind and reality is laid bare in such formulations as ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s: “It belongs
to mature reason [kamāl al-ʿaql] to know that injustice is something we deserve
blame for.”59 In claiming that God’s command follows the real value of acts, the
more specific claim the Baṣran Muʿtazilites were defending was that God’s com-
mand follows their desert entailments. “God’s imposition of obligation [taklīf],” in
the words of ʿAbd al-Jabbār again, “does not confer on an act an attribute it does
not possess, but rather indicates the state of the act, and that it has an attribute
for which reason necessitates specific desert entailments [annahu biʾl-ṣifa allatī
yaqtaḍī al-ʿaql lahā al-aḥkām al-makhṣūṣa].”60
The significance of deontological considerations, finally, is also evident on the
level of moral psychology. For an act to be morally fertile—to generate desert,
and desert of reward in particular—it must be undertaken at least in part due
to its intelligible moral ground (li-ḥusnihi, li-wujūbihi or li-wajh ḥusnihi, li-wajh
wujūbihi). “Were one to do what is obligatory for some other purpose [gharaḍ],”
as Ibn Mattawayh writes, “one would be like one who acts out of impulsive desire
[shahwa]”—and such people do not deserve praise.61 Truly meritorious action is
action undertaken out of duty, not out of inclination.
The relations between the deontological and the consequentialist components
of Muʿtazilite ethics, it must be admitted, are far from unambiguous, and even
the strongest deontological affirmations turn out to have roots that are watered
by deeper consequentialist considerations. The claim that lying is uncondition-
ally bad regardless of its utility or disutility is a case in point, as it is necessitated
by an ultimately teleological reflection on what the project of divinely instituted
Law requires for its success.62 Even more pointed, while merit depends on acting
for the sake of the intrinsic value of the act, the projected consequences of one’s
actions and the way these impact on one’s interests—above all, the prospect of
otherworldly reward and punishment—are acknowledged by the Muʿtazilites as
by all Muslim thinkers as crucial factors in exacting obedience or disobedience to
God’s Law. Liʾl-mustaḥaqq biʾl-afʿāl ḥaẓẓ al-duʿāʾ waʾl-ṣarf: what is deserved serves
to attract and repel, as Ibn Mattawayh characteristically says.63
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 33

Yet even if not watertight, it is a distinction that does not entirely give way.
Given the fundamental theological function of Muʿtazilite ethical theory—the
purpose of talking about human morality is to get a grip on what we can say about
God—one of the foremost locations where this distinction has to hold is unsur-
prisingly in accounting for divine action. For to the extent that God is inaccessible
to considerations of personal utility or disutility, His motivation to abstain from
certain actions can only be grounded in the intrinsic disvalue of these actions as
this derives from their act-descriptions.64 His motivation to perform certain acts,
conversely, must be grounded in their intrinsic value (li-ḥusnihi). Given His inac-
cessibility to benefit, in fact, all of God’s acts have to be transitive or other-directed
(tataʿaddā liʾl-ghayr), and most have to be subsumed under the concept of acts of
grace or beneficence (tafaḍḍul, iḥsān).65
The later stages of our discussion will present further opportunities for sketch-
ing out the Muʿtazilites’ ethical understanding from additional angles. Yet even
this rapid look through the Muʿtazilites’ windows has provided us with many of
the ingredients we need in order to turn back to Ibn Taymiyya’s position and con-
sider it with new eyes. And looking back at his statement of the objectivity of
value—“An act contains benefit or harm [maṣlaḥa aw-mafsada], even if the Law
had not come to report that, the way it is known that justice serves the good of
the world and injustice tends to its harm”—we can now allow ourselves to be sur-
prised. For the most natural way to receive Ibn Taymiyya’s positive affirmation of
the independent reality of moral values was to read it as an attempt to dialectically
synthesize into his view that “element of truth” which the Muʿtazilite ethical posi-
tion had contained. Yet this affirmation, it will be clear, sits remarkably awkwardly
against the ethical claims articulated by the Muʿtazilites in some of their most
sophisticated works.
Certainly, here are the notions of justice and injustice that had preoccupied
the Muʿtazilites so intensely within their theological and ethical vision. Yet what
is one to make of the immediate conversion of such notions into those of ben-
efit and harm? Benefit and harm, to be sure, had figured prominently in the
way these notions had been articulated by the Muʿtazilites. Injustice is harm
that is then submitted to critical judgment, a judgment partly of utility (Is this
harm outweighed by greater utility?) but also, crucially, of desert (Is this harm
deserved?).66 The notions of justice and injustice, as explained earlier, rested on
a backbone constituted by deontological concepts such as that of ḥuqūq-claims
and desert. What this means, among other things, is that some harm can turn
out to be just, all things considered, and some benefit can turn out to be unjust.
In leaving such complex conceptual points out of view, Ibn Taymiyya’s swift and
unmarked passage between the notions of justice and injustice and the notions of
benefit and harm can only seem bewildering. To ask the obvious question: What
is going on?
34 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

What Can Our Love of Fine Acts Tell Us

about the Nature of Ethical Value?
This response of surprise and the question it generates, I would suggest, holds the
key to the way we understand Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical claims (including the episte-
mological claims deferred to the next chapter) and their relationship to their intel-
lectual context. Stated more positively, this is a question about how Ibn Taymiyya
understands the real form or nature of ethical value. Stated more derivatively, it is a
question about the story his understanding of ethical value has to tell us about his
location within the classical debates about value. With this derivative question in
the background, in this section and the next I will attempt to marshal the evidence
for the positive question, with the aim of clarifying the relationship between deon-
tology and utility within Ibn Taymiyya’s thinking. It is the notion of utility, I will be
arguing, that appears to carry moral ultimacy within Ibn Taymiyya’s scheme; yet
this conclusion has to be gained in the teeth of several puzzles and tensions within
Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion and by sifting through fragmentary evidence that does
not always wear its interpretation on its sleeve.
One puzzle has already come before us: How might Ibn Taymiyya mean us to
take the unglossed transition from talk of justice to talk of utility? It is a puzzle
that we can work through only by first allowing it to deepen. And the best way of
doing so is by surveying a wider range of evidence and taking stock of what Ibn
Taymiyya has to say about the nature of value elsewhere. Coming from the direc-
tion of Muʿtazilite theory, Ibn Taymiyya’s translation of justice and injustice into
utility may have struck us as extraordinary. Yet the emphasis on utility, we quickly
discover, coheres with much of what he has to say about ethical value.
Throughout his work, Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks on this subject display a remark-
able consistency. Out of the pages of his critique of philosophical logic, al-Radd
ʿalaʾl-manṭiqiyyīn, we hear: “The goodness and badness of human actions is a
matter of the benefit and harm that actions involve [al-ḥusn waʾl-qubḥ min afʿāl
al-ʿibād yarjiʿu ilā kawn al-afʿāl nāfiʿa lahum ḍārra lahum].”67 Out of the pages of
his Fatāwā, we hear again: “The only kind of good that exists is in the sense of
what is agreeable, and the only kind of bad that exists is in the sense of what is dis-
agreeable [laysa fiʾl-wujūd ḥasan illā bi-maʿnā al-mulāʾim, wa-lā qabīḥ illā bi-maʿnā
al-munāfī].” Restating and amplifying: “There are things that are agreeable and
beneficial to human beings which thus give them pleasure [mā huwa mulāʾim
liʾl-insān nāfiʿ lahu fa-taḥṣulu68 lahu bihi al-ladhdha], and there are other things
that are contrary and harmful to them and give them pain [mā huwa muḍādd lahu
ḍārr lahu yaḥṣulu lahu bihi al-alam], so the distinction reduces to the difference
between pleasure and pain and their respective causes … and if we affirm the dif-
ference between good deeds and misdeeds, which is the difference between good
and bad, the difference reduces to that.”69 These quotes are but a minute sample
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 35

of a view we find replicated widely across Ibn Taymiyya’s writings. Taken together,
their import seems unmistakable: what is good is equivalent to what is pleasur-
able; or beneficial; or agreeable.70 Utility is here identified as the sole good-making
feature of actions. The Muʿtazilites had offered a number of plural and irreducible
considerations; Ibn Taymiyya offers only one. It is not even a matter of weighing
different possible grounds against each other and deciding which to privilege.
Here and elsewhere Ibn Taymiyya grants the title to utility without contest.
The primacy of utility, pressed so directly in this context, emerges no less
brilliantly in several others. If the remarks above have told us what is the value
at which our actions should aim, another set of remarks tells us that this is the
value at which our actions in fact do aim. “Every living being,” states Ibn Taymiyya
in his Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, “strives for what brings it enjoyment [tanaʿʿum] and
pleasure.”71 Pleasure is the “final end of voluntary actions” and “desired in itself”
(maqṣūd li-nafsihi); couching it again in more normative tones: “that living beings
should attain what benefits them and what gives them pleasure” forms the “objec-
tive of life.”72 The close imbrication just observed between what is desired and
what is desirable—the smooth glide from a description of actual human desires
to a more normative characterization of the proper object of human desires—will
remind us of a long history of similar imbrications, from Aristotle to utilitarian
philosophers such as Bentham and Mill. Yet given the baldness with which this
double characterization of utility appears in Ibn Taymiyya’s work—utility forms
the ground of value and the object of human motivation—the effect in this con-
text must be to make us wonder just how it might help us understand those other
claims that appear no less baldly in his work, where value is ascribed to acts such
as justice and injustice and immediately construed in consequentialist terms.
“Justice is good,” we hear elsewhere, “that is to say, it brings about benefit and
good; and injustice is … bad, that is to say, it brings about harm and corrup-
tion.”73 For like the Muʿtazilites, these are not notions we would intuitively think
to translate into consequentialist terms, and with the adventures of philosophical
utilitarianism behind us, we might indeed be wary of presuming they could be
entirely reduced to utility without remainder. At the very least we will want to ask:
Benefit to whom? What about ḥuqūq-claims? And: What is the argument?
Ibn Taymiyya nowhere seems to offer an explicit argument that would explain
in detail how justice and utility stand to be related, yet there are several occa-
sions within his works where his discussion poises itself to shed light on the
topic. One of the most important—and the one that will form the focus of this
section—is the discussion of ethics that appears in his critique of logic, al-Radd
ʿalaʾl-manṭiqiyyīn. There is an interesting story to be told at this location as to why
one of Ibn Taymiyya’s most concentrated treatments of ethical questions should
have appeared in a work engaging not works of kalām—where such questions
had historically found their primary habitat—but rather views of the falāsifa. This
36 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

story will come more fully into view in the next chapters, but we can anticipate it
by recalling the close intellectual embrace into which falsafa and kalām—notably
Ashʿarite kalām—had been drawn by Ibn Taymiyya’s time. This embrace, as we
will later see, had been cemented with special tenacity in the philosophical view
of moral propositions that provides Ibn Taymiyya with his immediate target and
with the foil against which he articulates his own views. All we need to remark at
present is that it is as a response to, and a refutation of, a view of moral knowl-
edge that he ascribes to both the philosophers and their Ashʿarite commenta-
tors, respectively represented in the Radd by Avicenna and al-Rāzī—namely the
view that moral propositions do not belong to the class of epistemic certainties
(yaqīniyyāt)—that Ibn Taymiyya crafts his own position. And this consists in an
emphatic declaration of the ironclad certainty of human ethical knowledge.
No less important, among the narrative threads leading out of this particular
text, is the fact it forms the prime scene for one of the most distinctive develop-
ments of Ibn Taymiyya’s approach to ethical questions. It is here, and for reasons
once again connected to his argumentative context, that Ibn Taymiyya deploys
with the highest intensity a key notion, that of fiṭra—often translated as the “natu-
ral disposition or constitution” or our “original nature”—as an idiom for couching
his ethical claims. These claims will center on certain core types of moral acts that,
crucially for our purposes, fall on both sides of the rough deontological-conse-
quentialist divide and notably include justice (ʿadl), injustice (ẓulm), truth-telling
(ṣidq), lying (kidhb), and beneficence (iḥsān).74 Ibn Taymiyya’s argument will be
that the moral propositions we frame concerning such acts—as in our claim that
“injustice is evil” or that “justice is good”—are such that they are not only known
with certainty but are indeed among the greatest certainties known by reason (min
aʿẓam al-yaqīniyyāt al-maʿlūma biʾl-ʿaql).75 ʿAql, or—in this new idiom that will
shadow the language of “reason” in a series of slippery epistemological transi-
tions—the human fiṭra.
Yet for our context, the focus must once again fall not on what this text has
to tell us about how we know ethical values, but (in this far-from-hermetic divi-
sion) what it has to tell us about their nature, and more specifically about the
nature of the benefit we derive from them. For in the slippery transitions that
stamp this text with its special character, the glide from “reason” to “nature” that
stands out as a notable signature is accompanied by another and no less notable
glide from the notion of “reason” to that of “desire.” In several of Ibn Taymiyya’s
statements against his interlocutors, it is not as objects of knowledge but more
saliently as objects of desire—indeed of a passionate response dignified with the
language of “love”—that we are invited to consider our relationship to ethical
acts. The argument that we know the value of these acts is executed as an argu-
ment about how strongly we desire them. And while Ibn Taymiyya’s focus falls
on deontological types of acts in this discussion, his argument is heavily couched
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 37

in consequentialist terms. Digging deeper beneath such responses and the con-
sequentialist language that frames them would seem to hold the promise of new
insight into the question—Why benefit?—that we have raised. Although the dis-
cussion in this chapter is premised on sequestering questions about the nature of
value from questions about its epistemic access, it is a token of the close conjunc-
tion in which ontology and epistemology are drawn in classical debates that one
of the best ways of investigating the former should have to lie in approaching it as
the object of intentional states.

When people say “justice is good and injustice is bad,” what they mean by
this is that justice is beloved to our nature [al-ʿadl maḥbūb liʾl-fiṭra], so that
its realization causes it [i.e., one’s nature] pleasure [ladhdha] and joy [faraḥ],
and that it is beneficial for its bearer [ṣāḥibihi] and for those other than its
bearer. . . . And when they say “injustice is bad,” what they mean by this
is that it is harmful for its bearer and those other than its bearer, and that
it is hateful [baghīḍ] and that it causes pain [alam] and grief [ghamm] and
torment to the soul [mā tataʿadhdhabu bihi al-nufūs].

Reformulating and expanding:

One naturally [min nafsihi] finds in justice, truthfulness, knowledge, and

beneficence a pleasure and happiness [surūr] which one does not find in
injustice, lying, and ignorance. And [both?] the people whom this has
reached [alladhīna waṣala ilayhim dhālika] and those it hasn’t experience
[yajidūna fī anfusihim] a sense of pleasure, joy, and happiness at the just
man’s justice, the knowledgeable man’s knowledge, and the benefactor’s
beneficence which they do not experience with injustice, lying, ignorance,
and offenses. That is why they experience love for those who do these
things and a desire to praise them and wish them well, and they are natu-
rally formed [mafṭūrūn] to love and take pleasure in this … just as they
have been naturally formed to take pleasure in food and drink and to expe-
rience pain upon hunger or thirst.76

Present in these two passages are two separate claims that are placed in relations
of mutual dependence. There is a semantic claim about the meaning of moral
propositions: “justice is good” means “we love justice,” “justice brings us pleasure
or happiness,” “justice is beneficial.” Notice the presence of two related yet distinct
components within this claim: one an ascription of subjective emotive states, the
other a more objective claim about benefit. Yet this semantic claim, it will be obvi-
ous, is linked to an empirical claim: this is how human beings in fact respond to
justice and injustice and similar acts.
38 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

Taking it as a semantic claim, readers familiar with philosophical history may

here be reminded of Hume and his sentimentalist analysis of moral notions (spe-
cifically “virtue” and “vice”). “When you pronounce any action or character to be
vicious,” he would write in his Treatise of Human Nature, “you mean nothing, but
that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame
from the contemplation of it.” And while Hume specifically refers to the moral
response of blame (and praise or admiration), elsewhere he focuses precisely on
the emotions of love and hate that Ibn Taymiyya picks out in this passage.77 The
comparison bears further scrutiny; Hume’s objective in this analysis—to question
the view that “the immutable measures of right and wrong impose an obligation,
not only on human creatures, but also on the Deity himself” (T 456)—is one he
shares with Ibn Taymiyya and one of many superficial similarities that light the
way to even deeper and more instructive ones.
It is a comparison we will be revisiting in what follows. Yet more relevant for
our purposes will be a different kind of comparison that Ibn Taymiyya’s second,
empirical claim more immediately evokes. For in the context of Islamic debates
about value, the claim that human beings are intrinsically drawn to justice will
remind us of a very specific position that had been taken within those debates—a
view of human motivation that had once again been associated with Muʿtazilite
theologians. In that peculiar interweaving of epistemology and ontology that had
typified these debates, empirical claims of moral psychology had often been in
turn drafted to play a crucial supplementary role. The argument that values are
objective (an ontological claim) had passed through the argument that human
beings in fact rationally know what is right and wrong (an epistemological claim)
and had been linked to an audacious empirical claim about human behavior and
its deeper drives. Look around you, the Muʿtazilites had said, and you will see
ordinary people, even people who know nothing of revealed religion, running
after the blind to rescue them from their next misstep, leaping with alacrity
to the assistance of those who have lost their way. Looking a bit harder, you
will see the death-defying determination with which people cling to their oaths
and convictions even when faced with the sword. Ordinary people act in such
ways even when they expect no praise, even when they are unbelievers (mulḥid
zindīq) and expect no heavenly reward, and even indeed (here Kant would have
broken into a broad smile) when they are hard-hearted (qāsī al-qalb jāfī al-fuʾād)
and have no passionate inclination to benefit others. They do so for no other
reason than that they know such acts to be good. Purely moral or “deontological”
motivation—motivation grounded not in need, ḥāja, but in goodness, ḥusn or
iḥsān—may be rare, but it is real.78 And—here the argument closed in on its real
quarry through a typical leap of qiyās al-ghāʾib ʿalaʾl-shāhid, a transfer from the
seen to the unseen—if human beings can act for moral reasons, so, a fortiori,
does God.
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 39

Ashʿarites had responded to this starry-eyed view of the possibilities of human

nobility with a reductive cynicism that we, nourished on an ethical history still
laboring under the reality check it received from Hobbes, will find uncannily famil-
iar. The heart that Muʿtazilites declared to be stocked with disinterested impulses
in fact pulses to a rather different beat—the beat not of reason but of desire, and
more specifically self-interested desire. Kull insān majbūl ʿalā ḥubb nafsihi, “every
person is formed by nature to love himself,” al-Ghazālī would write in his reprise
of the debate in the Mustaṣfā, in an epigram that summarized many of his most
potent arguments against the Muʿtazilite showcase of high-minded good-doers. Or
in a more pregnant rephrasing: “Everyone is by nature besotted with himself, and
contemptuously indifferent to others [kull ṭabʿ mashghūf bi-nafsihi wa-mustaḥqir
li-ghayrihi].”79 If we lead the blind and jump after the drowning, it is because of
our love of praise, which we have unconsciously learned to associate with such
actions, or because of the discomfort we experience when we imagine ourselves
(and the focus here is on ourselves) in another’s predicament. Central to this decon-
struction, as the second rephrasing reveals, was a notion that already came into
view earlier as a core aspect of the Ashʿarite scheme, that of ṭabʿ or human nature
taken as a set of appetitive egoistic drives.
In avowing our natural attraction to moral acts like truth-telling and justice in
the Radd, it is the Muʿtazilite conception of human nature that Ibn Taymiyya seems
to be resuming, offering a flat disavowal of al-Ghazālī ’s psychological egoism.
Al-Ghazālī had said: kull insān majbūl ʿalā ḥubb nafsihi. Ibn Taymiyya’s claim regis-
ters as a precise inversion: al-nufūs majbūla ʿalā maḥabbat al-ʿadl wa-ahlihi (“people
are naturally formed to love justice and those party to it”).80 The Muʿtazilites, of
course, had not used the emotive language of love in couching their view; they had
used the cognitivist language of approval and disapproval (istiḥsān, istiqbāḥ) and of
knowledge and ignorance. They had also, crucially, not used the language of util-
ity or benefit. And it is partly these differences that create the space for a question
within Ibn Taymiyya’s account—a question not unlike the one the Ashʿarites had
carved open within the Muʿtazilites’ discussions in a more polemical spirit when
they had asked for a deeper explanatory “why” of the surface moral phenomena. It
may be the spirit of self-doubt we have inherited from Hobbes: we cannot help ask-
ing “Why?” when things seem too good to be true. In this case: “Why love?” “Why
joy?” And resuming our initial parsing: “Why benefit?”
In fact it may not seem all that paradoxical to say that Ibn Taymiyya invites
this question by the very fact that he fails to pose it directly himself. What’s more,
much of what he says seems to paper over the most important distinctions that
would need to be drawn in answering it. For the question “Why benefit?” can be
addressed only by considering more closely the different ways of answering the
question “To whom?” More specifically, are we thinking of the first-person per-
spective of the agent of the relevant acts (justice, beneficence, truth-telling, and
40 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

so on)? Or are we thinking of the third-person perspective of those on the receiv-

ing end of such acts? Ibn Taymiyya’s language appears to slide between the two
perspectives without marking the significance of this transition. He speaks about
“the bearer” of justice—which would seem to refer us to its agent—but he also
speaks of “those other than the bearer.” Overall one’s impression is that it is the
third-person perspective—that of the beneficiary of such acts—that dominates Ibn
Taymiyya’s remarks, as in the reference to “the just man’s justice,” to our love
“for those who do these things,” and to those whom such actions reach (alladhīna
waṣala ilayhim dhālika), which must mean those who are on the receiving end of
these actions.81
Yet whether we take ourselves to be considering the perspective of the agent as
against the recipient would make a tremendous difference to the way we answer
the question “Why?” we have posed. Because from the latter perspective—the
perspective of the one who receives back deposits or has his debts repaid, who
is treated to the generosity or honesty of another—it is obvious that questions
such as “Why joy?” and “Why pleasure?” can be readily answered in straight-
forwardly self-interested, nonmoral terms. Ibn Taymiyya makes this clear in an
important passage whose immediate topic is the different ways of loving God and
that addresses the love that is based on divine beneficence. “People are naturally
formed [majbūla] to love those who act beneficently toward them and to hate those
who act badly toward them”; but in this type of love, “what one only really loves is
oneself.”82 Yet the perspective that has often seemed to require the most pressing
attention is not this one. It is the perspective of the person who must herself decide
whether to return a deposit or undertake a beneficent act. And it is the awareness
of the fact that justice, beneficence, and other ethical actions come at a cost that
has been the enduring source of inspiration for efforts to justify them and defend
their rationality ever since Plato’s Republic, in the backdrop of a fear that ethical
action may turn out, not only not to further one’s interests, but to openly conflict
with them—that happiness and duty (or virtue) may fail to coincide.
It was this sense of the cost of acting rightly, certainly, that Muʿtazilites had sig-
naled when they had foregrounded the notion of hardship (mashaqqa or kulfa) in
their ethical account. The term kulfa is in fact etymologically linked to the notion of
taklīf, the divine imposition of obligations on human beings, in both its rationally
known (ʿaqlī) and revelationally known (samʿī) forms. Obeying the moral Law is
difficult: it involves “doing something that one’s nature [ṭabʿ] is averse to, and
abstaining from something that one covets.” Yet it is precisely the difficulty one
sustains in obeying the Law that is then commuted into reward by way of requital
or correspondence (muqābala).83 Ibn Mattawayh brings the point even closer to
our own context when he openly states: “One suffers harm [ḍarar] by returning
deposits, paying back debts, and undertaking justice [inṣāf] in its different forms,
and one suffers hardship also through [performing] all obligations.”84 This open
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 41

statement indeed offers us a cue for returning to one of the core evaluative notions
that we connected to justice earlier—the notion of ḥaqq—for a crucial clarification.
I called this a “deontological” notion; yet better-versed readers of Muʿtazilite texts
will note the striking fact that the Muʿtazilites elsewhere specify ḥuqūq-claims in
terms of utility. ʿAbd al-Jabbār thus characterizes ḥuqūq as consisting of “either
benefit or the repulsion of harm.” In doing so he echoes the words of other writers
on the topic, such as the Mālikite jurist al-Qarāfī (d. 1285), who states in his Kitāb
al-Furūq: ḥaqq al-ʿabd maṣāliḥuhu—a person’s right/claim is their welfare, benefit,
interests.85 The reasoning behind this equation seems obvious if we are consider-
ing things from the perspective of the owner of the right: the property I rightfully
own, for example, is to me a good I enjoy. Yet when this good faces others, it does
so as a limit to their own enjoyment and as a source of obligation: the property I
own is a good you are obligated to return if you have borrowed it or taken it into
safekeeping.86
In describing our affective response to morally good acts, as I have suggested,
the perspective that Ibn Taymiyya foregrounds is that of their third-person recipi-
ent. Yet the first-person perspective is not absent, and it is this perspective with
regard to which the question “Why?” seems most meaningful and most signifi-
cant (because more costly). So it is worth focusing our question on this perspective
and asking again: “Why pleasure?” Here it will be helpful to take a step back and,
drawing on the history of philosophical and theological ethics, to consider some
of the types of answers that might be possible. Why might I take pleasure in an
act of justice or beneficence I  perform? One answer might be the Aristotelian
one: if I am virtuous, I take pleasure in such acts because they are intrinsically
fine, and I count the external costs of virtuous action differently than most peo-
ple (and may not even experience them as costs). Another is what we may call
broadly Humean:  I  take pleasure in such acts because of the natural sympathy
that connects me to others. A third is the prudential one: I take pleasure not in
these acts themselves but in their consequences, which outweigh their immediate
perceptible costs.
Quickly eliminating one of the contenders from the field, we may simply
observe that the second answer suffered an unlucky defeat in the kalām debates
about value, where the notion of sympathy came to be associated with the egoistic
perspective to which Ashʿarites sought to reduce all ethical responses.87 What is
also worth remarking is that Ibn Taymiyya himself does not appear to have devel-
oped his understanding of fiṭra in a way that would incorporate other-regarding
desires directed to the good of other human beings. We will be returning to this
particular answer in what follows from a different direction. Yet it is the first
answer, or something along its lines, that would involve taking Ibn Taymiyya’s
claims at face value, resealing the space for asking “Why?” of this pleasure and
ruling the pleasure to be irreducible and inaccessible to further explanation. The
42 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

pleasure or benefit we find in moral action is simply the intrinsic pleasure in the
good—discouraging our use of “utility” as a potentially misleading choice of term
and, crucially for our overarching argument, leaving open the possibility that the
(objective) features of actions to which we (subjectively) respond with such delight
may not reduce to their utility.
Yet the key question now is this: Can this view be reconciled with those other
descriptions of human motivation that Ibn Taymiyya offers us elsewhere? We
have heard some of these descriptive statements already: “every living being
strives for what brings it enjoyment and pleasure”; pleasure is the “final end
of voluntary actions” and “desired in itself.” What these statements spell out in
unmistakable terms is a thesis of psychological hedonism. If the space for ask-
ing “Why?” opens up at all within Ibn Taymiyya’s prima facie rehearsal of the
Muʿtazilites’ high-minded depiction of humanity, we can now state more clearly,
this owes in no small part to the depiction of humanity that Ibn Taymiyya himself
offers us in other parts of his work. The claim that human beings are naturally
pleasure-seeking, of course, may still seem to leave many options open. There
can be different kinds of pleasures, some higher and some lower, as Plato had
recognized in the Republic; and we know that Aristotle also made pleasure central
to his understanding of the ethical life. The virtuous person takes pleasure in
acting well. (“Just things are pleasant to the lover of justice,” as he had put it in
the Nicomachean Ethics, “and in general, things in accord with virtue are pleasant
to the lover of virtue.”)88 Yet in developing this notion, Aristotle—whose ethical
viewpoint, in various refractions and amalgamations, was available in the Islamic
milieu and had been reworked by several writers with whom Ibn Taymiyya was
familiar, such as Avicenna (d. 1037) and al-Ghazālī—had been specifically con-
cerned to dismantle the type of hedonism expressed by Ibn Taymiyya. His aim, as
Dorothea Frede notes, had been to “integrate pleasure in his moral philosophy
and to assign an intrinsic value to it without treating it as the ultimate motive of our
actions.” This was the context of Aristotle’s articulation of his distinctive view that
pleasure is a “characteristic of the performance” of actions rather than an end at
which we aim.89
The strongest evidence for the “intrinsic” reading of the pleasure we take in
moral acts, in fact, appears in an extraordinary epistle that Ibn Taymiyya devotes
precisely to the topic of the human attraction to the good, where he proposes to
investigate whether “human beings have a love for what is good and right and
praiseworthy in itself, so that they do it out of the love they have for it … the way
one might love acting beneficently to those in need, love practicing forgiveness
toward delinquents, love learning … and telling the truth [ṣidq], keeping promises
and rendering back trusts,” as well as justice (ʿadl). The first-person perspective
of the agent is here foregrounded with remarkable clarity, and Ibn Taymiyya’s
immediate response to this question registers as a strong claim that this kind of
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 43

motivation in fact characterizes the majority of people (hādhā ḥāl akthar al-nufūs).
The next remark presses this home even more forcefully, rehearsing a claim about
the purity of moral motivation that will remind us of the Muʿtazilites’ character-
istic formulations, but also adding a notable new gesture. “One performs these
actions,” Ibn Taymiyya explains, “not by way of ingratiating oneself with any per-
son nor by way of soliciting anyone’s praise or for fear of incurring their blame,
but rather because living beings enjoy these perceptions and movements and take
pleasure in them [yatanaʿʿamu bihā al-ḥayy wa-yaltadhdhu bihā], and experience
joy [faraḥ] and happiness [surūr] in them, just as they take pleasure in merely
hearing beautiful sounds or seeing joyous things and in merely [smelling] lovely
fragrances.”90
This passage will seem remarkable for many reasons, not only for its unambig-
uous attribution of disinterested action to human beings, but also for comparing
moral pleasure to aesthetic forms of enjoyment—a startling maneuver in a debate
in which the aesthetic-moral comparison, suggested by the term ḥusn itself, had
been used by opponents of Muʿtazilite-style objectivism seeking to call attention to
the subjectivity of moral responses.91 The philosophical associations of this com-
parison will seem equally resonant, in a tradition of reflective inquiry where the
good and the beautiful had often been found entwined. We may be reminded once
again of the particular comparison sparked by Hume when remarking that “there
is no spectacle so fair and beautiful as a noble and generous action” (T 470). The
language of this passage throws out multiple bridges to the language of the pas-
sages of the Radd we surveyed. No less remarkable is the bridge it throws out to
the statements tagged earlier as expressions of psychological hedonism: “Every
living being strives for what brings it enjoyment and pleasure [kull ḥayy innamā
yaʿmalu limā fīhi tanaʿʿumuhu wa-ladhdhatuhu].” That enjoyment, this passage
suggests, can include the intrinsic and irreducible pleasure we take in ethical acts.
Here we have it, the shard-like nature of some of the texts that enter into our
comprehension of Ibn Taymiyya’s thought: a unicum that offers to nuance the
hedonistic view of human motivation expressed elsewhere, contributing a new
interpretive thread that would unravel the pattern assembled by other, seemingly
more numerous threads. All that can be done is to highlight the isolation of this
thread and to emphasize the evidence that resists it. This perspective—whose nat-
ural affiliation with an ethics of virtue Ibn Taymiyya flags directly when he refers
to the “noble character traits” (makārim al-akhlāq) in the same context92—simply
does not seem to be developed elsewhere. Moreover, when the opportunity arises
when he might have integrated the viewpoint of this shard-like epistle more deeply
into his thinking, Ibn Taymiyya passes it by. Writing in his Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba,
he offers us a threefold classification of (mundane) pleasures, dividing them into
bodily pleasures (typically deriving from food, drink, and sex), pleasures of honor
(deriving from the esteem we receive from others), and pleasures of the mind or
44 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

spirit (such as those deriving from the knowledge of God or the knowledge of
truth).93 This scheme is significant in presenting an expressly pluralistic view of
human pleasures, and it will put us in mind of its counterparts in the Greek philo-
sophical tradition and of the Arab philosophers who reworked it. Yet what is more
relevant for the present point is that in setting out this scheme, Ibn Taymiyya
gives us no tools for locating moral pleasure (or aesthetic pleasure, for that matter)
within this scheme and leaves us to fill in the gaps ourselves.
Left to our own devices, I would argue, it is an emphasis on sensory pleasures
that we are likely to pick out within Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical remarks, and a related
emphasis on the agent’s natural self-interest that often directly resumes the
wording of al-Ghazālī. “Human beings are naturally formed to love themselves
[al-insān majbūl ʿalā maḥabbat nafsihi],” we hear.94 Transposed to the question of
morally good actions, this results in a view of our motivation that is framed in the
strong terms of egoistic hedonism. People, Ibn Taymiyya states in another epistle,
“act beneficently toward others in order to obtain a benefit or repel harm.”95 But
in that case we are back where we started. “Why pleasure?” we asked, and put our
ear to the possibility that this could take an Aristotelian type of response, tying our
pleasure to the intrinsic attraction exercised by the moral character of the acts.96
Having put this answer aside, I would suggest that it is the third answer outlined
earlier—the prudential perspective that looks to the consequences of acts—that
Ibn Taymiyya appears to presuppose in his account of the first-person pleasure
taken in fine acts that carry immediate costs. As he puts it later in the Radd with
reference to the reverse case of first-person displeasure in wrongful acts that carry
immediate gains: “Even if we suppose that one takes pleasure [in such things] in
the present, one will experience pain at their evil consequences [qubḥ ʿāqibatihi].”
The point is spelled out more programmatically elsewhere: “One endures what is
painful on account of a greater pleasure or pain that outweighs it,” just as “one
desists from what is pleasurable on account of a greater pleasure or pain that
outweighs it.”97
These consequences include the ones implicit in Ibn Taymiyya’s own discus-
sion in the Radd: the love we provoke in others by acting well and the hatred we
provoke by acting badly. For we experience pleasure and joy in being the objects of
others’ love and praise; it is “agreeable” (mulāʾim, muwāfiq) to us—terms that sig-
nificantly resume Ibn Taymiyya’s earlier schematization of moral value (“the only
kind of good that exists is in the sense of what is agreeable,” we heard above).98
This is one of several beneficial consequences Ibn Taymiyya elsewhere pins to
ethical acts, which include increased intellectual understanding and physical
well-being and a greater propensity to good actions.99 These consequences repre-
sent the worldly or mundane (ʿājil/dunyā) domain; they predictably but crucially
find their complement in the consequences relating to the otherworldly domain
(ʾājil/ākhira). For we might derive an immediate pleasure from ethically bad acts
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 45

such as adultery (zinā) or injustice, yet these then serve as the “cause [sabab] of
torment that exceeds the pleasure of the act itself,” like delicious food that is poi-
soned and leads to illness and death.100 Mutatis mutandis with ethically good acts.
If human beings love those who act well, so does God—for reasons to be consid-
ered in greater detail in ­chapter 4—and He metes out an appropriate reward for
such acts (“Whoso brings a good deed shall have ten the like of it,” Q 6:160). This
is the logic implicit in the Qur’anic dictum “If you do good, it is your own souls
you do good to [in aḥsantum aḥsantum li-anfusikum], and if you do evil it is to them
likewise” (Q 17:7) and unpacked by Ibn Taymiyya in several locations in his own
work.101
Yet I  would argue that there is something more to be exhumed from Ibn
Taymiyya’s discussion of the utility of morally good actions in the passages of
the Radd we are considering—a broader conception of utility that forms a cru-
cial motif in his thinking and that involves a rather more complex specification
of the first-person perspective that we have been pursuing. In order to bring
this into the open, however, we need to connect several dots that Ibn Taymiyya
does not himself pull into the most convenient proximity. For turning back to
the passage from the Radd translated earlier, our attention may be caught by
the striking comparison that concluded it. People feel “love … and a desire
to praise” the just and the beneficent, Ibn Taymiyya had written, “and they are
naturally formed [mafṭūrūn] to love and take pleasure in this … just as they
have been naturally formed to take pleasure in food and drink and to experience
pain upon hunger or thirst.”102 The comparison will seem curious next to the
aesthetic comparison that terminated that other brief epistle that recently came
before us. Here Ibn Taymiyya crafts a comparison calculated to put us in mind
of the agent’s self-interest; there he had struck an analogy calculated to put us in
mind of utter disinterest. Yet the more illuminating textual collocations, in my
view, lie elsewhere.
For in comparing the pleasure of justice with the pleasure of food and drink
here, the “they” with which Ibn Taymiyya frames the second claim (“they have
been naturally formed to take pleasure in food and drink”) will most readily be
heard as inviting the kind of interpretation we have already seen. The “they” is
the first-person singular, the individual agent whose motivation for acting justly
comes up for question given the prima facie gap between the two sets of plea-
sure at stake. Yet that this is not the only way of receiving the present “they” is
intimated by Ibn Taymiyya in a remark of rather different vintage, whose broader
context we may here leave out of view. “The need of Muslims for food and cloth-
ing and the like,” he states in his treatise al-Ḥisba, “belongs to the general interest
[maṣlaḥa ʿāmma].”103 The “they,” this tersely suggests, can be taken at face value as
a first-person plural, and may speak not for the individual agent, but for the com-
munity as a whole. The interest at stake, correlatively, may be the interest of the
46 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

whole. Having opened ourselves to this distinction, we may be better prepared for
the discussion of ethical norms to which Ibn Taymiyya regales us in several other
writings and may find ourselves slightly less astonished at the proposal we hear
there. In this proposal, the social community is presented as the genetic origin, no
less, of ethical norms, and it is the connection of ethical norms with communal
welfare that lies at its heart.
“For all human beings endowed with reason,” Ibn Taymiyya writes in one place
of his collected Fatāwā, “there are things that they must command and things they
must prohibit, for their welfare [maṣlaḥa] cannot be achieved without that, and
they cannot live in the world [fiʾl-dunyā]—indeed, even a single one of them, taken
on his own, cannot live—without doing things that bring them benefit [manfaʿa]
and doing104 things that repel harm from them.”105 The enumeration of ethical
actions that succeeds this remark will be familiar to us: justice, truthfulness,
beneficence, the return of trusts. In the Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, the notion of the
community’s self-command is recalibrated using the significant notions of a “con-
vention” and “contract.” It is through a mutual pledge and contractual agreement
(al-taʿāhud waʾl-taʿāqud) that human beings place themselves under obligations
in order to collaboratively pursue what benefits the community as a whole and
to repel what harms it.106 The focal categories of justice and truthfulness appear
again in this context. So does an affective notion familiar to us from the Radd:
people thereby “agreed and contracted themselves to bring about what they love,
and repel what they find repugnant [ittafaqū wa-taʿāqadū ʿalā ijtilāb al-amr alladhī
yuḥibbūnahu wa-dafʿ al-amr alladhī yakrahūnahu].”107 Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks in
the Radd provide no clue to the fact that the subject of this emotive response could
be anything other than the individual. In ascribing this response to the collective
here, he holds out the key for a different interpretation. The larger interpretive
possibility this opens up is that in speaking of the pleasure and benefit that “we”
derive from ethical norms—apparently deontological acts such as justice, truthful-
ness, or beneficence—Ibn Taymiyya has in mind not so much the benefit of the
individual as the benefit derived by the community from the adherence to such
norms. It is at this level that the question we have been asking—“Why benefit?”—
can best be answered.108
The division between the individual and the community, of course, need not
be drawn too sharply. Many of the best-known philosophical theories that have
proposed to root ethical norms in social contracts, from Hobbes onward, have
grounded them in the self-interest of individuals. Hume once again provokes the
most interesting comparison, having claimed that “there is no passion … capable
of controlling the interested affection, but the very affection itself” (T 492), and
having made this central to his account of justice and injustice. For the conven-
tion instituted to bestow stable possession of external goods, thereby generating
notions of justice, was based on a consideration that our own interests and the
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 47

interests of our friends are better served by such a convention. It is thus “from
the selfishness and the confin’d generosity of men … that justice derives its origin”
(T 495). This original motivation, Hume suggests, shifted as society grew, and it
is now our sympathy with the pain or pleasure that certain actions cause other
people and indeed human society as a whole—“a sympathy with public interest”
(T 499–500)—that underlies our emotional responses to those actions. Hume’s
aesthetic characterization of our response to fine actions, to which Ibn Taymiyya’s
remarks earlier recalled us, is in fact linked with our ability to command this more
disinterested viewpoint.
Unlike Hume, however, Ibn Taymiyya does not offer us the material for con-
structing a clearer story about how the self-interested viewpoint of the individual
and the viewpoint of the community are to be related—leaving it uncertain, for
example, whether the interests of the two should be seen as perfectly coincid-
ing.109 This may well reflect the fact that his thoughts are implicitly focused on the
first-person plural rather than the first-person singular in the discussions we have
seen. And it is perhaps this interpretation of Ibn Taymiyya’s hypnotic if unstated
focus that can best explain an otherwise extraordinary fact that I left out of view in
my discussion of the different ways “happiness” and “virtue” may coincide for the
first person. For Ibn Taymiyya himself, as I mentioned earlier, does not volunteer
the distinction between the different possible perspectives from which the ques-
tion “Why joy (and pleasure and benefit)?” can be asked. This is tied to another
remarkable omission. For having drawn our attention so emphatically to the plea-
sure we derive from morally good actions such as justice in the passages of the
Radd quoted earlier, Ibn Taymiyya falls silent when it comes to counting their
costs. We hear next to nothing about the reasons we have for hating justice apart
from loving it.
These costs, as I  have suggested, were brought to the limelight by the
Muʿtazilites through the limiting notion of ḥaqq, which figured centrally in their
notion of justice and justice. Facing its holder, ḥaqq may register in terms of its util-
ity. When it faces others, it faces them as a limit and a source of obligation. What
is then striking is that in these discussions of ethics, as in many others, both the
notion of haqq and the evaluative concept of obligation (wujūb)—that concept to
which the Muʿtazilites themselves ascribed the “highest rank” among the actions
subsumed in the broader category of “goodness” (ḥusn)—remain conspicuously
absent.110 Even though Ibn Taymiyya, like any good Muslim jurist and theologian,
elsewhere gives ample recognition to both notions, he never integrates them in
his formal remarks about ethical value. To adapt a helpful terminology used by
Henry Sidgwick, he focuses on an evaluative vocabulary that carries “attractive”
rather than “imperative” force. Similarly, even though he gives abundant recogni-
tion elsewhere to the darker elements of our nature that draw us toward evil rather
than good—human beings do evil, we hear elsewhere, either out of ignorance
48 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

or because “they crave for it and take pleasure in it” (yashtahīhi wa-yaltadhdhu
bi-wujūdihi)—this insight is never integrated into his discussion of our nature in
these positioning remarks.111
This raises a question about Ibn Taymiyya’s conception of human nature; it
also raises a question about the character and above all the analytical depth of his
ethical writing which I previewed at the start of this chapter. It may also provoke
a question about the broader context of his discussion in the Radd and a greater
curiosity to situate the excerpted remarks against his specific aims there—a task
I will undertake in the next chapter. Putting such questions aside for the moment,
what matters more for our immediate purposes is to take stock of where the dis-
cussion has brought us relative to the main thread we have been pursuing.

The Ethical Primacy of Welfare

Beginning from a stage-setting exposition of Ibn Taymiyya’s via media, we were
quickly brought up against a surprise: Ibn Taymiyya avowed an objectivist view
of ethical value that was prima facie reminiscent of the view traditionally adopted
by Muʿtazilite thinkers; yet in specifying this he made sole reference to consider-
ations of utility, sidelining the deontological components that had been central to
the Muʿtazilite view. How might we understand this? His programmatic remarks
about the nature of value seemed to support the conclusion that utility forms the
sole ground of value, just as it forms the paradigmatic object of human motiva-
tion. We turned to the Radd for further insight on how the relationship between
utility and deontology could be construed. Analyzing Ibn Taymiyya’s claim about
the pleasure and benefit we derive from seemingly deontological actions such as
justice and truthfulness—and digging beneath yet another surface resemblance
with a characteristically Muʿtazilite view of moral motivation—we explored a
number of ways in which the utility of such acts might be understood. One of the
most significant, I suggested, is the one that recognizes the welfare of the commu-
nity as the ontological ground, no less, of the value of these acts. With this in sight,
we can finally join our ends to our beginnings. For it is precisely this notion of
communal interest, we may now observe, that was marked out in the stage-setting
exposition of Ibn Taymiyya’s via media, when he had isolated the first (“objective”)
type of value as “the case in which an act contains benefit or harm … the way it is
known that justice serves the good of the world [maṣlaḥat al-ʿālam] and injustice
tends to its harm.”112
Our answer to the positive question from which we began—How does Ibn
Taymiyya understand the real form or nature of ethical value?—is relatively plain.
There is little in the discussions we have seen that suggests that Ibn Taymiyya
recognized the existence of intrinsic deontological features. The claim that human
beings are intrinsically attracted to deontological acts such as justice, which was
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 49

one of the interpretations of the Radd we considered and which might have sup-
ported the view that such features are defined independently of utility, seems to
give way upon closer consideration. Ibn Taymiyya nowhere deploys the Muʿtazilite
notion of wujūh, has nothing to say about ḥuqūq in his main ethical remarks,
and maintains a stony silence with regard to the notion of desert, although its
vocabulary makes unglossed appearances.113 What of his talk of the rightness and
wrongness of things “in themselves” ( fī nafs al-amr) in our stage-setting exposi-
tion? Objectivist markers are profusely in evidence in this text—recall, for that
matter, the vocabulary of “attributes” or ṣifāt that also appears in the same exposi-
tion. Yet the Muʿtazilites, drawing a distinction between those values that depend
on the intrinsic features of actions and those that depend on their consequences,
had reserved this objectivist vocabulary notably for the former class. Here and
elsewhere, by contrast, Ibn Taymiyya deploys the vocabulary of ṣifāt to speak of
consequences or utility.114
These objectivist markers may here be relevantly said to raise a question that
remained in the margins in the above discussion, which focused on the human
relationship to morally good actions and the description under which human
beings desire them. Our stage-setting exposition of Ibn Taymiyya’s via media, by
contrast, had far more to say about God’s relation to such acts and was organized
by an insistence that God’s command is not merely arbitrary but is grounded in
the features of acts in themselves. The natural question to pose at this juncture
would thus be the counterpart of the one we have asked at the human level, asking
under what description certain classes of actions become the object of God’s com-
mand and indeed—as the conclusion of that passage suggested:  the Ashʿarites
denied that “God loves what is right and hates what is wrong”—of God’s love.
The order of our narrative is best served by deferring the discussion of this point
until c­ hapter 4, where the theological dimensions of Ibn Taymiyya’s position will
be explored more directly. All I would do is preview its conclusions, namely that
there too—and despite, once again, certain tensions—it is the contribution that
particular classes of actions make to human welfare that forms the most relevant
description under which God’s love and command attaches to them.
This conclusion leaves much to be unpacked; yet it is already embodied in a
view that Ibn Taymiyya takes about the nature of the divine Law that it is important
to foreground at this juncture as further evidence for the primacy of welfare in his
thought. As Ibn Taymiyya puts it in an epitomic statement, God sent prophets to
people in order to “communicate to them what benefits them and harms them
[mā yanfaʿuhum wa-yaḍurruhum], and to perfect their good [mā yuṣliḥuhum] in
the present world and the next.” And again: “The Law came to realize and perfect
[human] interests [maṣāliḥ].”115
However unambiguously such statements fall, the evidence they offer may once
again not appear to be beyond contest. For it might be observed that the notion
50 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

of welfare that takes the stage so prominently in such statements elsewhere finds
its complement in a different set of statements, in which it is justice (ʿadl) that is
rather made the central term among the aims of the divine Law. “All that [God]
commanded,” we hear, “reduces to justice.” The borders between the two types of
statements often seem to be open, resulting in an easy slippage reminiscent of the
one we witnessed in our stage-setting exposition. “The Law distinguishes between
the acts that benefit [people] and the acts that harm them, and this is the justice
of God in His creation.”116 This equivocation is also reflected in Ibn Taymiyya’s
discussion of specific legal prescriptions, such as the Law’s prohibition of usury
or gambling, which he refers to the demands of justice in some locations and to
the demands of utility in others.117 The question imposes itself again: Which of the
two types of demand should be considered more basic?
It might be useful in answering this question to say something more about
the more complex range of meanings that the notion of justice bears within Ibn
Taymiyya’s thought. Following well-established precedents, one of the ways he
occasionally specifies justice and injustice is by reference to the notion of rights
or claims: injustice is thus “wrongfully taking what rightfully belongs to another
[akhdh ḥaqq al-ghayr bi-ghayr ḥaqq].”118 Elsewhere this specification is joined by
another, which ties justice more directly to the notion of parity or equality—an
understanding that will not seem entirely unfamiliar to us. Justice, in these terms,
means observing the principle of parity and treating like things alike. This is a
principle, as we will later see, that Ibn Taymiyya deploys not merely as a concept
of morality but equally so of rationality, connecting it to the notion of legal analogy
(qiyās) and giving it a central place in his claims regarding the rationality of God
and of His Law.119
This double significance is worth keeping in mind in considering the relation-
ship of priority that holds between justice and welfare. The nature of this relation-
ship then appears to be signaled clearly in a series of statements that directly bridge
the two types of statements (justice-parsed and welfare-parsed) recorded above.
Justice in human transactions, Ibn Taymiyya remarks in al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, is
the mainstay of human life, and “both the present world and the next depend on
it in order to come to good [lā taṣluḥu al-dunyā waʾl-ākhira illā bihi].”120 Discussing
commutative transactions (muʿāwaḍāt) elsewhere—transactions that notably
include buying and selling, renting and leasing, and in which the principle of just
exchange plays a governing role—Ibn Taymiyya states: such transactions constitute
“a worldly and religious necessity, for human beings cannot achieve their welfare
in isolation, and need the help of their conspecifics… . Their welfare can only be
achieved through commutative transactions, and it is the justice for the sake of which
God sent down His books and dispatched His messengers that puts these in good working
order [ṣalāḥuhā biʾl-ʿadl].”121 The causal bi in both statements leaves no doubt that
ʿadl and ṣalāḥ/maṣlaḥa are here placed in a relationship of means to end.
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 51

In many respects, these statements merely rehearse a view of the relationship

between deontological norms and welfare that we have already seen. Indeed, they
find a direct echo in the Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba in the same vicinity in which Ibn
Taymiyya articulates the social-contract model that grounds these norms in com-
munal welfare more specifically.122 Yet if we wished to anchor this view in a deeper
context, and one closer to the heart of the Islamic religious sciences as against the
philosophical tradition from which the notion of the social contract appears to
derive, we would do well to look toward the fascinating discussion that Ibn Taymiyya
offers us in one of his Qur’anic commentaries regarding a principle that belongs not
to civil but to criminal justice, namely the principle of retaliation (qiṣāṣ).
Taking its religious foundation from a key verse in al-Baqara—“O believers,
prescribed for you is retaliation, touching the slain; freeman for freeman, slave
for slave, female for female” (2:178)—this is a principle that presents itself as a
demand of justice in two separate ways. It is a form of punishment administered
for bodily injury or homicide. It thus responds to offenses that represent breaches
of what the Muʿtazilites would not have been alone in calling considerations of
“justice,” and more specifically of persons’ rights (ḥuqūq). An act of unjustified
harm breaches my right to physical integrity and, in the limit case, my right to life.
In breaching an order of rights, the offense creates a new one. This act of punish-
ment in fact belongs to the victim or their surviving family unit as their peculiar
right or claim (ḥaqq). The act of punishment thus becomes constitutive of justice.
Yet the notion of ḥuqūq foregrounded here finds its complement in the crucial role
played by the notion of parity, as immediately evident in the verse itself, which
demands that retaliation be practiced with due regard for the characteristics of
the victims and offenders. The term “retaliation” (qiṣāṣ), Ibn Taymiyya explains,
denotes parity and equality (al-muʿādala waʾl-musāwā) and it indicates that God
prescribed justice and fairness (ʿadl, inṣāf) with regard to those killed.123
Yet this prima facie deontological norm, as Ibn Taymiyya approaches it, turns
out to be embedded within a framework dominated by powerful teleological ele-
ments. For human beings, he states in opening his own interpretation of the
verse, the practice of retaliation belongs to those things they “know they cannot
live without,” and their need for it is comparable to “their need for food and drink
and shelter.”124 This teleological comparison will strike a strong chord, remind-
ing us of a similar comparison we saw in the Radd only recently. The teleological
good to which the practice of retaliation is more narrowly tied, however, is even
more basic than food and drink, and it is indicated in the Qur’anic verse itself
when it offers the explanatory-sounding continuation, “In retaliation there is life
for you [wa-lakum fiʾl-qiṣāṣ ḥayā]” (2:179). The explanation may seem paradoxical,
for retaliation immediately results in the taking of life, not in its preservation. Yet
the verse can be naturally taken as referring to the life of both the perpetrator and
his victim protected through the deterring effect of this punitive norm.
52 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

Such explanations in fact formed the linchpin of an understanding of the

divine Law that had entrenched itself firmly within Islamic legal theory by Ibn
Taymiyya’s time, one that gave a prominent place to the aims that organized the
Law (maqāṣid al-sharīʿa) in accounting for its workings. Studied carefully, many
of the prescriptions of the Shari’a could be seen to be anchored in a set of rela-
tively consistent aims—a set of consistent goods or human interests. The Law’s
prohibition of consuming intoxicants, for example, and its related imposition of
punishment for doing so can be linked to its concern to preserve human reason;
its prohibition of adultery and its imposition of punishment for adultery to its
concern to preserve the integrity of family lines. Something similar could be said
about the prohibition of theft and the Law’s concern with the protection of prop-
erty, and—closing in on the case we just met—the prohibition of unlawful killing
and the prescription of retaliation as punishment for it and the Law’s concern to
preserve human life. There will be more to say about this conception of the Law
in ­chapters  4 and 5.  Yet here it is crucial to recognize that it is this theoretical
understanding that shadows Ibn Taymiyya’s own view of the centrality of welfare
in the law;125 and it is then no less crucial to notice what this theoretical under-
standing imports. For one of its distinctive features is the programmatic reading
of deontological norms that could be parsed in terms of ḥuqūq and identified as
forms of justice—the prohibition of killing and the promulgation of punishment
for its violation, the prohibition of theft and adultery and their respective punish-
ments, and so on—as means for attaining particular goods: the protection of life,
property, or family lines.
It is the presuppositions of this theoretical understanding, and more specifi-
cally the programmatic translation of deontological notions into instrumental
terms, that appear to be reflected in Ibn Taymiyya’s thinking and to govern the way
he conceptualizes the relationship between justice and welfare. Taken as the gen-
eral claim that the Law aims at the human good, this was a conception of the Law
that Muʿtazilite theologians themselves had not only subscribed to, but indeed for
which they had served as prime architects—though the theory of maqāṣid would
achieve its archetypal formulations among Sunni jurists only after the lifetime of
the theologians we have been considering. These theologians had likewise recog-
nized, as already mentioned, the teleological significance of deontological notions
such as ḥaqq-claims. Yet as we have seen, the Muʿtazilites had made efforts to
safeguard the distinction, however fragile, between the deontological and the con-
sequentialist components of their ethical theory. Ibn Taymiyya, by contrast, seems
to enshrine the notion of utility as the basic term of his ethical thinking in a way
that wholeheartedly succumbs to the logic of the legal discourse of maqāṣid.
In trying to balance Ibn Taymiyya’s emphasis on considerations of welfare and
his countervailing emphasis on considerations of justice, I have been suggesting,
we have strong reasons to take the former as basic, reinforcing the conclusions of
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 53

our earlier discussion and the positive response we give to the question regarding
Ibn Taymiyya’s understanding of the nature of ethical value. The answer to our
positive question is interesting in its own right, but it also has far-reaching reper-
cussions for the way we respond to our other question, regarding the story this
tells about Ibn Taymiyya’s relationship to the theological topography in which he
is operating and to the traditional layout of the debate about “the determination
of good and bad.”
For what this shows is that Ibn Taymiyya’s understanding of the nature of value
departs from the Muʿtazilites’ in some of its most fundamental features. What
will then seem perplexing is that Ibn Taymiyya does not signal this himself. The
only one of these departures that he comes close to signaling in his enumeration
of his differences from the Muʿtazilites is his disavowal of desert. This disavowal
may be said to be implicit in his insistence that God will punish only after He has
sent prophetic revelation, and is made rather more explicit elsewhere, as we will
see in c­ hapter  4. These unlabeled departures—particularly his unlabeled exclu-
sion of deontology—may make us wonder about his familiarity with Muʿtazilite
works and about the identity of the Muʿtazilite thinkers that he thought himself
as engaging in conversation. His stylized and spare exposition of the debate—a
sparseness well poised, after all, to serve the rhetorical imperatives of a via media
carved between two stark extremes—often seems too elliptical to supply evidence
that would help with such questions. Abuʾl-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī (d. 1044) is one of the
few later Muʿtazilites whom Ibn Taymiyya quotes directly, though not in his ethical
discussions. And while Ibn Taymiyya waged important polemical confrontations
with Shi’ite theologians (such as al-Ḥillī in his Minhāj al-sunna) whose Muʿtazilite
sympathies ought to have given him numerous opportunities for direct engage-
ment with Muʿtazilite ethical ideas, his distance from the detail of these ideas
may tempt us to extend Kevin Reinhart’s observation that the Muʿtazilism cri-
tiqued by opponents “is often a straw man” to suggest that the same may hold
true even of its partial and prima facie admirers.126 Yet Ibn Taymiyya’s neglect of
the theory of wujūh and the deontological-consequentialist distinction may still
surprise us given the relative clarity with which they had been brought up by sev-
eral of the Muʿtazilites’ opponents, including those, such as al-Rāzī, whose works
Ibn Taymiyya had read with close attention.127 It may thus make us wonder, more
critically, whether this neglect should be described as a matter of deliberate choice
or unintended oversight.
This somewhat invidious question is one to which I  will be returning in
­chapter 3, as I believe it carries nonnegligible narrative consequences. Yet here it is
more relevant to pull into view the beginnings of an alternative telling of the com-
plex story of Ibn Taymiyya’s relationship to the classical debates about ethics. The
denouement to which we drove Ibn Taymiyya’s conception of moral motivation
in the previous section has already suggested one area where his views, initially
54 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

calling attention to their Muʿtazilite affinities, turn out to resemble views charac-
teristic of the Ashʿarites. Yet the more critical resemblance that has not yet stepped
into the light concerns our central question regarding the nature of value itself.
For the Ashʿarites had rejected the notion of inherent deontological grounds; they
had rejected the view (we may recall al-Anṣārī ’s words) that a thing is “good on
account of itself [li-nafsihi] or its class or an intrinsic attribute that is inseparably
attached to it [ṣifa nafsiyya lāzima lahu].” Discounting objective features, they had
focused on relative ones: the relationship to God’s command; the relationship to
contingent human purposes (mā yuwāfiqu al-gharaḍ).
The latter had presented itself as a naturalistic account of the way people use
evaluative vocabulary, an account whose relativistic implications connect it to the
similar-sounding formulation that Hobbes would offer when writing that “what-
soever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire; that is it, which he for his
part calleth good.”128 Yet later Ashʿarite writers would slough off these relativis-
tic and linguistic trappings and give this proposal a more positive—or, let us say
with Ayman Shihadeh, normative—expression, and no one more limpidly than
al-Rāzī, who would state in his late work al-Maṭālib al-ʿāliya: “Everything that leads
to preponderant benefit [manfaʿa] is good [ḥasan] and there is no other meaning
to its being good than that fact, and everything that leads to preponderant harm
[maḍarra] is bad [qabīḥ] and there is no other meaning to its being bad than that.”
Thus, there is “no meaning to good or bad than the fact of conducing to what
serves and impairs one’s welfare [al-maṣāliḥ waʾl-mafāsid].”129
Fresh from Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion of value, these words can only give us a
start of anagnorisis. It is far from the sole start of recognition one experiences in
holding up Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical views against those that find voice in Ashʿarite
writings. Similar responses could be provoked by leaning more closely over his
notion of a social contract or the notion of communal welfare to which this is
linked. To the more complex story of Ibn Taymiyya’s relation to Ashʿarism that
such threads promise, I will be returning in ­chapter 3.

Our discussion took its starting point from an exposition of Ibn Taymiyya’s
stance on the topic of the “determination of good and bad” that promised to illumi-
nate the nature of his via media. Our initial impression of this via media was that
it conceded so much to the type of rationalism and objectivism we associate with
Muʿtazilite theology that it was tempting to call this a revised Muʿtazilism and
close the subject. Yet a closer scrutiny of the evidence brought surprises, revealing
that the objectivism Ibn Taymiyya adopts is in fact framed, seemingly exclusively,
in terms of utility or benefit. These are terms that had formed only one moiety
of the ethical theory developed by Muʿtazilite thinkers, in which deontological
notions had occupied a prominent place. The consequences of this move have cru-
cial repercussions not only for the way we understand the shape of Ibn Taymiyya’s
 Ethical Value: Deontology and Consequentialism 55

ethical thought but also for the way we write his relationship to his theological
surroundings. Similarly, the fact that the nature of this move, and the distance
it places between Ibn Taymiyya and the Muʿtazilites despite first impressions,
should be an insight acquirable only by close scrutiny—by raising questions that
Ibn Taymiyya does not himself pose, by working through conflicts and tensions
that he does not call attention to, by the assiduous pursuit of interpretive infer-
ences and textual juxtapositions—has much to tell us about the character of Ibn
Taymiyya’s thought and writing. This assiduous interpretive work may not always
be able to find the threads it needs or seamlessly weave into the overall pattern
every thread it finds, but it is rewarded by the discovery of sufficiently convincing
patterns to make the case for its relevance.
We have taken one walk around Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical understanding, but
we are far from having yet surveyed it in full, just as we are far from hav-
ing unraveled the entire range of messages present in the stage-setting expo-
sition of his via media. To follow his via media further, we now need to splice
back together two elements of the subject that were forcibly kept apart in the
above discussion, finally reuniting questions of ontology to the questions of
epistemology that formed their natural concomitant in classical discussions.
A via media that acknowledges the objectivity of value—yet also a via media that
acknowledges their accessibility to human reason. Human reason or, in that
new idiom that has already come into view, human nature. Let us turn to Ibn
Taymiyya’s ethical epistemology.
 2

Ethical Knowledge between Human

Self-guidance and the Revealed Law

It is a claim that Ibn Taymiyya would repeat across his works with vary-
ing degrees of emphasis and depth. Opening his discussion in al-Radd
ʿalaʾl-manṭiqiyyīn he would write: when people say “acts of justice are good and
fine and their agents deserve praise and honor, and acts of injustice are evil
and blameworthy and their agents deserve blame and dishonor,” these judg-
ments belong to “the greatest certainties known by human reason [min aʿẓam
al-yaqīniyyāt al-maʿlūma biʾl-ʿaql].”1 The claim is enunciated so clearly that there
is no mistaking it: the knowledge of what is right and wrong is accessible to us
by reason. Couched in the language of reason, elsewhere this claim is couched
in the language of human nature or fiṭra.
My aim in this chapter will be to probe these claims more closely. Just what
do people know about right and wrong through reason? How do the two ways of
framing these claims—in terms of reason and in terms of nature—stand to be
related? In doing so, my discussion will be guided by the same double aim that
organized the previous chapter: to offer an insight into Ibn Taymiyya’s positive
view and an insight into how this view situates Ibn Taymiyya within his intel-
lectual topography. As we will see in this chapter, on rather different terms than
the last, these two insights cannot be so easily disengaged. What Ibn Taymiyya
thinks is often made available to us only through what he says about what others
think, frequently in a polemical context. Beginning with his thinking-in-bello in
the Radd, I will plot the contours of the polemical exchange that provides the occa-
sion for his ethical remarks and consider what we can take away about his positive
understanding of ethical epistemology. I will then consider the notion of nature
that comes together in this and other writings in order to address its status as a
normative principle and epistemological source, before turning to the notion of
reason—that more familiar focal term of classical Islamic debates about ethics—
to assess the strength of the ethical appeal that Ibn Taymiyya makes to it.
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 57

For philosophical readers, the appearance of the notion of “nature” at this junc-
ture—indeed a notion conjoined to that of reason—may provoke a sense of instant
recognition. The notion of nature, as we know, has waged a long and fruitful part-
nership with ethical reflection in the Western intellectual tradition. The roots of
this partnership can be found in ancient ethics and have sometimes been said to
be already evident in Aristotle’s appeal to the natural function of human beings
when specifying the human good in the Nicomachean Ethics and tying this func-
tion to virtuous activity.2 The ethical appeal to nature appears forcefully among
Hellenistic writers, notably the Stoics, who develop it as the claim that living vir-
tuously (and happily) is living according to nature. It is the Stoics who have been
taken as the intellectual godfathers of what forms the best known ethical deploy-
ment of the concept of nature, linked, however, not to the perfectionist notion of
virtue but to the more deontological notion of law—the tradition of natural law.
The Roman writer Cicero offers a famous characterization of natural law when in
the Republic he defines it as “right reason corresponding to nature, diffused in all …
which commanding, calls to duty, and forbidding, deters from wrongdoing.”3
Taken over by Christian writers, this ethical appeal to nature was brought into
dialogue with scriptural bases of the faith that included the well-known passage
from Paul’s epistle to the Romans: “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law,
by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law
to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts” (Romans
2.14–15). Having led a vibrant life among the medieval scholastics, the notion of
natural law achieved one of its most celebrated forms in the works of early mod-
ern writers such as Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf. The connection
between nature and reason evidenced in Cicero’s statement constitutes a hallmark
of this long tradition, tying the notion of natural law—as one writer epitomically
puts it—to the idea of “a universal morality, accessible to all rational persons what-
ever their particular metaphysical or religious commitments.”4 In our day, ethical
naturalism has continued to be revived in different forms among theorists who
focus on natural law as well as among theorists preoccupied with virtue, and it has
acquired new meanings outside these contexts that nevertheless continue to press
the claim of its ethical relevance.5
Readers who think to align Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical appeal to nature with the
tradition just evoked may find much to surprise them. Yet this swift encapsulation
of the ethical appeal to nature should after all not mislead us with false pretences
of unity. The historical articulations of this appeal have been multifarious, and
core notions, including the notion of nature itself, have not survived unchanged.
Instructively calling up this history to read Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical appeal against
it will partly be a matter of choosing the episodes of this history on which to
focus, keeping in mind that the documentation of difference can sometimes be
more instructive than that of similarity. Before such broader comparisons can be
58 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

possible, however, we need to lean closer to consider Ibn Taymiyya’s view on its
own terms and against its sources—and this includes its formative argumentative
contexts.

Imagining Moral Judgments Away:

A Philosophical Thought Experiment
The story of the ethical argument of the Radd can be told at least twice. Told from
one perspective, it is the story of Ibn Taymiyya’s engagement with the falāsifa and
his fierce contestation of their epistemological claims. The broader aim of this
work is to respond to and defeat the glorified view of philosophical logic as a tool
for the attainment of true knowledge. Logic, Ibn Taymiyya will argue, is more
a hindrance than a help, and human understanding can proceed no less, if not
more, successfully without the benefit of its technical tools, such as those privi-
leged stocks-in-trade, the definition and the syllogism. In the backdrop lies the
larger story of what Michot has termed the “Avicennan pandemic,” which swept
through Islamic intellectual culture from the twelfth century onward, and of the
confident march of logic on strongholds of the religious sciences such as theology
and law.6 Told from another perspective, the ethical argument of the Radd is the
story of Ibn Taymiyya’s engagement with Ashʿarite theologians, who had been
among the most enthusiastic victims of this intellectual pandemic. The polemi-
cal encounter over ethics in the Radd thus takes shape as an encounter with the
master practitioner of Islamic philosophy, Avicenna, and with the luminary of late
Ashʿarism, al-Rāzī, in his capacity as a commentator on Avicenna’s work. And it
is a specific view of ethical propositions expressed by Avicenna and appropriated
with little change by al-Rāzī that Ibn Taymiyya takes as his immediate target and
as the foil for articulating his own position.
What had been that view? It was a claim that had appeared in several places of
Avicenna’s logical writings, in those sections where the class of “widely accepted
propositions” had come up for discussion. Having identified the demonstrative
syllogism (qiyās burhānī) as the type of syllogism uniquely capable of producing
the highest degree of certainty (yaqīn), Avicenna had proposed to isolate the types
of propositions that partook of the quality of certainty (yaqīniyyāt) and could be
used as premises for such syllogisms. In this privileged list, he had included pri-
mary propositions (awwaliyyāt), sensory propositions (maḥsūsāt), experiential or
empirical propositions (mujarrabāt), intuited propositions (ḥadsiyyāt), proposi-
tions transmitted by universal report (mutawātirāt), and propositions that contain
their syllogisms (qaḍāyā qiyāsatuhā maʿahā).7 Among the propositions pointedly
excluded from this privileged category was the class of “widely accepted” proposi-
tions (mashhūrāt or dhaʾiʿāt) or “praiseworthy opinions” (ārāʾ maḥmūda), as he
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 59

also termed them, which comprise familiar moral judgments such as that “justice
is good” and “causing pain is bad.” Such propositions “have no basis other than
the fact of their wide dissemination” (la ʿumdata lahā illā al-shuhra) and are usable
only for dialectical arguments.8
As an opening to one of the most interesting ethical discussions in Islamic
intellectual history, this dry classificational claim may seem rather uncompelling,
and it may not rouse us to an immediate response or capture our imagination. The
next move to which Avicenna had coupled it, on the other hand, is not only calcu-
lated to provoke our imagination but is comprehensible only as a calculated appeal
to it. For the claim that people do not know ethical propositions with certainty had
to be maintained in the teeth of the fact that people often think they do. It was then
a radical appeal to the imagination that Avicenna would offer his readers to help
them mark the distinction between what they think they know and what they really
do know. These propositions, he tells us in al-Ishārāt waʾl-tanbīhāt, are such that

were a human being to be left with his bare intellect [ʿaql mujarrad], esti-
mative power [wahm], and sense perception [ḥiss], were he not educated
to accept and acknowledge their judgments, were induction [istiqrāʾ] not
to incline his strong opinion to make a judgment due to the multiplic-
ity of particular cases, and were one not provoked to them by the mercy,
abashment, pride, zeal, and other [sentiments] that are found in human
nature [ṭabīʿa], then his intellect, his estimative power, or his senses would
not compel him to assert them [lam yaqḍi bihā al-insān tāʿatan li-ʿaqlihi
aw-wahmihi aw-ḥissihi]. Examples are our judgment that it is wrong [qabīḥ]
to despoil people of their property and that it is wrong to lie … [or] that it is
wrong to slaughter animals, which flows from the instinctual response of
sympathy… . Nothing of this is required by the pure intellect [ʿaql sādhij].
If a human being were to imagine himself [law tawahhama] as created at
once with a complete intellect, having received no education and not being
under the power of psychological and moral sentiments [lam yuṭiʿinfiʿālan
nafsāniyyan aw-khuluqiyyan], he would not assert any such propositions. It
is not the same with his judgment that the whole is greater than the part.9

The basic thrust of this remarkable passage can be summed up in a few words: Take
human nature as you know it, peel away certain key features, and you will find that
you can no longer make moral judgments as you used to. Your moral conscious-
ness will suffer collapse. What are the features whose removal can have such a
dramatic effect? Avicenna speaks of the education we receive, the inductive rea-
soning we practice, and the sentiments that move us.
This list may strike us as an odd one, in need of a commentary to help us
see how its elements mesh. Elsewhere, Avicenna provides us with a partial but
60 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

important interpretive key. For this passage, crucially, does not make clear that
what you discover once you scratch the palimpsest clean and arrive at the deepest
layer is something you can call your “nature.” The term “nature,” it will be noticed,
does not appear in this passage, yet it does so in another passage of Avicenna’s
Najā in the context of his discussion of estimative propositions (wahmiyyāt).
There, the notion of nature is brought up to be defined precisely in the terms of
the imaginative vantage point conjured in the Ishārāt: “The meaning of nature
[fiṭra] is for one to imagine oneself having come into the world in a single stroke as
an adult possessed of reason [bāligh ʿāqil], yet having heard no opinions, espoused
no doctrines, associated with no nation and come to know no government, but
having observed perceptible things and derived images from them. One then pres-
ents something to one’s mind and tries to doubt it, and if one succeeds in doubt-
ing it, one’s nature does not testify to it. If it impossible for one to doubt it, it is
necessitated [tūjibuhu] by nature.”10
The character of this moment as an active appeal to the imagination—as an
active thought experiment, to put it more recognizably for modern readers—that
can serve as a practical tool for testing different types of judgments stands out
far more clearly in this passage. And so will the lineaments of the insight at
which it aims. For with the term “nature” now before us, one of the most potent
yet also most familiar ways this thought experiment invites to be construed is in
terms of a contrast between nature and what, using several varying terms across
different texts (ʿāda, iṣṭilāḥ, muwāḍaʿāt ittifāqiyya), Avicenna suggests we think
of as “convention.”11 Seasoned readers of Avicenna’s work will notice a similarity
between this thought experiment and others performed to even greater effect
elsewhere in his work, such as the “flying man argument,” designed to press
an insight about the immateriality of the soul.12 This particular thought experi-
ment seems different in several respects, not least in the negativity of the insight
at which it aims, serving not as an instrument for producing certainty but for
engineering doubt.
The central contrast, and its creative doubt, will remind us of a perspective on
morality that has carved long tracks in our intellectual history. We may think of
that distinctive antithesis between nomos and physis that traversed ancient Greek
thought, and whose relativistic implications when applied to morality were clearly
drawn by the sophists. Closer to our own times, we may think of the skepticism
different thinkers have expressed about the moral intuitions to which philoso-
phers and laymen often appeal, querying their trustworthiness by reading them
back to problematic and highly contingent origins—to “discarded religious sys-
tems,” “warped views of sex and bodily functions,” “customs necessary for the sur-
vival of the group in social and economic circumstances that now lie in the distant
past.”13 Beliefs that seem to us intellectually basic may not always wear their real
foundations on their sleeve.
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 61

The contrast between nature and convention may thus offer us the most intui-
tive way of reading the terms of Avicenna’s thought experiment. In this capac-
ity, we may recognize in it an imaginary that would later receive its most vivid
dramatization in Ibn Ṭufayl’s (d. 1185) philosophical novel Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, in
which Avicenna’s thought experiment would be converted into the tale of a lone
human being growing up in isolation and developing an understanding of the
world deriving solely from the data of his unspoiled nature.14 Yet it will be clear
that Avicenna’s terms are not exhausted by this simple contrast. Moving too rap-
idly toward this intuitive reading, in fact, is liable to blind us to this experiment’s
peculiar features and to those of its features that are likely to provoke puzzlement
rather than recognition. So what—to consider more closely—is the epistemic van-
tage point that this thought experiment isolates?
It is constructed, at the simplest level, by an act of exclusion and an act of
inclusion. Included in the vantage point, the Ishārāt passage suggests, are three
main features: estimation (wahm), sense perception (ḥiss), and reason or the intel-
lect (ʿaql). Excluded are the features already mentioned: reactions that have been
acquired through social education; emotional responses such as sympathy, zeal,
and shame; and inductive judgments. To this list, the version of the thought exper-
iment found in the logical section of Avicenna’s Shifāʾ adds another: utility or
welfare (maṣlaḥa), which al-Rāzī, reprising the experiment, parses using the more
cognitive-sounding “judgments of utility” (qaḍāyā maṣlaḥiyya).15 And considered
this closely, Avicenna’s terms may now seem perplexing. To ask one obvious ques-
tion: there appear to be no fewer than two notions of nature at work here—one,
indicated by the term ṭabīʿa, connected to features that we are asked to exclude
(psychological and moral sentiments); another, indicated by the term fiṭra, con-
nected to the vantage point we isolate by this exclusion. Why does Avicenna invite
us to detach ourselves from nature in one sense and not in another?
The answer to this particular question is not too hard to piece together, and
Avicenna offers us the resources for doing so in a seminal passage in the psycho-
logical section of his Shifāʾ that provides a crucial interpretive foil against which
to read his remarks about ethical judgments. What we find fleshed out there is
precisely the social genealogy of these judgments gnomically alluded to in his
logical remarks. Human beings, we hear, need association (mushāraka) in order
not merely to survive but indeed to flourish. One of the special features of human
association is that “utility [maṣlaḥa] demands that among the acts [human beings]
would ordinarily perform, there should be certain acts they must not perform.
They come to learn this while young and they are brought up on it, and from
the time of childhood they grow accustomed [taʿawwada] to hearing that they
must not perform those acts, so that this belief comes to be ingrained in them
like an instinctive response [kaʾl-gharīzī].”16 These acts are called “bad” (qabīḥ),
while the acts one should perform are called “good” or “fine” (jamīla). It is this
62 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

conception of the social genealogy of ethical judgments that shadows Avicenna’s

reference, only moments later, to the peculiarly human emotion (infiʿāl nafsānī) of
shame (khajal). Shame is a response that results from “a person’s awareness that
another is aware that he has done one of the things that it has been commonly
agreed [ujmiʿa ʿalā] one should not do.”17 The evaluative standards built into our
reflective self-assessment, this suggests, depend on socially acquired and—no less
relevantly, as the reference to “common agreement” tersely indicates—socially
produced beliefs about right and wrong. It is the educability of our emotions and
their permeability to social influence that makes it necessary to exclude them from
a thought experiment whose aim is to isolate a vantage point that is epistemically
prior to social influence.
Acquired custom, as Avicenna’s contemporary, the philosopher Miskawayh (d.
1030), would suggest more clearly, cuts in two ways, educating us into new emo-
tional responses and rewiring the emotional responses and value judgments to
which we are already disposed on a more instinctive, nonrational level. Thus, the
instinctive sense of sympathy that derives from our animal nature (ḥayawāniyya)
may lead us to judge the slaughter of animals abhorrent; this is a value judgment
that is also mentioned by Avicenna and that often served as a flashpoint in debates
about the relation between reason and revelation in light of the Law’s prescrip-
tion of the slaughter of animals. Yet why is it that butchers or veterans of war
experience no such abhorrence? It is due to a difference in custom or habituation
(ʿāda), for with repeated exposure, “the sense of revulsion falls away, and the act
of slaughtering and butchering comes to seem no different … than that of sharp-
ening a pencil or carving wood.” The notion of custom is here deployed more
widely to refer to formative processes that may introduce variations in the ethical
responses of members of even a single social community. Yet it calls attention to
the environmental modifiability of our responses that also seems critical for the
way we receive Avicenna’s discussion.18
In clarifying Avicenna’s exclusion of sentiments from this vantage point,
importantly, the above passage from the Shifāʾ also obliquely sheds light on
another exclusion, that of utility or welfare. For to the extent that utility is inter-
preted through the notion of association (mushāraka) and refers us to the social
community, which propagates those principles that are serviceable for communal
life, the reason for its exclusion would seem to lie, once again, in the fact that it is
posterior to the vantage point of the individual inquirer who, as the Najā put it, has
“heard no opinions, espoused no doctrines, associated with no nation, and come
to know no government.”19 Avicenna’s emphasis on the inescapable necessity of
association, at the same time, calls attention to a point that we may otherwise over-
look. For in saying that ethical propositions are “merely” conventional, we may be
tempted to hear the “merely” so loudly that we end up forgetting that such norms
are vitally necessary for our social existence, and hence for our existence as such.
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 63

Yet while Avicenna was not denying the practical value of such principles, it is
nevertheless evident that he intended to deny their epistemic value. And it is pre-
cisely at this point that a further and rather more pressing puzzle would seem to
attach itself to the thought experiment he draws up in order to press that claim. If
this thought experiment is intended to isolate a vantage point that carries a certain
epistemic privilege, why does it include features that do not carry such privilege?
For in the list of components included within this vantage point we see reason; but
we also see estimation and sense perception. And what we know about the estima-
tive faculty as Avicenna understands it is that it plays important roles in the men-
tal life of human beings and indeed other animals, but also that its deliverances
must often be treated with distrust. Estimation follows the senses, and it leads us
astray when it oversteps its limits and tries to account for non-sensible things in
sensible terms. Estimation, for example, would have us believe that every existent
must be spatially located. It is the intellect that must correct for such errors and
others—though even when it does so, estimation will often refuse to surrender its
sense of conviction.20
It is for this very reason that the notion of fiṭra as Avicenna employs it cannot
itself be considered epistemically privileged. In the Najā, Avicenna makes clear
that both the deliverances of our estimative faculty and those of our rational faculty
are included in the “testimony of our nature” (shahādat al-fiṭra). Hence it is that
“not everything that is necessitated by human nature is true, but indeed much
of it is false.”21 Deborah Black draws the obvious conclusion when she states that
“any appeal to something’s being in accordance with fiṭrah must of necessity be
epistemologically irrelevant: it can tell us nothing in itself about whether or not
we can trust our cognitive instincts.”22 It is only one subset of what is demanded
by our natural cognitive instincts, in fact, that we can trust—and this is the sub-
set of our nature that corresponds to the operation of reason. In Avicenna’s own
words:  innamā al-ṣādiq fiṭrat al-quwwa allatī tusammā ʿaqlan.23 So to ask again,
why does the epistemic vantage point isolated by the thought experiment include
features that speak to an epistemically unprivileged notion of nature?
The inclusion of the estimation, it should be said, seems puzzling for an addi-
tional set of reasons. For what Avicenna has to say about this faculty elsewhere is
calculated to highlight how closely connected it is to the ethical domain. When he
discusses the faculty of practical reason (al-ʿaql al-ʿamalī), which operates on the
basis of the kind of ethical propositions under discussion here, he makes estima-
tion a tributary to its work.24 Even more crucially, in elucidating the functions of the
faculty of estimation and identifying its peculiar objects, Avicenna explicitly links
it with the notions of benefit and harm and their more sensory correlates, pleasure
and pain, with what is agreeable and disagreeable (muwāfaqa, mukhālafa), and (in
a stronger ethical register) with the notions of good and evil (khayr, sharr). These
ligaments are brought out crisply in the paradigm case through which Avicenna
64 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

exemplifies the operations of the estimative faculty:  the sheep that “sees” the
wolf’s hostility. The sheep sees the wolf “as” hostile, as harmful, as bad for it—an
act of seeing-as that is achieved through the estimation. These ligaments are also
brought out in another example Avicenna uses to illustrate this type of instinctive
response, one that our later discussion will place in a particularly evocative light,
namely the manner in which infants attach themselves to their mother’s breast.
This is the product of an instinctive reflex that Avicenna speaks of as “implanted
by God” (gharīza fiʾl-nafs jaʿalaha fīhi al-ilhām al-ilāhī) and that show the infant as
unwittingly orienting itself toward what serves its good.25
The interpretive skein that these puzzles roll out is too complex to untangle in
full. Leaving this task to some of Avicenna’s more dedicated readers, here I will
have to flatten the skein into a simple proposal that I will posit rather than defend
in detail. For this thought experiment, as I suggested, can be read as an attempt to
help us mark the distinction between what we think we know and what we really
do know. Its aim can most readily be seen as an attempt to provide a criterion for
distinguishing between two types of propositions that carry a similar sense of self-
evidence yet command unequal degrees of trust—namely widely accepted and
primary propositions (awwaliyyāt).26 The proposition often invoked to exemplify
the latter class is the judgment that the whole is greater than the part. It is against
this context, in fact, that the aims of the thought experiment, and the particular
privilege its viewpoint carries, can be grasped more precisely. For taken on its own,
Avicenna’s claim about ethical propositions is not immediately a claim about their
truth. “These widely accepted propositions,” he writes in the continuation of the
Ishārāt passage we have seen, “may be true, and may be false.”27 But if they are
true, this will have to form the end rather than the starting point of an argument—
and more specifically the conclusion of a demonstrative syllogism. In this, they are
unlike primary propositions, which are epistemically sufficiently robust to serve
as premises for demonstrative syllogisms.28
Primary propositions, crucially, are counted among the deliverances of reason:
they are judgments “necessitated by pure reason through its essence [yūjibuhā
al-ʿaql al-ṣarīḥ li-dhātihi].”29 Despite the more inclusive reference to estimation
and sense perception in the passage of the Ishārāt we heard, the more restricted
reference to reason registers strongly in Avicenna’s remarks—we will recall his
assertion that “nothing of this is required by the pure intellect [ʿaql sādhij].” No
less striking, in the variant of the thought experiment that is presented in the
Shifāʾ, it is reason that is exclusively referred to as the constituent of the epistemic
vantage point it seeks to isolate. Excluding all the factors mentioned in the Ishārāt,
Avicenna asks us to refer to reason as the only arbiter (lam yaltafit ilā ḥākim ghayr
al-ʿaql), and when he comes to state his conclusion—under such conditions, we
will be brought to doubt judgments like “justice is good” and “injustice is bad”—
he crucially parses this by referring once again to the more privileged perspective
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 65

of natural reason (ṣidquhā laysa mimmā yatabayyanu bi-fiṭrat al-ʿaql).30 This more
restrictive parsing of the experiment, finally, is also the one we find reflected in
al-Rāzī ’s reformulation in his commentary.
The most coherent way of understanding Avicenna’s thought experiment is
thus the one that takes it to be isolating an epistemic vantage point identified
with the privileged term of reason, leaving open how the presence of the other
faculties (ḥiss and wahm) should be construed.31 Thus distilled, the terms we are
left with return us to the governing contrast from which we began. Strip away
the contingent accretions of social learning, strip yourself down to your original
nature as a rational being, and you will find that your moral consciousness rolls
up and disappears. With this disappearing act in sight, we are ready to turn to Ibn
Taymiyya’s reception of it.

Reclaiming Certainty: Moral Judgments

between Natural Desire and Empirical Reason
It will be clear from the discussion above that Avicenna’s thought experiment
raises more questions than it answers. And one question it never addresses is
just how we should consider its own probative status. Exactly what have you done
when you have imagined what Avicenna has invited you to? Given the explicit con-
cern of this experiment, particularly, to help us mark the difference between what
we think we know and what we really do know, it is worth asking: How do you tell
the difference between whether you have really imagined or whether you merely
think you did? How would you respond to someone who said “I have imagined
this, but my moral consciousness has not turned a hair”?
This kind of question may dispose us to lend a more attentive ear to the proposal
articulated by Meryem Sebti regarding that seeming confrère of our own thought
experiment, the “flying man argument,” namely that it should be understood as
carrying the probative force of an appeal to direct experience or mushāhada. Either
you have that experience (this suggests) or you don’t—and whether you do may
depend on whether your intellectual gifts permit you.32 The differences between
the two thought experiments may prevent an easy transfer of this insight to our
own case. But we can already see the grounds of the skepticism that some of
Avicenna’s readers would later direct to this type of experiment; as we can see the
grounds of the complaint that Ibn Taymiyya lodges against it: it is nothing but a
mere assertion (daʿwā mujarrada).33
In discussing the vantage point Avicenna seeks to isolate, I raised a question
about the privilege attaching to it. Ibn Taymiyya’s polemical campaign against
Avicenna’s view of ethical judgments is premised on a clear perception of the epis-
temic privilege Avicenna meant to deny them. His counterassertion has already
66 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

come before us, but now we can hear it again: when people say “acts of justice
are good and fine, and their agents deserve praise and honor, and acts of injustice
are evil and blameworthy, and their agents deserve blame and dishonor,” these
judgments belong to “the greatest certainties known by human reason [min aʿẓam
al-yaqīniyyāt al-maʿlūma biʾl-ʿaql].” A deeper probing of this counterclaim would
seem to hold the promise of a better understanding of Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical epis-
temology. Yet given that Ibn Taymiyya’s claims are offered as counterclaims, in
approaching them there will be two separate questions to consider, one regarding
Ibn Taymiyya’s positive view of ethical epistemology and one about how the terms
of this view speak to the terms of his interlocutors as we have outlined them. And
as we will see, there will be a further question to ask as to whether the two perspec-
tives can be entirely disengaged.
Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion leaves no doubt that part of it must be read in
straightforwardly dialectical terms. Large segments of his discussion are devoted
to uncovering the internal inconsistencies produced by Avicenna’s ethical posi-
tion. I have spoken of the questions provoked by Avicenna’s thought experiment
as “puzzles,” yet what the interpreter receives as a puzzle, the polemicist will
more naturally receive as a weakness. Even if the best interpretation of Avicenna’s
thought experiment might lie in excluding the estimation and sense perception
from its terms, Ibn Taymiyya does not grant him the benefit of charitable inter-
pretation and, taking him at his word, brandishes a long list of contradictions
that result from their inclusion. You say the estimation has nothing of ethical
significance to tell us—yet you acknowledge it allows animals and human beings
to perceive other beings as hostile or friendly, attractive or repulsive. You say the
senses are blind to ethical meaning—yet elsewhere you speak about the pleasure
arising from virtuous actions, and this pleasure corresponds to an internal sense
(ḥiss bāṭinī). You dismiss ethical propositions as epistemic chaff—yet you then
build your view of the soul’s afterlife and of posthumous intellectual pleasures on
their foundation.34
It is this polemical intent that partly accounts for the dizzying plurality of
epistemological registers with which Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion is packed. Ibn
Taymiyya has been walking around Avicenna’s philosophy and taking notes, and
he returns to the Radd and begins to work his way down his shopping list of cross-
references. In doing so, he crucially takes on epistemological terms that speak to
two moves that Avicenna’s account had not wholly fused: his exclusion of ethical
judgments from the class of certain premises suitable for demonstrative argu-
ments (a larger class that included primary, empirical, and universally transmitted
propositions, among others) and his exclusion of them from the class of premises
known through the “original position” of nature (a class that, as I argued, was
intended to isolate primary propositions). We thus see ethical propositions con-
nected to reason, to sense perception, to the estimation—the privileged epistemic
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 67

faculties included prima facie in the thought experiment. We also see ethical
propositions connected to experience (tajribiyyāt)—one of the privileged proposi-
tions included in the class of yaqīniyyāt. The sheer luxuriance of epistemological
terms in which this results is made evident when, in the space of a few lines,
Ibn Taymiyya refers to “people’s knowledge of these propositions through nature
and through experience [biʾl-fiṭra wa-biʾl-tajriba]” and then again as propositions
“known by the senses and by reason [al-ḥiss waʾl-ʿaql].”35
Yet in this fluid welter of polemically deployed terms, it is clear that Ibn
Taymiyya is not merely arguing ex concessis but also arguing independently and
speaking in his own voice. Thus, having taken Avicenna to task for giving con-
tradictory accounts of the role of the estimation in ethics—“you say it has noth-
ing ethically significant to tell us—yet you also say it allows animals and human
beings to perceive other beings as hostile or friendly, attractive or repulsive”—Ibn
Taymiyya continues:

This faculty that he [i.e., Avicenna] calls “estimation” is the one through
which human beings perceive the friendliness [ṣadāqa] of the friend and
the hostility of the enemy, through which each of two spouses perceives the
beloved quality of the other, and through which one human being inclines
to or is repulsed by another… . And it is known that this faculty inclines
toward the type of person who it knows to be just, honest [ṣādiq], and benef-
icent, and is repulsed by the type of person who it knows to be mendacious,
unjust, and a wrongdoer—indeed, it inclines to this person even if it has
not been benefited or harmed by him. People are naturally formed to love
justice and those party to it, and to hate injustice and those party to it. And
it is this love which is in human nature [hādhihi al-maḥabba allatī fiʾl-fiṭra]
that gives the meaning of [the former’s] being good and it is this hatred that
gives the meaning of [the latter’s] being bad.36

Ibn Taymiyya appears to leave it open whether he is ready to follow Avicenna

in calling this faculty wahm; but he leaves no doubt that he accepts that human
beings perceive the specific qualities Avicenna had made the province of this fac-
ulty. What is central for our present question is that it is then in terms of this type
of perception that Ibn Taymiyya signals—positively and in his own voice—that
ethical perception must partly be understood.
This understanding will not be entirely new to us, having already stepped into
our view in the previous chapter in the context of a question about the place of util-
ity within Ibn Taymiyya’s thinking. It is now a matter of turning it around to face
toward the questions of epistemology that concern us more immediately—and
this includes:  toward the notion of fiṭra that we want to get in clear sight. The
statement that concludes the above passage appears to press a more narrowly
68 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

semantic claim: “good” and “bad,” respectively, mean “provoking love” and “pro-
voking hatred.” As noted in c­ hapter 1, this semantic claim locks onto an empirical
claim: human beings in fact love certain types of actions and hate others. What
we may now bring out more strongly is the fact that Ibn Taymiyya’s epistemo-
logical view—both his contention that, pace Avicenna and his retinue, we know
ethical propositions with certainty and his contention that we know them by
nature—involves a crucial move away from a more cognitive vocabulary to the
noncognitive vocabulary of love or desire. The claim that we know right and wrong
by reason is partly given as a claim that we desire right and hate wrong. And the
notion of human nature or fiṭra is in great part given through the notion of love or
desire (ḥubb, maḥabba).
In c­ hapter  1 I  debated whether the emotional responses that people have to
actions—or, as the passage above indicates, to the qualities of those who perform
them—can be understood as a response to their intrinsic value or to the interests
they serve, whether the individual agent’s or the community’s. My suggestion was
that it is the latter interpretation that best harmonizes with Ibn Taymiyya’s perva-
sive emphasis on utility; in this respect, the use of “love” as a translation for Ibn
Taymiyya’s linchpin terms may obscure interpretive possibilities that the use of
“desire” makes it possible to pick out more clearly. The same emphasis on interest
and indeed self-interest stands out in a seminal passage in the Radd that elicits Ibn
Taymiyya’s translation of cognitive claims about ethics into noncognitive terms
with particular starkness:

The foundations of these [i.e., ethical] judgments are necessarily known

by people, for they are formed by nature to love what is agreeable to them
and to hate what harms them [al-nufūs … mafṭūra ʿalā ḥubb mā yulāʾimuhā
wa-bughḍ mā yaḍurruhā], and what is signified by the term “good” is what
is agreeable to them and by “bad” what harms them. So if they are formed
by nature to love the one [mafṭūra ʿalā ḥubb] and to hate the other … it is
evident that people know these widespread propositions by their inborn
nature [bi-fiṭarihim].37

It is qua beneficial and harmful, Ibn Taymiyya here makes clear, that we desire
acts, and the qualities of acts qua beneficial and harmful that ground the mean-
ing of evaluative terms. Ibn Taymiyya speaks of the meaning of terms, and I
have accordingly described this as a “semantic claim.” Yet what he seems to
have in mind is not so much the question how “good” and “bad” are defined,
but to which actions they are applied, and thus which features make actions
good and bad. Nature, in turn, is the ground of ethical knowledge taken as the
principle through which we desire what is beneficial to us and are averse to what
is harmful.
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 69

Having brought this out, we stand face to face with what I believe lies at the
heart of Ibn Taymiyya’s understanding of the concept of fiṭra in the ethical con-
text. It is as a principle of desire, and more specifically as a desire that has ben-
efit as its primary object, that the notion of fiṭra is repeatedly characterized in
Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical remarks across a number of different writings. “People are
naturally constituted to love what benefits them and hate what harms them,” as
Ibn Taymiyya encapsulates it in one of his epistles (al-ʿabd mafṭūr ʿalā ḥubb mā
yanfaʿuhu wa-bughḍ mā yaḍurruhu).38 It is a characterization that invites important
questions, and one of the main questions I will be exploring later in this chapter is
what it has to tell us about the status of nature as a normative principle and epis-
temological source within Ibn Taymiyya’s scheme. Yet his understanding of fiṭra
has been deployed in the context of a very specific argument. It is thus important
to begin by considering how this conception engages its terms.
One of the reasons this argumentative exchange has seemed to me worth docu-
menting in some detail is that I take it to have provided a key formative context for
Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical development of the notion of fiṭra. “Ethical propositions are
not known from the perspective of human nature.”—“On the contrary, they are.”39
Yet in subverting Avicenna’s position and articulating his own counterclaim, it
is clear that Ibn Taymiyya has done far more than remove the sign of negation
over Avicenna’s central claim. There are in fact a lot of questions to be raised
concerning how Ibn Taymiyya speaks to the terms of the specific argument—if
we allow ourselves to call this thought experiment “an argument”—with which
Avicenna had supported it. It is undoubtable, on the one hand, that Ibn Taymiyya
does not wish to wholly speak to its terms—and that is because he rejects many
of them. He rejects Avicenna’s category of “primary propositions,” against which
the thought experiment had been framed. He also rejects, crucially, the distinction
between the “privileged” and “unprivileged” aspects of our nature, wahm and ʿaql,
and rejects Avicenna’s view about the inferior epistemic status of the estimation.40
Yet the most important difference lies in the way he treats the notion of fiṭra itself.
For even a superficial reading will reveal that the notion of fiṭra that Ibn Taymiyya
deploys in asserting the claim “we know ethical propositions by nature” has little
to connect it with the notion of fiṭra that Avicenna had deployed in denying it.
The emotional responses through which Ibn Taymiyya specifies our nature in
this context—we naturally love and rejoice over the ethically good, and we natu-
rally hate and are aggrieved by the ethically bad—invite us to consider them under
what Avicenna had called “psychological and moral sentiments,” though they can
also be linked to the estimation, as we have seen.41 The attraction and repulsion
we respectively feel toward benefit and harm, through which he also specifies our
nature here and elsewhere, seem to directly evoke what Avicenna and al-Rāzī had
referred to as utility (maṣlaḥa). If I am right in thinking that the first type of emo-
tional response is ultimately grounded in the natural attraction and repulsion we
70 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

feel toward benefit and harm, it is our natural attraction to what serves our welfare
that forms the core of Ibn Taymiyya’s conception of fiṭra in the ethical context. Yet
the key point is that both types of responses correspond to elements that Avicenna,
and al-Rāzī after him, had excluded from the vantage point of the thought experi-
ment, which picked out the contours of fiṭra, and more specifically, as I have sug-
gested, of fiṭrat al-ʿaql—of the natural operation of reason.
The most radical criticism one can offer an argument, of course, is to inter-
rogate its presuppositions. Yet while my main aim here is not to evaluate this
argument on its own merits, a closer evaluation would have to raise a question
as to whether this particular interrogation is accomplished without loss. For to
the extent that Avicenna’s reasons for excluding emotional responses from the
vantage point of the thought experiment had rested on the insight that ethical sen-
timents are acquired precisely through a process of social enculturation reflecting
the interests of the community, to simply appeal to the existence of such senti-
ments and ascribe them to human nature without argument would seem to beg
the question as this had been put.42 Ibn Taymiyya himself, we will recall from
­chapter 1, acknowledges this communal perspective elsewhere in his work, but
this acknowledgment remains occluded in the Radd itself, where the different
perspectives from which the benefit of actions and the emotional responses they
provoke can be considered—first-person and third-person, first-person singular
and first-person plural—are passed over without comment.
There will be something more to say in the next chapter about how these
moments of Ibn Taymiyya’s thinking connect. Here we should instead resume
our main track of questioning. What can we say positively, I asked, about Ibn
Taymiyya’s ethical epistemology? Central to his epistemology, the above suggests,
is a proposal to ground our knowledge of ethical propositions in human nature
understood in desiderative terms. Yet Ibn Taymiyya’s epistemological register in
this discussion, as I noted earlier, is a rather more composite one. At places he
speaks of our knowing ethical propositions “through nature and through expe-
rience” (biʾl-fiṭra wa-biʾl-tajriba); elsewhere he speaks of them as “known by the
senses and by reason” (al-ḥiss waʾl-ʿaql). And it is indeed the emphasis on reason
that rings out early in his discussion when he describes them as “the greatest cer-
tainties known by human reason” (min aʿẓam al-yaqīniyyāt al-maʿlūma biʾl-ʿaql).43
The emphasis on reason is doubly significant here. For apart from aligning
Ibn Taymiyya’s epistemological concern more directly with the cognitivist term
that defined Avicenna’s and al-Rāzī ’s vantage point, it even more crucially aligns
his concern with the focal term that had stood at the heart of the classical kalām
debates about the epistemology of value. For the polarizing topic of these debates
had been parsed precisely as a question about the role of reason as the source of
our epistemic access to the ethical value of actions. The claim that it does, as I have
already mentioned, typified the viewpoint of Muʿtazilite theologians. “It belongs to
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 71

mature reason [kamāl al-ʿaql] to know that injustice is something we deserve blame
for,” as we heard from ʿAbd al-Jabbār in c­ hapter 1.44 Once we know the ground or
act-description that a given action instantiates, we have an immediate knowledge
(ʿilm ḍarūrī) of its value (though extra reflection may be required in some cases).
In making God’s command the ontological cause of value, Ashʿarites, by contrast,
had also made revelation its epistemic source. There is a more complex story,
in fact, to be told about the Ashʿarite ethical viewpoint at this juncture, which
will come into view in the next chapter. Yet the familiar Ashʿarite opposition to a
rationalist epistemology of value makes it easier to explain why Avicenna’s denial
of such an epistemology would have found an eager audience among Ashʿarite
theologians, and also easier—on the surface at least—to explain why one of Ibn
Taymiyya’s interlocutors in the Radd should have been an Ashʿarite.
It will not surprise us, then, to find that Ibn Taymiyya, opening his discus-
sion in the Radd, quickly makes the link between this philosophical debate and
the classical theological debates about value. The claim he frames in this vicinity,
couched in terms of utility—what we identified as the primary good-making fea-
ture in his scheme in the previous chapter—is also couched in the epistemologi-
cal term central to those debates, and registers as a clear claim of reason. “The
goodness and badness that pertains to the actions of human beings is a matter of
whether actions are beneficial or harmful to them [i.e., human beings]. And there
is no doubt that this can be known by reason.” Similar claims recur later in the
Radd. “The most distinctive trait of human reason,” we hear, “is that one knows
what benefits one and does it, and knows what harms one and avoids it.”45
Fresh from our discussion of Ibn Taymiyya’s notion of human nature, however,
our first response may be bafflement. Ibn Taymiyya has spoken of human nature
as the source of our desire for what is beneficial, and thus as a source of knowl-
edge: people are “formed by nature to love [mafṭūra ʿalā ḥubb] what is agreeable
to them and to hate what harms them”—therefore “people know these widespread
propositions by their inborn nature [bi-fiṭarihim yaʿlamūna hādhihi al-qaḍāyā
al-mashhūra].” Now we hear that reason forms the source of that knowledge. What
are we to make of this equivocation between nature and reason, and reason and
desire? Ibn Taymiyya does not comment on this himself, and once again leaves it
to his readers to speculate how his fluid transitions between these elements might
be explained. These fluid seams, I would argue, point to an aspect of this exchange
that has not yet come into view—to that second and more complex storytelling
filter that concerns the Ashʿarite contribution to this exchange and Ibn Taymiyya’s
relationship to it. Deferring this part of our story to the next chapter, here I will
consider the most fruitful way Ibn Taymiyya’s welter of epistemological registers
can be unified and his invocation of reason filled out.
We find the material for this unifying story by turning back to a passage we saw
in part in the previous chapter, which it is now worth quoting more fully. When
72 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

people say “justice is good,” we heard, this means that people find joy in justice
and derive benefit from it. When they say “injustice is bad,” this means that people
are aggrieved and harmed by it. And it is a fact, Ibn Taymiyya continues,

that people’s knowledge of these propositions through nature and through

experience [biʾl-fiṭra wa-biʾl-tajriba] is greater than it is with respect to
most medical judgments, such as that scammony purges bile. Why then
are empirical propositions [tajribiyyāt] reckoned as certainties [yaqīniyyāt]
while these ones, though more widespread among people and more widely
tested by experience, are not reckoned as certainties? And this, even though
those testing them through experience [al-mujarribīn lahā] are greater in
number and have better knowledge and credibility, and even though the
worldly particulars that relate to them exceed the particulars of the former
in number …?

Covering old ground yet also breaking new:

One naturally finds in justice, truthfulness, knowledge, and beneficence

a pleasure and happiness which one does not find in injustice, lying, and
ignorance… . That is why [people] experience love for those who do these
things and a desire to praise them and wish them well, and they are natu-
rally formed [mafṭūrūn] to love and take pleasure in this … just as they
have been naturally formed to take pleasure in food and drink and to expe-
rience pain upon hunger or thirst. Why then should those propositions
belong to the certainties known by the senses and by reason, such as by
experience among other things, whereas these ones should not be consid-
ered rational propositions that are also known by the senses and by reason
[al-ḥiss waʾl-ʿaql], even though matters stand more strongly with respect to
them?46

The lavish array of epistemological terms with which this passage is splashed may
immediately confuse us. Yet out of this array, it is worth fastening on one key ele-
ment that appears in the above passage: the notion of experience, or tajriba. This
was a notion that had been explored most systematically by the falāsifa against a
background of Greek philosophical sources, and it had been used to describe a
form of knowledge produced by the regular conjunction of events. The example
that served as a paradigm illustration for this type of knowledge was the one that
Ibn Taymiyya invokes in the lines we just heard. “Experience,” as Avicenna had
explained in the Shifāʾ, is “e.g., our judgment [ḥukmunā] that scammony purges
the gall-bladder. Since this (fact) recurs many times, it ceases to belong to what
occurs by chance [biʾl-ittifāq].”47 Empirical judgments, more specifically, rest on
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 73

the repetition of a sensation that is then preserved in the memory, and an implicit
reasoning—effectively a latent syllogism—that this connection is not merely inci-
dental. As the focal example betrays, the notion of tajriba as developed by the
falāsifa had come to be virtually synonymous with medical knowledge.48
In his discussion of ethical propositions, Ibn Taymiyya does not address the
notion of experience directly, yet he has done so earlier in the Radd. Drawing heav-
ily on the resources of the philosophers, he characterizes empirical judgments
(mujarrabāt or tajribiyyāt) as the product of a repeatedly perceived conjunction
between events (takarrur iqtirān aḥad al-amrayn biʾl-ākhar). Thus “when people
do something, they find that a certain effect follows from it, then this is repeated
until one comes to know that this is the cause of that effect.” Empirical judgments,
as the last formulation suggests, are more specifically concerned with relations of
cause and effect. The causal relation established by experience is to be understood
in universal terms (“whenever a given thing is done to anyone, such a thing happens
to him”:  kull man fuʿila bihi dhālika yaḥṣulu lahu mithlu dhālika). And crucially
for the thread we are pursuing, the resulting judgment is a universal proposition
that Ibn Taymiyya qualifies as the mixed product of sense perception and reason
(al-ḥiss waʾl-ʿaql). For our senses tell us about particulars, and it is reason that then
commutes these particular perceptions into general judgments.49
There will already be much in the above to indicate why empirical knowledge
would offer an especially hospitable framework for locating Ibn Taymiyya’s under-
standing of ethical judgments. Several of the statements we just heard point to
the special connection that empirical judgments bear to human action and to
events initiated by human beings (“when people do something,” when people
have something “done to them”).50 The association of empirical judgments with
medicine—forged by the philosophers and appropriated by Ibn Taymiyya in his
own discussion—is also significant, as it shows empirical judgments to be con-
nected not merely with human action but also with human suffering, and with the
effects of action on human well-being. Yet it is the peculiar concern that empirical
judgments have with causal relations that speaks with particular directness to the
terms of Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical understanding.
For having noted Ibn Taymiyya’s claim that the primary ground of value is
utility, we may now note that this claim can in turn be intuitively construed in
two separate ways—ways that Ibn Taymiyya himself does not entirely help to regi-
ment clearly. An act can be beneficial by being immediately pleasurable, and it
can be beneficial by serving as the causal means for later pleasure. This distinc-
tion is present if unmarked in Ibn Taymiyya’s statement, which we have already
heard, that the ethical distinction between good and bad “reduces to the difference
between pleasure and pain and their respective causes [asbab].”51 The consequences
of actions, as we saw in ­chapter 1, play a critical role in explaining why, on Ibn
Taymiyya’s scheme, an agent might agree to act in a way that is not immediately
74 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

pleasurable. These consequences reflect God’s creative decision to assign specific

causal powers to human actions as to other entities in the created world.52 Some of
them, as we also saw in c­ hapter 1, extend over the mundane realm, and others over
the otherworldly realm. The former includes a wide range of effects that relate
to the intellectual, physical, and moral well-being of the agent. It also notably
includes the social consequences densely referred to throughout the Radd—the
fact that by acting ethically, we are rewarded with the intrinsically pleasurable
esteem and love of other people.
And leaving the otherworldly realm out of view for the time being, empirical
knowledge would seem to present itself as a natural paradigm on which to map Ibn
Taymiyya’s positive view of the way human beings come to know the causal effects
of actions that determine their ethical value in the mundane realm by determining
the overall balance of pleasure over pain. The passage of the Radd cited above that
highlights this connection, it must be admitted, does not make for unequivocal
reading.53 Yet its interest in bringing moral judgments into close connection with
the notion of experience appears to be sufficiently conclusive. This is patent in
the first remark (“people’s knowledge of these propositions through nature and
through experience”) and even clearer in the continuation (those propositions are
“tested by experience,” through contact with “particulars”). This understanding
of Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical epistemology, crucially, would permit us to unify the
luxuriance of epistemological registers in the Radd, above all providing a way of
accounting for the composite reference to sense perception (ḥiss) and reason (ʿaql)
in many of the passages we have heard.54 For empirical judgments are produced
by the combined work of sense perception and reason, taking “sense perception”
in an inclusive sense that might range over both the physical and the emotional
domain and might thus incorporate both physical pleasures and emotional ones,
such as the pleasures produced by social esteem.55
What about fiṭra? My understanding here will have to be simply stated. Allowing
for the unstable boundaries of the concept and its fluid relationship to more cogni-
tive elements—a relationship about which there will be more to say—the notion
of fiṭra, as deployed in Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical discussions, is primarily constructed
as a principle of desire. Our natural disposition provides us with desires for cer-
tain kinds of pleasures and for our overall welfare, construed as a longer-term
balance of pleasure over pain. Throughout Ibn Taymiyya’s works, in fact, the types
of pleasures and desires with which the notion of fiṭra is repeatedly drawn into
the strongest connection are physical ones, such as the natural desire for food and
drink, to which sexual desire is occasionally added.56 Fiṭra, thus qualified, repre-
sents our nature as physical beings endowed with a characteristic set of physical
needs and desires. As such, it forms the ground of the core values toward which
we strive. It is in this modified sense that we might say it “tells us” what is good.
With these motivational ends in place, the epistemological task is to discover how
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 75

we can achieve them. The quality of actions qua immediately pleasurable is imme-
diately (phenomenologically) available to us, falling under what Ibn Taymiyya in
the Radd and elsewhere refers to as “sense perception.”57 The quality of actions
qua instrumentally pleasurable, on the other hand, is not available to us in the
same manner and requires a more complex epistemology like the one provided by
empirical reason. It is significant that, having stated that reason tells us what ben-
efits and harms us, elsewhere Ibn Taymiyya specifies that what reason informs us
of more narrowly are the consequences of actions that constitute them as beneficial
and harmful: “Acting on the basis of knowledge, which consists in pursuing what
is beneficial to human beings and repelling what harms them through consider-
ation of the consequences [of actions] [biʾl-naẓar fiʾl-ʿawāqib], is the meaning of the
term ‘reason’ [al-ʿaql] that predominates in the words of the pious forebears and
imams [al-salaf waʾl-aʾimma].”58
It is a proposal whose virtue, I  have suggested, lies in the way it allows us
to unify many of the phenomena Ibn Taymiyya presents us with in his ethical
discussions, as well as (albeit more glancingly) in other parts of his work. In his
Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, for example, he uses a term with clear empirical resonance,
induction (istiqrāʾ), to couch a point that can be essentially heard as an orotund
claim that virtue and happiness coincide in the present world, and we know this
by experience. An inductive consideration of human life reveals that “everyone
who acts with gross injustice to people and causes great injury to them comes to
an ugly end … and everyone who greatly serves people’s welfare and acts with
great beneficence toward them comes to good.”59 Yet what cannot but stand out,
on the one hand, is the fact that having provided a few pregnant allusions to the
connection between ethical and empirical judgments in the Radd, Ibn Taymiyya
himself fails to fill in this skeletal frame in any detail. Similarly, while the con-
ception of acts as causes (asbāb) and of ethical knowledge as consequential in
form pervades his other writings, outside the Radd the terminology of “empiri-
cal judgments” virtually disappears into thin air. Even in the Radd, moreover, his
analysis of empirical propositions, far from straightforwardly arguing for their
relevance as a framework for ethical knowledge, often seems pointedly calculated
to undermine it.
To see why, all we need to do is consider more attentively some of the examples
with which Ibn Taymiyya proposes to illustrate the class of empirical judgments.
“The generality of people,” he writes when first introducing these judgments,
“have established through experience [jarrabū] that drinking water is accompanied
by [yaḥṣulu maʿahu] the quenching of thirst, that severing the head is accompanied
by death, and that severe beating necessarily causes [yūjibu] pain.” Similar exam-
ples occur later in the work: thus “the fact that satiation and quenching arise after
[ʿaqība] eating and drinking belongs to the class of empirical judgments … like-
wise with the fact that pleasure is experienced in/through those things [bi-dhālika],
76 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

as through sexual intercourse and the like.”60 All these cases have an immediate
bearing on human well-being, and as such appear to send their nerves into the
heartland of Ibn Taymiyya’s evaluative scheme. Yet on second glance, one can-
not help being struck by the exceptional brevity of the causal sequence they place
on display. This is already clear in the first set of examples, which refer us to the
causal connection between eating and satiation, and drinking and the quenching
of thirst. It is more visible still in the second, where the same set of actions (eat-
ing and drinking) is addressed, yet this time with pleasure and pain nominated
as their causal effects. Ibn Taymiyya’s uneasy linguistic turns and shifting choice
of prepositions—“after” is replaced with “in” or “through” as he moves between
examples—is here revealing; and what it reveals is the difficulty of separating the
two “events” at stake and relating them in causal terms. Even if one accepts that
satiation occurs after eating—and one might query the point: Do I feel satisfied
after I finish eating or while I am engaged in the act? (everything would seem to
hang on our conceptual grip on the notion of “satiation”)—it is harder to grant
that the pleasure produced by eating or drinking or sex can be described in causal
terms that present it as temporally posterior to the respective actions.
Ibn Taymiyya’s continuation suggests one reason such a conceptual
representation—in terms of two separate events relating as prior to posterior in a
temporal and causal sequence—might have appeared compelling. Drawing once
more on epistemological notions current among the falāsifa, he goes on to refer
to a distinction between “external” and “internal” perception that would seem to
correspond to the precise distinction between “events” we have just seen, placing
the sensory experience of smelling, eating, and so on on one side and the plea-
sure thereby experienced on another. One’s external senses first “perceive a given
thing; they see something, hear something, taste something, touch something;
and then the fact that pleasure arises in the soul belongs to the experiences known
through the internal senses [al-ḥiss al-bāṭin].”61 Given this scheme, one can see
why the act of eating and the pleasure derived might have presented themselves
as distinct events. Given this scheme—and perhaps even without it. For later in
philosophical history, Schopenhauer would collapse the distance between these
“two” events and identify them in The World as Will and Representation as differ-
ent ways of relating to a single thing.62 Yet the fact that the distinction should
need collapsing is a token of its intuitive hold, to the extent that we can intuitively
distinguish between the act publicly available for representation and the internal
experience that is not.
Even if we agree to distinguish these events and relate them in causal terms,
however, it is clear that the causal sequence at stake is a singularly short one.
And it is noteworthy, and not a little paradoxical, that the cases under consid-
eration correspond not so much to the specification of utility that demands a
real epistemic achievement—namely the future consequences of actions that
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 77

determine the overall balance of pleasure and pain they involve—as to the
specification of utility that consists in immediate pleasure and pain and that
is immediately available in experience. While actions involving longer causal
chains do come into view in Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion,63 the resources in
his discussion of empirical judgments are overwhelmingly set up with a bias
toward the short term or indeed the immediate present, as against the longer-
term future in which the consequences of actions unfold. If we were looking for
an explanation of why an action that is pleasant in the short term, like adultery
or theft, might nevertheless not be in our interests due to its long-term conse-
quences, we would not find it here. In writing about empirical judgments or
mujarrabāt, Ibn Taymiyya does not appear to have the future consequences of
actions in mind.
What this suggests is that Ibn Taymiyya does not fully develop the promise
that the epistemology of tajriba would seem to hold as a framework for evalua-
tive knowledge. Taken together with the poverty of his references to empirical
judgments in other writings, this might make us wonder just how seriously to
take his commitment to it. More narrowly, it may make us wonder whether his
invocation of this epistemology should be construed in dialectical rather than
positive terms—as a heuristic proposal developed in sufficient detail to question
Avicenna’s exclusion of ethical propositions from the privileged class of premises
usable in demonstrative syllogisms (a class that notably included tajribiyyāt) but
not intended as a positive proposal postulated in his own voice. Ibn Taymiyya’s
explicit references to this epistemology in the Radd, its coherence with other ele-
ments of his intellectual scheme, and its ability to lend coherence to his ethical
remarks seem to me strong grounds for reading this proposal in positive terms. Yet
it remains a fact—a fact worth keeping in view in the discussion that follows—that
Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks about ethical epistemology often bear a fragmentary and
spartan character. Even though there is a more unified story that can be told to tie
such phenomena together, it is instructive that this story should require a con-
certed interpretive exercise to be achieved.

Ibn Taymiyya’s Appeal to Nature in Context:

Nature as a Foundation for Ethics?
The above has offered a snapshot of the ethical epistemology that emerges from
one of the key documents for Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical views. In doing so, it has
furnished many of the resources we need in order to turn to face our guiding
questions more directly. How to understand Ibn Taymiyya’s notion of nature as
a normative principle and epistemological source? How far is Ibn Taymiyya pre-
pared to push the claim that ethical norms are accessible to what we may more
78 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

inclusively refer to as the epistemological resources internal to human beings?

A more inclusive mode of reference is helpful here in allowing us to accommo-
date all of the central epistemological terms that have come up in our discussion.
Earlier theological writers, as mentioned, had focused on one particular internal
resource, reason, and questioned whether we have access to ethical norms by rea-
son or require the external output of revelation. Ibn Taymiyya speaks of reason, yet
he also speaks of fiṭra. It is time to consider how this understanding speaks to our
starting questions. In this section my narrower concern will be with the notion of
fiṭra and its status as a normative principle and epistemological source.
We have seen that Ibn Taymiyya’s claim that ethical norms are known by nature
is developed as a counterclaim to the view expressed by Avicenna: “Ethical propo-
sitions are not known from the perspective of human nature.”—“On the contrary,
they are.” In pressing this claim, as I have suggested, Ibn Taymiyya has done far
more than remove the sign of negation over Avicenna’s, rewriting the notion of
fiṭra in the process. Unlike Avicenna, Ibn Taymiyya thinks of fiṭra in desiderative
terms; unlike Avicenna, he rejects the view that privilege attaches to our rational
as against our estimative nature. Yet putting these more careful distinctions aside,
at this juncture someone will want to ask the obvious question: Why all the fuss?
Why care so much about whether this claim falls or stands?
There are many types of responses this question could invite—responses that
open out to important insights into Ibn Taymiyya’s motivations and the broader
intellectual scheme in which his ethical understanding must be anchored. For
our context, the most relevant way of reading this question is as an invitation to
finally take a long-awaited step away from the context of the Radd to situate Ibn
Taymiyya’s deployment of the notion of fiṭra within a larger perspective. I  sug-
gested earlier that the story of Ibn Taymiyya’s argumentative exchange about eth-
ics in the Radd is worth following to the extent that it provided the formative
context for his development of the notion of fiṭra in ethical terms. Yet this is by no
means to say that his preoccupation with this notion was confined to this context
or that it could be simply understood as its immediate product. Shadowing his
discussion in the Radd is a larger preoccupation with the notion of fiṭra that runs
through his work like an ever-present frieze.
In Avicenna’s own writings, in those (far from numerous) passages where the
notion of fiṭra emerges, it appears without ceremony and with little to mark it out
as a concept invested with special significance or a broader place in the intellec-
tual life of his time. Yet the notion of fiṭra had led a vivacious if somewhat unruly
life in the Islamic religious tradition, and this richer intellectual presence forms
the backdrop of Ibn Taymiyya’s own engagement with it. In this engagement the
ethical deployment of fiṭra does not in fact constitute the sole or even the most
prominent strand. The more salient deployment—one might even say its master
usage—is one that lies closer to the heart of the tradition and concerns not the
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 79

knowledge of ethical value but the knowledge of God. The two types of deploy-
ment are far from hermetically sealed from each other, and are in fact bound
together by important links. It is thus worth pausing to bring Ibn Taymiyya’s theo-
logical usage of fiṭra into view and hold it up against his ethical usage, bolstering
our understanding of the latter and shedding new light on its context.
The concept of fiṭra derived its centrality from its scriptural appearances, prime
among them the appearance it makes in the Qur’an itself: “So set your face to
the religion, a man of pure faith [ḥanīfan]—the nature (framed) of God, in which
He has created man [fiṭrat Allāh allatī faṭara al-nās ʿalayhā]. There is no altering
God’s creation. That is the right religion, but most men know not” (Q 30:30). This
verse was paired to several prophetic traditions, including the seminal hadith:
“Every child is born with the natural constitution, and it is its parents that render
it a Jew, or a Christian, or a Magean [kull mawlūd yūladu ʿalaʾl-fiṭra, fa-abawāhu
yuhawwidānihi aw-yunaṣṣirānihi aw-yumajissānihi].”64 In both scriptural passages,
a certain connection is drawn between the notion of fiṭra and a religious state that
seems to carry positive status. The Qur’an more specifically links the notion of
fiṭra to that of ḥanīfiyya—a monotheistic belief in God taken to antedate revealed
religions and finding its paradigmatic embodiment in Abraham.65 Yet just how
should this inborn religious state be characterized more precisely? Should one, for
example, connect the notion of fiṭra to the primordial testimony given by humans
acknowledging God as their Lord in the “Covenant of Alast” (Q 7:172) and see this
as a universal pact uniting the whole of humanity to a primordial acknowledg-
ment of God? Should one then say, more guardedly though not noncommittally,
that all human beings are born believing in God? Or should one go so far as to say
that all human beings are born Muslim?
These were some of the interpretations proposed by those approaching these
scriptural bases with the aim of clarifying their meaning. The way one answered
such questions had important practical repercussions, particularly with regard to
conduct in war. Jurists thus debated the meaning of fiṭra with a view to answering
practical legal questions such as whether the children of unbelievers should be
killed, whether a child who has not yet come of age and is taken captive without its
parents should be treated as an unbeliever, whether the children of non-Muslims
who die in captivity should be buried as Muslims, or whether the children of
non-Muslims whose parents die are capable of inheriting from them.66 Far more
divisive than these legal questions, however, were the theological questions to
which these interpretive debates came to be harnessed, generating firewood for
long-standing controversies about God’s justice and human responsibility. The
use to which Muʿtazilite theologians had put these scriptural traditions is indica-
tive. Capitalizing on the interpretation that human beings are born in a religious
state with positive valence, Muʿtazilites had employed it to press their distinctive
defense of God’s justice. For if children are born in a positively qualified religious
80 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

state, this must mean that God does not punish the children of unbelievers and
thus does not inflict pain on the innocent (an oft-debated topos). By the same train
of reasoning, it must mean that God does not create or will unbelief or intention-
ally lead anyone astray (another key Muʿtazilite claim). For God’s will must be
reflected in the positive state in which human beings are born; and then subse-
quent unbelief might be ascribed to environmental factors or indeed, more opti-
mistically and closer to the core of Muʿtazilite theological sentiment, to one’s own
free choice.67
These kinds of arguments Ibn Taymiyya would declare so full of holes as to
make them unwearable, and his own stance on this debate would rest on a rework-
ing of theological possibilities that may not seem unfamiliar given what we heard
in the previous chapter. Rejecting the Muʿtazilite view of human freedom, his
stance would reflect the conviction that two facets which the Muʿtazilites had
represented as indetachable were in fact eminently capable of separation. Happy
beginnings, more specifically, can be very amicably reconciled with unhappy ends.
The state in which human beings are initially created and begin their lives is one
of belief, yet the state in which they end their lives may yet be one of unbelief—or
whatever fate God has determined for them. This position would on the one hand
involve taking a stance on a refractory theological tradition, including apparently
contradictory traditions received from Ibn Ḥanbal—a state of affairs that has
prompted Geneviève Gobillot to comment almost despairingly, in her study of
fiṭra, that “in the domain of theology as much as that of jurisprudence, there was
a genuine awkwardness and profound confusion surrounding the tradition of kull
mawlūd, which gave rise, among a number of thinkers, to choices that it would
be extremely difficult and even impossible … to take on in their entirety.”68 Yet
it would also, and more crucially, involve adopting a firmer stance on the cen-
tral question of how the “positive” state at issue should be construed, forcefully
embracing the claim that this should be dignified with the term “Islam.” “One’s
nature itself,” we hear, “requires that one acknowledge one’s Creator [nafs al-fiṭra
tastalzimu al-iqrār bi-khāliqihi]”; even more thickly:  “One’s nature entails and
necessitates the Islamic faith [fiṭratuhu muqtaḍiya mūjiba li-dīn al-Islām].”69
Human beings, Ibn Taymiyya thus claims, are born with a knowledge—or,
more accurately, with a disposition to know—God. One speaks of “knowing” God;
yet in many of Ibn Taymiyya’s works where this claim is expressed, particularly
in his monumental Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql waʾl-naql, where it is developed at great-
est length, this cognitive-sounding claim is in fact articulated in a rather more
complex set of terms. And here we find the beginning of the ligaments tying the
theological deployment of fiṭra to the ethical deployment that forms our peculiar
concern. For the disposition to acknowledge God that is enfolded within human
nature is not merely a disposition to apprehend God as an object of representa-
tion or neutral existent. It is a tendency to respond to God in certain ways—ways
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 81

specified in strongly emotive or affective terms. “One’s nature itself requires that
one acknowledge one’s Creator”; yet what it also requires, as the continuation of
this line makes clear, is that one “love Him and sincerely devote oneself to His
service [maḥabbatahu wa-ikhlāṣ al-dīn lahu].”70 Human nature here registers as a
notion that looks to two separate directions: one cognitive, one affective or desid-
erative. It exacts a cognitive state, but it also exacts an affective state, which Ibn
Taymiyya significantly parses using the same vocabulary that animates his discus-
sion of fiṭra in the ethical context, namely “love.”71
Yet this is not where the similarities stop. This becomes obvious when, at a
particularly pregnant juncture of the Darʾ taʿāruḍ, Ibn Taymiyya turns to offer a
rational argument for the scripturally grounded claim that we are naturally dis-
posed to know and love God. I will run through the argument very swiftly because
it is primarily its conclusion that interests us. All human beings, we are told, form
beliefs (iʿtiqādāt), and all human beings, necessarily, have desires (irādāt). Beliefs
sometimes correspond to the truth and sometimes they do not, and desires some-
times correspond to what is in our interests (maṣlaḥa) and sometimes they do
not; and in the former case our desires and beliefs are good, in the latter bad
(ḥasana maḥmūda/sayyiʾa madhmūma). Now either good beliefs and good desires,
as against bad beliefs and desires, are equal with respect to our nature, or there is a
special relationship between our nature and the good set, something in our nature
that renders this set preponderant (murajjaḥ). But (and here I condense several
steps in a single leap) if a person is faced with two options—“to tell the truth
and be benefited, and to lie and be harmed”—his nature disposes him to choose
the former. One conclusion that follows from this, according to Ibn Taymiyya, is
that there is some power in our nature that leans toward good desires and good
beliefs. Another conclusion is that our nature leans toward the belief and love of
God, for the belief in God is true and the desire for God (ḥubb here replaces irāda)
is beneficial.72
The historical fascination of this argument lies in the fact that Ibn Taymiyya is
here seen adapting an argument that Muʿtazilite theologians had earlier used to
ground their ethical claims, in particular the claim that people may act for moral
reasons. Faced with the option of lying and telling the truth, the Muʿtazilites had
argued, and supposing that each action produces equal results in terms of benefit
and harm, people will always choose to tell the truth. In Ibn Taymiyya’s recraft-
ing, the argument seems highly problematic; yet the logical robustness of this
argument is less relevant than the main point it helps to bring out.73 For what it
clarifies is that the telltale appearance of the vocabulary of “love” is not the only
bridge between the ethical and the theological deployment of fiṭra. Soldering the
two contexts even more strongly together is the basic premise that we are naturally
disposed to love what benefits us and to hate what harms us. Our love for God and
for the religion to which He holds us is, at least in part, a love organized by their
82 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

description qua beneficial to us.74 If what is objectively good, and what naturally
attracts us, is what serves our welfare, as we hear in the ethical context, it is the
relationship to God to which we are naturally disposed, as Ibn Taymiyya clari-
fies elsewhere, that achieves our truest welfare (ṣalāḥ) and thereby constitutes the
highest fulfillment of the good.75
There will be more to say about this point later; yet here it is important to notice
that this basic continuity is also reflected in the paradigm that Ibn Taymiyya appeals
to pervasively in characterizing the natural disposition to know and love God—
namely the child’s instinctual desire for its mother’s breast. “A child is formed by
nature [mafṭūr] to drink milk through a drive of its own, so that given access to
the breast, it will certainly suckle,” he writes in the Darʾ taʿāruḍ; “it is in similar
manner that one is born [mawlūd] to know God.”76 Or again our natural acknowl-
edgment of God mirrors the way “every child is born with a disposition to love the
foods and drinks that agree with [yulāʾimu] its body, so that it craves [yashtahī] the
milk that suits it [yunāsibuhu].”77 The term mulāʾama lays down a direct linguis-
tic bridge to the terms of Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion of ethics and to an expres-
sion of his view that we only recently left behind in the Radd: “The foundations
of [ethical] judgments are necessarily known by people, for they are formed by
nature to love what is agreeable to them and to hate what harms them [al-nufūs …
mafṭūra ʿalā ḥubb mā yulāʾimuhā wa-bughḍ mā yaḍurruhā].” Throughout Ibn
Taymiyya’s works, as mentioned earlier, the notion of fiṭra is often linked to physi-
cal desires, such as the natural desire for food and drink and sex. These kinds of
desires are used as the main frame of reference for talking about other human
drives, such as religious and ethical ones. We may recall the crucial reference to
these kinds of desires in a passage of the Radd we considered in ­chapter 1, where
Ibn Taymiyya had compared our natural love for morally good actions to our natu-
ral disposition “to take pleasure in food and drink and to experience pain upon
hunger or thirst.” It is the identification of the good with the beneficial, we may
say, and of the beneficial as the object of natural desire, that animates this analogy
most intuitively; it is the same identification that stands out as the connecting liga-
ment between Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical and theological deployments of fiṭra.
In the theological context, as I have suggested, the notion of fiṭra is additionally
given a cognitive turn, tying it to the disposition to form a substantive belief.78 This
substantive specification joins itself to a broader understanding of the cognitive
dimensions of fiṭra that finds voice elsewhere in Ibn Taymiyya’s work, as we will
see, associating fiṭra very closely with the human faculties of reasoning. In many
places the notion of “natural” knowledge is used in ways that render it virtually
coextensive with that more specific subsection of reason that theologians typically
referred to as “immediate” or “necessary” knowledge (ʿilm ḍarūrī/ḍarūrat al-ʿaql).
In discussing our native knowledge of God, thus, Ibn Taymiyya often employs
the two terms in a parataxis implying synonymity (ʿulūm fiṭriyya ḍarūriyya, or
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 83

uṣūl fiṭriyya ḍarūriyya, or again of al-ṭuruq al-fiṭriyya al-ʿaqliyya al-yaqīniyya) and in

certain locations explicitly identifies necessary knowledge with the knowledge of
fiṭra.79 In the ethical context, by contrast, this cognitive aspect falls away from view,
and human nature is specified not so much in terms of a disposition to know what
has value as to desire what has value—and this means, most immediately: what is
beneficial.
Why care about whether Avicenna’s claim falls or stands? I asked. The discus-
sion above sought to provide further background for this question by locating
Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical appeal to nature against an even more fundamental appeal
to nature in the theological domain. In doing so, it has given more substance to
the ethical deployment we saw in the Radd and the terms in which Ibn Taymiyya
specified it. It has also crucially bared to view what I take to form a core reason for
Ibn Taymiyya’s alacrity to defend the claim that ethical norms are accessible to us
through the resources internal to our nature. For this is a tenet that feeds into a
broader conception of the religious life as the highest fulfillment of the good. To
the extent that this conception deploys a notion of “good” that is intuitively avail-
able to us—“good” is what serves our welfare—it supports a theological vision
whose basic thrust, as previewed in c­hapter 1, is to argue for the convergence
between the demands of the faith and the demands of our being.80
We will be returning to this notion of convergence shortly. Yet what I want
to hold on to is the crucial fact that the notion of “nature” that figures in this
thinking is vested with a far from neutral significance. This significance looks
back to the scriptural bases of the notion, which connect it to a religious state
understood in positive terms—to an original faith that represents the “right
religion” (al-dīn al-qayyim), to a purer state in which God purposefully created
people yet which may be corrupted. When such corruption takes place, it will
mark a departure from God’s own purposes.81 There will be far more to say
about this notion of divine purposefulness in ­chapter 4. Here it is important to
note that it is a positive vision of God’s character that is simultaneously at work
in Ibn Taymiyya’s own appropriation of the positive significance harbored by
the scriptural appearances of fiṭra, expressing itself in the insistence that God
vested human beings with natural resources carrying positive qualification.
Spelling out the cognitive dimensions of human nature elsewhere in the Radd,
Ibn Taymiyya refers to the natural human ability to form basic rational judg-
ments about entities and writes that such judgments “belong to the real natu-
ral matters [al-umūr al-ḥaqīqiyya al-fiṭriyya] to which God naturally disposed
people, just as He naturally disposed them to the different kinds of wholesome
desires and sound motions [al-irādāt al-ṣaḥīḥa waʾl-ḥarakāt al-mustaqīma].”82
The emphasis on the positive character of our natural endowments (“real,”
“wholesome,” “sound”) can be partly understood by reference to the positive
conception of God’s creative activity it parses.
84 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

It is this positive representation of human nature that appears to organize

Ibn Taymiyya’s engagement of fiṭra in both the theological and the ethical
domain and his effort to connect it to positively valued content. The way we
interpret the theological content of fiṭra, he indicates in the Darʾ taʿāruḍ when
discussing the knowledge of God, should safeguard the premise that there is
something “praiseworthy” (yastaḥiqqu madḥan) in it.83 The concern to vouch-
safe the praiseworthiness of human nature, similarly, was plainly attested in
an argument about fiṭra we heard moments ago, which was designed to press
the double conclusion that we are naturally inclined toward positively valo-
rized or good beliefs but also, crucially for the ethical context, good desires
(irādāt ḥasana maḥmūda).84 The same concern is in turn reflected in Ibn
Taymiyya’s eagerness to contest Avicenna’s position and to restore to human
nature the privilege Avicenna was denying it. The positive valence carried by
human nature then appears to be splashed in fluorescent colors across the
pages of the Radd, with its effusive descriptions of the joy people naturally
derive from the good.
Yet of course we have already had much to say about this natural joy and about
the deeper sources of its derivation. In many ways the present discussion can
be taken as a way of deepening and extending the insights of that earlier analy-
sis. What that analysis had indicated and can now be spelled out more fully is
that despite this patina of impressions, human nature cannot be understood as
a straightforwardly privileged notion in the ethical context. More specifically, and
despite the positive terms in which Ibn Taymiyya appears to inscribe it, natural
desire does not provide a normative criterion for ethical value. The reasons for
this may have already suggested themselves, and it is merely a matter of bringing
them out.
For we have seen that in his ethical remarks, Ibn Taymiyya specifies human
nature as a principle of desire. A desire for what? For “utility” or “benefit,” we said,
drawing on a number of his statements. Commenting on his ethical concern with
the long-term consequences of actions, I drew a distinction between two ways in
which the notion of utility could be construed: in terms of immediate pleasure and
in terms of the overall future balance of pleasure over pain. This is a distinction
that had been clearly signposted by earlier theologians, such as ʿAbd al-Jabbār,
who had defined benefit (nafʿ) as pleasure and joy (ladhdha, surūr) and what leads
to them. Distinguishing pleasure from benefit, such writers had used the term
“benefit” (nafʿ, manfaʿa, maṣlaḥa) to refer inclusively to what is intrinsically good
(generally identified as pleasure and joy) and what is instrumentally good, while
tying it more closely to a judgment on the overall balance of pleasure and pain that
actions involve.85 With this distinction freshly in mind, we can now consider with
sharper attention how Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks about the natural human constitu-
tion speak to its terms.
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 85

Turning back to one of the passages we considered, we will recall Ibn Taymiyya’s
claim that “the foundations [mabādiʾ] of [ethical] judgments are necessarily known
by people, for they are formed by nature to love what is agreeable to them and to
hate what harms them [mafṭūra ʿalā ḥubb mā yulāʾimuhā wa-bughḍ mā yaḍurruhā].”
And again: “human beings are naturally formed [mafṭūr] to love what benefits them
and hate what harms them.”86 Our natural desires, to do no more than rehearse,
take our benefit or welfare as their object. Yet this specification of our natural con-
stitution takes its place next to a number of other statements that give us some-
thing different, and that call attention this time not to the more inclusive notion
of benefit, but to the more exclusive notion of pleasure. People, we heard, “experi-
ence [yajidūna fī anfusihim] a sense of pleasure, joy and happiness at the just man’s
justice,” and they are naturally disposed to such experiences as they are disposed
to “take pleasure in food and drink and experience pain upon hunger or thirst
[fuṭirū ʿalā wujūd al-ladhdha biʾl-akl waʾl-shurb waʾl-alam biʾl-jūʿ waʾl-ʿaṭash].”87 The
psychological experience of joy and happiness provoked by ethically good actions
here finds its counterpart in the physical experience of enjoyment provoked by
physical goods. In both cases it is an immediate experience of pleasure (wajada:
to perceive, to experience) that is made the correlate of our natural constitution. It
is an emphasis on our natural susceptibility to certain types of pleasures and, as I
suggested above, paradigmatically for physical pleasures that repeatedly surfaces
in Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks about our natural constitution.
Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks about fiṭra thus speak to competing sides of this dis-
tinction. He himself does not mark the transition between these specifications
of our natural disposition and in many places glides between them without any-
thing to mark that there is a transition at stake or that anything hangs on it.88
Despite the centrality of utility in his ethical thought, in fact, he never draws the
distinction between the two construals of utility with comparable clarity. More
than that: much of what he says in different contexts seems calculated to obscure
it, and there are contexts where his thinking is premised on the programmatic
suppression of the insight that evaluative criteria are constituted by anything other
than immediate pleasure, and more specifically by pleasure of a sensory kind.
A good example is provided by an exchange that forms one of Ibn Taymiyya’s
best-known confrontations with the intellectual schools of his time: his polemics
against the monistic theosophy of Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240). This is a confrontation that
Ibn Taymiyya wages across innumerable locations in his writings, and readers
following the thread of his ethical views will quickly discover it is a context where
this thread can be reliably sought out, for reasons that are not hard to come by.
At the heart of Ibn Taymiyya’s critical response to Ibn ʿArabī ’s brand of philo-
sophical mysticism lies a concern about its pernicious impact on the religious
life, and more specifically about the antinomian tendencies it harbors. It is a sus-
picion of the mystical path that had certainly been voiced before in the Islamic
86 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

tradition, but Ibn Taymiyya formulates it in terms that speak more narrowly to the
distinctive views of Ibn ʿArabī and his acolytes. In the brilliance of ecstatic states,
Ibn Taymiyya complains, these mystics claim that the very distinction between
good and evil burns up and falls away, a mere phenomenal distinction that col-
lapses back into the primal ontological unity constituted by the divine reality. Such
claims, he declares, mark a failure to maintain God’s power and God’s command
in the necessary equilibrium and drastically undermine the divine Law—a parsing
of his complaint that significantly locates it against a programmatic concern to
calibrate this tension that we are already familiar with.89
Yet the etherealization of this distinction, Ibn Taymiyya argues—a distinc-
tion between good and evil, or what God loves and what He hates—flies in the
face not only of scriptural evidence but indeed of all rational self-evidence.
This distinction, he tells us in al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya, simply cannot
disappear—not unless one proposes to leave one’s bodily existence behind
altogether. Whatever their visionary engrossment, it is humanly impossible
that these mystics should fail to “find certain things pleasurable and other
things painful, and distinguish between what can be eaten or drunk and what
cannot be eaten or drunk, between the heat and cold that causes them discom-
fort and that which does not, and this distinction between what benefits them
and what harms them is what religious legislative reality [al-ḥaqīqa al-sharʿiyya
al-dīniyya] consists in.”90 Reprising the topic in another epistle:  so long as
these visionaries “feel hunger and thirst” and “can tell the difference between
bread and drink” and between “what’s bitter and brackish and what’s sweet to
the taste,” their claim that good and evil fall away in these privileged states is
shown to be hollow, whether by way of deceit or self-deceit. For the distinction
between good and evil comes down to “the difference between pleasure and
pain and their respective causes”; thus the difference between “good actions,
which bring pleasure to their agent, and evil actions, which bring him pain, is
a matter of sense perception known alike by all the beasts in the field [amr ḥissī
yaʿrifuhu jamīʿ al-ḥayawān].”91
In these remarkable statements, Ibn Taymiyya can be seeing tying ethical
notions exclusively to the immediate experience of pleasure, and indeed to plea-
sure of a sensory kind, as the startling last remark makes clear. While the notion
of longer-term consequences is not wholly absent—it is present in the telltale ref-
erence to “pleasure and pain and their respective causes” and immediately evoked
by the reference to “religious legislative reality,” hardly intelligible in isolation
from the otherworldly context—Ibn Taymiyya largely leaves it out of the picture.
The notion of “benefit,” while also terminologically present, seems to be nar-
rowly interpreted through the notion of pleasure. And what is important is that
the restricted attention to immediate experience as the ground of ethical value
is central to the architecture of Ibn Taymiyya’s argument for the ineliminability
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 87

of ethical distinctions. For the distinction between immediate pain and pleasure
is ineliminably present to us; that between painful and pleasant consequences is
not.
This argumentative context thus exemplifies a notable tendency, in Ibn
Taymiyya’s writings, to blur the distinction between the narrower and broader
specifications of utility. Yet of course one of the most important illustrations of this
tendency we met in c­ hapter 1 when studying the exuberant connection in which
Ibn Taymiyya draws ethical action and positive phenomenological responses such
as pleasure and joy in the Radd. This is a connection, as we saw, that obscures the
costs that ethical action often involves—costs that, once brought out, require a ref-
erence to the pleasures anticipated in the future (and thus to utility in the broader
sense) in order not to count against it. Ibn Taymiyya’s silence with regard to these
costs, we said earlier, is striking. This silence feeds into a positive representation
of human nature and the motivational drives that constitute it. Having brought
out the conflicts that Ibn Taymiyya suppresses and the normative perspective of
long-term consequences that accounts for their resolution and that provides the
full criterion of ethical value, we already have reason to think that this positive
representation cannot provide the full picture. This becomes plainer once we take
into account Ibn Taymiyya’s composite specification of our natural disposition
in terms of an orientation toward pleasures—particularly pleasures of a sensory
kind—and an orientation to benefit. For to the extent that our natural desires attach
to objects under their description as pleasant, natural desire cannot carry norma-
tive status. Not every natural desire we experience will be good; our desires will
require further ordering. By the same token, and contrary to what Ibn Taymiyya
invites us to think in the Radd by invoking fiṭra and the notion of epistemic cer-
tainty in the same breath, an empirical survey of our actual desires—a turn inward
to what is subjectively available to us—cannot provide us with a “moral compass”
that tells us how we ought to act.92 The “natural” is neither a normative category
nor a self-sufficient epistemological source.
That our desires require ordering, of course, is a thesis that would seem wholly
unsurprising coming from the perspective of the divine Law, which openly pro-
claims it in stating, “It is possible that you dislike a thing which is good for you,
and that you love a thing which is bad for you” (Q 2:216). Many of the desires
subsumed in the scope of our natural constitution or fiṭra in fact form the object
of explicit religious legislation that places limits on their fulfillment and provides a
normative framework for their pursuit—a framework in which the notion of ḥaqq
often serves as an illuminating joint. Thus, the natural desire for food and drink
is one whose satisfaction is bounded by the ritual demands of the Law, such as the
obligation to fast or to avoid certain food types like pork and carrion—obligations
that represent rights of God (ḥuqūq Allāh)—just as it is bounded by the normative
limits posed by human rights (ḥuqūq al-ʿibād), which accord individuals exclusive
88 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

rights over particular goods and make it wrong for others to avail themselves of
them for the satisfaction of their desires. Similarly with sexual desire, included by
Ibn Taymiyya in the scope of our natural constitution, whose value clearly depends
on its pursuit within the bounds of a lawful relationship generated through the
right (contractual) forms and in turn generating rightful claims and obligations
among the parties involved. Here and elsewhere, a firm line of norms—norms
naturally specified through the notion of ḥuqūq that Ibn Taymiyya shuns in his
main ethical remarks—provides the domain of natural desire with its frontiers.
The positively valorized way in which the notion of fiṭra and that of natural
pleasure appear in Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical remarks calls attention away from the
need for frontiers. In other locations of his writings, however, these positive terms
are revealed to have been only partial in reach, and the human inclination toward
negatively valued desires is explicitly held out as the core of a more distrustful view
of human nature. This distrust is succinctly expressed in Ibn Taymiyya’s reference
to the human “proclivity to evil desires” (mayluhu ilā mā yahwāhu min al-sharr).93
The need in which our natural desires stand for normative ordering is similarly
made plain when, speaking in the Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba of those who “love food and
drink and women”—archetypal desires of our fiṭra, we may recall—Ibn Taymiyya
writes that, while such desires are “commendable and human welfare is vested
in them,” they must be pursued with “right measure and moderation [al-ʿadl
wa’l-qaṣad].” This point is encapsulated again in an apophthegmatic remark in the
same work, which now reveals the grounds for such normative ordering: “Many
an immediate desire [shahwa] has had enduring grief as its bequest.”94 This is a
remark all the more significant for its context, emphasizing the deleterious effects
of natural pleasures, which include not only the ones derived from the illegitimate
satisfaction of natural sexual desire (by adultery) but also the pleasures derived
from injustice. Yet it was the natural love of justice that had been highlighted in
the long passage of the Radd that gave us our starting point.
Here and elsewhere, Ibn Taymiyya openly acknowledges that wrongdoing is
something toward which human nature inclines, and perhaps nowhere more
clearly than in a statement from the Fatāwā that we already heard in the previous
chapter: human beings “commit evil acts that have been forbidden to them due
to their ignorance [of their evilness] or their need for [these acts], in the sense that
they crave them and take pleasure in them.” This statement brings into the open
what the Radd entirely occluded: wrongdoing can also be a source of pleasure and
object of desire. The distinction between good and bad desires arrives as its obvi-
ous concomitant.95 This open admission is particularly striking seen against the
thread of discussion from which it emerges, which presses a familiar message
about the concordance between the demands of our nature and the demands of
the religious faith. “For everything that God commanded,” Ibn Taymiyya had writ-
ten only a few lines above, “God created in the nature of human beings that which
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 89

serves as its cause and necessitates it, and He set it up as an object of their need
and as a basis of their welfare and perfection.” The command to faith is one such
example, for “every child is born with the natural constitution” according to the
well-thumbed hadith. The command to knowledge, justice, and truth is another,
for these are things that people “know and love, hence the fact that they are called
‘right’ ” (maʿrūf: literally “what is known”), as is the divine prohibition of lying
and injustice, actions that human beings naturally find repugnant (tunkiruhā
al-qulūb).96 The continuation just cited seems to arrive as a subversion and serious
qualification of this view, bringing to the fore the way what is ethically good (and
what is commanded by God) may conflict with our desires, and thus raising a ques-
tion about how the message of concordance should be received.
What the above shows is that the notion of the “natural” has a more ambiva-
lent status in Ibn Taymiyya’s thinking than he lets on and that the conception of
human nature at work in his thinking is likewise far from uniformly positive. If
these ambivalent aspects fall away from view, especially when the discussion is
parsed in the language of fiṭra, that is linked to the kind of intellectual investments
outlined earlier—to Ibn Taymiyya’s investment in appropriating the positive rep-
resentation of fiṭra harbored by the scriptural texts in support of a certain vision
of God’s character and a particular message about the harmony between human
nature and the demands of religious faith. It is not that this claim of concordance
cannot be made. But if it is, this can only be by isolating one of the two aspects of
our nature that Ibn Taymiyya picks out in his discussion, its responsiveness not to
the subjective and fallible drive for pleasure but to the more objective and norma-
tive notion of long-term welfare. It is, after all, this objective notion, it could be
observed, that figures more prominently in some of Ibn Taymiyya’s most direct
statements about natural desire. The term fiṭra might perhaps be definitionally
reserved for that higher-order desire directed to the true good—a move that would
of course leave the acknowledgment of lower-order natural desires untouched and
thus leave it clear that faith will often demand things that are in conflict and not
in harmony with one’s natural desires in another sense of the “natural.” Yet it is
important that this is not a reservation that Ibn Taymiyya himself signals clearly,
and the fluidity of his transitions between the notions of pleasure and benefit
and the drives they correspond to makes it harder to argue for that as an explicit
intention.
Ibn Taymiyya does, it may be said, offer a reflective viewpoint elsewhere in his
writings that would show these two aspects of human nature to fall together and
allow the positive value of natural desire as such to be preserved. “When a person’s
soul or temper becomes corrupt [fasidat],” we hear elsewhere in his Fatāwā, “one
craves and takes pleasure in things that harm one.”97 Implied in this remark is a
distinction between sound (salīm/ṣaḥīḥ) and corrupt (fāsida) nature that consti-
tutes a recurring theme in Ibn Taymiyya’s writings, and indeed flows immediately
90 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

from the seminal prophetic tradition at work in them. For while every child may
have been “born with the original disposition,” as that tradition would have it, this
disposition was subsequently exposed to fateful corruption through external fac-
tors (“it is its parents that render it a Jew, or a Christian, or a Magean”).98 The pos-
sibility of corruption is a presumption necessary for explaining how something
can be innate yet fail to be universally manifested. Deployed in this context, it sug-
gests that only desires flowing from corrupted natural constitutions may require
normative ordering. Our natural desires might form a trustworthy guide to action
so long as our natural constitution has not been impaired.99
The normative character of natural desire could thus be secured by introducing
a normative filter at the level of human nature itself—a move that would mirror
the effects of the definitional reservation just considered. This would not be the
first time that a normative conception of nature would have turned out to form
the heart of an ethical appeal to human nature. Heirs as we are to a long history
of intellectual developments that saw the notion of nature transformed in the pro-
cess, this is a point we have sometimes found it easy to miss in looking back to
some of the most celebrated appeals of this kind, from ancient ethics onward. The
notion of nature that animates this type of appeal in the ancient context is not,
as Julia Annas points out, that of a “neutral” or “brute” scientific fact, as modern
philosophers have presumed. Nature in fact forms an “ethical ideal” and an “ideal
concept.” One central way it is used in ancient ethics is thus as “the goal or end
of human development; the natural life is the life led by humans who have devel-
oped in a natural way, this being understood as a way in which the potentialities
which for us are given develop without interference from other, external factors.”
This presupposes, among other things, “that we can distinguish between what
forms an expression of a person’s nature and what forms a corruption of it.” And
it makes clear that we cannot “find out about human nature just by observing
people.”100
Something similar has been remarked about the appeal to nature at other
stages of its history, as among the medieval scholastics, whose view of natural law,
as Jean Porter notes, rests on a strongly teleological view of nature, presupposing
“the overall goodness or value of a specific kind of life, the form of life appropriate
to a given creature when it is flourishing in accordance with the intrinsic prin-
ciples of its existence.”101 Porter is in fact prepared to make the case more broadly,
suggesting that the concept of a human being simply cannot be detached from the
concept of what it is to do well as a human being. Even more than among ancient
philosophers, Christian reflection on natural law was tightly bound up with a con-
sideration of the ways human nature has been corrupted or obscured. Later theo-
logians, such as Martin Luther, would acknowledge the presence of natural law in
human conscience yet consider the corrupting influence of sin a barrier to using
it as a foundation for ethics.102
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 91

Yet even if Ibn Taymiyya’s appeal to nature can be interpreted in normative

terms that align it with this longer tradition—and his failure to call attention to
this more openly in his ethical discussions leaves this interpretation unstable—
the evocation of this historical foil seems designed to throw into relief what
divides him from it rather than what unites him with it. For within this tradition,
the appeal to nature had been brought into relation with a number of thick ethi-
cal concepts—a number of concepts reflecting modes of ethical thinking that we
today are disposed to tell rather more sharply apart. We may recall Cicero’s open-
ing encapsulation, which identified natural law as “right reason corresponding to
nature, diffused in all … which commanding, calls to duty, and forbidding, deters
from wrongdoing” (De Republica, III, 33). The appeal to nature is here connected to
a use of reason that is notably prescriptive and serves as a source of duty or obliga-
tion. This prescriptive law-like aspect would be strongly reflected in later articula-
tions of the Stoic appeal to nature, in which natural law would come to be thought
of as an idealized version of the actual law that governs political communities. It
would likewise mark the reception of this notion among Christian writers, and
would be reflected in the fact that Christian theologians from Augustine onward
would connect natural law to the Golden Rule (“Whatever you want men to do
to you, do also to them”) and to the commandments included in the Decalogue
(“Thou shalt not kill”; “Thou shalt not commit adultery”; “Thou shalt not steal”).
At the same time, this prescriptive or law-like aspect, in several contexts—cer-
tainly in ancient ethics and among some of the best-known scholastic contributors
to the natural law tradition, such as Thomas Aquinas—worked in synergy with
thicker conceptions of human flourishing parsed in the vocabulary of the virtues.
Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical invocation of nature seems starkly different. As I have
already noted, his focal term in his ethical discussions, including those in which
he deploys the notion of fiṭra, is not the “imperative” concept of obligation but
the “attractive” concept of goodness. Fiṭra, by the same token, issues not a call of
duty but a call of desire. Unlike the above types of appeal to nature, where nature
is associated with reason—“the natural law,” Albert the Great would character-
istically write, “is nothing other than the law of reason or obligation, insofar as
nature is reason”—the emphasis falls on the desiderative rather than the rational
dimensions of human nature.103 And the higher good that is made the object of
natural desire has none of the thick texture that characterizes conceptions of the
flourishing life among ancient and medieval thinkers. It is simply what “benefits”
us—a notion of utility that ultimately reduces to pleasure and pain.
If we were trying to bring Ibn Taymiyya’s appeal to nature into conversation
with philosophical history, in fact, it is not the ancient appeal or its medieval and
later resumptions that would provide us with the most ready term of comparison.
It is rather some of the more recent architects of an ethical appeal to nature who
defined themselves in opposition to earlier modulations of this appeal by calling
92 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

attention away from reason and toward desire, away from rational intuition and
toward empirical observation. This includes Hume, whose claim that morals are
“founded entirely on the particular fabric and constitution of the human species”
was executed as a project to ground ethical ideas in the passionate as against ratio-
nal aspects of human nature (“morality … is more properly felt than judged of,”
T 470)—in emotions of approval and disapproval, love and hate, that are them-
selves forms of pleasure and pain and in turn respond to the pleasure and pain
that actions cause.104 It also includes some of the utilitarian philosophers who
would see themselves as treading in Hume’s footsteps, such as Bentham, who
identified the good with pleasure and then made nature the source of ethics in the
well-known statement that opens his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign
masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do,
as well as to determine what we shall do.”105
Ibn Taymiyya does not frame his ethical claim in the universalizing terms
in which utilitarians like Bentham and Mill parse it, as a pursuit of the hap-
piness of the greatest number. His principle, in this respect, invites to be read
in egoistic terms. For the purposes of our own narrative, however, the more
interesting point of comparison—and the more relevant angle of questioning—
lies elsewhere. For among both the earlier and particularly the later advocates
of an ethical appeal to nature, this appeal had been twinned to a strong claim
regarding the access human beings have to standards of right and wrong and the
self-sufficiency of human ethical reflection. This had stood out with particular
crispness among some of the later humanist exponents of this idea. Writing
in his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire had expressed the point epitomically:
“When Nature created our species and gave us instincts … after giving us our
portion, she said to us: ‘Now do the best you can.’ ” Jerome Schneewind glosses:
“God created nature, and nature created us with the ability to guide our own
affairs.”106
This finally allows us to pull into focus an epistemological question that has
been with us from the beginning of this chapter and that we can now face more
directly. I have suggested that Ibn Taymiyya includes in his conception of nature
desires that require further normative ordering, and as such nature cannot be
taken to constitute a privileged category. That normative ordering, as I  have
explained, derives from a consideration of the longer-term consequences of these
desires (or the actions they motivate). What is the epistemic source of that order-
ing? And what does this have to tell us about Ibn Taymiyya’s understanding of our
ability to “guide our own affairs” on the basis of epistemological resources internal
to us as human beings? Or again: just how substantive is the capacity for ethical
self-guidance that Ibn Taymiyya is prepared to concede human beings? It is to this
question that I now turn.
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 93

Reason and Its Ethical Content

It is a question that, parsed in the language of reason, had stood at the heart of the
classical kalām debates about ethics, as I have already said. “Reason tells us what
is right and wrong.”—“On the contrary, revelation forms our source.” Yet this
sharply distinguished pair of strident dichotomies, which may seem like a tempt-
ing way of schematizing the conflict between Muʿtazilite and Ashʿarite theological
views, is liable to mislead us. In encouraging an exclusively yes/no construction of
the debate, it may lead us to overlook that a lot of interesting things—if not indeed
most of them—took place not at the level of either/or or whether, but on the level
of how and how much.
Linda Zagzebski’s observation must surely be allowed to stand: however dif-
ferent religious thinkers have configured the controversial relationship between
morality and religion, all religions teach that “the ultimate goal of moral liv-
ing is unattainable without the practice of that religion” and that “morality is
incapable of standing alone.”107 Having evoked some of the more recent mani-
festations of the ethical appeal to nature, it is also salutary to keep in mind
that the kind of capacity for independent ethical reflection that humanists like
Voltaire and Hume or their utilitarian successors claimed for human beings
was the product of a long history of intellectual developments in which ethical
reasoning was gradually disengaged from religious and other cultural frame-
works. The idea of the moral agent capable of reasoning autonomously about
ethics—a construction of the everyman best known to us from Kant’s depic-
tion of him—is a modern invention that would have surprised many earlier
natural law theorists.108 The point has been relevantly made by Porter regarding
the medieval scholastics’ articulation of natural law. In linking natural law to
reason, the scholastics had not attempted to derive “a system of natural law
thinking out of purely natural data or rationally self-evident intuitions.” Hence
their otherwise surprising appeal to “Scripture to establish specific points of
natural law morality—for example, the wrongfulness of fornication, which they
cheerfully admit could not easily be determined by reason alone.” Not either/
or but and:  “Human reason and Scripture are complementary and mutually
interpreting.”109
It is in the spirit of this inclusive and and in the light of the more open how
much that the Muʿtazilites’ own ethical understanding needs to be read—a read-
ing that will provide a helpful backdrop for considering Ibn Taymiyya’s stance.
Islamic theological discussions regularly featured polemical jousts with iconoclas-
tic figures—figures enjoying varying degrees of historical reality—who interro-
gated the need for prophecy building on claims about the innate human grasp
of ethical truths. Given that ethical standards are accessible to human reason,
why is revealed guidance needed at all? Looking more closely at the standards
94 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

of action that revelation prescribes, it was additionally complained, we find they

grate against the standards we know innately. The ritual prescriptions of the
Law—prescriptions like praying and fasting or like slaughtering animals and cir-
cumambulating the Ka’ba during the hajj—formed a particularly tenacious topic
in this connection.110 Like many theological participants in these discussions, the
Muʿtazilites agreed that revelation did not conflict with reason and that revela-
tion had an important role to play in guiding human action. The task was then
to explain just why and how, against the context of their affirmation that ethical
standards are intuitively known.111
Central to the solution of the Baṣran Muʿtazilites, who will once again be my
focus, was a distinction between two levels on which we may know what makes
actions good or bad. We may know, on a general level (ʿalaʾl-jumla), that injustice
is bad or repelling harm from oneself is good. Yet if we want to evaluate acts,
a second judgment will be required on the particular level (ʿalaʾl-tafṣīl), which
relates these specific cases to the general act-descriptions and recognizes them as
instances of the latter. We need to recognize that this act is an act of injustice, and
this will usually mean settling the facts about it, for example determining that it
produces harm undeservedly or without countervailing benefit.112 The case then
made by the Baṣran Muʿtazilites was that the standards of action prescribed by
revelation could be seen to relate to the standards of action indicated by reason as
the particular to the general. “What the prophets convey,” Mānkdīm would write
in his Sharḥ al-Uṣūl al-khamsa, “can only constitute the particularization [tafṣīl] of
a general knowledge [jumla] already established by reason.”113
In talking about particularization in this context, these Muʿtazilites primar-
ily had in mind a very specific type of evaluative standard belonging not to the
deontological but to the consequentialist side of their ethical theory:  the prin-
ciple that we must seek what serves our welfare and repel what harms us. For we
may know that pursuing what serves our welfare is good; but we may not know
what serves our welfare. With the general evaluative principle firmly established
in our reason, revelation comes to offer us the latter, particularizing (factual)
knowledge. In doing so, the role of the prophets is “akin to that of physicians
when they say, ‘This herb is beneficial’ and ‘This herb is harmful,’ ” against the
background assumption that it is good to seek what is beneficial and obliga-
tory to repel what is harmful. Revelation, in Ibn Mattawayh’s phrasing, comes
to “reveal the presence of benefit or goodness in one act [and] the presence of
harm or injuriousness in another.”114 A paradigmatic example is the prescription
to perform ritual prayer. Left to our own devices, we would not know that, as
this world is contingently and in fact at present organized, prayer can be instru-
mental to our ability to lead upright lives, a point indicated by the Qur’an when
stating that “prayer restrains from shameful and unjust deeds” (Q 29:45). And
while sometimes, as in this case, God may explicitly indicate to us the reasons
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 95

behind His commands, in many other cases these reasons remain opaque to
us. Any conflict we perceive between the demands of reason and the demands
of revelation is to be ascribed to this position of ignorance. Having seen this,
we may rest in the confidence that “all prescribed ordinances are in accord with
reason [muṭābiqa liʾl-ʿuqūl].”115
This is an important foil to keep in place in turning back to Ibn Taymiyya.
For like the Muʿtazilites, Ibn Taymiyya offers a vigorous affirmation of the thesis
that ethical truths are intuitively available to human beings, and he couples it to
a similar message regarding the necessary concord between the dictates of our
epistemic nature and the dictates of the Law. The right question to ask is thus not
on the level of whether but of how much. My main conclusion can be put simply
before offering the evidence that supports it: the independence that Ibn Taymiyya
seems interested in securing for human judgments about ethical matters is in
fact rather more limited than his affirmation of ethical rationalism may lead us
to expect. Just how substantive are the terms in which we take him to be thinking
of ethical knowledge, however, once again partly depends on the view we take of
the relationship between deontological and consequentialist grounds within his
ethical thinking.
The best wedge into the topic is afforded by considering an insight that Ibn
Taymiyya has already offered us in explaining why people may do wrong. It is
a question that exponents of a rationalistic ethics come under a relatively more
pressing demand to respond to. For if we know what is good, why do we not do
it? The answers given to this question across the history of philosophy have been
many, and have included hopeful bids to reserve the term “knowledge” solely
for those judgments that successfully express themselves in the way we act (we
really know what is good only if we act on it). The answers Ibn Taymiyya offers us
are two: people “commit evil acts … due to their ignorance of [their quality] or
their need [ḥāja] for them, in the sense that they crave them and take pleasure in
them.” As he phrases it in other passages, it is always one of two things, either
“ignorance” (ghafla) or “desire” (shahwa).116 Yet it is in fact the former that Ibn
Taymiyya elsewhere names as the primary cause of wrongful action: “In reality,
all bad deeds have their ground in ignorance.” We will already have more than an
inkling as to the relevant type of ignorance, yet even if we did not, Ibn Taymiyya
himself makes it perfectly clear in his continuation: “If one knew … that perform-
ing a given act would cause one preponderant harm, one would not do it; because
that is the hallmark of rational beings [khāṣṣiyyat al-ʿāqil].”117
I suggested that in Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical remarks, fiṭra is approached mainly
as a principle of desire and includes desires that require further normative order-
ing. It is these kinds of desires that we may naturally see as the correlate of the
second factor he names. What the last-cited statement now reminds us is that it
is precisely the faculty of reason that Ibn Taymiyya has elsewhere invoked as the
96 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

source of that knowledge of future consequences that provides a way of norma-

tively ordering such desires and deciding which ones to overrule. In the Radd,
Ibn Taymiyya had offered a number of statements that lent themselves to a ratio-
nalistic epistemology specified in terms of experience (tajriba), a kind of knowl-
edge combining sense perception (ḥiss) and reason (ʿaql) and responding to the
recurrent conjunction between types of events. His remarks there, I suggested,
seem fragmentary and spartan, leaving it to his readers to connect the dots in
order to elicit the possible lineaments of his positive epistemology. The coherence
of this epistemology with other elements of his intellectual scheme—particularly
his consequentialist understanding of value and his emphasis on reason—offer
strong arguments for reading this proposal in positive terms. Yet even if we agree
to see in empirical reasoning a source of evaluative knowledge, this is still to say
nothing about its scope or extent.
And it is now the question of scope—not the question of whether but of
how much—that is explicitly broached in a number of other remarks that we
find widely dispersed across Ibn Taymiyya’s works and that propose to tell
us just how the knowledge of what benefits and harms us is to be attained.
Conditioning these remarks is a message about the complementarity of
our natural resources and the resources of revelation invoking a distinction
between the “general” and the “particular” that will immediately seem famil-
iar. Couched in the idiom of fiṭra, we hear this message in Ibn Taymiyya’s
Kitāb Mufaṣṣal al-iʿtiqād as a claim that our “natural constitution is perfected
by the natural constitution that is revealed by God [al-fiṭra mukammala biʾl-fiṭra
al-munazzala]; for the natural constitution knows a given thing in general
form [mujmalan], and the Shari’a particularizes and clarifies it [tufaṣṣiluhu
wa-tubayyinuhu] and attests what the natural constitution has no independent
access to.”118
About this paradoxical-sounding notion of a “revealed natural constitution”
there will be something more to say in ­chapter 5. More important for our context
is the fact that this message of complementarity elsewhere appears to give way
to a rather less balanced view of the relationship between naturally available and
divinely communicated resources. In Ibn Taymiyya’s targeted remarks about
ethics, this is a relationship on which he largely preserves a gnomic silence.
This silence is broken in other locations, and nowhere more starkly than in his
al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya. “Human beings,” he writes there, “stand in need of a Law
[sharʿ] in their earthly life, for they inevitably need to act in order to realize what
benefits them and repel what harms them.” And the crucial continuation: “And it
is the Law that distinguishes between the actions that benefit them and the actions
that harm them. This is the justice of God for His creatures, and His light among
His servants; and so people cannot live without a Law through which they discern
what they should do and what they should avoid.”
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 97

It is a statement that Ibn Taymiyya continues to nuance in the ensuing pas-

sages, and the very next breath appears to bring mitigation, restoring the empha-
sis on the complementarity of different epistemic sources: “Part of this [i.e., what
is beneficial or not] people may know through their natural constitution [fiṭra] just
as they know they derive benefit from food and drink, and just as they know the
things which they know necessarily through their natural constitution; another
part of it they know only through a process of proof to which their reason guides
them, while yet another part they only know through being informed by messen-
gers and through the clarification and guidance [these messengers] provide them
with.” The first part named gives us the familiar link between fiṭra and physical
needs, with fiṭra “informing” us of what we need on a physical level. The sec-
ond part refers us to the role of reason in ways that might be heard as evoking
the rationalist epistemology of experience explored earlier. Yet this emphasis on
complementarity is in tension with the neighborhood in which it appears—not
only what precedes it, but also what follows. For yet another breath arrives after it
to restore more decisively the restrictiveness of the first, now bringing an added
emphasis on the otherworldly domain. Speaking of what is agreeable and dis-
agreeable (mulāʾim/munāfir):  “The detailed knowledge of that [maʿrifat dhālika
ʿalā wajh al-tafṣīl], and the knowledge of the end [ghāya] which will be the resulting
consequence of actions—whether bliss or misery in the afterlife—is only known
through revelation. For the details of the other world which the messengers have
informed us about and the details of the laws they commanded us to obey cannot
be known by people through reason.”119
At another location in the Fatāwā, this claim is framed in ways that deliver
with a clean single stroke all the distinctions that Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical remarks
elsewhere occlude:

Just as one is always in need of God to help one … and meet one’s needs,
one is need of Him in order to know what brings one to good [or “what is
in one’s interest”: mā yuṣliḥuhu] … and this is what command and prohi-
bition and the Shari’a are about. Otherwise, should one satisfy the need
one sought after and desired and it was not in one’s interest, one would
be brought to harm, even if one found it pleasurable and beneficial at the
time. For what should be taken into account is the net or preponderant
benefit, and this is something that God has informed His servants about
through His messengers and His books.120

The distinction between what is immediately pleasurable and what is in our long-
term interests appears here in scintillating terms, with the knowledge of the lat-
ter ascribed to revelation as its product. In yet another passage, this evaluative
distinction is coupled even more revealingly to its epistemological counterpart. It
98 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

is “the Law that is the light that distinguishes between what benefits and harms
one [al-sharʿ huwa al-nūr alladhī yubayyinu mā yanfaʿuhu wa-mā yaḍurruhu],” Ibn
Taymiyya writes in a set of concentrated remarks addressing the human need for
the Law. But what is thereby meant is not the Law’s “distinguishing between what
is harmful and beneficial on the level of the senses [al-ḍārr waʾl-nāfiʿ biʾl-ḥiss], as
this is something that even brute animals can do; for donkeys and camels distin-
guish between barley and dirt. Rather [what is meant is] the distinction between
acts that harm their agents in this life and the next [maʿāshihi wa-maʿādihi].” A
long list of actions follows—actions subsumable under the heading of beneficial
actions—which includes faith and the acknowledgment of divine unity, justice
and piety, beneficence and the discharging of obligations (adāʾ al-ḥuqūq), and vir-
tues such as courage, chastity, and honesty. This is a list that is significant in con-
taining many of the actions that recur in Ibn Taymiyya’s targeted remarks about
ethics, as well as in again reducing them to utilitarian terms. Were it not for revela-
tion, Ibn Taymiyya concludes, people would have remained “in the status of cattle
and beasts of the field” (bi-manzilat al-anʿām waʾl-bahāʾim).121
We may recall that it is precisely as a knowledge accessible to the beasts of the
field that Ibn Taymiyya has spoken of moral distinctions elsewhere, notably in
his polemics against monistic Sufis, comparing our grasp of them to our ability
to discern “what’s bitter and brackish and what’s sweet to the taste” in a way that
seems to have little to divide it from the distinction “between barley and dirt” just
referred to. This open contradiction of a claim we will have already recognized
as misleadingly partial is important, on the one hand, in placing on display the
mercurial character of Ibn Taymiyya’s terms. Nāfiʿ is used to refer both to what is
immediately pleasurable—dubbed nāfiʿ biʾl-ḥiss—as well as what is beneficial in a
longer-term sense. Yet more important for our purposes is the crucial fact that it
recasts the distinction between the senses and reason, which elsewhere appears as
the epistemological counterpart of the evaluative distinction between the immedi-
ately pleasurable and the beneficial, as one between the senses and revelation. It is
revelation here, not reason, that tells us what our senses do not.
What the above suggests is that in some of Ibn Taymiyya’s most direct position-
ing remarks about the consequences of actions—consequences, as I  have said,
that constitute the real criterion for their value—his vision of the complementar-
ity of different epistemic resources yields to a way of scripting this balance that
skews it heavily toward one of its terms, assigning to revelation the central role.
If the value of actions lies in their utility, it is the Law that primarily informs us
of this. The directness with which this message is pressed will make us wonder
just how its force should be calibrated against the force of the message held out in
the Radd and the empiricist picture of ethical epistemology it appeared to encour-
age. And the confidence of the former, weighed against the relatively threadbare
development of the latter, may fan our doubts as to how seriously Ibn Taymiyya
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 99

intended to claim this empiricist understanding as his own. This epistemology,

I suggested earlier, harmonizes with several elements of Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical
discussion, including his emphasis on reason and his consequentialist view of
value. Yet it will be noticed that it is at odds with an overwhelming emphasis
on human dependence that stamps Ibn Taymiyya’s work throughout and that is
enshrined as a spiritual imperative that Sufi writers before him described as the
virtue of tawakkul or trust in God.122 It is also at odds with an understanding of the
sheer reach of the Law that Ibn Taymiyya was far from alone within the Islamic
tradition in embracing. The Shari’a makes a comprehensive claim on every aspect
of our daily lives that must in each instance be identified through careful study.
The “straight path” (al-ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm), Ibn Taymiyya writes, “consists in one’s
doing at every moment whatever one has been commanded to do at that particular
moment, whether by way of action or knowledge, and in not doing what one has
been forbidden to do, and this requires that one know and do at every moment in
time what one has been commanded to do at that particular time and what one
has been forbidden.” Having been created in a state of ignorance and injustice,
we need particular knowledge (ʿilm mufaṣṣal) to counteract our ignorance and par-
ticular moderation or justice (ʿadl) to counteract our injustice and govern all our
actions—our sleeping and our waking, our eating and our drinking. And “if God
did not graciously give [in lam yamunna] [human beings] the particular knowledge
they need and the particular justice they need,” they would stray from the straight
path.123
There are real interpretive tensions here, and no less relevant than resolving
them will be to consider what they have to tell us about the nature of Ibn Taymiyya’s
engagement with ethical questions and about the motivations that ground it, an
issue to which I will return in c­ hapter 5. Here I will confine myself to spelling out
one particular insight about the nature of this engagement that is relevant to the
present context. For the construal of the relationship between reason and revela-
tion in terms of the particularization of intuitively available ethical standards—a
construal distinctly invoked in Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks quoted above—was not,
as I have said, a new move in the classical debates, and had been notably made
by Muʿtazilite writers before. Yet this comparative foil now allows us to consider
more clearly why this move should seem to yield a less substantive view of ethical
reason in Ibn Taymiyya’s case than it had done at the hands of the Muʿtazilites.
For the Muʿtazilites, as we saw in ­chapter 1, had stocked reason with a number
of ethical requirements, only some of which had consequentialist form. “Pursue
what is in your welfare” (and avoid what undermines it) was only one of these
requirements, and it took its place next to a number of more substantive require-
ments such as “Do not lie under any circumstances,” “Show gratitude to benefac-
tors,” and “Do not cause harm without just cause.” It is also crucial to record that
the Baṣran Muʿtazilite claim that divinely prescribed norms are instrumental to
100 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

human welfare—thereby forming an instance of luṭf or divine assistance—had

involved a very particular understanding of the means and ends at stake. The end
that revelation was instrumental in achieving was the fulfillment of the moral
requirements available through reason (ʿaqliyyāt or wājibāt wa-qabāʾiḥ ʿaqliyya);
and these were of course requirements that included commitments of a deon-
tological kind. Put more clearly, they were instrumental not merely or primarily
to the good but to the right. This was a relationship of priority implicit in the
Qur’anic statement “Prayer restrains from shameful and unjust deeds” (Q 29:45)
and unpacked more fully by Muʿtazilite thinkers. The fulfillment of what is right
might resolve to utility in the long term, given the deserved consequences one’s
actions attract posthumously, yet the norms at stake as they present themselves to
human reason were not parsed directly in utilitarian terms.
In all these respects, the Muʿtazilites had vested reason with an ethical con-
tent that seems decidedly substantive. In approaching the nature of value, Ibn
Taymiyya, as we saw in the previous chapter, silently elides the deontological com-
ponent of Muʿtazilite ethical theory, even though he continues to refer to deonto-
logical types of actions across his writings. Everything we have heard since will
have served to cement that impression, accentuating Ibn Taymiyya’s preoccupa-
tion with the notions of benefit or utility. Yet of course the imperative “Pursue
what is in your welfare” is far thinner than requirements like “Do not lie” and
“Do not harm without just cause”—a largely formal principle that carries little
action-guiding significance prior to a thicker identification of what counts as one’s
(genuine) welfare and the means through which one’s welfare can be achieved.
In the previous chapter, it may be pointed out, our story had followed Ibn
Taymiyya’s account with a question that bore a chiefly ontological inflection: What
makes actions good? Our conclusion that deontological-sounding types of acts like
justice and injustice ultimately “reduce” to utility was articulated expressly against
this background, as a claim about what makes justice and injustice good. And the
narrower proposal I outlined was that it is the utility of such actions for the social
community—their public interest—that undergirds Ibn Taymiyya’s conversion
of justice and injustice into consequentialist notions. It may thus be wondered
whether this ontological claim should be unquestioningly taken to translate into
epistemological terms and, more precisely, whether it offers us an account of the
descriptions under which ordinary moral agents know such actions to be good.
Just how substantive ethical reason emerges out of Ibn Taymiyya’s hands would
partly depend on the way we answer this question.
Yet it will be remembered that the seams between the ontology of value and the
human perception of value were not hermetically sealed in the previous chapter,
which drew heavily on Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion of the human attraction to ethi-
cally good acts. All I can do here is thus to rehearse the key facts that have already
provided this question with a response. For as we have seen, Ibn Taymiyya indeed
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 101

speaks of people as attracted to justice, beneficence, and truthfulness and repulsed

by their contraries. More often than not, he uses the desiderative idiom of “desire”
or “love” rather than the more cognitive idiom of “knowledge” to speak of the
human relationship to deontological-sounding acts. What we hear is not so much
“human beings know that justice is good” as “human beings desire justice.” Yet
the utilitarian timbre that dominates Ibn Taymiyya’s characterization of the nature
of value and the nature of human motivation means that the most intuitive way of
receiving these statements is by taking them to signify that the description under
which human beings ordinarily desire such actions—the description under which
they consider them good—is precisely qua beneficial.
In the previous chapter, at the same time, I suggested that it is public inter-
est rather than individual self-interest that Ibn Taymiyya isolates as the ultimate
foundation of ethical norms. One of the most relevant questions to raise here,
thus, might be just how that description should be taken to figure within the ordi-
nary epistemic and motivational states of human beings. Taken as an object of
motivation, it has often been queried whether what we know about the natural
self-concern of human beings makes it plausible to envisage that the common
good could figure among their motivating drives. “Experience,” as Hume put it,
“sufficiently proves, that men, in the ordinary conduct of life, look not so far as
the public interest, when they pay their creditors, perform their promises, and
abstain from theft, and robbery, and injustice of every kind. That is a motive too
remote and too sublime to affect the generality of mankind” (T 481). Yet Hume
himself, like other thinkers dissatisfied with deontological approaches to morality,
would consider a broader concern with the good of others—an ability to command
a more general viewpoint constituted by sympathy with the “good of mankind”
and the “interest of society” (T 578–79)—the truest paradigm of the moral point
of view.
Ibn Taymiyya, I noted in c­ hapter 1, has little to say about how the motivational
gap between self-interest and public interest might be bridged. Yet what is strik-
ing is that he issues unambiguous statements to the effect that public interest not
only makes justice good but forms the description under which it is known to be
such. No clearer statement of this kind can be found than the one appearing in
the stage-setting exposition of Ibn Taymiyya’s via media that opened the previous
chapter. Outlining his threefold division of acts, Ibn Taymiyya had begun with the
one that represented his most significant ethical positioning, namely “the case
in which an act contains benefit or harm, [and it would do so] even if the Law
had not come to report that,” and he had significantly continued, “the way it is
known that justice serves the good of the world [maṣlaḥat al-ʿālam] and injustice
tends to its harm.” 124 Yet this remarkable claim, it will be instantly noticed, is far
from transparent. Digging beneath the ambiguous passivity of Ibn Taymiyya’s “it
is known,” we would like to ask more openly: Exactly who is the grammatical
102 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

subject implied here? Ibn Taymiyya nowhere seems to clarify how that statement
should be received. Left with such meager interpretive aids, the most natural way
of interpreting it will be by connecting it to the analysis offered in the previous
chapter, where we had entertained a similar question about how the subject of
our conversation should be identified—and more specifically, how the “we” that
derives benefit from ethical norms should be construed. One of the most compel-
ling ways of construing this, I had suggested, is not as a first-person singular but
as the first-person plural of the community. It is on the same level that the subject
of Ibn Taymiyya’s present epistemic statement invites us to parse it. The commu-
nal “we” who knows injustice is bad is the same communal “we” whose welfare
is impaired by it.
Taken together, the above suggests that Ibn Taymiyya’s conception of ethical
reason is far thinner than that of his Muʿtazilite predecessors whose position his
own ostensibly resembles. Yet the last observation also helps bring another point
more clearly into the open. For if the “we” buried in Ibn Taymiyya’s passive “it is
known” is not the first-person singular, what this calls attention to is just how little
we seem to hear about the moral consciousness of the ordinary human agent in
Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical discussions and how overall grainy he leaves our picture of
the processes of ethical reasoning.
The comparative robustness of the picture emerging from Muʿtazilite writings
had to do, on the one hand, with the far more detailed table of contents they had
provided in specifying the notion of moral reason. Yet it had then been reinforced
in a multiplicity of other ways. In the intramural debates between Baṣran and
Baghdādī Muʿtazilites, for example, each side made substantive appeals to what
we would nowadays call “moral intuitions.” In arguing against the Baghdādī view
that God is obliged to optimize human welfare in the mundane realm (wujūb
al-aṣlaḥ fiʾl-dunyā), the Baṣrans drew attention to what this moral principle would
entail if it were brought to bear on ordinary human life: that a poor man would
be entitled to avail himself of a rich man’s property without the latter’s permis-
sion, or that we would all be under an unlimited obligation to help the needy. And
their case would rest on the claim that this conclusion conflicts with our ordinary
moral intuitions about what is right or morally required of us. The strategy was a
two-way street, and thus we also see Baghdādīs arguing for their position on the
basis of the contrary intuition, that we would morally disapprove of an extremely
wealthy person (not unlike God, for that matter) who sees another in dire need
and begrudges him the simple means of stilling his hunger or thirst.125
The fact that these intuitions might internally conflict, as intuitions after all
do—or indeed that this appeal to moral intuitions was motivated by a theological
agenda, reflecting the distinctive Muʿtazilite understanding that human beings
and God share a single set of ethical standards—is immaterial to the point. The
Muʿtazilites, similarly, had elaborated at some length on the different senses in
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 103

which one might speak of ethical knowledge as being rationally “available” to

people. For to say that ethical norms are known by reason is not to say that the
value of actions is always known immediately and that ethical judgment may not
require an achievement. People will often need to take an extra step of reflection in
determining the value of particular actions. This includes not merely the kind of
reflection indicated earlier, using the distinction between “general” and “particu-
lar” judgments (I know injustice is bad, but do I know this is an instance of injus-
tice?), but also a kind of reflection that Ibn Mattawayh designates in particularly
pregnant terms as the “method of analogy” (ṭarīqat al-qiyās). We may thus know
the moral judgment attracted by one type of act, for example lying that brings no
benefit, but we may then require an extra cognitive move in order to transfer its
qualification to a subsidiary case (farʿ) in which lying does bring some benefit by
recognizing that the cause (ʿilla) of the qualification has remained the same.126
The comparative robustness of ethical reason as portrayed by Muʿtazilite writ-
ers had also been reinforced by the programmatic interest shown within certain
Muʿtazilite works in marking the boundaries between where our rational ethical
knowledge ends and the ethical knowledge provided by the Law begins.127
I speak of a “comparative” robustness because, as I have pointed out elsewhere,
the ethical theories of the Muʿtazilites always need to be read against the theo-
logical agenda that motivates them—above all, to affirm that God is just in all
He does—and they do not float free from this agenda. Despite Ibn Mattawayh’s
intriguing invocation of the notion of “analogy,” which in the domain of Islamic
law that forms its foremost habitat was a generative tool for new evaluative deci-
sions, reason is not approached as an action-guiding resource that indeed enjoys
such independent and substantive status it might allow us (in Schneewind’s
expression) to “guide our own affairs.” As already mentioned, there were hardly
any theologians who would have wished to advocate such a self-sufficient role,
rendering revealed guidance otiose, though it is not unimportant to record that
Muʿtazilites like Ibn Mattawayh had avowed in principle that prophetic guidance
might, under certain circumstances, be otiose and the ethical truths known by
reason sufficient for guidance.128
It is an avowal that, even taken as a purely theoretical possibility, it is hard to
envisage Ibn Taymiyya offering; in talking about ethics, he never quite imagines
revelation away. And even if “robustness” is here a matter of degree, it is clear that,
set against the Muʿtazilite example, Ibn Taymiyya’s articulation of a claim that
seems to share in the Muʿtazilite emphasis on reason as a source of ethical norms
has none of the depth and detail typifying the Muʿtazilites’ reflections. The ordi-
nary moral subject uninformed by religious teachings might always have been a
semifictional figure in theological debates about value. In Ibn Taymiyya’s writings
he is less than a ghost. I noted above that Ibn Taymiyya’s discussions of ethical
epistemology confront the reader with important tensions, demanding a decision,
104 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

notably, about how to balance Ibn Taymiyya’s allusive interest in an empiricist

epistemology against his powerful emphasis on revelation as an epistemic source
for the utility of actions. No less important than these tensions are the features of
Ibn Taymiyya’s writing they call attention to, above all the thinness and fragmen-
tariness of his discussions of ethical epistemology and the rudimentary character-
ization of moral awareness they hold up. Ethical reason, I have suggested, looks
back at us from Ibn Taymiyya’s writings in gossamer terms. Yet this reflects not
merely the content of Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks about ethics, but also their form.
The comparison just struck between Ibn Taymiyya and the Muʿtazilites will
seem to call for something further. For having invoked the motivations that under-
lie the ethical theories developed by Muʿtazilite writers, this will naturally invite
a question about Ibn Taymiyya’s motivations in advancing his own—motivations
that may provide a helpful interpretive filter for approaching both the content and
the form of his engagement. One description of these motivations has already
come to the fore: Ibn Taymiyya’s concern to press a message of harmony between
reason (or nature) and the divine Law. There is more to be said about this mes-
sage, and more specifically about the conception of God to which it is tied. We will
be returning to this question in ­chapter 5 once Ibn Taymiyya’s broader theological
vision has stepped into view.

Having focused on the question “What makes actions good?” in ­chapter 1, my

main focus in this chapter was on the question “How do we know what actions
are good?” Ibn Taymiyya claimed we know ethical norms by reason. He also, more
distinctively, asserted we know these by our natural constitution or fiṭra. My aim
was to clarify these two claims, shedding light on Ibn Taymiyya’s positive ethical
epistemology and situating it within its context, particularly his engagement of
Avicenna in the Radd. We have seen that isolating Ibn Taymiyya’s positive epis-
temology is no mean task, and is hampered by the nature of the textual bases he
makes available to it. To the extent that we can prise out his epistemological view
from its dialectical environment, we can say that he calls attention to empirical
reasoning as an important paradigm for our knowledge of the long-term conse-
quences of actions that form the main criterion for evaluating them. Yet elsewhere
he brings this epistemology into question by delivering a vigorous emphasis on
the Law as a source of this knowledge. Ethical reason, overall, is limned in very
thin terms within Ibn Taymiyya’s work. Human nature, as he deploys it in his
ethical discussions, is conceptualized chiefly as a principle of desire. And to the
extent that it ranges over natural desires that require further normative ordering,
nature cannot be understood to carry the privilege or positive valence it prima
facie appears to.
This is not the last word we have had on Ibn Taymiyya’s evaluative epistemol-
ogy. We will be revisiting it from another direction in c­ hapter 5, when we turn
 Ethical Knowledge: Self-guidance and Revealed Law 105

to consider whether the epistemological views he articulates in the legal context

have something new to contribute to our picture. But here there is a different
part of the story we are pursuing that must more immediately claim our atten-
tion. One of my objectives in the foregoing was to elicit Ibn Taymiyya’s positive
views while situating them against their topography—the composite topogra-
phy constituted both by kalām debates about ethics and by the philosophical
writings of Avicenna which I  suggested provided a formative context for Ibn
Taymiyya’s elaboration of some of his ethical views. In situating Ibn Taymiyya
against the kalām debates, several of my comparative juxtapositions focused on
the Muʿtazilites, whose emphasis on reason Ibn Taymiyya would most readily
seem to be reprising. It is high time for the fuller topography to step into the
light. For the story of the Radd itself, as I have said, needs to be told twice to
account for the double life that the ideas it targets would lead in Avicenna’s
own writings and in those of his Ashʿarite readers. It is this richer telling of
the story, as I hope to show, that we must look to for a deeper understanding
of the formative context of Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical views. It is an understanding
that may lead us to reappraise the significance and indeed the accomplishment
of Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical approach, revealing his multiple affinities with—and
plural debts to—Ashʿarite thought, including a crucial debt for the very claim of
reason and the very arrogation of “nature” as a vocabulary for his ethical stance.
Gaining these insights, however, will once again require working through cer-
tain misleading first impressions, as it will require becoming clearer on the
contours of Ashʿarite ethical thought. To this task I turn.
 3

Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its

Ashʿarite Antecedents

Looking over Ibn Taymiyya’s intellectual trajectory, it would not take much to
conclude that Ibn Taymiyya and the Ashʿarites had never enjoyed an easy peace.
It had been the Ashʿarites, as we know, that had been responsible for one of his
earliest public trials after the publication of his al-ʿAqīda al-Ḥamawiyya, adding a
new episode to an old history of hostile relations between Ashʿarite and Ḥanbalite
thinkers and launching Ibn Taymiyya on a career of high-pitched polemical con-
frontations with Ashʿarism waged with both word and pen. Many of Ibn Taymiyya’s
best-known works are directed against targets that are either exclusively composed
of Ashʿarites or include Ashʿarites as prominent mouthpieces. His famed Darʾ
taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql waʾl-naql is pitted against a view of the relationship between rea-
son and revelation notably developed by Ashʿarite theologians. His Bayān talbīs
al-jahmiyya attacks a view of the divine attributes pressed by Ashʿarite theologians,
and most particularly by al-Rāzī. His al-Radd ʿalaʾl-manṭiqiyyīn finds its stimulus
in the insidious infiltration of logic into the religious sciences, which Ashʿarite
thinkers like al-Ghazālī had spearheaded, and in his discussion of ethical proposi-
tions, it is characteristically an Ashʿarite thinker, al-Rāzī, that Ibn Taymiyya con-
fronts along with Avicenna.
There is much truth in this appearance of conflict, and there is much in the
Ashʿarite transactions with reason in theological matters that Ibn Taymiyya would
trenchantly and unambiguously oppose. Yet turning to the topic of ethics, we will
find that the relationship between Ibn Taymiyya and the Ashʿarites cannot be writ-
ten in such straightforwardly conflictual terms. As with Ibn Taymiyya’s engage-
ment with the philosophers, which gave rise to al-Dhahabī ’s accusation that Ibn
Taymiyya “repeatedly swallowed the poison of the philosophers and their works,”
in engaging the Ashʿarites what Ibn Taymiyya ingested turns out to have been
greater than what he expelled. This is an insight, however, to be gained by working
 Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its Ashʿarite Antecedents 107

through several appearances that train the spotlight more sharply on what divides
Ibn Taymiyya from the Ashʿarites than what unites them.
In this chapter my aim will be to take the first major step in limning the relation-
ship between Ibn Taymiyya and the Ashʿarites on ethical questions. My emphasis
will fall on key convergences that relate to the way these thinkers approach the
nature of ethical value and the nature of human beings’ epistemic access to it.
Having documented what unites these viewpoints, it will then be the task of the
next chapter to locate Ibn Taymiyya even more firmly within his theological topog-
raphy by documenting what divides them and what constitutes the heart of Ibn
Taymiyya’s more distinctive contribution.

Schematizing Ashʿarite Ethics: Reason, Natural

Desire, Social Convention
It is an emphasis on what divides that emerged strongly in the stage-setting expo-
sition of Ibn Taymiyya’s via media considered in the first chapter, whose themes
we are far from having depleted. Ibn Taymiyya had significantly objected to the
Ashʿarites for denying that “what is right [maʿrūf] is … right in itself [fī nafsihi]”
and “what is wrong [munkar] in itself wrong” and that actions have objective quali-
ties that provide grounds for God’s command. He had remonstrated with them for
making out ethical qualities to be a mere matter of “relation and association [nisba
wa-iḍāfa]” and for not acknowledging any other meaning to such qualities besides
“that which agrees with people’s appetites [mā yulāʾīmu al-ṭibāʿ].”1
Yet looking back over the ground we have covered in the previous chapters, it
will not be difficult now to pick out several features of Ibn Taymiyya’s perspec-
tive that throw unmistakable bridges into the terrain typical of Ashʿarite ethi-
cal thought. Ibn Taymiyya’s sidelining of the deontological perspective was the
first important bridge. This was an aspect of Muʿtazilite ethics that Ashʿarite
writers had also rejected in claiming, as we heard from al-Ghazālī, that evalua-
tive judgments reflect the subjective desires of human agents. They had paired
this to an egoistic view of human nature epitomized in al-Ghazālī ’s words in the
Mustaṣfā: “Every person is formed by nature to love himself.” These were words
Ibn Taymiyya at first appeared to be exposing to vertical bouleversement with his
counterclaim in the Radd: “People are naturally formed to love justice and those
party to it.” Yet his view turned out to be merely a new investiture of al-Ghazālī ’s
under a different guise, and it was al-Ghazālī whom he elsewhere directly echoed.
For the Ashʿarites, as for Ibn Taymiyya, this was naturally paired with the claim
that God is not subject to the ethical standards of human behavior.
This last claim, as we will recall from c­ hapter 1, was one of the key objections
Ibn Taymiyya had brought against Muʿtazilite ethics. We may notice that the
108 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

other objections on his list had also met with vocal endorsement among Ashʿarite
authors. The Ashʿarites had also claimed that God determines human actions.
And they had similarly made the divine punishment of actions conditional on
the arrival of revelation—God’s word, after all, created the relationship between
actions and their otherworldly consequences—rejecting the notion of desert that
the Muʿtazilites had made the cornerstone of their account of this relationship.
The notion of desert is likewise absent from Ibn Taymiyya’s thinking, an absence
that reflects a deliberate act of exclusion, as we will see more fully in ­chapter 4. No
less relevant, Ibn Taymiyya’s privileging of revelation as a source of our knowledge
of the consequences (and thus the overall utility) of actions directly echoes a view
adopted by Ashʿarite theologians. For having asserted that revelation institutes the
consequences of actions, the Ashʿarites had asserted the natural corollary, namely
that these consequences are epistemically accessible to people only by revelation.
As al-Ghazālī had pithily written in al-Iqtiṣād fiʾl-iʿtiqād: “The one who creates
obligation is God, the one who informs is the prophet [al-mūjib huwa Allāh taʿālā,
al-mukhbir huwa al-rasūl].”2 God makes actions obligatory or prohibited by attach-
ing reward or punishment to actions as their consequences; it then falls to the
prophets to inform us of this.
In this light, Ibn Taymiyya’s advertised objections to Ashʿarite ethics as
expressed in the stage-setting passage of c­ hapter 1 and as widely rehearsed else-
where may in fact strike us as deeply perplexing.3 For Ibn Taymiyya himself has
referred ethical value to human desires and to what is “agreeable” to human
beings. “Agreeability”—the very term he uses in dissociating himself from the
Ashʿarite view that value is merely a matter of what “agrees with people’s appe-
tites” (mā yulāʾimu al-ṭibāʿ)—appears in several of his own remarks about value,
including a seminal passage of the Radd we have already heard: “The foundations
of [ethical] judgments are necessarily known by people, for they are formed by
nature to love what is agreeable to them and to hate what harms them [al-nufūs …
mafṭūra ʿalā ḥubb mā yulāʾimuhā wa-bughḍ mā yaḍurruhā], and what is signified by
the term ‘good’ is what is agreeable to them and by ‘bad’ what harms them. So if
they are formed by nature to love the one [mafṭūra ʿalā ḥubb] and to hate the other
… it is evident that people know these widespread propositions by their inborn
nature [bi-fiṭarihim].”4 This passage will immediately put us in mind of the kind of
analysis that al-Ghazālī had put forward in his Mustaṣfā in discussing the meaning
of moral terms. Focusing on the term “good” (ḥasan), as we have seen, al-Ghazālī
had proposed a naturalistic account of ordinary usage of this term, arguing that
what we call “good” is whatever agrees with our purposes (mā yuwāfiqu gharaḍ
al-fāʿil).5 These self-interested purposes are grounded in our passionate or appeti-
tive nature (ṭabʿ) and reveal evaluative terms to be fundamentally relative (iḍāfī)
in nature. Every agent calls “good” whatever agrees with his purposes, and his
purposes may not agree with another’s; indeed they will often conflict. Given these
 Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its Ashʿarite Antecedents 109

dramatic resemblances, one must wonder how Ibn Taymiyya could possibly have
meant to distinguish his ethical view from the one Ashʿarites like al-Ghazālī had
espoused. No less crucially, one must wonder how Ibn Taymiyya could have taken
his view to be capable of securing the kind of ethical objectivism he made central
to his quarrel with the Ashʿarites. There must be something in the actions them-
selves (fī nafs al-amr) that makes them good, we heard. Yet what is that something
if all there is to the value of actions is “what is agreeable”?
Juxtaposing Ibn Taymiyya’s words to al-Ghazālī ’s, our eye will naturally first
be caught by the similarities that connect them. A closer reading, however, may
also call attention to certain palpable differences between the ways they couch
their respective views—differences that may hold critical clues for answering such
questions and that it is therefore worth bringing out. For the accent on desire (what
a person “loves,” in Ibn Taymiyya’s idiom; what an agent takes as his “purpose,”
in al-Ghazālī ’s) may be shared, as may some notion of “agreeability” (whether
mulāʾama or muwāfaqa). Yet is there nothing to be made of the fact that al-Ghazālī
speaks of “purpose” where Ibn Taymiyya—both here and even more clearly else-
where—speaks of the pair “benefit” and “harm”? “What I want” as against “what is
good for me” or what in fact benefits me and serves my interests. We may put this
difference most relevantly by using a notion not unlike that of “objectivity” we just
queried. Ibn Taymiyya is referring evaluative concepts to the desire individuals
have for their real welfare; al-Ghazālī is referring them to the contingent desires
individuals happen to have for one thing or another—desires that may or may
not serve their real welfare. What I “subjectively” consider good may not always
coincide with what is “objectively” good for me. Having marked this distinction,
we might connect it to another, this time more interestingly relating to the notion
of “nature” with which each desire is associated. For where al-Ghazālī speaks of
ṭabʿ, Ibn Taymiyya speaks of fiṭra. Al-Ghazālī connects the term ṭabʿ to the egois-
tic desires of particular individuals which he makes foundational to our ordinary
usage of “good” and “bad.” Ibn Taymiyya, by contrast, has connected the term fiṭra
to natural (paradigmatically physical) desires that are universal to human beings
and to a desire for objective good. In this respect, human nature as fiṭra would
seem capable of serving as a foundation for ethical norms in a way that human
nature as ṭabʿ could not. Taken as the seat of the egoistic desires of individuals,
ṭabʿ supports a merely relative usage of the term “good.” Fiṭra, by contrast, can
serve as a basis of a more objective usage.
These differences in turn help propel to the foreground something else that
might have otherwise passed unnoticed, namely the diverging ways al-Ghazālī
and Ibn Taymiyya invite us to construe the nature of their accounts. Al-Ghazālī
highlights the fact that this is what people call “good”; he emphasizes what people
say, and in doing so emphasizes the subjectivity and fallibility of such “sayings”
and “callings.” Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks are not free from such emphasis: al-murād
110 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

bi-qawlinā (“what is signified by the term”), he says here; al-nāsa idhā qālu …
yaʿnūna (“when people say … they mean”), he captions his concern elsewhere.6
Yet his voice falls with a different accent, most visible in his concluding state-
ment, which speaks not of “calling” or of “saying” but of knowing: “People know
these judgments by their inborn nature.” Not linguistics, but epistemology. Ibn
Taymiyya’s parsing thus appears objectivist twice over, in focusing on what really
benefits or harms us and on what we know is good and bad—thus what is really
good and bad. Emerging from his pen, the last statement seems less like the kind
of statement one might have encountered in the work of a lexicographer docu-
menting with descriptive neutrality the usage of language and more like what we
might find in the work of a moralist, setting out in clear normative tones what is or
is not right and wrong. “The goodness and badness of human actions is a matter of
the benefit and harm acts involve,” we heard earlier. And again: “The only kind of
good that exists is in the sense of what is agreeable, and the only kind of bad that
exists is in the sense of what is disagreeable.”7
This way of indexing the differences between Ibn Taymiyya’s view and the view
expressed by al-Ghazālī will seem particularly interesting, and all the more com-
pelling, for allocating a central place to the notion of fiṭra that we have recognized
as a salient element of Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical viewpoint and indeed of his theologi-
cal vision as a whole. Setting out the context of Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion in the
Radd and his appeal to fiṭra as a foundation of ethical judgments, we earlier saw
that he had pitted himself against a set of ideas that had found their home in the
writings of Avicenna. Yet what is now important to bring out is that this is a home
that had brought the Ashʿarites and Avicenna under the same roof, uniting them
in a common ethical perspective.
The reasons why Ashʿarite thinkers came to find in Avicenna’s approach to
ethical judgments a particularly fertile resource for bolstering their own posi-
tion are not hard to come by. Avicenna’s discussion, we may recall, had found
its purchase in the basic contention that not everything we consider self-evident
may in fact constitute a primary rational truth. We may think we know certain
truths, but we may be mistaken. Yet it was just such a claim of unassailable
self-evidence that had typified the Muʿtazilite ethical viewpoint, set down as
a nonnegotiable premise that Muʿtazilites stubbornly barricaded themselves
behind and refused to converse with those who denied it. Everyone knows ethi-
cal truths; you do too—all you need to do is look inside you. A simple turn
inward (al-rujūʿ ilaʾl-nafs), as ʿAbd al-Jabbār had said, was all that was needed
to set the facts straight on certain questions, including questions about moral
knowledge.8 The turn inward to reason, as we also saw in the previous chapter,
was coupled to an outward turn to the empirical world to harvest examples of
ordinary people acting in disinterested ways that reflect the influence of purely
ethical principles. In trying to secure the purest possible conditions for such
 Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its Ashʿarite Antecedents 111

case studies, this empirical turn outward, it is true, sometimes appeared to inch
closer to something rather less real than ideal. Mānkdīm would thus use the
telltale language of a “hypothesis” in rehearsing the point in his own voice: “We
are hypothesizing” (or stipulating: nafriḍu al-kalām) that the person in question
is hard-hearted, indifferent to praise or blame (or acting on a desert island where
social praise cannot reach him), an unbeliever who does not believe in posthu-
mous reward or punishment.9
Avicenna’s discussion of ethical judgments would upstage the real-yet-ideal
hypothesis of the Muʿtazilites by a more radical thought experiment designed to
transport one to a perspective not merely materially outside the reach of human
society, but intellectually prior to its epistemic influence. Seen from this perspec-
tive, the phenomenal surface of our ordinary moral consciousness can be plowed
up to reveal our sense of self-evidence as the product of a longer genealogy built
on the bedrock of self-interested desire as it makes its way upward through the
social world. You think you know objective ethical truths, but you are mistaken.
What you “know” are merely conventional ideas that have been etched into you
in the social world that shaped you by harnessing your natural desires. Avicenna’s
account would thus allow the Ashʿarites to grant the Muʿtazilites their precious
claims while emptying them of their significance, boring beneath them to displace
the notion of “reason” no less than the notion of “disinterested action,” and to
replace them with a typically Ashʿarite view of desire and self-interested action as
the heart of the ethical life.
The notion of a social genealogy had not been wholly absent from the brew
of Ashʿarite theological ideas even prior to the more forceful engagement of
Avicenna’s philosophical resources from al-Ghazālī ’s time onward. Al-Ghazālī,
certainly, was far from the first to propose an egoistic deconstruction of disinter-
ested motivation. This was a proposal already at work in the thinking of earlier
Ashʿarites, as attested by al-Juwaynī ’s (d. 1085) dense reference to people’s “natu-
ral inclination to pleasures and their aversion to pains [mayl al-ṭibāʿ ilaʾl-ladhdhāt
wa-nufūrihā ʿan al-ālām]” in this context, and even earlier by the remark of
al-Ashʿarī relayed by Ibn Fūrak (d. 1015): “For both good and bad, in the domain of
the present world, the same thing holds: bad acts are avoided due to the deficiency
and harm that redounds to one who commits them, and good and wise acts are
chosen due to the benefit and perfection10 that redounds to the one who performs
them.”11 The pain and pleasure or benefit and harm at stake had often in turn been-
concretized in terms of the praise and blame attracted by actions. Yet to focus on
praise is immediately to invite attention to the identity of those directing praise to
certain actions over others. It is also to invite attention to the formative processes
that effect the link between “morally good” actions and egoistic drives—and more
specifically to the processes of education or habituation through which practices
of praise cement that link.
112 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

The notion of habituation, and the implicit reference to the social community
as its administrator, had already glimmered into the open in the works of earlier
Ashʿarites, as in al-Juwaynī ’s anticipatory remarks in the Niẓāmiyya. Referring
to people’s drive toward noble behavior, he had stated that this “is caused by the
strong influence praise usually exerts; for if one keeps at something and grows
accustomed to it [yataʿawwaduhu], there comes a point where it becomes difficult
for him to oppose it.”12 Yet it is a generation later, with al-Ghazālī, that it stands out
more distinctly, in ways that betray the influence of Avicenna more clearly and also
lay its deconstructive potential plain. The connection between ethical actions and
praise, al-Ghazālī clarifies, cannot be done away with merely by temporarily remov-
ing ourselves from the physical reach of society, as the Muʿtazilites had fancied in
postulating their semifictional “moral informants.” Even if in a given instance an
action is unlikely to be praised in fact, this connection is indelibly imprinted within
us. “For one sees praise attaching to [maqrūn bi] this form [i.e., the action] and one
supposes that praise attaches to it under all circumstances alike,” just as when a
person of healthy constitution (ṭabʿ salīm) who has been bitten by a snake sees a
mottled rope and flinches from it in fear. And “what is conjoined to the pleasurable
is pleasurable, and what is conjoined to the repugnant is repugnant.”13 Al-Ghazālī
does not explicitly stress the notion of education or the role of the social environ-
ment in effecting this connection here, yet it must clearly be presupposed. As this
remark suggests, it is our passionate nature or ṭabʿ—that aspect of ourselves that
experiences pleasure and pain, desire and fear, and is capable of learning from
them—that gives us our educability and also the dark core of our irrationality, a
core that must therefore belong equally to our ethical responses.14
This is the genealogy that could be used to explain how universal moral judg-
ments like “lying is bad” come to acquire the absolute airs that the Muʿtazilites
had ascribed to them. For there are certainly cases, as al-Ghazālī writes in the
Mustaṣfā, where lying is the right course of action, for example when it is a matter
of saving a prophet’s life. Yet in those cases, “one finds oneself shrinking from it,
given how long he has been brought up thinking that this is bad. For it has been
inculcated in him ever since he was a child, by way of disciplining and instruc-
tion [al-taʾdīb waʾl-irshād], that lying is bad and nobody should engage in it …
and when one hears something at a young age, you might as well be carving it
into stone.”15 Avicenna’s thought experiment, in which the claim that ethical judg-
ments are produced by social enculturation achieved a potent expression, would
be reprised by al-Ghazālī directly in his discussion of widely accepted proposi-
tions in Miʿyār al-ʿilm fī fann al-manṭiq, as also in the logical introduction to the
Mustaṣfā, and its motifs would then recur in his account of the ethical question of
the “determination of good and bad.”16
Many Ashʿarites after him would follow his example, injecting Avicenna’s
ideas forcefully into the bloodstream of Ashʿarite polemics against Muʿtazilite
 Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its Ashʿarite Antecedents 113

moral rationalism and developing them in ever-finer nuance. The key idea that
society teaches us ethical standards, crisply set out in al-Ghazālī ’s last statement,
would thus be reformulated by other Ashʿarites more pointedly as a claim that
society produces these standards. Writing in his Nihāyat al-iqdām fī ʿilm al-kalām,
al-Shahrastānī (d. 1153) would deny, in true Ashʿarite style, that good and bad con-
stitute intrinsic qualities of acts, and would then offer the following alternative
construal. Since these qualities have no real epistemic foundation, they must
instead be founded on “people’s custom [ʿādāt al-nās] of calling what harms them
bad and what benefits them good. For our part we do not deny these kinds of des-
ignations, but they vary from one people to another depending on their custom,
they vary from place to place and from time to time … and anything that varies
depending on these [kinds of ] relations and parameters [al-nisab waʾl-iḍāfāt] has
no intrinsic reality of its own [ḥaqīqa … fiʾl-dhāt].”17
This statement is significant not only in offering an illustration of the notion
of custom or convention as Ashʿarite writers would deploy it but also in reveal-
ing the idea that would be taken as its logical adjunct, namely the relativity
and variability of moral norms. In this respect, this understanding would align
itself with a motif that formed one of the defining features of the Ashʿarite
approach. For the relativity of norms generated by social means, and their
variability from one social milieu to another, mirrors the relativity of norms
founded on self-interest and their variability from person to person. Al-Ghazālī
had emphasized the latter point in the Mustaṣfā when speaking of the relative
(iḍāfī) meaning of moral terms: people call things “good” when they agree with
their personal purposes, and one man’s purposes are not another’s. To this
view, al-Shahrastānī ’s claim now appears as the precise counterpart, yet with
a telling shift from the individual to the community. Different societies call
acts “good” when they benefit them, and what one society thinks beneficial and
harmful may not be shared by another. Importantly, thus, moral norms may be
explained by reference to the social whole taken as a suprapersonal unit with
interests that can be harmed or served.
All that is left is to add the name of al-Rāzī to the list of Ashʿarites imbibing
this particular element of Avicenna’s resources. It is indeed, as already mentioned,
in his capacity as commentator to the relevant passage of Avicenna’s Ishārāt that
al-Rāzī appears as one of Ibn Taymiyya’s chief interlocutors in that location of his
Radd that provides the stage for a concerted treatment of ethical ideas. The cradle
out of which Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical deployment of fiṭra emerges, thus, is one in
which his opposition to Ashʿarism seems to be directly flagged. If in fact one was
looking for a formulation of the precise statement that Ibn Taymiyya’s entire dis-
cussion in the Radd would seek to overturn, one need not look beyond al-Ghazālī ’s
discussion of widely accepted propositions in his Mustaṣfā. “The original nature,”
he had written about moral propositions, “does not entail them [al-fiṭra al-ūlā lā
114 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

taqḍī bihā].”18 Indeed it does, Ibn Taymiyya would counter. Given all the above, it
would be only natural to conclude that the notion of fiṭra has a pivotal role to play in
guarding the borders between Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical viewpoint and the Ashʿarites’.
The opposition seems simple and profound. The Ashʿarites had claimed ethical
norms are mere matters of convention; Ibn Taymiyya claimed they have their basis
in nature.
Yet this way of limning the relationship between Ibn Taymiyya and the
Ashʿarites, as I  hope to show, is not as straightforward as it appears, and the
self-evidence it carries belies some deeper surprises that tell a rather different
story about this relationship once probed more fully. To piece this story together,
however, we need to bring more of the landscape of Ashʿarite ethical thought
into view. And this means, among other things, training a sharper light on
some of the central distinctions drawn above in juxtaposing Ibn Taymiyya and
al-Ghazālī—between epistemology and linguistics, or the merely descriptive and
normative perspective, or again between subjective and objective notions of the
good—to ascertain their significance and place in the Ashʿarite understanding.
It is al-Ghazālī who once again offers us the edge of the wedge we need for
turning to the first distinction, to assess the importance of the distance between
“calling” and “knowing,” or the “descriptive” and the “normative.” And he does so
by voicing a view to which he stands not as architect but simply as representative
exponent. “Whoever seeks for meanings through words, loses his way and is led
to ruin,” al-Ghazālī writes in his Mustaṣfā; one should rather “first establish the
meanings in one’s mind” and language will follow. As long as we agree on the
meaning, he continues, there is no need to quarrel about the words (lā mushāḥḥa
fiʾl-alfāẓ baʿda maʿrifat al-maʿānī).19 In stating this, al-Ghazālī would be expressing
a view about the relationship of mind and language that many of his fellow theolo-
gians would have recognized and endorsed. Language follows the mind; we apply
words to realities after we have grasped their intelligible characteristics through
the mind. In this respect, to frame something as a demand of our language is
already to tie it umbilically to the demands of our thought. A gap between what is
said and what is thought, however, would seem to arise to the extent that it would
then be a further step to recognize “what is thought” as a product of reason, or
indeed, as its demand. To put it in al-Ghazālī ’s language: it might be questioned
whether, having discovered that people call something good when it agrees with
their purposes, they are right to do so, so that this claim can be stated positively
in one’s own voice, not merely as a statement of semantics, but as an evaluative
or normative claim.
I talk about a claim of “semantics” here, taking my cue from the terms of
al-Ghazālī ’s and his fellow-Ashʿarites’ discussions. Al-Ghazālī in the Mustaṣfā
indicatively parses his question as one about the “meaning of good and bad”
(maʿnā al-ḥusn waʾl-qubḥ). But the central focus of his discussion, in fact, seems
 Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its Ashʿarite Antecedents 115

to be less a question about what terms like “good” or “bad” mean than a question
about what kinds of things “good” and “bad” are applied to—what kinds of things
are therefore thought to make actions good or bad. Having noted this ambigu-
ity (an ambiguity reflected, as we saw earlier, in Ibn Taymiyya’s own remarks), it
becomes easier to see why it would not have taken much for the door of semantics
to open out to a more positive engagement of these evaluative judgments, and
indeed to a more normative appropriation of them.
In the works of earlier Ashʿarites, the normative cadence does not yet seem to
have emerged strongly, though streaks of it already appear in Ibn Fūrak’s account
of al-Ashʿarī ’s views.20 The same might be said of al-Bāqillānī (d. 1013), one of
the earliest Ashʿarites to relate evaluative notions to human desires, who does
not seem to have transcended the neutral tones of a semantic claim when, in
his legal work al-Taqrīb waʾl-irshād, he accepted the definition of good and bad in
terms of “what people’s natures [ṭibāʿ] incline to and what attracts and repels their
souls through instinctual dispositions [gharīzat al-jibillāt]—whether pleasures …
or pains and different kinds of harm.”21 Yet if this cadence is not fully audible in
al-Bāqillānī, it can be heard distinctly in the tones of his successor, al-Juwaynī,
who would articulate a view fated to percolate widely through the writings of the
later Ashʿarite school. The new tones are perceptible still modestly in his theologi-
cal work Kitāb al-Irshād; they assert themselves more openly in his late al-ʿAqīda
al-Niẓāmiyya; but it is in his work of legal theory, al-Burhān fī uṣūl al-fiqh, that this
view unveils itself with the greatest clarity.
Resuming the traditional debate about the value of actions, al-Juwaynī
announces his own preference for the following position as the one closest to the
truth: “We do not deny that reason demands [al-ʿuqūl taqtaḍī] from its bearer to
steer clear from dangers and hasten toward possible benefits [ijtināb al-mahālik
wa-ibtidār al-manāfiʿ]… . To deny this would be to part ways with the deliverances
of reason [al-maʿqūl].” This, al-Juwaynī clarifies, only “concerns the domain of
human beings”—drawing a distinction between the application of evaluative stan-
dards to God and to human beings that will be familiar to our ears and that will
instantly fall in place. Because if utility forms the main criterion for the application
of evaluative terms, God is inaccessible to such considerations. Al-Juwaynī contin-
ues: it is only this preexisting rational judgment or demand that explains how the
notion of “obligation” (wujūb) could have any meaning for human beings when
they find themselves confronted with the revealed Law. For it is the harm that God
threatens to visit upon us—the threat (waʿīd) of punishment for failing to perform
the acts commanded in the Law—that gives the notion of obligation its purchase.
Thus “were we to imagine that a categorical command should be issued by God
without any threat attaching to its omission, to qualify this as ‘obligatory’ would
have no rationally intelligible meaning [maʿnan maʿqūl] with respect to us.”22 Yet
such a rationally intelligible meaning the notion of obligation indeed possesses.
116 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

To rephrase and clarify: it is only because, prior to revelation and thus “rationally,”
we exhibit certain evaluative responses to benefit and harm, seeking the one and
avoiding the other, that the Law acquires its normative hold over us. It is our ability
to experience punishment as an evil—what al-Juwaynī in the Niẓāmiyya calls an
undesirable ḥaẓẓ or “stake”—that underwrites the notion of “obligation” and the
obligating ability of the Law.23
To the extent that this view grounds the normative force of the Law in our
existing motivations and desires, it involves an important modification of the one
often associated with Ashʿarite ethics, according to which “good” and “bad” receive
their definition from the Law itself. “Good,” in this familiar view, means whatever
agrees with God’s command, and “bad” means whatever contravenes it. This is a
view that would seem to leave a yawning chasm between the legal definitions of
evaluative terms and actual human motivations, or between the value assigned by
God to actions and any value assigned by human beings. The demand that human
beings should respond to God’s commands and prohibitions would then have to
appear as inexplicable or dizzyingly high-minded as any Kantian motive of duty.
Given the egoistic emphasis that shapes the Ashʿarite understanding of human
nature, motives of self-interest would a priori offer themselves as the best if not
the sole way of bridging this heady divide. With al-Juwaynī ’s remarks, this bridge
is openly laid down, and the demand of the Law is decisively grounded in a claim
of reason framed explicitly (al-ʿuqūl taqtaḍī) as a demand.
Looking forward to later legal theory, one can discover the implicit presence
of this demand in the definitions of “obligation” that would be expounded by the-
orists of different stripes, where the threat of punishment for omission would
be isolated as a central component. Looking backward, and with the benefit of
some hindsight, one can also follow the thread of this view to the works of earlier
Ashʿarites, including (however discreetly) al-Ashʿarī himself.24 At the same time,
were we to seek the beginning of this thread more widely, we would have to con-
nect it with a view taken by the Muʿtazilites, and more narrowly the Baṣrans,
which has already come before us. For Baṣran Muʿtazilites, as we saw in c­ hapter 2,
had not only spoken of the pursuit of benefit and avoidance of harm as moral
demands of reason, but they had indeed made these demands the principal para-
digm for relating the normative demands of reason to the normative demands of
the revealed Law, casting the latter as a particularization of the former. Already
knowing through reason that we must seek what benefits us and repel what harms
us—“It has been established in reason,” Mānkdīm would write, “that it is obliga-
tory to repel harm from oneself”—we discover through revelation which particu-
lar acts serve our welfare and which impair it.25
Many later Ashʿarites would take up al-Juwaynī ’s normative claim, modulating
it in different ways and with varying points of emphasis. Given the context of our
own argument, it is worth observing that this rational demand was framed using
 Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its Ashʿarite Antecedents 117

terms that speak to a very specific side of the distinction we carved earlier between
“what we want” and “what is good for us,” and thus between “subjective” views of
the good and “objective” good. What reason bids us is the avoidance, not of what
we contingently happen to dislike, but of what objectively harms us. These terms
reappear among later Ashʿarites rehearsing this claim, including, significantly
for our story, al-Ghazālī. There is thus an interesting contrast—a contrast that
al-Ghazālī himself does not mark or gloss for his readers—between al-Ghazālī ’s
discussion in both the Iqtiṣād and the Mustaṣfā of the terms “good” and “bad”
(ḥasan/qabīḥ) and of the term “obligation” (wājib). His emphasis on the subjec-
tive and relative nature of the former—each of us calls good what he desires—is
strikingly absent from his discussion of the latter, which is defined through the
notion of harmful consequences (yastaʿqibu tarkahu ḍarar).26 And it is with refer-
ence to the latter, in addressing the controversial obligation to undertake religious
inquiry (wujūb al-naẓar), which the Muʿtazilites had claimed is known by reason,
that al-Ghazālī, openly rejecting this specific Muʿtazilite claim, concedes its part-
ner—now already seen to have been conceded by al-Juwaynī—that reason bids us
to avoid what harms us. Reason, or, indeed, nature; for talk of reason here should
not obscure the fact that this is a knowledge grounded in natural desire. To call
this rational is then simply to indicate its availability independently of revelation
against the context of a familiar antithesis between “reason” and “revelation” as
competing epistemic possibilities. “We do not deny,” al-Ghazālī thus writes in this
connection in the Iqtiṣād, that “a rational being is incited by his natural disposi-
tion [al-ʿāqil yastaḥiththuhu ṭabʿuhu] to protect himself from harm … and there
is nothing objectionable in applying the term ‘obligation’ to this incitement.” He
continues, striking a note that we have already heard: “for one need not quarrel
about the use of terms [al-iṣṭilāḥāt lā mushāḥḥa fīhā].”27
Certainly, with words one need not quarrel. Yet in al-Ghazālī ’s case one won-
ders whether this high-minded attitude toward language may not have concealed
a certain hesitation about the normative claim at issue and may not indeed have
served as a way of avoiding the awkward acknowledgment of any gap between
the “semantic” and “normative” ways of inflecting this claim—and of perhaps
using the back door of semantics to quietly let the normative into the house.
For al-Ghazālī at times appears rather too eager to call attention to the linguistic
character of his observations, speaking of what language “permits” or “prevents”
and sequestering the empire of language in ways that seem to leave reason unin-
volved.28 This linguistic emphasis is visible, for example, in his naturalistic account
of people’s usage of moral terms in the Mustaṣfā. Yet it is an emphasis that is not
uniformly sustained, as indicated by the last-quoted remarks in the Iqtiṣād, where
the point is clearly put not as a claim of semantics but a demand of reason or
nature. And it is likewise a less descriptive kind of emphasis that we see expressed
in the remarks on obligation in the Mustaṣfā. “One cannot describe as ‘obligatory,’ ”
118 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

al-Ghazālī writes there, “something whose commission and omission are equal in
our respect, for the only sense in which we can conceive of obligation is in terms
of an act’s performance having a preponderant claim over its omission relative to
our purposes [lā naʿqilu wujūban illā bi-an yatarajjaḥa fiʿluhu ʿalā tarkihi biʾl-iḍāfa
ilā aghrāḍinā].” The relationship between language and thought is here brought
into plain view: what we grasp (naʿqilu) is seen to provide the basis for what we
say about an action or how we describe it (naṣifu). Yet the normative note rings out
distinctly: it is not only that our words mirror our contingent conceptions; it is that
we cannot conceive of obligation except in these terms.29
The emphasis on reason as against language, and on a normative as against a
semantic perspective, appears in different combinations and degrees among later
writers. Al-Āmidī (d. 1233), who follows al-Ghazālī ’s lead particularly closely, issues
a rather hybrid and uncertain sound, rehearsing the main elements of al-Ghazālī ’s
account about people’s linguistic usage yet redubbing this in several places as a
judgment of reason. (“One may call ‘good’ … what agrees with one’s purpose
from the perspective of reason”:  mā wāfaqa al-gharaḍ min jihat al-maʿqūl; and
more clearly: taqbīḥ al-ʿaql lahu bi-iʿtibār umūr khārijiyya … min al-aghrāḍ.)30 But
it is al-Rāzī who perhaps strikes the normative note most decisively, and he does so
in the context of a sharp distinction—earlier introduced by al-Juwaynī—between
the ability of reason to deliver ethical judgments with regard to the human domain
and the relevance of these judgments for the divine one. The nub of these judg-
ments is expressed in a set of statements from the Maṭālib that we already heard
at the end of ­chapter 1: “Everything that leads to preponderant benefit [manfaʿa] is
good [ḥasan], and there is no other meaning to its being good than that fact, and
everything that leads to preponderant harm [maḍarra] is bad [qabīḥ], and there
is no other meaning to its being bad than that.” Thus there is “no meaning to
good or bad than the fact of conducing to what serves and impairs one’s welfare
[al-maṣāliḥ waʾl-mafāsid].”31
A knowledge of reason, or indeed a knowledge of desire—so that our desire for
certain things (our desire for them by nature) is implicitly commuted into a judg-
ment of value that we may not object to dignifying with the term “knowledge.”
Several writers evince an endemic slippage between the notion of reason and that
of desire in their remarks on the subject. Yet underlying this slippage seems to
be a clear understanding that the language of reason, to the extent that it is used,
takes desire—the biddings of our ṭabʿ—as its core and foundation. As such, this
claim stands to be distinguished from the claim that had typified the Muʿtazilite
brand of ethical rationalism. The concern to mark such distinctions is palpable
in al-Ghazālī ’s remark in the Mustaṣfā that “it is our appetitive nature [ṭabʿ], nat-
urally disposed to experience pain at punishment and pleasure at reward, that
incites one to guard against harm,” a remark that registers as a direct counter to
Mānkdīm’s formulation:  “It has been established in reason that it is obligatory
 Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its Ashʿarite Antecedents 119

to repel harm from oneself.” (“You have erred,” al-Ghazālī continues, “in saying
that reason motivates.”)32 In the Iqtiṣād, al-Ghazālī qualifies the relations between
reason and desire in terms that hold up a picture essentially Humean in outline.
Through reason we grasp the relevant facts and form the beliefs that inform our
actions—most important, beliefs concerning the consequences of actions, formed
on the basis of the facts revelation transmits to us. But it is our appetitive nature
that sets the ends to which our actions are directed and that provides us with the
motivation to pursue or avoid particular actions by finding itself in agreement or
disagreement with their consequences.33
This schematic overview of the evolving Ashʿarite approach to ethics could be
fine-tuned further. But for our purposes, we have enough before us to finally be
able to rejoin the main trunk of our investigation.

Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics:

New Wineskins, (Mostly) Old Wine
How, I began by asking, might we understand the relationship between Ibn
Taymiyya’s ethical viewpoint and the one expressed by Ashʿarite authors? In his
exposition of his via media, Ibn Taymiyya advertised points of friction. The archi-
tecture of the Radd appeared to second the advertisement of conflict. A survey
of his ethical positions, however, called attention to fundamental points of uni-
son. Juxtaposing the statements of al-Ghazālī and Ibn Taymiyya, we looked more
closely for the seams, and we seemed to find a promise of seams in certain per-
ceptible differences of register. These included a difference between calling and
knowing, or the linguistic against the normative perspective; between a subjec-
tive notion of “what I want” as against an objective notion of “what is good for
me”; and between a related notion of nature: ṭabʿ as against fiṭra. What the above
survey suggests is that these apparent differences collapse upon a more attentive
consideration of Ashʿarite ethical thought in its evolution. For all of the facets
that initially appear distinctive about Ibn Taymiyya’s viewpoint turn out to have
been critical components of the Ashʿarite ethical approach. By the same token,
in collapsing these apparent differences, this discovery allows us to recognize the
profound similarities that tie Ibn Taymiyya’s viewpoint to the Ashʿarites’, and sug-
gests that here we may indeed need to speak less neutrally of “similarities” and
more thickly of “debts.”
We have seen, thus, that evaluative judgments were drawn into connection not
only with fallible contingent desires but also with objective welfare in Ashʿarite
works from at least as early as al-Juwaynī. Similarly, from at least al-Juwaynī ’s time
prominent Ashʿarite thinkers embraced the view that reason delivers normative
judgments concerning matters that affect our interests. What reason tells us is
120 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

that it is obligatory to repel harm and good to pursue benefit. This admission was
perfectly compatible with holding that reason does not tell us what repels harm
and benefit, a point that al-Ghazālī drew attention to in discussing the obligation
to undertake religious inquiry. Al-Juwaynī would put the point even more plainly
and in more pregnant terms in his Niẓāmiyya: “Human reason may command a
view of what is in our interests on a general level, yet it cannot arrive at its details
[wa-la-in tashawwafat al-ʿuqūl ilā kulliyyāt al-maṣāliḥ lam taqif ʿalā tafāṣīlihā].”34 Put
this way of course, and using the language of general and particular, this state-
ment will again evoke the scheme developed by the Baṣran Muʿtazilites for relat-
ing rational and revealed norms—a scheme that Ibn Taymiyya’s resembles, as
I noted in c­ hapter 2, while excluding the deontological elements implicit in the
Baṣran view. As such, it suggests a different and more compelling way of drafting
this resemblance, one that also accommodates Ibn Taymiyya’s exclusions.
No less seminal here is another resemblance that will have cried out for remark
in the foregoing survey. In considering Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical remarks in the
Radd, we earlier recorded the notable slippage between his talk of knowing what is
good and his talk of desiring what is good, and between the more cognitive notion
of “reason” and the noncognitive notion of “desire” as an epistemic foundation of
ethical norms. This slippage now turns out to reflect one that had been endemic in
Ashʿarite writings. And this observation prepares us to pick up another point, and
another seminal resemblance, this time linked to the critical notion of “nature” at
stake in Ibn Taymiyya’s and the Ashʿarites’ thinking and shadowing their respec-
tive notions of “desire.” Al-Ghazālī ’s ṭabʿ and Ibn Taymiyya’s fiṭra, I heuristically
suggested at the outset of this discussion, appear to be divided by important differ-
ences that relate to the types of desire to which each is coded. The first refers us to
the egoistic desires of particular individuals; the latter to natural (paradigmatically
physical) desires universal to human beings, and to a desire for objective good.
Human nature as fiṭra thus seems eligible as a foundation of ethical norms in a
way that human nature as ṭabʿ does not.
Yet on the one hand, we have seen that the notion of ṭabʿ was also tied by
Ashʿarites to the desire for a more “objective” kind of good—for what really ben-
efits and harms us. Similarly, physical desires like the ones Ibn Taymiyya connects
to fiṭra must certainly be understood as forming part of the appetites constituting
the Ashʿarite ṭabʿ. And if we wanted to seal the distance between the two notions
of nature even further, all we would need to do is turn back to the discussion of
the previous chapter to recapitulate one of its conclusions. For the domain of fiṭra,
as we saw, includes natural desires whose satisfaction may not be in our inter-
ests. It thus includes desires that are not objectively good for us and that need to
be ordered normatively by an external criterion not provided by our nature. To
the extent that ṭabʿ refers us to a set of desires (and capacities for pleasure and
pain) that provide the corrigible material for value but not its normative criterion,
 Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its Ashʿarite Antecedents 121

fiṭra and ṭabʿ hardly lie far apart. In the evaluative domain, at any rate, the notion
of fiṭra—for all its resonance and all the rhetorical force deriving from its scrip-
tural roots and its role in other significant contexts, such as the knowledge of
God—would not seem to have traveled far from the notion of ṭabʿ.
Just how little it may have traveled, in fact, is a question that some of our
Ashʿarite authors give us tantalizing occasions for asking, in doing so inviting
a more pointed change of register from talk of “similarities” to talk of “debts.”
Particularly tantalizing here will be the otherwise unobtrusive remark with which
al-Rāzī opens his discussion of benefit and harm and their relationship to our
nature in the Maṭālib. For if ṭabʿ was the term we had grown accustomed to meet-
ing among the works of our Ashʿarite authors—not only al-Ghazālī but also many
of his predecessors speaking in the same context—here we find a rather delicate
shift of diction. “There is no doubt,” al-Rāzī writes, “that there is something which
our nature [ṭabʿ] inclines to and which the original natural disposition [aṣl al-fiṭra]
ordains that we desire to realize, and that there is something else which our pure
natural disposition [ṣarīḥ al-fiṭra] ordains that we cringe from and flee.”35 What we
incline to, of course, are pleasure and joy (ladhdha, surūr), and what we flee from
are pain and grief (alam, ghamm). These represent respectively what we desire
intrinsically and what we are intrinsically averse to, and they form the foundations,
in turn, for the notions of benefit (maṣlaḥa or khayr) and harm (mafsada or sharr),
which include both intrinsic and instrumental goods. None of these distinctions
will seem surprising, having already made extensive rounds in theological and
philosophical works. Nor is there anything to excite our surprise in the general
point itself, which chimes in with the by now familiar Ashʿarite endorsement of
normative judgments grounded in our nature (or reason). Yet it is the unobtrusive
appearance of the vocabulary of fiṭra that lends this passage its special interest. For
it appears at a juncture we will recognize: as the referent for our desire for benefit
and our aversion to harm. And if this already provokes recognition, juxtaposed
to al-Rāzī ’s definition of good and bad (which we saw moments ago) it will make
our sense of familiarity instantly deepen. If the meaning of good comes down to
benefit, and bad to harm, the claim that fiṭra forms the foundation of evaluative
judgments lies but an ever so slight logical step away.
Al-Rāzī himself does not seem to take that particular step. Moreover, the lan-
guage of fiṭra, appearing here so tantalizingly, flashes through the sky like a one-time
comet and fails to return, and it is rather ṭabʿ that figures prominently throughout
his discussion in the relevant contexts.36 Even so, it will be difficult to dismiss the
observation that it has already fulfilled the function that Ibn Taymiyya would later
call upon it more openly and extensively to perform. Should we take this observa-
tion at face value and permit ourselves to read al-Rāzī ’s suggestive usage as a tribu-
tary to Ibn Taymiyya’s development of this term in his moral epistemology—albeit
not the sole one, and if only by way of seeding the latter—then we should be
122 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

led to a surprising conclusion. For while it is one Ashʿarite (al-Ghazālī) who had
provided the formulation from which Ibn Taymiyya would remove the sign of
negation (“not by fiṭra”) in order to frame his own view of ethical judgments, it is
another Ashʿarite who had performed the same move before him and formulated
the very positive claim that Ibn Taymiyya would defend.
The conclusion flowing from the above is that the distance dividing the
Ashʿarite notion of ṭabʿ and Ibn Taymiyya’s seemingly distinctive idiom may be
nugatory indeed. On this reading, the distance between Ibn Taymiyya and the
Ashʿarites would narrow down even further; the distance between Ibn Taymiyya
and al-Rāzī even more. Having attuned ourselves to this point, we will find it easy
to pick up on important similarities between these two theologians that attest to
Ibn Taymiyya’s fundamental indebtedness to al-Rāzī ’s work. Some of the great-
est similarities—as in the claim that the meaning of ethical terms comes down
to benefit and harm or that the latter are grounded in our nature, whether we
call it ṭabʿ or fiṭra—we have already seen. But we may now note other similarities
in more specific positions and formulations, revealing several of Ibn Taymiyya’s
characteristic turns of thought to have their anticipating counterparts in al-Rāzī. It
will thus be hard not to hear echoes of the salient passage in the Radd, where Ibn
Taymiyya had connected our love of justice and hatred of injustice to the mean-
ing of moral terms, in the following remark from al-Rāzī ’s Maṭālib, addressed to
Muʿtazilite theologians:

If, in claiming that beneficence is good, you mean that it is beloved to our
nature [maḥbūb al-ṭabʿ] and desired by the self [marghūb al-nafs] as a means
for obtaining benefits, that is true and correct. Taken on this interpretation,
we do not dispute your claim that our knowledge of its [i.e., beneficence]
goodness is necessary [ḍarūrī]. Similarly, if what you mean in claiming
that injustice is bad is that it is hated by our nature [makrūh al-ṭabʿ] and
despised by the heart [mabghūḍ al-qalb] insofar as it is a cause of pains,
griefs, and sorrows, there is no dispute concerning the fact that the knowl-
edge that it [i.e., injustice] is bad is necessary, taken on this interpretation.

Using the term ṭabʿ instead of fiṭra and stating explicitly what Ibn Taymiyya had
left it to his readers to deduce—namely that acts such as justice and beneficence
are desired (or “loved”) due to their impact on one’s self-interest—this would seem
to be the spitting image of the view we had heard in Radd.37
The kernel of this view does not seem to have been originated by al-Rāzī, as
it had appeared earlier in al-Ghazālī ’s Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn in the context of a set of
remarks in which he had connected our love of others’ beneficence to our natural
self-interest. “Human hearts,” he had written there, “have been naturally formed
to love [jubilat al-qulūb ʿalā ḥubb] those who do well by them and those who do
 Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its Ashʿarite Antecedents 123

them harm”—a mere corollary of their fundamental self-love. Only moments later
he had restated the point using the more telling vocabulary of fiṭra.38 This is one of
several moments in the Iḥyāʾ that directly prefigure Ibn Taymiyya’s terminological
usage, so that nothing but the simple linguistic transfiguration of ṭabʿ into fiṭra
would seem to be missing to obtain Ibn Taymiyya’s characteristic formulations.
Perhaps the most evocative of these moments, in fact, are those that relate not
to the ethical but to the theological context, and to the love of God. Al-Ghazālī ’s
discussion of the human love of God is heavily laced with references to our natu-
ral ṭabʿ. This is the term he notably invokes to explain the very notion of love:
to love a given thing means to have an inclination for it in one’s nature (ṭabʿ).
Yet it is al-Ghazālī ’s deployment of the notion of sound nature—reminding us
of Ibn Taymiyya’s emphasis on fiṭra salīma in his theological epistemology—that
provokes the strongest echo with Ibn Taymiyya’s understanding of our natural
disposition to love God, when he refers the spiritual pleasure experienced in the
divine to the “inclination of sound nature and right reason” (mayl al-ṭabʿ al-salīm
waʾl-ʿaql al-ṣaḥīḥ).39 This, of course, reveals a deployment of ṭabʿ in al-Ghazālī ’s
writings in which it carries positive connotations that mirror those adhering to
Ibn Taymiyya’s deployment of fiṭra, even as, for al-Ghazālī ’s ṭabʿ no less than Ibn
Taymiyya’s fiṭra, nature remains material in need of discipline and education in
order to be harnessed to its salutary bent.
Ibn Taymiyya himself often does little to signal the affinities that connect his
ethical views to those of the Ashʿarite school, though there are isolated occasions
when he not only invites us to remark them but indeed openly advertises his
indebtedness. One of the most significant of these occasions, in fact, concerns the
very characterization of his ethical via media itself. In the Minhāj al-sunna, having
reiterated the traditional debate about ethics and outlined its two extremes—two
extremes that serve to identify his own approach as a middle road and third pos-
sibility—Ibn Taymiyya crucially adds that “there is a third view concerning this
question which al-Rāzī opted for in his later works, and this is the view that good
and bad are determined by reason as regards the actions of human beings but not
as regards the actions of God.”40 For the basis of this remark, we need look no
further than al-Rāzī ’s affirmation of this position in his Maṭālib. The qualification
that al-Rāzī may not have been the originator of this position (this position having
been earlier expressed by al-Juwaynī) leaves the substance untouched.41
Taken together, this serves to confirm the appearance of unison suggested by
our initial tabulation of the convergences between Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical views
and those of the Ashʿarite school, reinforcing the insight that these convergences
run deep. Yet even if this insight is accepted, it may now be said, the appearance
of conflict cannot be wholly cleared away. And there is one particular point where
the conflict would seem to stand before us with particular obstinacy. This is the
conflict that formed the heart of the argumentative exchange of the Radd, bringing
124 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

Ibn Taymiyya into unambiguous collision with the Ashʿarite viewpoint. For where
the Ashʿarites had claimed that ethical norms have their basis (both epistemi-
cally and indeed ontologically) in social convention, Ibn Taymiyya claimed they
have their basis in (human) nature. Yet once again, one only needs to scratch the
surface of the facts to uncover a more complex story that calls the appearance of
unambiguous collision into question and in doing so again deepens our under-
standing of Ibn Taymiyya’s debts, while also providing the traction for addressing
some of the consequences of his unmarked borrowing of Ashʿarite resources.
The best wedge into this more complex story can be found by turning back
to that tantalizing deployment of the notion of fiṭra that al-Rāzī had made in the
Maṭālib to confront the obvious paradox this deployment would appear to gener-
ate. For al-Rāzī, commenting on the Ishārāt, had not used the notion of fiṭra at that
juncture; this was a notion, as we saw in ­chapter 2, that was after all not present
in the relevant passage of the Ishārāt. Yet it was present in the counterpart of
the thought experiment in Avicenna’s Shifāʾ, and its connection to the topic was
cemented by Avicenna’s discussion of fiṭra in the Najā. Other Ashʿarites taking
over these resources, such as al-Ghazālī, had incorporated it clearly in their discus-
sion of ethical judgments. To the extent that the notion of fiṭra is implicit in the
context of al-Rāzī’s discussion, it might then seem paradoxical that al-Rāzī should
be seen connecting the notion of fiṭra to ethical judgments in one context, while
disconnecting it in another.
In the Maṭālib, of course, al-Rāzī had couched his point using both terms, fiṭra
and ṭabʿ. This observation suggests one obvious way of making the paradox disap-
pear, namely by interrogating the significance we attach to the terminological shift
at stake. Fiṭra was, after all, a term that had long formed a living part of Islamic
religious vocabulary given its scriptural origins, and had infiltrated ordinary usage
in ways that may open to question the wisdom of hearing it as an exclusively
technical term. The linguistic seams between the terms fiṭra and ṭabʿ, in fact, long
appear to have been fluid in kind, as Gobillot brings out in her study of the former
notion. In earlier phases of their linguistic history, thus, the terms ṭabʿ or ṭabīʿa
and the term fiṭra had both been employed by different writers to designate the
four humors or elements. This fluidity finds a particularly intriguing illustration
in the work of al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 869) that directly anticipates the use later theologians
would make of both terms in their ethical writings. God created animate beings,
he writes in one of his epistles, and then “naturally disposed them to seek out
benefits and avoid harms… . This is an inbuilt natural disposition and innate
formation [ṭabaʿahum ʿalā ijtirār al-manāfiʿ wa-dafʿ al-maḍārr … hādhā fīhim ṭabʿ
murakkab wa-jibilla mafṭūra].” We will instantly recognize this as the claim that
Ibn Taymiyya would parse in terms of fiṭra and Ashʿarites in terms of ṭabʿ.42
Al-Rāzī ’s fluid transition from one mode of designation to the other should
thus be taken to signal the light semantic weight this transition carries. The same
 Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its Ashʿarite Antecedents 125

weight, I would argue, is exhibited by several of the appearances of the term fiṭra
in Avicenna’s works, where it displays a loosely linguistic meaning that often lacks
the technical force that, reading his works backward—especially backward from
Ibn Taymiyya—one is tempted to hear.43 In other locations, particularly in the con-
text of the thought experiment that defines it, the notion of fiṭra indeed seems to
carry a stronger meaning. Al-Rāzī ’s own attunement to the semantic force of the
notion of fiṭra, this additionally suggests, might be modulated by the different con-
texts of its appearance. His simultaneous affirmation of fiṭra in one and (implicit)
denial of fiṭra in the other then become easier to comprehend.
The more obvious resolution of the paradox, however, lies elsewhere. For on
the one hand, it will be clear that the notion of fiṭra as deployed in the Maṭālib does
not coincide with the notion deployed by Avicenna, where, as I have argued, it is
most intuitively taken as referring to our intellectual nature. In the Maṭālib, by
contrast, al-Rāzī uses it to refer to our nature as beings susceptible to certain char-
acteristic forms of pleasure and pain, susceptibilities that determine what consti-
tutes our welfare. The notion of fiṭra that figures in al-Rāzī ’s claim that “ethical
judgments are grounded in our fiṭra” in the Maṭālib and in his implicit denial of
this same claim in his Avicenna-related remarks is simply not the same. With this
in view, we will now recall that al-Rāzī had explicitly excluded considerations of
welfare from the perspective of the thought experiment. Once such considerations
were included, ethical judgments would indeed be possible. To the extent, in fact,
that our nature in the second sense (the sense of the Maṭālib) determines the
kinds of things that we can count as goods, notably with respect to physical plea-
sures and pains, al-Rāzī could not have meant to deny that ethical judgments have
a natural foundation. In this respect, the Ashʿarite claim that ethical judgments
are grounded in convention was perfectly compatible with the Ashʿarite claim that
ethical judgments, in another sense, are grounded in human nature taken as ṭabʿ.
Yet of course the crucial point that Avicenna had brought out is an insight
that contemporary writers have often highlighted: what our nature “determines”
is far more limited than we might suppose. Our biological nature may constrain
cultural possibility, yet, as Alasdair MacIntyre notes, “man who has nothing but
a biological nature is a creature of whom we know nothing.”44 It is precisely the
educability of human nature and its permeability to cultural influence, I argued in
­chapter 2, that accounted for Avicenna’s exclusion of moral and psychological sen-
timents from the thought experiment. Ashʿarite writers assimilating Avicenna’s
insights had heard that point well, accentuating the central role of the commu-
nity in shaping the ethical responses of individuals by harnessing the material of
their nature. With this facet of the Ashʿarite ethical approach freshly in our sights,
in fact, the notion of “welfare” that al-Rāzī deploys in his reprise of Avicenna’s
thought experiment can be read more insightfully. For it will be noticed that al-Rāzī
refers us to “judgments of utility” (qaḍāyā maṣlaḥiyya), a cognitive parsing that will
126 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

seem surprising if we are thinking mainly of individuals’ instinctive responses

to pleasure and pain. Yet the fact that al-Rāzī is not thinking in these narrow
terms becomes clear when in the immediate vicinity he refers more specifically
to “public interest” (maṣlaḥa ʿāmma). This is a notion we may recall meeting
earlier when surveying the Ashʿarite appropriation of Avicenna’s conven-
tionalism, which had fed into a view of the social community as both teacher
and producer of ethical norms that was twinned to a conception of the com-
munity as a subject of benefit and harm. Different societies, al-Shahrastānī
had suggested, call acts “good” when they benefit them and “bad” when they
harm them.
These kinds of ideas similarly find an important expression in al-Rāzī ’s work.
The idea that ethical standards are grounded in a social contract or convention
is one that al-Rāzī develops more fully outside his commentary on the Ishārāt,
claiming, as Shihadeh puts it, that “an implicit social agreement lies at the back-
ground of widely-accepted moral conventions, which is then, as it were, ‘forgot-
ten.’ ”45 In responding to the Muʿtazilites in the Maṭālib, he refers to the general
interests (maṣlaḥat al-ʿālam) that are served by the moral disapproval of lying and
the approval of beneficence and that might lead people to adopt the convention
(iṣṭalaḥa ʿalā) that lying is bad and beneficence good.46 It is this notion of public
interest, thus, that should be taken to interpret al-Rāzī ’s gloss on Avicenna’s dis-
cussion of widely accepted propositions and the specific terms in which he frames
the notion of utility. What is to be excluded from the “privileged” perspective of
the thought experiment are “judgments of utility that have become habitual and
familiar to oneself” (mā taʿawwadtahu wa-aliftahu min al-qaḍāyā al-maṣlaḥiyya),
and that is to say: that have been taught to one by the community to which one
belongs because of the way they service its interests (al-maṣlaḥa al-ʿāmma, al-niẓām
al-kullī).47
To the extent that the community is involved in the inculcation and production
of such moral principles, one has little difficulty seeing why they should appear
on the conventional side of the divide at stake in Avicenna’s thought experiment.
Thus, to repeat, the Ashʿarite claim that ethical judgments are a matter of con-
vention was not inconsistent with the claim that ethical judgments are grounded
in human nature, taken in the sense of those instinctive responses that provide
social convention with the educable material for its operation. If we thought that
the essential distinction between Ibn Taymiyya’s and the Ashʿarites’ ethical views
could be captured in the contrast between two diametrically opposed claims—
“ethical judgments are founded on convention,” yet “ethical judgments are
founded on nature”—it is clear we need to think again. A more nuanced reading
of the issue shows that the notion of nature itself admits of different interpreta-
tions, and that the relations between nature and convention are too complex to be
accommodated by a simple disjunction that would place these terms on opposite
 Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its Ashʿarite Antecedents 127

sides of a sharp divide. And a less simplistic interpretation of the Ashʿarite posi-
tion accordingly shows that they had inhabited both sides of this divide.
Having weakened this antithesis, in fact, we will be more prepared to bring
to the fore something that readers who have followed the argument so far may
already have found perplexing. For I noted in c­ hapter 1 that in certain writings Ibn
Taymiyya himself also employs the notion of a social contract or convention to talk
about the origin of ethical norms. Through a mutual pledge and contractual agree-
ment (al-taʿāhud waʾl-taʿāqud), we heard in Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, human beings
have bound themselves to ethical norms that allow them to collaboratively pursue
what benefits the community as a whole and to repel what harms it. These ethical
norms include deontological-sounding principles such as telling the truth, keep-
ing promises, and generally conforming to the demands of justice. The discovery,
in ­chapter 2, that Ibn Taymiyya made a special point of grounding ethical norms
not in convention but in nature cannot but have left readers bemused.
How could Ibn Taymiyya have intended us to understand the relationship
between these claims? Ibn Taymiyya, once again, offers to shed no light on the
question, never placing his remarks about fiṭra into conversation with his remarks
about the social contract. Is this a case where we are simply forced, on account
of the sheer dissonance of the intellectual phenomena, to postulate intellectual
change and to hypothesize about diverging textual chronologies? The notion of
the social contract, it will thus be noticed, makes isolated appearances in his work,
even if the notion of public interest to which it is linked appears pervasively. And,
measured against the centrality of fiṭra certainly, the notion of the social contract
seems far less prominent in his ethical remarks. Guarding against strong claims
about the status of the latter notion within Ibn Taymiyya’s thought, all I  would
note here is that the need for complex hypotheses disappears once we see that
this apparent dissonance can be dispelled even without sacrificing the interpre-
tive heuristic of an unchanged intellectual viewpoint. Just how the two claims
can be reconciled had after all been clearly demonstrated before Ibn Taymiyya by
Ashʿarite thinkers, whose conception of a social convention and the related idea
of communal welfare his writing reflects. While there is undoubtedly a more com-
posite story one could tell about the infiltration of these ideas into Ibn Taymiyya’s
thought—particularly the idea of public welfare, which also found a salient home
in Islamic legal writing—for the most intuitive pedigree we need not look past the
writings of Ashʿarite theologians.
A closer analysis of the nature-convention antithesis thus suggests that neither
party under consideration stood for a single term of this antithesis. As such, this
antithesis seems useless as a tool for approaching the relationship between Ibn
Taymiyya and the Ashʿarites, and more specifically for identifying the issues that
divide them. The result of this analysis, in fact, is once again to reinforce our
perception of what unites Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical viewpoint with that of Ashʿarite
128 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

theologians and to point us in the direction of his intellectual debts. Ibn Taymiyya’s
view of the nature of ethical value and his view of the human knowledge of ethical
value appear to coincide with the Ashʿarites’ in their essentials.
Yet looking back at our discussion in earlier chapters, it might now seem that it
had brought to light a feature of Ibn Taymiyya’s understanding where he had pro-
posed to push things further, and showed a readiness to broach terrain where the
Ashʿarites had been unwilling to tread. For in many locations, as we have seen, Ibn
Taymiyya takes deontological types of actions such as justice or truth-telling as cen-
tral foci in his discussion of our evaluative grasp. Human beings know such actions
to be good—in Ibn Taymiyya’s characteristic parsing, they love such actions. Hence
the fact that such acts are called “right” or maʿrūf, literally “what is known.” When
the Qur’an thus says that the Prophet “commands [people] that which is right
[maʿrūf] and forbids them that which is wrong” (Q 7:157), it implicitly refers us to
an ethical grasp that predates its own advent and that is presupposed in under-
standing it. Something similar could be said about the statement that “God bids to
justice and good-doing [yaʾmuru biʾl-ʿadl waʾl-iḥsān]” (Q 16:90). Such passages call
attention to our extrarevelational ethical grasp in ways that undercut the Ashʿarite
denial that ethical norms are known by reason, and resist the Ashʿarite definitional
disemboweling of evaluative terms by referring them to God’s command and pro-
hibition. “God commands what He commands” is simply an empty statement.48
Ibn Taymiyya’s willingness to highlight such passages aligns him with a typically
Muʿtazilite practice and, significantly for our context, gives evidence of his willing-
ness to foreground deontological types of acts in specifying our ethical grasp.
In his seminal discussion of the proof of prophecy in Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya,
Ibn Taymiyya goes so far as to make the ordinary human knowledge of the value
of such actions a criterion for evaluating the veracity of prophets. Everyone who
has falsely claimed to be a prophet, he writes there, “has exhibited ignorance,
lying, and turpitude … that are plain to even the most undiscriminating, and
everyone who has truthfully claimed to be a prophet has exhibited knowledge,
truthfulness, uprightness, and varieties of good that are plain to even the most
undiscriminating.” It is our ability to ethically judge a prophet’s actions and his
character, conscripting an extrarevelational horizon of moral understanding that
notably includes an evaluative response to deontological categories such as “lying”
and “truth-telling,” that underpins our ability to determine the truthfulness of a
given prophet. The same point emerges even more forcefully in Ibn Taymiyya’s
additional claim that our assessment of a prophet’s veracity is supported by an
assessment of the content of his prophetic message itself. “Were we to suppose,”
thus, that someone came along and “commanded polytheism and idolatry and
permitted foul deeds, injustice, and lying, and did not command the worship of
God or belief in the hereafter—would this person need to be asked for a miracle
 Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its Ashʿarite Antecedents 129

[before his claims could be doubted]?”49 The implication is clear: it is our ability to
judge acts like injustice and lying bad independently of prophetic revelation that
gives us a criterion for judging the soundness of any supposed revelation. These
commands, we are in a position to say, are all wrong.
What we see in such passages is a powerful appeal to our independent moral
intuitions that is notably couched in terms of deontological types of actions. It is
an appeal that brings out Ibn Taymiyya’s readiness to talk about the content of
ethical awareness in ways that the Ashʿarites rejected, and as such it would seem
to provide an important check on our picture of the near-exceptionless concor-
dance between the ethical views of these parties. Yet this check in fact turns out
to be far weaker than it appears; a closer examination of the reasons why offers a
more judicious perspective on Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical approach and on some of the
consequences of his unlabeled borrowing of Ashʿarite resources.
For on the one hand, as we will see in greater detail in c­ hapter 5, the prerev-
elational moral horizon Ibn Taymiyya evokes in discussing the ethical judgments
that allow us to appraise prophetic veracity cannot be taken as a straightforward
reference to the resources of reason. The backdrop for our appraisal of one pro-
phetic revelation is often the pattern set by another and the divine signature these
prophetic incidents collectively spell out. More relevant for our present context,
however, is another point, one that formed a central theme of previous chapters
and that we can now revisit for a more insightful consideration. One of the recur-
ring motifs of our discussion from the very beginning has been a question about
the ambiguous relationship between deontological and consequentialist consid-
erations within Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical outlook. If the argument in ­chapter 1 was
correct, Ibn Taymiyya gives little sign of being invested in an ethical approach that
gives a robust place to deontological considerations. On the ontological front, his
embrace of a view that appears to resemble Muʿtazilite moral objectivism turns
out to be sharply differentiated from the Muʿtazilite view by construing ethical
value seemingly exclusively in consequentialist terms. On the epistemological
front, as I argued in ­chapter 2, the most plausible way of construing the descrip-
tion under which people desire certain kinds of actions is their description qua
beneficial—whether to themselves or whether to the community, recalling Ibn
Taymiyya’s enigmatic statement that “it is known that justice serves the good of the
world [maṣlaḥat al-ʿālam] and injustice tends to its harm.” And it is as objects of
desire, I emphasized, that Ibn Taymiyya typically presents ethically good actions.
In this respect he once again differs starkly from the Muʿtazilites, who had spoken
of ethical actions as objects of knowledge. “There is no rational person [ʿāqil],” as
Ibn Mattawayh had characteristically put it, “who does not know [yaʿlamu] that
injustice is bad and justice is good, and that it is obligatory to return deposits …
and give thanks for benefaction.”50
130 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

Ibn Taymiyya’s adoption of a noncognitivist idiom to talk about ethical episte-

mology, as I have shown, reflects his assimilation of a typically Ashʿarite approach.
The same thing would have to be said about his adoption of an exclusively conse-
quentialist understanding of ethical ontology. All this seems clear; yet what I par-
ticularly wish to call attention to here is the fact that in both cases, Ibn Taymiyya is
adopting views that served a reductive function at the hands of Ashʿarite thinkers.
They were views that had been developed as a counter to that more ambitious
conception of ethical rationalism and ethical objectivism that had been articulated
by Muʿtazilite theologians. The Ashʿarite claim that natural desire tells us what is
good was designed as a deconstruction of the Muʿtazilite thesis that reason is our
informant. The Ashʿarite claim that utility is what makes acts good was designed
as a deconstruction of the Muʿtazilite thesis that deontological grounds (at least
in part) make acts good. The notion of public interest, in turn, featured in an
argument with a reductive function, aiming to show that the way ethical truths
appear to us may not be a reliable indication of the way things are in themselves.
Underlying the phenomena of ordinary moral consciousness is a longer social
genealogy which reveals that judgments whose surface form is deontological and
indeed absolutist in kind—“it is always bad to lie” or “it is always good to act
justly”—are watered by consequentialist roots that are not transparent to ordinary
consciousness.51 Appearance and reality, surface and depth, come apart. In each
case, the thesis the Ashʿarites asserted could not be understood independently
from the counterthesis it served to disprove.
In taking over the Ashʿarite view, Ibn Taymiyya severs the umbilical cord
between thesis and counterthesis. What are essentially Ashʿarite positions are
presented to us as stand-alone assertions with little to betray their Ashʿarite origin
and nothing to betray their original context and motivation. Ibn Taymiyya uses the
noncognitivist language of desire without making clear to his readers whether this
is a deliberate rejection of the language of reason or indeed a reinterpretation of it
along Ashʿarite lines. He talks exclusively of utility as a ground of value and does
not make clear to his readers what alternative view of its ground this excludes. It is
not that the Muʿtazilite notion of deontological act-descriptions (wujūh) is brought
up for explicit discussion and rejected. The theory of wujūh is simply never men-
tioned. While Ibn Taymiyya continues to refer to these kinds of act-descriptions,
such as justice and truth-telling or injustice and lying, his silence on this front
means that there is nothing to make such references register as a claim that such
act-descriptions are ontologically and/or epistemologically basic. Taken on its
own—to finally make contact with the beginning of this argument—the mere fact
that Ibn Taymiyya refers to these act-descriptions is not a feature that fundamen-
tally sets his ethical approach apart from the Ashʿarites’. Ashʿarites, after all, had
also accepted that “deontological” types of acts could have value—because of their
utility. They had also accepted that deontological types of judgments could figure
 Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its Ashʿarite Antecedents 131

in the content of our surface moral consciousness—itself the product of a conse-

quentialist communal mindset. The more interesting distinctions turned out to
center not on the level of whether but of why. Most intellectual systems, Arthur
Lovejoy has observed, “are original or distinctive rather in their patterns than in
their components,” so that the “seeming novelty of many a system is due solely
to the novelty of the application or arrangement of the old elements which enter
into it.”52 This holds as true for Ibn Taymiyya as for any other thinker. Yet in Ibn
Taymiyya’s case, one cannot help but wonder whether, in the re-presentation of
intellectual ingredients, something of the original pattern that gave these ingredi-
ents their meaning has fallen away from view.
Noting Ibn Taymiyya’s neglect of the deontological side of Muʿtazilite moral
theory in c­ hapter 1, I suggested there is an invidious question to raise as to whether
this neglect should be taken as the result of a deliberate choice or an unintended
oversight, perhaps reflecting Ibn Taymiyya’s limited familiarity with Muʿtazilite
texts. Yet even if we eschew more invidious talk of oversight and confine ourselves
to more neutral talk of silence, the thematization of his silences, we now see, is
something to which we are inescapably driven when we seek to consider his ethi-
cal thought against its context and indeed its formative influences. Probed atten-
tively, these silences hold the key for locating Ibn Taymiyya within his theological
topography and situating his specific view of ethics against preexisting possibili-
ties. Our story took its departure, in ­chapter 1, from a sense that Ibn Taymiyya’s
via media conceded so much to Muʿtazilite rationalism and objectivism that it was
tempting to simply close the subject and conclude that his ethical approach was
a via media that leans heavily toward one of its extremes. Its current denouement
shows that such an impression could not be further from the truth, and masks
Ibn Taymiyya’s profound debts to Ashʿarite thought. Yet it is highly significant
that there should be a discrepancy between what Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks initially
invite us to conclude and what a closer analysis reveals, and that the real contours
of his ethical understanding should need to be elicited by an act of excavation that
digs beneath his own representation of the debate to which he is contributing.
It is an act of excavation that has made for many of the turning points of our
narrative thus far. It made for the discovery of Ibn Taymiyya’s silence on deon-
tological considerations in c­ hapter 1, or his silence on nonimperative concepts
of value. It made for the unearthing of the distinction between first-person and
third-person perspectives that gave us one of the plots of the same chapter, and
the distinction between individual and communal interest there and elsewhere.
Many of these suppressions carry important consequences for the way we locate
Ibn Taymiyya on the map of classical debates about ethics, as I have just said.
They also carry important consequences for the cogency of his arguments, just
as they carry consequences for the substantiveness of his ethical views. Having
brought to light Ibn Taymiyya’s Ashʿarite debts in founding ethical norms on
132 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

communal welfare, we have been given additional grounds for adopting the sug-
gestion outlined in ­chapter 2 regarding how the epistemological subject implicit
in his gnomic statement “it is known that justice serves the good of the world
[maṣlaḥat al-ʿālam] and injustice tends to its harm” should be construed—not as
the first-person singular but as the first-person plural of the community. For in
the Ashʿarite analysis that trails this statement, the perspective from which ethical
judgments are shown to be grounded in communal welfare is not the perspective
of ordinary ethical experience, but of a higher-order reflective (and indeed reduc-
tive) analysis of it. Yet to accept this conclusion is to be confirmed in the sense that
the ordinary moral subject as this looks back at us from Ibn Taymiyya’s writings is
made of gossamer material indeed.
Such suppressions, to resume a theme that closed ­chapter 2, offer a testament
to the theoretical thinness of Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical remarks and provide us with
telling indications regarding the character and also the limitations of his account.
I hope the discussion pursued in the previous chapters will have given abundant
reasons for thinking that a close analysis of Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical remarks is
worth undertaking despite these limitations. So long as our interest does not lie in
narrowly engaging his views for their philosophical cogency or substantiveness,
there are robust insights such analysis can offer regarding both the contours of
his ethical understanding and his place within his theological topography. Yet no
less central are the insights it affords us into the form of his ethical remarks and
indeed of his writing more broadly. Appreciating the form of Ibn Taymiyya’s writ-
ing, in this respect—including those features that throw obstacles before the effort
to understand its content and that invite partial interpretations—is a part of the
task equally crucial as appreciating its content.

What about Objectivity?

I have shown that Ibn Taymiyya’s view of the nature of value and the human
knowledge of value, scrutinized more carefully, turns out to share many of its
distinctive features with the Ashʿarite view. In that case, it may be asked in clos-
ing, what of the points of conflict that Ibn Taymiyya called attention to in outlin-
ing his via media? For he may share far less with Muʿtazilite ethical rationalism
and ethical objectivism than may be initially evident. Yet we will recall that it was
a vigorous claim of ethical objectivity that had shaped his remarks in the stage-
setting exposition we heard in c­ hapter 1 and that formed the backbone of the dis-
agreement he had expressed with the Ashʿarite perspective. He had objected to
the Ashʿarites’ denial that the value of actions is a matter of objective reality—that
“what is right [maʿrūf] is … right in itself [fī nafsihi]” and “what is wrong [munkar]
in itself wrong.” Similarly, he had objected to their reduction of value to a mere
matter of “relation and association” (nisba wa-iḍāfa), such as the relative value
 Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its Ashʿarite Antecedents 133

deriving from agreement with people’s natural appetites (mā yulāʾimu al-ṭibāʿ).
Ibn Taymiyya’s objection to the latter point will seem very puzzling, as signaled
earlier, given the paramount role he also allocates to natural desires in his ethical
account. What purchase, one may ask more broadly, could a notion of objectivity
have within such an understanding?
The analogy with Hume that picked its way through earlier parts of our nar-
rative is worth reviving at this juncture. In c­ hapter 1, I compared Ibn Taymiyya’s
way of grounding morality in emotional responses to the sentimentalist view of
morality articulated by Hume. Ibn Taymiyya’s comparison of ethical reactions to
aesthetic responses carried a similar resonance. The analogy seems illuminat-
ing, among other reasons, because it allows us to observe the ways certain ideas
naturally organize themselves into similar neighborhoods and conjunctions in
sharply diverging intellectual contexts. No less noteworthy than the common con-
cern with the emotions and with utility or indeed the shared empiricist temper, in
this respect, is the larger theological aim that shadows the projects of both think-
ers. For the context of Hume’s ethical project, as Schneewind has shown, was
a long-standing conflict between rationalist and voluntarist views of God’s rela-
tion to morality. Hume’s own concern was to discredit the former by denying that
“there are eternal fitnesses and unfitnesses of things, which are the same to every
rational being,” and that “the immutable measures of right and wrong impose an
obligation, not only on human creatures, but also on the Deity himself” (T 456).53
Whatever their other differences (and there are many), it is an interest in
driving a wedge between the human and the divine domain that Hume shares
with Ibn Taymiyya. Yet Hume, on his side, made it clearer than Ibn Taymiyya
had before him that this involved denying that morality is a matter of “confor-
mity with reason,” and that his proposal to ground morality in the passions was
a proposal to ground morality in feeling in contradistinction to reason. He also
made clear that the decision to ground morals, just “like the perception of beauty
and deformity,” in human nature—in “the particular fabric and constitution of
the human species” with its particular emotional capacities and susceptibilities to
pleasure and pain—was a decision to embrace a very different conception of what
it means to talk about the objectivity of morality. You discover the moral quality
of an action when you “turn your reflexion into your own breast, and find a senti-
ment of [approbation or] disapprobation, which arises in you”—a sentiment in
turn reflecting the way this action impacts on human beings’ dispositions to plea-
sure and pain. Hence this quality “lies in yourself, not in the object” (T 468–69).
Hume’s choice of expression will seem highly evocative in considering the
Islamic context. For it was a phrase just like this one, as we saw—inviting a sim-
ple turn inward (al-rujūʿ ilaʾl-nafs)—that ʿAbd al-Jabbār had used in affirming the
ethical testimony that our inner resources afford us. Yet ʿAbd al-Jabbār, of course,
had had an inward turn to the resources of reason more specifically in mind. And
134 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

reason provides us with a window to real truths that are not merely a product of
our own minds and that are not applicable to us alone by virtue of our specific
features as subjects. This is a point that ʿAbd al-Jabbār and his fellow Muʿtazilites
would dwell on at length in their works, often in response to a peculiarly Ashʿarite
claim regarding those features of human subjects that made all the difference
to the moral standards that applied to them. It is the fact that human beings are
owned by God as chattels (mamlūk) and that God is the proprietor and lord (mālik)
of created beings, Ashʿarites had suggested, that makes the former subject to ethi-
cal constraints and the latter immune to them. God’s actions cannot be limited by
moral standards, for they themselves serve as their source. Al-Ashʿarī had put the
point clearly early on when writing that God “is the all-powerful Master, who is
under the mastery of none, and has none above Him to issue sanctions, none to
command or restrain or proscribe, and none to draw lines and trace out boundar-
ies for Him [man rasama lahu al-rusūm wa-ḥadda lahu al-ḥudūd]; this being so,
nothing He does can be evil.” In this, God is entirely unlike human beings, who
can overstep the boundaries set by their Master.54
The Muʿtazilite emphasis on the real features of acts that provide the grounds
of their value came as a counter to this type of “theistic subjectivism” (in George
Hourani’s phrase). Acts have value because of something that relates to the acts
themselves (amr yarjiʿu ilayhā) and that indeed operates as a necessitating cause
(ʿilla mūjiba). This is the respect, as ʿAbd al-Jabbār would significantly comment
elsewhere, in which ethical judgments diverge most sharply from aesthetic judg-
ments, such as our response to pretty or ugly pictures, which vary from person to
person and indeed from time to time. A picture is called ugly (qabīḥ) “to the extent
that one dislikes looking at it [min ḥaythu tanfuru al-nafs min al-naẓar ilayhā].”
As such, this disapproving response is grounded in something that relates to us
rather than to the picture itself (amr yarjiʿu ilaynā lā ilayhā). The disvalue of lying
or of injustice, by contrast, in no wise depends on the features of the agent con-
templating such acts, whether human beings or God.55
Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical claims, as we have seen, are often couched in terms that
carry strong objectivist commitments. We have heard him speak of what an act is
“in itself” (fī nafsihi or fī nafs al-amr) in our stage-setting text; we have heard him
speak of the “attributes” (ṣifāt) of actions. Elsewhere he speaks more emphatically of
intrinsic or essential attributes (ṣifāt dhātiyya), though in other locations he retreats
from this strong specification. Yet in many of these instances, it is clear from the
context that he is thinking, once again, of benefit and harm, which ultimately refer
us to the material of human pleasure and pain.56 Now it is not, to recapitulate an
earlier observation, that the Muʿtazilites made no room for such notions within
their framework. It is thus important to recall that within Muʿtazilite theory, deon-
tological act-descriptions took their place next to a number of consequentialist
considerations. What is crucial, however, is that the Muʿtazilites had reserved their
 Ibn Taymiyya’s Ethics and Its Ashʿarite Antecedents 135

strongest objectivist language for the former class as against the latter, for reasons
that can be easily summed up.
Acts like lying or injustice, as Ibn Mattawayh explains, owe their value to
unchanging characteristics (ṣifa lāzima lā tazūlu ʿan al-mawṣūf bi-ḥāl). Where the
value depends on the consequences (the utility) of actions, by contrast, the same
action can be good in some circumstances and bad in others. Ask yourself, “Is it
good to travel for trade purposes?” or “Is it good to run?”, and you will find that
you cannot give absolute answers. Traveling may be good if there is a realistic
chance of financial gain but bad in other circumstances. Running may be wrong
in some circumstances—it seemed undignified to those critics of Muslim practice
who lampooned many of the rituals, including running, comprised in the hajj—
but it may be right if you are fleeing a beast of prey, if you are coming to greet
your father, if the doctor has prescribed it for health, or if it has been prescribed
by a caring Creator who has discerned other benefits that are hidden from your
limited view. The context-dependence of such acts finds its complement in their
dependence on features of agents, to the extent that they presuppose a disposition
to benefit and harm.57 Ibn Taymiyya thus applies the language of “objectivity” to
actions that the Muʿtazilites had handled in distinctly relative terms. In the axis
extending between “what relates to us” and “what relates to acts themselves,” Ibn
Taymiyya leans strongly to the former, just like the Ashʿarites before him. What
makes acts good is very much a matter of the kinds of creatures we are and our
natural disposition to characteristic pleasures and pains: its quality, to return to
Hume’s phrase, “lies in yourself, not in the object.”58
Could we still speak of objectivity on these terms? Writing in a related connec-
tion, James Rachels has suggested that ethical naturalism can be seen as a “com-
promise between objective and subjective views of ethics. It is objective in that it
identifies good and evil with something that is really ‘there’ in the world outside
us, but at the same time, what is there is the power to produce feelings inside
us.”59 Hume himself, while setting aside the notion of “conformity with reason”
and instructing us to look for the passions moving within our breast, spoke of
what this inward look discovers as a “matter of fact.” The responses of pleasure
and pain we find within our breast or wired into our body—responses that reflect
our characteristic dispositions as the natural creatures we are—after all consti-
tute some of the hardest facts in the world, and thinkers in the past have often
judged them far more robust than alternative facts constituted by so-called ratio-
nal intuitions. That certain kinds of actions and events produce certain effects
or result in certain experiences that we find pleasurable or painful is another
hard fact, which places our nature into conversation with the natural world we
live in, though for Ibn Taymiyya this conversation also extends to the supernatu-
ral world that follows. Even if the “stuff” of value is human pleasure and pain,
against such facts we can still draw distinctions, as suggested earlier, between
136 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

pleasures that serve our overall interests and ones that do not—between a “sub-
jective” sense of the good that reflects our fallible likes and dislikes (“what I
want”) and a more “objective” sense of the good that represents our true welfare
in the long term (“what is good for me”). These distinctions become sharper still
if, with Ibn Taymiyya, we believe there are objective facts of the matter as to what
constitutes our true welfare and as to the means for achieving it.
A place for the language of “objectivity,” this schematization suggests, could
still be argued within this framework. Yet to the extent that we are considering Ibn
Taymiyya against his theological topography, it will be crucial to be clear how far,
once again, this would be from the place the Muʿtazilites had prepared for it and
how much nearer to a kind of place Ashʿarite theologians would also have been
prepared to concede.60

My main concern in this chapter has been to document the fundamental conver-
gences that unite Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical positions to those articulated by Ashʿarite
theologians, revealing Ibn Taymiyya’s profound debts to the latter for his understand-
ing of the nature of value and the mode of human beings’ epistemic access to it. Any
appearance of conflict on these issues gives way to a picture of deeper concord.
Yet this, in fact, is not to say that genuine conflict is not at stake between
the outlooks of these thinkers. If we wish to identify the real location of Ibn
Taymiyya’s conflict with Ashʿarite ethical thought, however, it is not among
the topics we have considered in this chapter that we should primarily seek it.
These topics, it may now be observed, lie on one particular side of a boundary
that we met early in our inquiry yet that has remained quietly in the back-
ground in these three chapters, namely the boundary between the human
domain and the divine. To talk about what human beings can and cannot do, we
earlier heard Ibn Taymiyya declare, is still to say nothing about God. The anal-
ogy between the human domain and the divine (qiyās al-ghāʾib ʿalā al-shāhid)
that the Muʿtazilites practiced has to be categorically rejected. To say that the
morality of human beings is not the morality of God, at the same time, is not to
say that there is no sense whatsoever in which one can speak of a divine “moral-
ity.” Having focused on the human domain thus far, it is to the divine domain
that we need to make the leap in order to bring into view not merely the real
grounds of Ibn Taymiyya’s quarrel with the Ashʿarites, but indeed the larger
theological vision in which his ethical views about human morality find their
deepest roots and his via media achieves a further—and perhaps its most criti-
cal—articulation. If what we say about God is not what we say about ourselves,
what can we say about God?
 4

The Aims of the Law

and the Morality of God

What makes actions good, and how do we know it? These were the questions
that focused the discussion of the preceding three chapters. Yet from the earliest
history of kalām debates about ethics, these questions had never stood alone or
been investigated purely for their intrinsic significance. Providing them with their
deepest roots had been issues of far-reaching theological importance.
ʿAbd al-Jabbār was one of many Muʿtazilites who signaled that clearly when,
opening his volume on “The Determination of Justice and Injustice” in the
Mughnī, he had simply stated his aim: to prove that “God only does what is good,
and cannot but do what is obligatory.”1 This theological focus is evident in the
way Ibn Taymiyya himself characterizes the conflict that gave the classical debates
their distinctive contours and generated the different theological stances. This was
a conflict between God’s justice and God’s power, or again between God’s title
to absolute praise (ḥamd) and His title to absolute sovereignty (mulk). Different
schools had seized upon a single one of those terms to the exclusion of the other:
Muʿtazilites had run away with justice and deprived God of absolute power;
Ashʿarites had run away with absolute power and deprived God of His entitle-
ment to praise. The first had conceded so much to human freedom that it placed
limits on God’s, and made so much of objective morality that God appeared as the
subject of a Law above Him. The latter had denied human freedom so flatly as to
make the ethical life seem absurd and denied the existence of constraints on God’s
possible action so blatantly as to make God seem like a tyrant. The God we can
love, or the God who can make things happen?
It is an impossible choice that thinkers have often come up against through-
out our intellectual history in different forms. It is the question Socrates calmly
debated with Euthyphro when asking whether that which is holy is “loved by the
gods because it is holy, or is … holy because it is loved by the gods” (Euthyphro 10a),
138 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

which continues to weave its way through discussions of the relation between
God’s goodness and omnipotence down to present times. It is the question that
philosophers and theologians have debated in more impassioned tones when ask-
ing why evil happens, and how—particularly in a world that still counts God as a
member—this can be explained. This of course is a concern that is far from aca-
demic, raising vital questions, as Susan Neiman writes, about “what the structure
of the world must be like for us to think and act within it” and thematizing our
ability to trust in the world we inhabit. Such questions have formed a driving force
of inquiry for long swaths of our intellectual history, unsurprisingly given their
deep-seated psychological roots.2
This broader history of tensions is worth keeping in the background; and so is
the close enmeshment of these types of questions with more living human con-
cerns. My aim in this chapter will be to bring into view one of the central compo-
nents of Ibn Taymiyya’s proposal for resolving the conflict that had riven classical
Islamic debates. It is a conflict, we have already heard him say, that cries out for
a via media. And this via media, he will state, is “the doctrine of the salaf,” which
sacrifices neither term and affirms that God “has both sovereignty and entitle-
ment to praise in full measure.”3 My narrower concern in this chapter will be
with Ibn Taymiyya’s articulation of the second term of this nodal statement. For
even as he announces the dissociation of human from divine morality, his distinc-
tive claim is that the notion of divine morality cannot be surrendered altogether.
God’s justice—or, in Ibn Taymiyya’s preferred focal term, God’s wisdom—has to
be upheld. These notions must be upheld as an imperative of God’s entitlement to
praise, yet they also respond to powerful imperatives belonging to the perspective
of a more vital human experience.
Ibn Taymiyya’s claims are developed in opposition to the view adopted by
Ashʿarite theologians, and thus my discussion will once again pursue the double
task of locating Ibn Taymiyya against his interlocutors and weaving together a
positive understanding of his own claims. A positive exploration of God’s moral-
ity will also open the space for raising afresh some of the questions about the
nature of value that we have already posed. In previous chapters the aspects of
Ibn Taymiyya’s view we explored engaged the ethical debates of kalām and the
conversation these had struck up with the writings of the falāsifa. In this chapter
our discussion is set to relay us to a different conversation between kalām debates
and legal discourse. The place where God’s justice and God’s power meet for an
adjudicating contest is the very body of the divine Law.
After an initial characterization of Ibn Taymiyya’s critical stance against the
Ashʿarites—which targets their denial that God is wise and that He legislates for
the sake of human welfare—I will devote the first part of my discussion to a closer
investigation of the Ashʿarite understanding of the place of welfare in the Law,
focusing on the conflict often said to subsist between Ashʿarite utterances in the
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 139

theological and legal contexts. The second part of my discussion will address Ibn
Taymiyya’s positive understanding of God’s wisdom and God’s justice, focusing
on two main reason-giving contexts:  the reasons for God’s commands and the
reasons for God’s punishment.

The Wisdom of God’s Law: A Theological Rift

and Its Internal Ashʿarite Tensions
There can be no better starting point than the stage-setting exposition of Ibn
Taymiyya’s via media that provided us with a foothold in ­chapter 1. It is an expo-
sition that we have already engaged at length on several levels, yet in returning
to it we will see that we have far from exhausted its orienting themes. Critically
adumbrating the Ashʿarite view, Ibn Taymiyya had berated the Ashʿarites for their
failure to acknowledge the objectivity of ethical values and for reducing them to a
matter of mere relations—a criticism we found puzzling in light of Ibn Taymiyya’s
affinities with the Ashʿarite view. Yet if we return to that anchor passage to rehearse
it once more, we will now find that the way he had parsed that point was rather
more specific. On the topic of “the determination of good and bad,” he had said,
such theologians

say that actions do not contain attributes that constitute [evaluative] quali-
fications [aḥkām] nor attributes that constitute the causes [ʿilal] of qualifi-
cations. Rather, [God] issued a command for one of two [equally possible]
similar actions [mutamāthilayn] out of sheer arbitrary will, not due to any
wise purpose, and not in order to promote any welfare [maṣlaḥa] in either
the realm of creation [khalq] or command [amr]. And they say that it is pos-
sible that God might command one to polytheism, or forbid one from wor-
shipping Him alone, and it is possible that He command injustice and foul
deeds, and forbid righteousness and piety, and that the qualifications that
attach to acts are only a [contingent or extrinsic] relation and association
[nisba wa-iḍāfa]. And what is right [maʿrūf] is not right in itself [fī nafsihi], in
their view, nor is what is wrong [munkar] in itself wrong… . Command and
prohibition, making lawful and prohibiting, are in their view not [about]
what is right or wrong, good or foul in itself [fī nafs al-amr], unless this
is taken to refer to that which agrees with people’s natural appetites [mā
yulāʾimu al-ṭibāʿ], and this does not entail, according to them, that God
loves what is right and hates what is wrong.4

Combing this passage for its linchpin critical terms, there are a number of notions
we should allow to stand out:  the reference to the qualifications and causes of
actions; the reference to God’s wise purpose; the reference to what God loves
140 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

and hates. Yet what must be immediately noticed is something even more basic,
namely the emphasis on the nature and grounds of God’s commands that holds
the entire passage together. With this emphasis in view, Ibn Taymiyya’s criticism
of the Ashʿarites’ anti-objectivism can be read with fresh nuance. Probed more
carefully, the offending view is not simply that actions do not have real ethical
qualities; it is that God’s command is not grounded in the real ethical qualities
of acts.
It is the contention just isolated that forms the focus of some of Ibn Taymiyya’s
more truculent engagements with Ashʿarite ethical thought. In trying to reconcile
God’s praiseworthiness and God’s power, Ibn Taymiyya will argue, the Ashʿarites
failed to give the former its due. Bent on preserving God’s sovereignty from the
encroachment of limiting standards foreign to His will, they left His will brute
and dark to reasons. There is no “Why?” to be asked of God’s will; God’s will
is not responsive to anything outside it, to the real features of actions, of the
world. When God chooses to do one thing or another—when He commands
human beings to perform one action over another or when He creates one thing
rather than another—He does so arbitrarily, preferring one of two equally pos-
sible actions without a ground (takhṣīṣ/tarjīḥ al-mutamāthilayn bilā sabab). Yet to
take that position, in Ibn Taymiyya’s view, is to deprive God of His praiseworthy
description as “wise” (ḥakīm). The term “justice” (ʿadl), which formed the chief
focus of Muʿtazilite theology, is not absent from Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion. Yet
it is the term “wisdom” (ḥikma) that forms the principal lodestone for his theo-
logical reflections in this context and the perfection whose ascription to God he is
most anxious to secure. To secure this, as he writes in his Minhāj al-sunna, is to
acknowledge that God’s actions and commands are directed to “praiseworthy con-
sequences” (ʿawāqib maḥmūda) and “beloved ends” (ghāyāt maḥbūba).5 In com-
manding specific acts, more especially, God does not randomly choose between
indifferent things. Far from commanding for no purpose, it may be said that God
commands out of love: God loves (yuḥibbu) the actions He commands.
There will be further detail to add to these views as this chapter progresses.
Yet for the grounds of Ibn Taymiyya’s reproach against the Ashʿarites, one does
not need to look far. We have already seen that Ashʿarites denied that actions
have intrinsic attributes that account for the evaluative qualifications the Law
distributes on them; such qualifications, in al-Anṣārī ’s already cited locution,
rather “stem from God’s word” (āyila ilā qawl Allāh). The implication that God
could have commanded other actions than He in fact has was cheerfully drawn
by several Ashʿarites. In his Niẓāmiyya, al-Juwaynī would be simply expressing
this point on another level when stating that “from the perspective of divinity,
all acts are equal [biʾl-iḍāfa ilā ḥukm al-ilāhiyya fa-inna al-afʿāl mutasāwiya],” as
would al-Ghazālī in the Iqtiṣād, when he would put the point with an incendiary
specificity in which the grounds of Ibn Taymiyya’s accusations can be even more
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 141

plainly seen: “Disbelief and faith, obedience and disobedience, are all equal as far
as God is concerned [Allāhu taʿālā yastawī fī ḥaqqihi al-kufr waʾl-īmān waʾl-tāʿāt
waʾl-ʿiṣyān].”6 Yet few would express the spirit of arbitrariness that Ibn Taymiyya
would take as his target more clearly than the Mālikite jurist al-Qarāfī (d. 1285),
when he would assert: God “renders preponderant one of two [equally] possible
things through His sheer will, which is such that it intrinsically renders pre-
ponderant without requiring a preponderating factor [bal yurajjiḥu taʿālā aḥad
al-jāʾizayn ʿalaʾl-ākhar bi-mujarrad irādatihi allatī shaʾnuhā an turajjiḥa li-dhātihā
min ghayr iḥtiyājihā li-murajjiḥ].”7
All acts are equal to God; there is nothing in their inherent qualities to explain
why God should attach positive value to one and not the other. And even if one
still felt the need to ask “Why?” at this juncture, the space for doing so was sealed
up even more programmatically by Ashʿarites through their distinctive under-
standing of God’s wisdom. For like most other theologians taking their point of
departure from scripture in deciding what could and could not be said of God, the
Ashʿarites had affirmed that the notion of “wisdom” can indeed be predicated of
God. Yet they had construed it in explicitly nonmoral terms, referring it chiefly to
knowledge and to well-wrought (muḥkam) action on the basis of knowledge and
will.8 Excluded from the antecedents of such action, significantly, was anything
that could be described as a “purpose” or “motive” (ʿilla, bāʿith, dāʿī). Such notions,
Ashʿarites contended, imply imperfection and need. An agent who aims at certain
ends is an agent who is incomplete without them. God’s wisdom thus had to be
construed in terms that did not involve ascribing to Him intentional concepts.9
A fortiori, what must also be excluded from the antecedents of divine action are
ethically charged aims such as those with which the Muʿtazilites had proposed
to stock the notion of wisdom, naming beneficence (iḥsān) as God’s principal
motivation.
Ibn Taymiyya himself, as we have seen, repudiates the Muʿtazilite claim that
the ethical standards that constrain the actions of human beings are the same as
those that constrain God’s. Yet what is crucial is that it is the same notion deployed
by Muʿtazilites to talk about God’s motivation that Ibn Taymiyya places at the
heart of his conception of God’s wisdom. The problem with the Ashʿarite denial
of God’s wisdom, Ibn Taymiyya elsewhere makes clear, is not simply the claim that
God “renders preponderant one of two [equally] possible things through His sheer
will.” It is its specific exclusion of beneficence (al-iḥsān ilaʾl-khalq) as the factor
that gives God’s will its rational ground and makes it lean (tarajjaḥa) in one direc-
tion as against another.10 And that is to say that the teleological notion of “praise-
worthy consequences” to which God’s will is directed must be understood, at least
in part, in terms of a notion that has already emerged as the governing concept of
Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical thought in the human context, namely welfare (maṣlaḥa).
To claim that God is wise is thus in part to claim that God directs His actions and
142 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

commands to the achievement of human welfare. Both a closer consideration of

the document of God’s speech, the Qur’an, and a closer empirical consideration
of the natural world that surrounds us reveal the purposefulness of God’s actions
and the concern with creaturely welfare that guides them.11
The connection between God’s wisdom and human welfare, we will recognize
in hindsight, was plainly visible in the stage-setting exposition of Ibn Taymiyya’s
via media that came before us. “God is knowing and wise [ḥakīm],” we heard
Ibn Taymiyya say, “and knowing the benefits that qualifications comprise [ma
tataḍammanuhu al-aḥkām min al-maṣāliḥ], He issued commands and prohibitions
based on His knowledge of the benefits and harms that commands and prohibi-
tions … involve for His servants.” Far from being the preserve of Muʿtazilites
or their like-minded Shi’ite colleagues, Ibn Taymiyya explains in the Minhāj, the
claim that God is wise in this sense is rather “the view of the majority of Muslim
factions, including the scriptural exegetes, the jurists, the traditionists, the Sufis,
the mutakallimūn, and others.”12 This proclamation of consensus will remind us
of a similar proclamation that came into view in ­chapter 1, tied more narrowly to
the thesis that acts are good or bad in themselves. Parsed now as the thesis that
God commands for the human good, this proclamation takes on new meaning.13
It is in fact only a small fraction of the Muslim community that opposes this
claim; and these are precisely theologians of Ashʿarite persuasion. The loca-
tion of one of Ibn Taymiyya’s main rifts with Ashʿarite theology, we can now say
more clearly, lies in a question about the place of human welfare within God’s
creative and especially legislative activity. That this question is at the forefront
of Ibn Taymiyya’s concerns in articulating his position on “the determination of
good and bad” is made evident in several passages, including a key passage in his
Qāʿida fiʾl-muʿjizāt waʾl-karāmāt where he revisits the topic. His overall proposal
will be familiar to us: good and bad may constitute a “quality of our actions,” and
reason may perceive part of this, taken as a matter of benefit and harm;14 the Law’s
commands and prohibitions may sometimes reflect the qualities of actions and
sometimes be the source of new qualifications. Whoever denies that acts may bear
intrinsic qualities (ṣifāt dhātiyya), he continues, “has denied the fact that revealed
laws come to indicate [jāʾat bi] what serves our welfare and what works to our det-
riment [al-maṣāliḥ waʾl-mafāsid] and what is right and wrong, and [has denied] the
relations of suitability [munāsaba] that hold between qualifications [aḥkām] and
their causes [ʿilal] in the Law, and he has denied the proper task of legal science
[fiqh] in religion, which is to know the wisdom behind the Law, its aims [maqāṣid]
and its excellences.”15 The claim that acts have real ethical qualities and that these
qualities are constituted by their beneficial tendency, this remark makes plain, is
intimately tied to the claim that benefit or welfare forms the aim of God’s laws.
Yet with the last-quoted passage before us, Ibn Taymiyya’s reproach against the
Ashʿarites may at the same time strike us as curious. Because several of the terms
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 143

of this passage, it will be noticed, point us to one particular discourse among

the Islamic sciences where such terms had achieved their critical articulation,
namely legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh). Jurists discussing God’s commands and seeking
to elaborate on the qualifications or rulings (aḥkām) God had assigned to specific
actions, thus, had taken a special interest in the ratio or cause (ʿilla) that could
be identified as the basis for these qualifications, with a view to extending the
Law to new actions through analogical reasoning (qiyās). The notion of “conve-
nience” or “suitability” (munāsaba) just invoked by Ibn Taymiyya appeared at this
juncture, as a way of identifying the legal cause that was based on discerning
the interests that particular rulings served to promote. Studying the behavioral
norms that God had prescribed, it was possible to discern that many of them
tended to the protection of certain key interests. In his landmark discussion in the
Mustaṣfā, al-Ghazālī had identified these interests as religion (dīn), human reason
(ʿaql), human life (nafs), property (māl), and “progeny” or the integrity of family
lines (nasal). Thus, he would write, the Law’s prescription of killing infidels could
be put down to the preservation of religion. The Law’s prescription of retaliation
(qiṣāṣ) could be connected to the preservation of human life (bihi hifẓ al-nufūs);
the imposition of punishment for drinking intoxicants to the preservation of rea-
son (bihi hifẓ al-ʿuqūl), which is the foundation of legal responsibility; the impo-
sition of punishment for adultery to the preservation of the integrity of family
lines (bihi hifẓ al-nasal waʾl-ansāb); the punishment for usurpation and theft to the
protection of property.16 Al-Ghazālī had described these five interests as “necessi-
ties” (ḍarūriyyāt) and placed them on the highest rung of a tripartite scheme that
included “needs” (ḥājiyyāt) and “improvements” (taḥsīniyyat). Many theorists in
the legal tradition would come to speak of these interests as constituting the “aims
of the Law” (maqāṣid al-sharīʿa).
It was a juncture within legal theory, as will be plain, in which the notion of
welfare or human interests (maṣlaḥa) made a powerful appearance. And what is
crucial for our context is that Ashʿarite thinkers had not only endorsed the devel-
opments that promoted welfare to a central place in the Law, but indeed played
a seminal role in spearheading them. Al-Ghazālī is a case in point, having been,
as Wael Hallaq remarks, “among the foremost theorists to elaborate a detailed
doctrine of munāsaba and, thus, of public interest” or maṣlaḥa. In developing his
views, al-Ghazālī looked back to earlier Ashʿarites, notably al-Juwaynī, and even
further back to a period of Shāfiʿite history that had been deeply saturated in
Muʿtazilite theological ideas. He also looked forward to a number of later Ashʿarite
legal theorists, including al-Rāzī and al-Qarāfī, who would take the emphasis on
welfare further and articulate it in ever more sophisticated ways.17
Considering the positions formulated by Ashʿarite thinkers in the context of
legal theory, Ibn Taymiyya’s complaint that the Ashʿarites denied the place of wel-
fare in the Law may in this light seem highly peculiar. Yet having made this point,
144 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

our attention may be drawn to a different observation. For these legal positions
themselves, on closer consideration, may seem to be no less peculiar read against
the light of the positions the Ashʿarites had expressed within the theological con-
text. The tensions begin to appear the moment one scratches the surface of the
legal discussions, and are already harbored by the very language that imposes
itself in this context. We may notice the relatively harmless instrumental “through”
(bi) that al-Ghazālī uses to frame the remarks cited above regarding the relation-
ship between specific laws and the interests they serve: bihi hifẓ al-nufūs (talking
about the prescription of retaliation), bihi hifẓ al-ʿuqūl (about the punishment for
consuming intoxicants), bihi hifẓ al-nasal waʾl-ansāb (about the punishment for
adultery). Yet al-Ghazālī himself, like many others, would elsewhere have to yield
to the openly explanatory tones of a “because” (li), characteristically stating that
wine was prohibited “because of the harm it leads to [ḥurrima limā fīhi min al-ifḍāʾ
ilaʾl-mafsada].”18
In the scriptural texts themselves, the notion of causation was more often
implied than explicit. “Satan’s plan is (but) to excite enmity and hatred between
you, with intoxicants and gambling, and hinder you from the remembrance of
God, and from prayer,” the Qur’an said in issuing the final prohibition of wine in
al-Māʾida (Q 5:91), implicitly referring this prohibition to both social and religious
goods and to the rational self-possession presupposed for the latter. “In retaliation
there is life for you” (Q 2:179), the Qur’an said, implicitly referring the prescription
of retaliation to its deterring effect. Yet theorists searching for legal causes under
the aspect of their “suitability” were inescapably invested in bringing this purpose-
rich subtext out into the open and in elaborating on the linguistic structures—“in
order to,” “because of,” and so on (li, kay, min ajl)—through which causation was
expressed in scripture. Such intentional language, however, distinctly enshrined
in the concept of maqāṣid al-sharīʿa, seemed to place the Ashʿarites at loggerheads
with their own theological views as conveyed in works of kalām. For there, as we
have seen, they had categorically rejected the applicability of notions of intention
and purpose to God. Reasons cannot be sought for God’s actions; a fortiori human
welfare cannot be ascribed to God as His legislative aim.
It was not the only point of tension to be found between the messages voiced
by Ashʿarites in the theological and legal contexts. If this tension derived from
the view the Ashʿarites had taken of the mind of God, another derived from the
view they had taken of the nature of value, pointing to a further difficulty relating
to their view of the mind of human beings. Ashʿarite writers, thus, frequently
opened works of legal theory with an account of legal qualifications (aḥkām) that
re-expressed an understanding of value also elaborated in works of kalām. Legal
qualifications, as al-Bāqillānī would characteristically rehearse the Ashʿarite posi-
tion in his Taqrīb, do not constitute attributes of the actions in question. His contin-
uation, which registers in the tones of an explanation, will also sound familiar: for
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 145

“what is forbidden by the Law may resemble what is obligatory in all of its fea-
tures, yet the Law may judge these two [actions] differently even though reason
pronounces them equal and alike [yaftariqāni fī qaḍiyyat al-samʿ maʿa istiwāʾihimā
wa-tamāthulihimā fī ḥukm al-ʿaql].”19 The focus of the latter part of this statement
is epistemological, denying that a difference is known rather than realized, but the
ontological focus of the first part serves as its interpreter. And it was an ontologi-
cal point, as we have seen, that was carried by the traditional Ashʿarite claim that
good and bad are merely a matter of command or prohibition coming to “attach”
(taʿalluq) to particular actions, contrasting external attachment to intrinsic (dhātī)
attribute.
The same point would be expressed by al-Juwaynī at the opening of his Burhān,
yet now with a concreteness that made plain not only its meaning but also its dif-
ficulties. The legal qualification is not a real characteristic of the action; thus “if
we say: the drinking of wine is forbidden, prohibition is not an intrinsic quality
[ṣifa dhātiyya] of the drinking”; rather “what is meant by its being forbidden is
that prohibition attaches to it.”20 “Not an intrinsic quality,” “prohibition merely
attaches”—yet all we need to do here is to recall the position taken on the topic of
wine by legal theorists, who drew on scriptural evidence to explain the relevant rul-
ings (the prohibition of consuming wine and the prescription of punishment for
violating this prohibition) by reference to the deleterious effects of intoxicants on
human reason. What this amounted to was a combination of positions that could
not but seem paradoxical:  affirming that the qualification “prohibited” attaches
merely contingently to the drinking of wine, yet insisting that this qualification
can in turn be explained by reference to the real consequences of the act. Ibn
Taymiyya himself, as we saw in c­ hapter 3, was prepared to speak of such conse-
quences (and the value deriving from them) as “real” attributes or features. The
Ashʿarites, as far as I am aware, had not embraced this usage. Yet to the extent
that such consequences represent cause-and-effect relations that are sufficiently
stable features of the world to be taken into account by the Lawgiver in prescrib-
ing one set of actions and proscribing another, this language could not be entirely
shrugged off.
This point of tension calls attention to another, one that Ashʿarite thinkers may
have been especially exposed to, but that reflects a worry that jurists belonging to a
broader spectrum of opinion also labored under. For if the aim of jurists’ interpre-
tive activity was to discover a Law whose comprehensive embodiment resided in
the “mind of God,” in Bernard Weiss’s phrase, there was a natural concern about
the risk that this activity might obscure its object and that the mind of man might
impose its own patterns on the apprehension of the divine ideal.21 The reliability
of human reason as a means for understanding the Law had been explicitly the-
matized in the use of analogy (qiyās) as a tool of legal reasoning. For analogy—that
special method that involved identifying the cause of a ruling in a given case and
146 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

transferring this ruling from the primary case (aṣl) to a subsidiary one (farʿ) on the
basis of the shared cause—was nothing if not an exercise of reason. Different writ-
ers would thus openly characterize it as a form of “rational” proof (ḥujaj/dalāʾil
al-ʿuqūl).22
It was this understanding of its character that underpinned the suspicion with
which certain jurists within the Islamic tradition had treated the use of analogy in
legal reasoning. These include not only jurists of a more traditionalist mindset,
such as the Ẓāhirites, but also thinkers who otherwise seemed enthusiastic about
engaging in rational inquiry in other domains. The early Muʿtazilite theologian
al-Naẓẓām (d. ca. 836) is a case in point, offering an expression of this suspicion
that would reverberate through many later discussions and defenses of analogy
and that is all the more arresting for echoing a vocabulary that Ashʿarite thinkers
would later use in framing their objections to ethical rationalism. “If we examine
the precepts of the Law,” he would state, “we find they form a disparate and var-
iegated lot. There are some cases in which the Law has treated different things
identically, and there are others where the Law has treated similar things as con-
traries [minhā mā sawwā al-sharʿ fīhā bayna al-mukhtalifāt wa-minhā mā khālafa
al-sharʿ fīhā bayna al-mutamāthilāt].” Consider, for example, the way the Law made
it off-bounds for a free woman to show her hair, but made it permissible for a
slave woman to do the same. Or consider the way it demands a ritual washing of
the entire body for certain kinds of impurities (such as sexual intercourse or men-
struation) and only a limited ablution for others (such as urination or defecation).
Such examples show that the Law follows a logic utterly inaccessible to human
understanding.23
In formulating this point, it is significant that al-Naẓẓām would focus on
types of acts that already in his time were grouped together under the heading
of “ritual observances” or “acts of worship” (ʿibādāt) and were contrasted with
“practical transactions” (muʿāmalāt), which included commercial and civil trans-
actions between human beings such as buying or selling, lending or borrowing,
and matters of marriage or inheritance. Later jurists endorsing the use of analogy
would draw a sharp distinction—though its sharpness would vary among differ-
ent schools—between the two categories in terms of their accessibility to rational
understanding and thus to the operation of analogical reasoning. Whereas the for-
mer category resisted such reasoning, the latter was far more hospitable to it and
likewise extended a stronger invitation to reflect on the human interests served
by it. This kind of invitation would seem calculated to rouse even more power-
fully the worry that the human mind might end up projecting its patterns on the
ideal contained in the mind of God. It is this fear, as Aron Zysow writes, a fear of
“the tendency of men to remake the law in their own image,” that underpinned
Ḥanafite lawyers’ conservative stance on considerations of suitability (munāsaba),
which engaged the notion of human welfare.24
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 147

Yet for Ashʿarite lawyers, this invitation would appear to generate an extra dif-
ficulty, seen against their other ethicotheological commitments. For if the effort to
determine the cause of a given ruling involves, in al-Āmidi’s striking phrase, mak-
ing judgments as to what is “eligible” or “capable” of forming the Lawgiver’s moti-
vation or aim (al-ashyāʾ allatī taṣluḥu an takūna bawāʿith, mā yaṣluḥu an yakūna
maqṣūdan), such judgments seem particularly problematic where considerations
of human welfare are concerned.25 For the claim that human reason can be relied
upon to identify the interests that motivate legal rulings and that underlie the Law
as its larger purposes—“suitability,” al-Ghazālī tells us, refers to “an intelligible
feature that is plain to reason and that can be readily established … through ratio-
nal reflection”—would seem to conflict with the Ashʿarite view of the limited pow-
ers of human reason as a means of accessing evaluative truths.26 The claim that
human beings can recognize the goods that the Law reasonably aims to promote
reflects a presumption that human beings can recognize these goods as goods,
worthy of figuring among the concerns of the Law. In this respect, the assertion
we heard from al-Bāqillānī, that actions attract different legal qualifications even
as they are judged “equal and alike in the perspective of reason,” would be belied
by the fact that other Ashʿarite theorists had deemed reason supremely capable of
marking certain distinctions between the acts God had forbidden and the acts He
had made obligatory.27
In c­ hapter 3, to be sure, we saw that many Ashʿarites after al-Bāqillānī voiced
support for the idea that human beings can make certain basic evaluative judg-
ments relative to their interests. These were judgments of natural appetite that
Ashʿarites often referred to as judgments of reason and that could be summed
up by saying “it is obligatory to avoid harm” and “it is good to pursue benefit.”
Yet of course these propositions, as they stand, carry little substantive content;
they are purely formal. To concede them is thus perfectly compatible with holding
that only the Law tells us what constitutes benefit and what constitutes harm, as
al-Ashʿarī had early on suggested is the case. Reason, in the words reported by Ibn
Fūrak, “contains no indication of the harms and benefits that form the outcome”
of actions (lā dalīla fīhi ʿalā mā yakūnu fiʾl-ʿawāqib min al-maḍārr wa’l-manāfiʿ)
and that constitute them as overall beneficial or harmful.28 The ability to recog-
nize the interests served by the Law as good(s), by contrast, seems to presuppose
something far more substantive, reflecting not only the formal knowledge that the
pursuit of what is in our interests is good, but indeed a more substantive knowl-
edge of the what.
There are several tensions, thus, that seem to arise when considering the posi-
tions adopted by Ashʿarites in legal theory from the perspective of their theological
positions. It is at this precise juncture, as Zysow has noted, that Ashʿarite theo-
logians had often been accused of a failure to harmonize the messages flowing
from their different discourses, and more specifically of a failure to resolve the
148 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

conflicts produced in the transition from the discourse of theology to that of legal
theory.29 Ibn Taymiyya himself would pick up on this tension in several locations
of his work, remarking on the diverging views voiced by different groups in differ-
ent contexts regarding the explanation (taʿlīl) of God’s actions and commands and
the status of legal causes, with one view appearing in the context of law (fiqh) and
another in the context of theology (uṣūl).30
Given the central significance of this conflict both for the way we understand
Ashʿarite ethical thought and the way we reconstruct Ibn Taymiyya’s location within
his intellectual topography, it is worth pausing to consider it more closely. In the
next section, I will focus on two core elements of this apparent conflict: the tensions
generated for Ashʿarite jurists by their view of the mind of human beings (their
untutored evaluative grasp) and by their view of the mind of God (His inaccessibility
to concepts of purpose). My argument will be that prominent Ashʿarites showed a
notable willingness to acknowledge the thicker evaluative grasp involved in knowing
the interests promoted by the Law, and I will raise a question as to how deeply this
acknowledgment after all conflicted with their ethical viewpoint. It is with regard to
the second, theological concern that a more genuine conflict would seem to arise,
but Ashʿarites developed specific strategies for resolving it. It is against this context,
and particularly against the Ashʿarite theological position, that Ibn Taymiyya’s own
conflict with the Ashʿarites and his distinctive position can best be addressed.

The Human Mind, the Mind of God: Ashʿarite Views

of Welfare between Theology and Law
Turning to the first point, it will be important to notice the special care al-Ghazālī
had taken in articulating his account of the five objectives of the Law in the
Mustaṣfā and the distinct emphasis he had placed on one key fact: these objectives
are to be understood as objects not of human desire, but of divine intention. In
its “original” sense (fiʾl-aṣl), al-Ghazālī would note in introducing the notion of
maṣlaḥa, this notion refers to the pursuit of benefit and the avoidance of harm
(jalb manfaʿa aw-dafʿ maḍarra). Used in the context of the Law and as a potential
legislative ground, however, “this is not what we mean by it; for the pursuit of
benefit and repulsion of harm constitute objects of human intentions.” Rather,
maṣlaḥa here refers to “the preservation of the intention of the Law; and what the
Law intends for people is fivefold: to preserve their religion, their life, their reason,
their progeny, and their property for them.”31 What the Law intends; to preserve
these things for them—markers of an external perspective that would bypass the
traps of ordinary language by purging the term maṣlaḥa of the meaning that ordi-
narily attaches to it and annexing it to a separate corpus of technical speech. Not
what we consider our good but what the Law intends.
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 149

The same focus on the intention of the Law, as against human conceptions
of the good, registers in another key contention within al-Ghazālī ’s discussion,
namely that it is scriptural evidence that constitutes the source for our knowl-
edge of welfare (or “welfare”):  “The aims of the Law are known through the
Qur’an, the Sunna, and consensus.”32 This contention would seem to form but
a natural continuation of the Ashʿarite view that the Law is the sole source
for our knowledge of value, as affirmed by Ashʿarites within kalām debates.
As Zysow has suggested, it was precisely a textual account of how the aims of
the Law are established that presented itself to Ashʿarite thinkers as the readi-
est means of avoiding the claim that the human mind provides us with epis-
temic access to them. If the Law itself informs us about its aims, the services
of human reason are plainly not required.33 The way the Law does so, Ashʿarite
jurists from al-Ghazālī through al-Rāzī to al-Qarāfī would argue, is by placing
before us recurrent examples of a connection between particular rulings and
particular purposes, which lead us inductively (through istiqrāʾ) to an under-
standing of its general purposes. It is by observing what al-Ghazālī in the Shifāʾ
al-ghalīl would refer to as “the behavior of the Law” (taṣarrufāt al-sharʿ)—by
observing God’s textual behavior—that we acquire a sense of the Law’s habit
or custom (daʾb al-sharʿ, ʿādat al-sharʿ). This is similar to the way we acquire
a sense of a person’s character through a close observation that enables us to
notice patterns and regular conjunctions between action and occasion.34
And yet if that is the overall import of al-Ghazālī ’s discussion in the Mustaṣfā,
what are we to make of the remarks he offers on the very same topic elsewhere?
For in his earlier work on legal theory, Shifāʾ al-ghalīl, the dominant accent had
seemed to fall differently. Introducing the different classes of considerations of
suitability (munāsaba), he had delivered an orienting statement that is worth quot-
ing at some length:

The highest among these are those that occupy the rank of necessities
[ḍarūrāt], such as preserving human life, for it is the aim of the Lawgiver,
and it is a necessity for people [min ḍarūrat al-khalq], and our reason indi-
cates and affirms it … and in the view of those who assert that reason
determines what is good and bad [taḥsīn al-ʿaql wa-taqbīḥihi], it is such
that no Law may ever fail to be without it. And even though we say that
God may act as He wills toward His servants and that He is not obliged
to promote what is in their interests, we do not deny that reason points to
what constitutes our welfare and what impairs it, and that it warns against
dangers and incites to the pursuit of benefits [lā nunkiru ishārat al-ʿuqūl
ilā jihat al-maṣāliḥ waʾl-mafāsid wa-taḥdhīrahā al-mahālik wa-targhībahā fī
jalb al-manāfiʿ] … nor do we deny that messengers, peace be upon them,
were sent for the benefit of people in both this world and the next, by way
150 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

of God’s mercy and grace [faḍlan] upon people, not by way of necessity and
obligation [wujūban] upon Him.35

There are many messages to mine within this statement, but here we may simply
register the most immediate one. For even allowing for some of the conservative
qualifications that clothe the point (like the interpolation of the more hesitant
jiha in ishārat al-ʿuqūl ilā jihat al-maṣāliḥ), in this passage al-Ghazālī appears to
ascribe to reason precisely the kind of epistemic role vis-à-vis the interests pro-
moted by the Law which in the Mustaṣfā he had disavowed. And he does so while
self-consciously locating himself in the “we” of Ashʿarite theologians, defined by
a denial that good and bad can be rationally determined. A rounder affirmation of
the thesis that human beings rationally know the interests promoted by the Law
could hardly have been desired. To the question just raised—“What to make of
this fact?”—the only answer would seem to be: a flagrant contradiction.
It is a contradiction that has been remarked more broadly in the past by read-
ers of al-Ghazālī ’s legal output, who have noted the palpably different spirit in
which he approaches the notion of maṣlaḥa between these two works. The differ-
ence between al-Ghazālī ’s attitudes, some readers have suggested—between the
“liberal pragmatism” of the Shifāʾ al-ghalīl and the “uncompromising literalism”
of the Mustaṣfā—can be explained by reference to the different chronologies of
each work. Thus, the Shifāʾ al-ghalīl was written at an earlier point in al-Ghazālī ’s
career marked by a pedagogical and practical preoccupation with positive law as
well as an engagement with the rational sciences. The Mustaṣfā, by contrast, is the
product of a time postdating his spiritual crisis marked by a retreat from mundane
affairs into an attitude of “fearsome piety,” which was linked with a concern to
present the “minimum doctrine” in a conservative manner without risking inno-
vation or controversy.36
However we may seek to account for it, it is a kind of contradiction that would
provide fodder for the view that the Ashʿarites confronted serious challenges
in trying to harmonize different regions of their theory with one another, and
that seems symptomatic of a type of entropy inherent in Ashʿarite theory that
made a stable viewpoint hard to achieve. Yet I would argue that what should be
underscored in this connection are less the discontinuities to be observed across
al-Ghazālī ’s writings, than the continuities. These are continuities that pull the
knowledge of value in the direction of reason; and they do so precisely through
the usage of language, and with greater complicity than suggested by earlier talk
of its “traps.”
For al-Ghazālī ’s remark here that the preservation of human life is “the aim
of the Lawgiver, and it is a necessity for people [min ḍarūrat al-khalq]” was echoed
in the Mustaṣfā by the remark, apropos the need to preserve people’s possessions,
that these “constitute people’s livelihood, and they stand in need of them [hiya
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 151

maʿāsh al-khalq wa-hum muḍṭarrūna ilayhā].”37 That the language of ḍarūra should
appear in this context should come as no surprise, given that al-Ghazālī is illustrat-
ing the category of interests he has identified as “necessities” or ḍarūrāt. Yet if he
had earlier invited us to purify words like maṣāliḥ from their habitual meanings
and to hear them in a technical sense divorced from ordinary experience, such
mental feats seem harder to pull off in this context in a way that would allow us to
understand the language of needs, not in terms of anything we know from human
experience—so that what is a need is what we know and experience as a need, refer-
ring us to a judgment made from within the human condition—but in terms of
what the Law enjoins us to call a “need” from its external perspective outside the
human world. To propose this, after all, would be to fly in the face of the most
self-evident facts, which we only need to tune into another semantic shade of the
term ḍarūra to state plainly: our life, and the means to our livelihood, are things
that we are compelled (muḍṭarr) to treasure and seek out.
Having tuned ourselves into these semantics, it will be hard not to hear them
again in the works of other Ashʿarites. In his Burhān, for example, al-Juwaynī
would refer the legal validation of selling (bayʿ) to the fact that “if people could not
barter what they have in hand, this would entail evident hardship [la-jarra dhālika
ḍarūra ẓāhira],” as he would refer the validation of renting (ijāra) to the “urgent
need for shelter [masīs al-ḥāja ilaʾl-masākin] combined with the inability to estab-
lish ownership,” which constitutes an “evident need” (ḥāja ẓāhira). Yet “evident,”
here, demands to be taken at its epistemological face value, leaving the terms
“need” and “necessity” untouched in their linguistic meanings and affirming the
simple fact that shelter—like the means to our livelihood, and our very lives—is
an object of experienced need and desire. Al-Juwaynī ’s references to our “natural
motives” (al-dawāʿī al-jibilliyya) and to the concordance between the Law and our
natural dispositions—“it is as if the Law harnesses the entailments of our nature
as its support [ka-anna al-sharīʿa tataʾayyadu bi-mūjib al-jibilla waʾl-ṭabīʿa]”—may
then have to be read precisely in the way that they immediately encourage us.38
The above suggests that a willingness to recognize the interests promoted by
the Law as objects of rational knowledge—taken in the sense identified in the
previous chapter, namely a knowledge of need or desire—was etched in the very
notions that Ashʿarites took as their vernacular in discussing and explaining
the provisions of the Law. And if, in certain of these cases, this presupposition
remains buried among the instruments of speech, in other writers, and in other
works of the same writers, it steps more plainly into the light. Al-Ghazālī him-
self provides us with the most brilliant illustration of the latter point, though it
is not insignificant that he does so in the pages, not of a work of legal theory,
but of his spiritual summa, Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-din. This is a work, we may recall,
that, like the Mustaṣfā, was written in the period postdating his spiritual crisis.
The purposes that guide this work, to be sure, differ sharply from those that
152 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

organize his writings on legal theory; this is also one of several works that
have sometimes been thought to sit uneasily within the corpus of al-Ghazālī ’s
writings in terms of their development of certain key themes. A case in point
is his treatment of the notion of causality, which appears to gravitate equivo-
cally between Ashʿarite occasionalism and an Avicennan embrace of second-
ary causation across different works, including the Iḥyāʾ.39 These are certainly
important tensions; yet it is then all the more significant to be able to once
again record those elements that make for the continuity of al-Ghazālī ’s under-
standing in the specific question we are considering, even as these elements are
transposed into a more complex intellectual vision.
It is with a combination of recognition and surprise, in fact, that we will greet
certain passages of the Iḥyāʾ that bring up for discussion several types of goods
that, looking out from the vantage point of uṣūl al-fiqh, we may recognize as
belonging to the gamut of the human interests identified as objectives of the Law.
The sense of recognition has to be sought out, for these goods are approached
through very different categories of interest in the Iḥyāʾ, and the intersection of its
concerns with those of legal discourse remains unmarked by al-Ghazālī himself,
who leaves the perspective of fiqh behind at the opening of the work, consign-
ing it to the domain of the dunyā as against the ākhira and to the realm of the
outer as against the inner—the qualities of the heart and the traits of character
from which external actions spring and which alone give them value, yet over
which legal science has no dominion.40 When we thus meet some of the goods
the jurists had discussed, we meet them modulated by a concern with the inner
and located against the larger spiritual perspective for which the Iḥyāʾ strives. The
mundane world, in this perspective, certainly forms the means by which human
beings arrive at the next (lā yatimmu al-dīn illā biʾl-dunyā), yet our attachment
to it must assume precisely an instrumental character, and our relationship to
the mundane region must be examined in terms of the intentions and spiritual
attitudes it incorporates, in ways calculated to transform the way we engage and
evaluate the mundane goods addressed by the jurists. Within this broader con-
text, we meet the jurists’ “property” (māl), for example, under the rubric of the
“etiquette” of earning a livelihood (ādāb al-kasb waʾl-maʿāsh). We meet it again,
more negatively this time, in discussions impugning the value of the mundane
world (dhamm al-dunyā) or discussions of spiritual traits like the love of wealth
and miserliness, poverty and abstinence. Similarly, we meet the jurists’ concern
with “progeny” or offspring (nasal or nasab) in the section of the Iḥyāʾ devoted to
the customs of daily life (ʿādāt) under the etiquette of marriage (ādāb al-nikāḥ).
And it is this latter discussion that I will here focus on as a source of some of the
most illuminating insights for our question.
The intersection with legal discourse, as I  have suggested, has to be sought
out, yet this is an effort that in many locations is facilitated by al-Ghazālī ’s own
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 153

language. This is particularly so in the evocative remarks with which he opens his
discussion of marriage and family life. “Praise be to God,” he writes, who

created human beings from water … and delivered people to the power of
an appetite through which He compelled them [shahwa iḍṭarrahum bihā]
to plow the land by a force beyond resistance, and preserved their progeny
[nasalahum] by coercion and duress, and then attached high esteem to lines
of kinship and assigned great value to them [ʿaẓẓama amr al-ansāb wa-jaʿala
lahā qadran], and on their account [bi-sababihā] prohibited fornication and
went to great lengths in declaring it evil [taqbīḥihi] by way of deterrence and
reprimand, and made its commission a vile criminal deed … and com-
mended marriage and exhorted people to it.41

It is a text remarkable for the depth of its resonance, and one need only scratch
lightly over its surface to pick up a wealth of terms that throw down bridges to the
concerns familiar to us from both the theological and legal domains. Nasal and
nasab are terms that instantly recall us to legal theory and its enumeration of the
five objectives, as does the term iḍṭarra to speak of the sexual desire that compels
us to reproduction, which recalls us to legal talk of ḍarūrāt. Something similar
will be said about the reference to adultery (sifāḥ) and the familiar instrumen-
tal connection drawn between the prohibition of adultery and the preservation of
family lines. What will be especially striking given our questions is the emphasis
al-Ghazālī appears to lay on God’s evaluative activity in these remarks. “Attached
esteem,” “assigned value” (notice also the telltale kalām term: taqbīḥ): with these
remarks, the value attaching to the good in question—reproductive activity and
family life—appears to be starkly proclaimed as the product of God’s willful
assignment. Translated into the terms of legal theory, the message foreshadowed
by these introductory remarks seems clear: the value of this good has to be sought
in God’s intentions. God installs sexual desire, God assigns value to its effects,
God assigns disvalue to actions that undermine the good in question.
Indeed the term maqṣūd, when it makes its first notable appearance in the body
of the discussion, seems to have God as its subject of predication. Listing the ben-
efits of marriage, al-Ghazālī begins with the first, reproduction, and states: “This
is the foundation, and the reason for which marriage was instituted; the purpose
[maqṣūd] is propagation [ibqāʾ al-nasal], and that the world should not be free from
the human species; and [sexual] appetite was created as a motive force that incites
[innamā al-shahwa khuliqat bāʿitha mustaḥiththa].”42 Yet the objective notion of
divinely intended benefit (fāʾida) is certainly not the only level on which the notion
of intention registers within al-Ghazālī ’s discussion. This emerges clearly when
he turns to compare some of the benefits of marriage he has enumerated, and he
refers to its advantage as a means of gaining rest, especially from intellectual and
154 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

spiritual labors, through the lightening effect of female company. “Few people,”
he remarks, “seek marriage on its account”; by contrast, “the desire for children
and the desire to manage [sexual] appetite and the like are widely in evidence
[ammā qaṣdu al-walad wa-qaṣdu dafʿ al-shahwa wa-amthāluhā fa-huwa mimmā yak-
thuru].”43 At work beside divine intention, this signals, is also the subjective experi-
ence of human desire.
And how, one may ask, could it have been otherwise? For even if we had worked
through these statements with perfect scholarly neutrality, as ordinary readers
we could not have accepted any other conclusion without abandoning common
sense and without flouting the basic facts of our own experience. That people need
shelter; that people need to earn a living and desire the possession of goods; that
people, now, seek marriage out of a desire for children—none could have denied
the status of these needs and desires as belonging to the content of experience and
declared them to be prescriptions externally imposed on human beings from the
otherworldly vantage point of the mind of God.
Elsewhere in his discussion, al-Ghazālī points to a crucial modification in the
way we understand this choice, suggesting that there are many ways of reading
the mind of God and that our own mind (our own desires) can serve as the vehicle
through which God’s mind receives its expression. To the extent that our desires
derive from our body as this has been fashioned by God—musabbib al-asbāb,
Disposer of causes—they offer themselves as yet another form of divine script
from which God’s purposes may be read off. In this respect, we hardly needed
God’s verbal command (through the intermediary of His Prophet) “Marry and
beget children!” to learn of God’s intentions. We can read this command no less
imperiously off His human works and the language of their natural construc-
tion. Our own desire is then a sign, and points beyond itself.44 To register this
point fully would be to raise finer-grained questions about what it means to be the
proper subject of a need or a desire and what it is for a desire or an intention to be
distinguished as “human” as against “divine.” All we need to retain of this more
complex message at present—a message, notably, that, in heavily invoking the lan-
guage of God’s wisdom and purpose, brings al-Ghazālī into special tension with
the Ashʿarite viewpoint—is its entailment: a coincidence between the intentions
of human beings and those of God and an explicit acknowledgment that the goods
promoted by the Law form objects of our own natural desire. And this, as I have
suggested, is an acknowledgment that would find its echo, albeit more implicitly,
in al-Ghazālī ’s other works and the works of those using the language of ḍarūra
and sharing in its presuppositions.
If we were looking for another and perhaps less contentious avowal of this view,
we could find it by turning to the work of the later Ashʿarite jurist and theologian
al-Āmidī. Opening his discussion of “suitability” in al-Iḥkām fī uṣūl al-aḥkām, he
begins by addressing the notion of the aim or objective (maqṣūd) of legal norms,
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 155

and there he offers the following statement: “The intended object of instituting a

given ruling is either the promotion of welfare, or the repulsion of harm, or the
combination of the above, with respect to human beings—God being far above the
reach of harm or benefit. And this may form the object of human intention inso-
far as it suits one and agrees with one [rubbamā kāna dhālika maqṣūdan liʾl-ʿabd
li-annahu mulāʾim lahu wa-muwāfiq li-nafsihi]. Thus, if [idhā] a being endowed
with reason [al-ʿāqil] is given a choice between its existence and its nonexistence,
he chooses its existence over its nonexistence.”45 The ambiguity of this strategic
rubbamā may hold us up for a moment: should we hear this as a sometimes or a
possibly? Yet whichever way we hear it, and combined with the reference to reason
(al-ʿāqil) that points us to an epistemic state of being prior to or independent of the
Law—one further buttressed by the implications of the real conditional idhā—the
concession to human intention seems to stand out plainly.
Should we remain unconvinced, several other moments in al-Āmidī ’s discus-
sion ply us with additional evidence. Particularly significant here is an invocation
of the notion of ʿāda (custom, habit) that shows this notion to have undergone a
subtle but telling displacement from the meaning we earlier documented in the
legal work of al-Ghazālī.46 The reference to the human domain is no longer a para-
digm used to illustrate the way we understand God’s textual behavior and read the
Law’s objectives off the latter (“as we observe human behavior, so we observe the
behavior of the Law”). Human behavior or “custom” serves as an object of obser-
vation in its own right, and the objectives promoted by the Law appear to coin-
cide with the objectives of human beings as we can read them from their natural
behavior. Speaking about the highest level of the five ḍarūriyyāt: “The restriction to
these five classes arises from consideration of the facts [or reality: naẓaran ilaʾl-wāqiʿ],
and from the knowledge that there is no necessary aim that lies outside these
in the ordinary course of things [fiʾl-ʿāda].” Even more clearly, speaking about
“improvements” (taḥsīniyyāt), exemplified by the Law’s denying slaves the right
to provide testimony: given the lowly position of a slave and the dignity of testi-
mony, “the office of testimony does not befit him … in accordance with what people
are accustomed to and the customs they deem commendable [jaryan liʾl-nās ʿalā mā
alifūhu wa-mā ʿaddūhu min maḥāsin al-ʿādāt].”47 With this background to frame it,
the experiential notion of need embedded in al-Āmidī ’s language (mā tadʿū ḥājat
al-nās ilayhi, we hear), as in that of his predecessors, can be heard more openly, its
implicit message now explicit before us.
It is this view of custom that Weiss, commenting on this dimension of
al-Āmidī ’s legal thought, put pithily in the following summation:

As we reflect upon the human part of the created order, that is to say, upon
human life, we discover patterns of need and aspiration that are as much
a part of the divine custom as patterns visible in the nonhuman part of
156 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

the created order, such as the daily rising and setting of the sun. We dis-
cover that there are recurring human conditions that constitute well-being
(maṣlaḥa, manfaʿa) and that there are other such conditions that constitute
affliction (maḍarra); and we also discover that certain things are condu-
cive to well-being and certain others to affliction. We discover, for example,
that security of life, rationality, lineage, property, and even worship of God
are constitutive of well-being and that certain concrete measures or social
arrangements are conducive to their realization. These discoveries in no
way depend upon revelation as mediated through prophets.48

The analogy struck by Weiss between the human and the nonhuman domain
is instructive. It reminds us, on the one hand, that whatever we might make of
the epistemological question we have been asking—How do we know the inter-
ests promoted by the Law?—it is God’s creative arrangement of the world that
determines that human beings experience certain things as goods or that certain
courses of action lead to the realization of certain goods, and thus God’s imparting
of ontological structure that determines what can constitute an “interest” in both
its intrinsic and instrumental senses. (Compare al-Ghazālī’s remarks in the Iḥyāʾ
above.) By the same token, it calls attention to the fact that to affirm that the inter-
ests promoted by the Law are known by reason does not entail an abandonment of
the hermeneutical stance, or indeed of the divine text (custom) as the hermeneuti-
cal object. It is only a matter of one divine text being replaced with another, for
both the regularities of human life and the regularities of the scriptural texts share
their character as a divinely composed script.
In emphasizing the Ashʿarite acceptance of a “rational,” that is to say prerev-
elational, knowledge of the interests served by the Law, Weiss’s voice joins that
of several other readers of Ashʿarite legal texts converging on the thought that,
whatever the prejudices of Ashʿarite ethics may have groomed us to expect, this
position enjoyed an appeal among prominent Ashʿarite jurists.49 It is a position,
I observed earlier, that would seem to be in conflict with the more limited view of
the intuitive evaluative grasp of human beings that Ashʿarite thinkers had taken
elsewhere. And yet I would argue that the conflict here does not run as deep as
may appear.
For on the one hand, Ashʿarite thinkers had indeed often emphasized the fact
that only the Law informs us of the value of actions—a mere corollary of the fact
that it creates it. It does so, as al-Ghazālī had put it in the Iqtiṣād, when God freely
chooses to attach (rabaṭa, anāṭa) consequences to actions that “tip” them (rajjaḥa)
into the domain of obligation or into the domain of prohibition.50 Yet the empha-
sis in this picture had fallen primarily on the consequences of actions in the other-
worldly domain, that is, reward and punishment. There is nothing “in” actions that
makes them naturally attract reward or punishment; it is merely an artificial act
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 157

of attachment or taʿalluq on the part of God. The corresponding emphasis, episte-

mologically, was on the human inability to know the posthumous consequences
of actions. This is evident, for example, in al-Ghazālī’s remark in the Iḥyāʾ that
reason cannot gain insight into “harm after death” (al-ḍarar baʿda al-mawt). It is
also implicit in many of the juridical definitions of legal qualifications, which are
framed in terms of consequences in the otherworldly domain. Here is al-Ghazālī
again, defining “prohibition” in the Mustaṣfā: that act is prohibited “whose com-
mission one has been given to understand will be punished in the hereafter [mā
ushʿira bi-ʿiqāb fiʾl-ākhira ʿalā fiʿlihi].”51 The interests served by the Law, by con-
trast, take the worldly domain as their immediate frame of reference. The five
objectives, several jurists including al-Rāzī and al-Qarāfī explicitly state, represent
“mundane interests” (maṣāliḥ al-dunyā).52
This observation must be complemented by an even more fundamental one,
which helps put in perspective the epistemological concession Ashʿarite jurists
were offering in acknowledging that human beings independently recognize the
value of the goods the Law aims to promote. For this concession, as the foregoing
discussion suggests, needs to be located against the same epistemological horizon
that Ashʿarites had described in their theological works. The evaluative “knowl-
edge” at issue is a knowledge grounded in desire, indeed knowledge of desire. We
know that property, offspring, and the integrity of our life are goods in the sense
that we are compelled (muḍṭarr) to seek them—we experience a visceral need for
them. This continuity is at times lit up by clear linguistic markers. Discussing
the natural desire for reproduction in the Iḥyāʾ, thus, al-Ghazālī had spoken of
God’s creation of sexual desire (shahwa) as a motive force (bāʿitha mustaḥiththa)
that incites people to procreation. These terms (bāʿith, mustaḥithth) were ones he
elsewhere linked with the notion of ṭabʿ—a notion in turn appearing copiously in
the Iḥyāʾ to refer to our natural inclinations—when addressing the question of
ethics.53 The evaluative vision deriving from natural needs and desires, it is worth
recalling here, was a vision indexed to the first-person singular: what each person
naturally desires is what is good for himself. (Al-Ghazālī: “Every person is formed
by nature to love himself”).
Seen from this perspective, al-Ghazālī’s concession that we rationally recog-
nize an interest promoted by the Law—that of nasal—as a good may appear in
a different light. For if all that means is that we naturally desire to reproduce, it
does not immediately follow from that desire that its satisfaction outside mar-
riage is wrong—as the Law, in proscribing adultery for the protection of this good,
declares. The desire for reproduction would seem indifferent to the means used
to achieve it. Similarly, from the fact that we desire certain goods for our suste-
nance, it does not follow that the satisfaction of this desire using goods that belong
to other people is wrong—as the Law, in proscribing theft for the protection of
property, declares. This suggests that the object of human desire (what our desire
158 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

“sees” as good) and the object of the Law (what the Law promotes as a good) do
not coincide. And they fail to do so for reasons that directly evoke the reasons put
forward in an earlier chapter in proposing that the evaluative knowledge provided
by the human fiṭra, within Ibn Taymiyya’s framework, must be more limited than
initially apparent. Natural desire needs to be ordered normatively by the Law. Or
again, what is subjectively held to be good needs to be modified by more objective
conceptions of the good.
If one wished to plot the distance between the surface of our preexisting evalu-
ative comprehension and the surface of the evaluative comprehension introduced
by the Law—between human maqāṣid and maqāṣid al-sharīʿa—one might hazard
the following schematization. On the one hand, the Law introduces a new, “deon-
tological” element of normativity into our relationship with the goods at stake.
The interest or good of human life, to take one example, is vouchsafed by God’s
institution of a prohibition against its removal (al-qaḍāʾ bi-taḥrīm al-qatl), which
finds its counterpart in the institution of a worldly punishment for its violation
(ījāb al-qiṣāṣ).54 A good that we already valued from our subjective perspective is
thereby provided with normative scaffolding by becoming the object of a com-
mand that faces in two directions. With the first, the good of human life acquires
a normative character: it is obligatory to protect it and forbidden to violate it. The
second supports this character by setting up sanctions in this world, which are
complemented by sanctions in the next—the ultimate court in which the norma-
tive claims of mundane life are settled. In this way God provides our sense of what
is valuable with normative force and places it under normative limits. Reaching
for a vocabulary that formed the lingua franca of the legal tradition, we might say
that what the Law does is to set up a normative structure of ḥuqūq-claims that
enshrines and promotes our interests or maṣāliḥ, reminding us again of the inti-
mate relationship between these two concepts. (Ḥaqq al-ʿabd maṣāliḥuhu, in the
already-cited words of al-Qarāfī). This conversion of the teleological into the deon-
tological, of maṣlaḥa into ḥaqq, also marks the entry of this good into the social
world. For the integrity of human life, the possession of property, or the integrity
of family lines are goods that constitute maṣāliḥ for the individual enjoying them.
But when this maṣlaḥa confronts other human beings, it faces them as a ḥaqq—as
something that limits their free action.55
The Law provides goods with normative force, partly by supporting them with
sanctions. Put in a more consequentialist idiom, on the other hand, what the Law
does is to show us the means through which these goods can best be achieved.
The prohibition of adultery and the punishment instituted for its commission, to
take one example, are related to the interest of nasab/nasal or progeny as means to
end. Adultery causally undermines this interest for reasons that al-Ghazālī would
indicate in his Shifāʾ al-ghalīl and al-Rāzī would repeat almost verbatim in his
Maḥṣūl. Unchecked sexual relations, al-Ghazālī would write, lead to competition,
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 159

to confused genealogical lines and uncertain paternity and thus to neglect of

one’s responsibility to care (taʿahhud) for one’s children, as well as to violence
and aggression. Punishment for adultery, on the other side, promotes this interest
through its deterring effect (zajr).56 It is this consequentialist vantage point that
would unsurprisingly dominate legal writings addressing the place of interests in
the Law, in which specific rulings would be related to their intended purposes as
means to ends or causes to effects. Much of the finer print of the Law—its detailed
provisions for the application of particular rulings, or what al-Juwaynī would refer
to in his Burhān as particular “cases and degrees” (al-ḥālāt waʾl-darajāt)—would
seem to fall under this same logic. Having extended its protection to the good
of human life by punishing homicide with retaliation, for example, the Law also
clarifies that this good is safeguarded most efficiently if retaliation is exacted with-
out regard for the nature of the weapon employed by the perpetrator, punishing
equally acts carried out with a sharp or a blunt weapon. Or again, it clarifies that
it is safeguarded best by modifying the principle of equal requital that operates
in ordinary circumstances so that where a group of individuals commit an act of
homicide in concert, many may be killed in retaliation for one.57
Thus, while we might “recognize” the goods the Law promotes in the sense
that we possess needs and desires broadly directed to these goods—and might
thus be said to have a general command of the “what” of value—the Law comes
to provide us with a normative framework for the pursuit of these desires. It like-
wise comes to inform us of the principles by means of which these goods can be
achieved (the “how”). The fact that we need the Law to provide us with this knowl-
edge does not preclude that we should be able to discern the underlying rationale
in hindsight, when it is a matter of cause-and-effect relations—for example, the
deleterious effects of adultery on family lines, or the deterring effect of punish-
ment—in the mundane sphere, with whose workings we are to a great extent
familiar. “Though human reason may command a view of what is in our interests
on a general level [kulliyyāt],” we heard al-Juwaynī say in his Niẓāmiyya earlier, “it
cannot arrive at its details [tafāṣīl].” These words, and the same contrast between
general and particular, would be echoed again in his legal work Burhān (al-kullī mā
yataṭarraqu ilayhi al-ʿaql maʿa nisyān al-tafāṣīl). Some such understanding of the
relationship between the general and the particular as we have outlined it would
offer an intuitive way of interpreting these statements and of reconstructing the
relationship between the evaluative knowledge of reason (or natural desire) and
the evaluative knowledge of revelation.58
The Ashʿarite concession that human beings know the goods promoted by the
Law as goods, the above suggests, need not be understood to involve the acknowl-
edgment of an especially substantive ethical grasp. There is one perspective from
which this acknowledgment might come to seem more substantive; and that is
if this grasp was taken to be indexed not to the first-person singular but to the
160 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

first-person plural, and the interests promoted by the Law were taken to be known
by ordinary people not in their status as objects of self-interested natural desire
but as goods serving the interests of the community as a whole. The interests
promoted by the Law have, after all, often been understood to carry a communal
dimension, as attested by the frequent translation of maṣlaḥa in this context not
merely as “interest” but indeed “public interest.”59 This reflects the intimate con-
nection in which they stand to the crucial legal concept of the rights or claims of
God (ḥuqūq Allāh), as distinct from the rights or claims of human beings (ḥuqūq
al-ʿibād).
Ranging the contents of the Law under these two headings, jurists would often
include in the latter most economic transactions, matters of family law, as well as
parts of penal law, notably the right to exact retaliation (qiṣāṣ); in the former they
would include acts of worship, many of the so-called ḥudūd punishments, and
taxes like kharāj and zakāt. To hold a right or claim, in the dominant analysis of
this concept, is to enjoy the right to waive this claim. Thus the distinction between
these two kinds of claims registers as the fact that human beings can freely decide
to drop the claims that belong to them—as by waiving a debt or the right to retali-
ate—yet they cannot decide to waive the claims of God, and God’s claims must be
unconditionally enforced.60 Yet this differential ability in turn reflects a point of
broader significance about the distinction as articulated by classical jurists, and
more specifically a critical dichotomy between the private and the public domain
that it maps on to. The notion of ḥaqq al-ʿibād, as Baber Johansen has illumi-
natingly characterized the point in connection with the Ḥanafites, refers us to
a network of contractual relationships initiated between isolated individuals and
private proprietors, governed by a principle of just exchange whose “relativist” or
nonabsolute character Johansen stresses. With the notion of ḥaqq Allāh, by con-
trast, the free exchanges between individual subjects are transcended to the larger
community, and the notion of the public sphere and public interest comes into
view, bringing with it a claim more absolute in nature. “The term ḥaqq Allāh,”
Johansen writes, “is used to denote those one-sided public demands upon the
individual that are legitimized by the sharīʿa in the interest of the public”—an
interest “free from all individual and selfish demands.” The public sphere is “the
realm of the absolute, the realm of God.”61 It is the link between God’s rights and
public interest that in turn forges the link with the state, in charge of the public
sphere and responsible for implementing divine rights. While the link between
ḥuqūq Allāh and maṣāliḥ ʿāmma would come to special prominence in the works
of Ḥanafite jurists, it is an understanding that enjoyed wider appeal. Ibn Taymiyya
himself provides an instance of this in al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya and elsewhere, when
he connects the claims of God with a utility that redounds to the community as a
whole (al-maṣāliḥ al-ʿāmma/ manfaʿatuhā li-muṭlaq al-muslimīn).62
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 161

While the objectives of the Law would not seem to be coextensive with God’s
claims,63 the two are closely linked to the extent that several of the interests
included in these objectives were protected by means of punishments classed as
ḥudūd—notably, the punishment of apostasy, theft, adultery, false slander, and the
consumption of intoxicants—and as such entered the scope of claims of God.
This reflects the importance of the interests in question for the community as a
whole: it is the entire community that has a stake in upholding religion or safe-
guarding the rational behavior of individuals, in safeguarding people’s enjoyment
of their rightful possessions against theft, in maintaining the purity of sexual
mores and the order of family life, and in safeguarding individuals’ reputation
against wrongful damage.64 It is this communal dimension that Zysow had in
mind in addressing the tension between the ethical positions Ashʿarites expressed
in their kalām writings and the positions they adopted in the context of uṣūl al-fiqh.
Zysow’s conclusion was that “the demands of legal practice produced a consider-
able mitigation of their anti-objectivism,” leading them to acknowledge that God’s
purposes “could be recognized by the human mind” and recognizing “larger com-
mon purposes” alongside “purely personal ends.”65
Yet if the above account is correct, what the human mind offers us is a knowl-
edge of desire indexed to the first-person singular, which the Law then places
under normative limits and brings into contact with the social community. What
we possess beforehand is necessity (ḍarūra); need (ḥāja); desire (al-Ghazālī:
shahwa). And we may here recall al-Āmidī’s pointed phrase about the objective
of the Law: “This may form the object of human intention insofar as it suits one
and agrees with oneself [mulāʾim lahu wa-muwāfiq li-nafsihi].” The interests pro-
moted by the Law would seem to be accessible to the human mind not under their
description as “common purposes” or “common standards” of action, but under
their description as objects of desire, indeed self-interested desire, or precisely
what Zysow refers to as “personal ends.”66
No doubt there is more that could be done to refine our understanding of how
the Ashʿarites’ conception of the human mind and its ethical capacities unfolded
between the competing demands of theology and Law. But for our own argument,
it is more important that we should finally turn to the second point identified
earlier as a source of tension or competition—and this is where Ashʿarite views
touched not on the mind of human beings, but on the mind of God. “God does
not have aims or purposes.”—“Yet God’s Law aims at human welfare.” How
could such a conflict be resolved? The overall evidence in fact indicates that it is
this conflict—the one generated by the use of the language of “purpose” in legal
discourse and its programmatic denial in theological discourse—that Ashʿarite
jurists perceived as a more pressing source of intellectual instability and that fig-
ured as the object of more intense preoccupation. Yet the conflict, they would
162 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

suggest, was not irremovable. There were definite strategies by which it could be
addressed without sacrifice of theological conviction.
Even those like al-Ghazālī who were prepared (at least in their more liberal
moments, as in the Shifāʾ al-ghalīl) to accord an important role to reason in the
knowledge of the interests promoted by the Law would in the same context draw
the line at the implication that purpose should be attributed to God. Yet they would
do so in ways immediately calculated to fuel afresh the accusations of their adver-
saries. Al-Ghazālī would thus write: God “intended [arāda] the welfare of people
in both their religious and mundane affairs.” Yet he would continue in the next
breath: “God is above being affected by purposes and being altered by motivat-
ing incentives or disincentives.” And then again: “Yet [laws] were legislated for
the interests of people [shurriʿat li-maṣāliḥ al-khalq].”67 Both intending and above
intention; both an open statement denying divine purpose and an ascription of
purpose through the prepositional structures (shurriʿat li) registering in the next
moment—flagrant contradiction, the Ashʿarites’ critics might say, if there ever
was one.
Such apparent contradictions would be found in the work of other Ashʿarite
jurists, and to the extent that one wished to speak about the aims of the Law and
the interests that explained its rulings, they would seem ineradicable. The solu-
tion could not be to abandon this language—a language that, as we have seen,
the Ashʿarites themselves had a large hand in cementing within legal discourse.
It was not about avoiding the forms of language, but rather about renegotiating
the commitments such use of language was understood to involve, and more spe-
cifically about reconceptualizing the meaning of one’s words in ways that made
it possible to bring the commitments of theology and law into fuller harmony. As
al-Qarāfī would succinctly put the Ashʿarite solution in his Nafāʾis al-uṣūl: al-ittifāq
fiʾl-iṭlāq waʾl-ikhtilāf fiʾl-maʿnā. We all agree on the words to be spoken; what is in
dispute is how these words should be understood.68
The words, and their truer meaning; the language, and its interpretation.
The kind of renegotiation that was possible here was already adumbrated by
al-Ghazālī in his Shifāʾ al-ghalīl, when, right on the heels of the remarks we just
heard, he had written: the Law is promoted for the sake of human interests, yet
“we understand this through the Law, and not through reason.” This statement
may remind us of his earlier remarks about how we discover which specific inter-
ests are promoted by the Law, namely through a detailed observation of the tex-
tual “behavior” of the Law (taṣarrufāt al-sharʿ). The present statement, addressing
itself more directly to the question of how we discover that the Law is promoted
for human interests, registers as the broader counterpart of that point. This
“quasi-empiricist,” “bottom-up” method of establishing the Law’s concern with
human welfare, as Ahmed El Shamsy has recently suggested, was in fact central
to post-Ghazālian Ashʿarites’ response to the “rationalist,” “top-down” method
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 163

associated with the Muʿtazilites, who deduced this thesis from a priori assump-
tions about God’s moral character.69
Yet how, al-Ghazālī’s readers will wonder, could the means by which we dis-
cover the truth of this proposition affect its substance—that God acts and com-
mands with purposes—and thereby remove its thorn? Almost a century later, it
is al-Rāzī who would offer the clearest Ashʿarite answer to this question by com-
paring the relationship between legal norms and human interests to the relation-
ship between events in the natural world. Consider the way satiation occurs after
(ʿaqība) eating, burning upon (ʿinda) contact with fire, and so on with familiar
natural phenomena. These natural connections are not necessary (wājib); they
only represent the way God has made it His custom (ajrā al-ʿāda), albeit a reliable
custom, that events should be arranged, regularly following one another without
real causal bonds subsisting between them. This is how we should understand
the connections between legal rulings and human interests, aḥkām and maṣāliḥ.
There is correlation but not causation; and this is a correlation, significantly, that
is known through the Law—through a reading of God’s scriptural custom mod-
eled on the reading of God’s custom as expressed in the text of the natural world
and sharing the same principled denial of real causation.70
Many of the linchpin terms employed by al-Rāzī point back to al-Ghazālī’s
discussion. And they would travel down the works of ensuing generations of
Ashʿarite thinkers, with whom the key distinctions would become progressively
clearer and the claim would step into sharper light. At its heart lay a denial of
necessity parsed in different yet closely related forms. Ontologically, it involved a
denial that the conjunction between legal rulings and human interests was nec-
essary in the sense that this conjunction was not upheld by the causal force of
divine intention. This was paired to a denial that the conjunction was upheld by
the normative force of a moral obligation, which was what the Muʿtazilites had
argued, claiming that God was obliged to promote human interests in the religious
domain (at least once He had placed them under the moral Law). The conjunction
in question, Ashʿarites maintained, was not a matter of necessity but a matter of
contingent fact (not wujūb but ittifāq).71 The denial of causal and normative force
on the ontological level had an immediate corollary on the epistemological level.
For if the connection between legal provisions and human interests is known only
through an inductive reading of scripture (istiqrāʾ), and not as the entailment of
a rationally self-evident moral principle to which God’s behavior is necessarily
subject, what results is not certainty but probability (ẓann).
What this renegotiation of “language as against its interpretation” seemed to
amount to was epistemology without ontology; a justification of our usage of cer-
tain notions while denying them ontological foundation. Al-Āmidī would put the
point with particular suggestiveness in his own discussion of the question in the
Iḥkām when he would write: even if God’s acting purposefully is not necessary
164 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

(wājib), as the Ashʿarites hold, “His acting with an intention is more congenial
to rational understanding than His acting without an intention; so an intention
follows from His action by way of probability [fiʿluhu liʾl-maqṣūd yakūnu aqrab ilā
muwāfaqat al-maʿqūl min fiʿlihi bi-ghayr maqṣūd; fa-kāna al-maqṣūd lāziman min
fiʿlihi ẓannan].”72 This remark invites us to turn our attention away from the real-
ity of God’s action and to focus on the way human beings perceive this reality. On
that level, we may see that the ascription of purpose to divine action is in greater
agreement with our forms of thought and the forms (customs) of human life,
given the deep-rooted presence of notions of purpose and intention within them.
(Contemporary thinkers might have said: human beings just can’t help adopting
the “intentional stance.”) As such, we may continue to discuss divine action in
these terms—we may call this a kind of license or rukhṣa, granted in recognition of
our characteristic epistemic needs as human beings. Yet our use of such notions,
it should not be forgotten on a higher-order level, represents merely the human
way of rationalizing the Shari’a, and the notion of purpose is but a projection of
the human mind without claim on divine reality.
With these distinctions and qualifications in place, however, many Ashʿarite
jurists would affirm that God’s rulings were instituted for the sake of human inter-
ests. In his theological work al-Arbaʿīn fī uṣūl al-dīn, al-Rāzī would describe the
Muʿtazilite view that “God’s actions and rulings are explained [muʿallala] in terms
of the promotion of human welfare” as “the preferred view of most later jurists”
and declare his own refusal to join this chorus.73 Yet it is important to note that this
was a refusal to join a chorus singing not the language of purposefulness—this was
etched far too deeply into the existing vision of the Law to disclaim it—but a sub-
stantial interpretation of this language in more robust ontological terms, through a
more realist concept of causation that al-Rāzī and many of his Ashʿarite colleagues
rejected. It is a view, admittedly, that would be maintained with a sense of tension
and accompanied by phenomena suggestive of open contradiction—between the
statements of different thinkers, between the statements of single thinkers across
different works, or even the statements of single thinkers within single works (as
exemplified above by al-Ghazālī).74 In demanding the displacement of words from
their ordinary meanings and indeed the suspension of basic forms of the human
mind, the wedge between language and its interpretation required special exer-
tions to be held in place.

Thematizing Wisdom:
Why Does God Command?
I began this chapter by suggesting that neither the relative nor the positive aspects
of Ibn Taymiyya’s via media—neither his relationship to his topography nor the
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 165

content of his distinctive contribution—could be appreciated without making the

move to the theological context. I then drew into focus Ibn Taymiyya’s oft-voiced
criticism of the Ashʿarites for their failure to acknowledge that God’s legislative
activity is governed by His wisdom, and more specifically by human interests.
God’s will is not brute, but tempered by a concern with human welfare. Having
sifted more carefully through the tensions in the Ashʿarite view of the mind of
human beings and the mind of God between theology and law, it is on the second
of these two issues that we must concentrate as the most relevant context for our
present concern. Having brought Ibn Taymiyya’s conflict with the Ashʿarites into
sharper view, we will then have the leverage we need for addressing his under-
standing on more positive terms.
In their theological writings, as we have seen, the Ashʿarites had provided suf-
ficient material for Ibn Taymiyya’s accusations, denying that the notion of purpose
could be predicated of God in any fashion. In their legal writings, by contrast, they
had integrated the thesis that the Law promotes human welfare deeply into the
methods of legal reasoning. They had done so, however, by offering an interpreta-
tion of this thesis that defanged it from its ontological implications. To that extent,
the justice of Ibn Taymiyya’s criticism of the Ashʿarites would seem to hang on
the delicate divide separating an affirmation from its interpretation. In many of
his critical remarks about the Ashʿarite view, Ibn Taymiyya does not appear to
mark this divide. Yet elsewhere, he offers clear signals that it is the affirmation
as modified by this interpretation that gives him cause for concern, as when in
Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya he critically rehearses the Ashʿarite view as the claim that
when something appears to serve human welfare, “this is nothing but a conjunc-
tion [mujarrad iqtirān] that forms part of [God’s] custom without His effecting this
through causes [bi-sabab] in any way and without His acting for the sake of a wise
purpose [li-ḥikma] in any way.” The claim that the Law’s aim to promote human
interests is known only through an inductive reading of scripture (istiqrāʾ) is also
isolated for explicit critique.75
The divide between affirmation and interpretation may at first sight strike us
as a gossamer one; yet closer consideration will suggest otherwise. For taken as
a divide between the way things seem and the way things are, it surely makes all
the difference as to whether we can think of God as having what I earlier called a
“morality,” as against the mere appearance of one. If the Ashʿarites had proposed
epistemological appearance without ontological reality, in fact—things may look
purposeful, but they really are not—it will be telling to observe that Ibn Taymiyya
elsewhere proposed a precise reversal of this order of priority: even if things do
not look purposeful, they nevertheless in themselves are. Bringing up the question
of God’s wisdom in Bayān talbīs al-jahmiyya, Ibn Taymiyya raised a doubt about
our ability to ask “Why?” of God’s actions and expect to uncover definite answers.
Yet “to deny the existence of a thing is not the same as to deny one’s knowledge
166 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

of it”; thus to deny that “Why?” can be asked of God’s actions is “not to deny the
existence of a wise purpose [ḥikma] which forms His intended end in the reality
of things [fī nafs al-amr].”76
No less interesting than this resounding embrace of objectivist language to
speak of God’s wisdom will be the ligaments such language forges with a view
that once again formed the characteristic preserve of Muʿtazilite thinkers. It is
a point Muʿtazilite theologians had notably emphasized in the context of their
analysis of scriptural prescriptions and prohibitions, which, as we have seen, they
grounded primarily in their utility. Yet to know in general—by way of jumla—that
these provisions serve our welfare is not to say that we will invariably know why
or how do they do so. More broadly, “it is not necessary,” in the words of ʿAbd
al-Jabbār, “that one should know the specific ground of wisdom [wajh al-ḥikma]
in every single one of [God’s] acts.” So long as we have a firm belief that God is
good and always acts wisely, we will know that every one of His acts conforms to
the same principle and that there is a hidden wisdom at work in them.77 This is
a view that had achieved a wider appeal among thinkers who acknowledged that
the Law promotes human interests. A noteworthy case here is Ibn ʿAqīl, who had
expressed a similar view in his legal work al-Wāḍiḥ fī uṣūl al-fiqh, and to whom Ibn
Taymiyya himself attributes a position very close to the one we just heard in Bayān
talbīs. He “affirmed God’s wisdom in general but declared himself incapable of
giving an account of its particulars [yuthbitu al-ḥikma waʾl-taʿlīl min ḥayth al-jumla
wa-yuqirru biʾl-ʿajz ʿan al-tafṣīl].”78
Not merely an appearance of wisdom but a reality—a reality robust enough
to survive our ignorance of it. It is in this strong claim that we could locate
one of the most fundamental rifts between Ibn Taymiyya’s and the Ashʿarites’
ethical-theological understanding. And it is a deeper examination of this claim, by
the same token, that would seem to hold the key to a more positive understanding
of Ibn Taymiyya’s distinctive theological viewpoint. The morality of God may not
be the morality of human beings; yet God’s acts are not free from governing stan-
dards. God acts according to standards and out of reasons that allow us to speak of
His wisdom and justice in more substantive ways.
My aim for the remainder of this chapter will be to probe this view more
closely and to unpack the notion of “reasons” or “standards” to the greatest extent
that it allows. In doing so, I will not be attempting an exhaustive overview of Ibn
Taymiyya’s understanding of divine wisdom. I will not, for example, be offering
a comprehensive reading of Ibn Taymiyya’s response to the burning question of
theodicy: How to explain the existence of suffering? (Though this is a question
that will come into view.) Instead, I will focus on two main topics: God’s reasons
for commanding human actions (the topic of this section) and God’s reasons for
punishing human actions (the topic of the next). Underpinning my train of inves-
tigation will be a question about how the standards that govern God’s actions relate
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 167

to the standards that govern those of human beings as we earlier saw them—two
sets of standards that Ibn Taymiyya himself has carved steeply apart—and how
the kinds of considerations we examined in earlier chapters, consequentialist
and deontological, figure within the content of God’s distinctive morality. And
although my task will be to elicit Ibn Taymiyya’s positive understanding, once
again this task cannot be pursued without a parallel engagement of the ways Ibn
Taymiyya’s understanding relates to his theological interlocutors’.

Why does God command the actions He does? The insistence that the question
“Why?” can be asked at this juncture shapes Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks about divine
wisdom throughout his work. Both in the domain of God’s creative activity (khalq)
and the domain of His legislative activity (amr), God’s choices are not the result
of mere arbitrary will. There is something “in the reality of things” that weights
(yurajjiḥu) God’s will toward commanding one action as against another. We heard
Ibn Taymiyya frame this point clearly in the stage-setting exposition of his via
media that reopened this chapter.
Yet for readers familiar with the Western philosophical tradition, Ibn Taymiyya
nowhere opens up the space for asking “Why?” more evocatively than when he
restates his claim that God commands acts wisely as a claim that God loves the acts He
commands. The Ashʿarite view of God’s command, we hear in Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya,
is flawed insofar as it is “premised on the notion that all entities and acts are equal
in actual reality [sawāʾ fī nafs al-amr], and that some of these do not contain an attri-
bute that necessitates [tūjibu] their being preferred over others, so that God might
love [yuḥibbu] the one and command it, and hate the other and forbid it.” Love, we
hear even more distinctly elsewhere, “must be grounded in a quality [maʿnā] in the
object of love that is beloved to the one who loves it [inna al-maḥabba lā takūnu illā
li-maʿnan fiʾl-maḥbūb yuḥibbuhu al-muḥibb].”79 The terms of Socrates’s question—
“Is that which is holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is
loved by the gods?”—would seem to stand reembodied before us. And so would a
vigorous avowal of the view that the order of priority is the one reflected in the first
of these options. God’s will does not create value: it responds to it.
The responsiveness of God’s attitudes is highlighted with unusual force in the
following passage from the Fatāwā, which focuses more directly on God’s creative
rather than legislative activity:

God is knowing and wise, so He knows things as they are in themselves,

and He is wise in what He loves and wills, what He speaks, what He com-
mands and what He does. So if He knows that a given act and a given
thing is characterized by that which renders it worthy of blame [madhmūm]
and deserving [mustaḥiqq] of hatred and repugnance, it is part of His wis-
dom that He should hate it and find it repugnant. And if He knows that
168 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

by coming into existence it will help realize a praiseworthy and beloved

wise purpose [ḥikma maḥbūba maḥmūda], it is part of His wisdom that He
should create it and will it on account of [li-ajl] this beloved wise purpose
which it serves to realize.80

God’s responses follow the intrinsic merit of things in themselves: when He loves

something, it is because that thing deserves to be loved. His responses are based
on His knowledge of the way things are in themselves. This last point will remind
us of a peculiar affirmation the Muʿtazilites had made when describing God’s
relationship to ethical qualities.81
There will be something more to say about the status of the notion of “love”
within Ibn Taymiyya’s thinking shortly. Yet our immediate task must be to turn
our attention to the notion of “the reality of things” or “the way things are in
themselves” that Ibn Taymiyya has deployed to consider it more closely. It is a
reality that Ibn Taymiyya has called up as a ground for God’s actions, and more
specifically for His commands. What is that ground? Put more relevantly, the
question we must ask here is: What are those aspects of actions that provide
grounds for God’s commands? Turning back now to our stage-setting exposition,
we may recall Ibn Taymiyya’s complaint against the Ashʿarites: they had claimed
that “what is right [maʿrūf] is not right in itself [fī nafsihi] … nor is what is wrong
[munkar] in itself wrong.” And we will recall his positive view: “God is knowing
and wise [ḥakīm], and knowing the benefits that qualifications comprise [mā
tataḍammanuhu al-aḥkām min al-maṣāliḥ], He issued commands and prohibitions
based on His knowledge of the benefits and harms that commands and prohibi-
tions … involve for His servants.” The implication of the second statement is
obvious, and it extends a simple answer to the question we have just asked that
ties in naturally with everything we have heard so far about Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical
understanding. The reason God commands human beings to undertake certain
actions as against others is because these actions serve their welfare. It is the
beneficial tendency of actions that forms the aspect of their “actual reality” which
makes God love them and hate them.
This answer presents itself so naturally that there might appear to be little
space for even considering alternatives. Yet the earlier thread of our inquiry
brought us up against an important alternative when, engaging Ibn Taymiyya’s
ethical discussion at a similar juncture, we asked just how the notions of “right”
and “wrong,” and indeed specific acts such as justice or truth-telling which Ibn
Taymiyya mentions in the same vicinity, relate to the emphasis on welfare that
dominates the context. My argument in previous chapters was that Ibn Taymiyya
reduces such deontological-sounding types of acts to their utility: both what makes
such acts good, and the description under which people know them to be good (or
desire them as good), is their utility. Given the wedge that he has driven between
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 169

the ethical domain and the divine, however, what holds true of the latter is a case
that would have to be made separately. Concretized into a focus question, we may
ask: Does God command justice because it is beneficial to people, or does He com-
mand it because it is intrinsically good?
There are certainly places in Ibn Taymiyya’s work where he gives signs of
being invested in a claim of the latter kind. A case in point is his articulation of
an idea that marks yet another confrontation with a typically Ashʿarite viewpoint,
the idea of God’s “self-binding.” It is an idea that is best read as a response to
the question: Can God do evil? This is a question that leans upon the answer
one gives to the prior question: What is evil? Ashʿarites, as we have briefly seen,
had placed God beyond the definitional reach of “evil” by specifying this con-
cept in terms of conformity with God’s command and (later on) conformity with
natural desires. And they had then drawn the natural conclusion: God can do
anything He pleases. All that we can rely on in order to predict His behavior—to
know, for example, that He will not consign pious believers to hellfire—is His
self-report (khabar) that He will not in fact do a given thing, which corresponds to
His knowledge that He will not do it. Reporting this view in his commentary on
a well-known hadith by Abū Dharr, Ibn Taymiyya would reject it on two grounds.
The Ashʿarite view fails to tell us why God will act the way He does—only that he
will do so (lā yubayyinu wajh fiʿlihi wa-tarkihi/ mā yadʿū ilaʾl-fiʿl wa-lā ilaʾl-tark);
and it fails to provide an account of God’s action that presents it as praisewor-
thy (bayān li-kawnihi maḥmūdan mamdūḥan ʿalā fiʿl hādhā wa-tark hādhā).82 The
hadith reported by Abū Dharr provides us with an account that satisfies both
criteria. “Oh my servants,” it begins, “I have forbidden injustice to myself and
rendered it forbidden amongst you.” This hadith clarifies that God will not do
injustice because He took a free decision to forbid Himself injustice, promising
for example to honor people’s good deeds by rewarding them.
Ibn Taymiyya’s focus, in discussing this topos, falls on God’s act of self-bind-
ing as a response to the question “Why does God act the way He does?,” and he
seems peculiarly tight-lipped when it comes to saying anything about the inherent
quality of the act of injustice itself which could also figure as a response to this
question. He has, after all, prefaced His discussion with a stern reproof against
the Muʿtazilites for placing God under a moral “Law” (sharīʿa)—a Law they had
spelled out precisely in terms of such inherent qualities—and the model of God’s
self-binding notably serves to emphasize His freedom vis-à-vis the norms of jus-
tice. Yet his discussion would appear to rest precisely on some recognition that
justice is an ethical norm with antecedent existence and indeed an antecedent
positive value from our perspective: hence the praiseworthiness we see in God’s
decision to forbid Himself this act.83
Yet taking everything together, Ibn Taymiyya gives us limited grounds for
thinking that when he speaks of the “reality” of actions he has the independent
170 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

status of such deontological values in mind. Instead, it is once again the notion
of welfare that seems to underpin his understanding of God’s reasons for com-
manding. I said above that the wedge Ibn Taymiyya drives between the human
and divine domains means that any argument about the relationship between
deontological and consequentialist considerations has to be made separately. But
of course many of the evidential bases I examined in c­ hapter 1 when making the
case for the reduction of the former to the latter were statements that concerned
the role of such considerations in the Law and thus in God’s legislative activity.
“The Law came to realize and perfect [human] interests [maṣāliḥ],” we heard. Yet
“all that God commanded,” we also heard, “reduces to justice.”84 A closer scrutiny
suggested that the notion of justice (ʿadl) primarily relates to that of welfare (ṣalāḥ/
maṣlaḥa) as means to an end. And this reflects a programmatic conversion of
deontological concepts into teleological ones—of ḥuqūq into maṣlaḥa—that had
been enshrined in legal theory in its discourse on the aims of the Law. The aspect
under which God safeguards human ḥuqūq-claims would seem to be precisely
their description as means to human well-being.
In Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical remarks, the insistence that acts possess real evalu-
ative features had been intimately linked with an insistence that God’s will does
not give preference to one of two similar things (turajjiḥu mithlan ʿalā mithl) arbi-
trarily and that there is a factor that “weights” God’s will in one direction as against
another.85 Yet we will now recall that it is beneficence that Ibn Taymiyya elsewhere
explicitly names as that factor. The objectivist vocabulary he employs in this con-
nection—referring us to how things are “in actual reality” (fī nafs al-amr) or to
actions’ attributes (ṣifāt)—is likewise one we saw to be associated with benefit and
harm. In Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, Ibn Taymiyya contributes another element to this
vocabulary when he stipulates the existence of “something that pertains to [the
action]” (maʿnan yaʿūdu ilayhi) as the only way of avoiding the unacceptable con-
clusion that the Lawgiver prefers one of two similar things without a real factor
to weight His decision. This explanatory locution will instantly remind us of the
terms Ibn Taymiyya used in framing his epitomic consequentialist claim that “the
goodness and badness of human actions pertain to [yarjiʿu ilā] the benefit and
harm acts involve.”86
It is the axiological notion of khayr (good) and maṣlaḥa that organize Ibn
Taymiyya’s understanding of God’s wisdom. “God is wise and merciful”: “He only
does good” (lā yafʿalu illā khayran).87 Yet the primacy of utility in Ibn Taymiyya’s
conception of God’s wisdom is laid bare even more starkly in a specific under-
standing of the view just framed that achieves pervasive expression in his work
and that goes to the heart of some of the questions of theodicy that had held
Muslim theologians in thrall for centuries before him. For the claim that God only
does good must after all be held in the teeth of the fact that the world we inhabit is
not free from evil. There is what has often been called “natural” evil—the pain and
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 171

suffering that people experience as a result of events in the natural world and as a
result of their natural constitution as beings that belong to that world. And there
is what we call “moral” evil”—the evil people themselves perpetrate, often causing
other people to suffer. In religious schemes, moral evil is typically understood as
in turn commuting again to the evil of suffering by way of redress. Both kinds
of evil make us ask “Why?” in agonized tones. And the religious commutation
of wrongdoing into suffering—indeed of ceaseless suffering in an otherworldly
domain in which human beings harvest the consequences of their actions in the
present life—often leads to deeper questions about the freedom of human beings
to act otherwise.
This is the context in which we must read Ibn Taymiyya’s narrower claim that
acting wisely is often a matter, not simply of choosing what is absolutely good
(khayr), but of choosing what is comparatively better. “Wisdom demands giving
precedence to the best of two goods by sacrificing the lesser one [tarjīḥ khayr al-
khayrayn bi-tafwīt adnāhumā].” And again: it is good on the part of a wise agent
(fāʿil ḥakīm) to allow the existence of evil (sharr) for the sake of a preponderant
good (al-khayr al-arjaḥ).88 God acts wisely, this suggests, when He weighs dif-
ferent goods against each other and against the evils they involve and prefers
what realizes the greatest amount of good. The terms khayr and sharr elsewhere
give way to the more openly utilitarian language of maṣāliḥ and mafāsid, and Ibn
Taymiyya makes the quantificational character of this act of weighing clear when
he refers to the general good that is secured as being “many times the amount”
(aḍʿāf) of the partial evil allowed. This comparative aspect is reflected again in
his characterization of the Law’s task as that of “giving preponderance to the
best of two goods … realizing the greatest of two benefits [aʿẓam al-maṣlaḥatayn]
by sacrificing the lesser one, and repelling the greatest of two harms [aʿẓam al-
mafsadatayn] by tolerating the lesser one.”89
This last statement may remind us of the kind of weighing of goods against
evils indicated by the Qur’an itself as the backdrop of the evaluative qualifications
it assigns to particular actions, for example in connection with its prohibition of
games of chance and the consumption of wine: “In both is great sin, and (some)
utility [manāfiʿ] for men; but the sin of them is greater than their usefulness” (Q
2:219). And while the less teleological notion of “sin” (ithm) appears here, we have
seen that elsewhere the Qur’an refers the prohibition of intoxicants, in a more
strongly teleological register, to their tendency to “excite enmity and hatred” and
to “hinder [people] from the remembrance of God, and from prayer” (Q 5:91)—a
proof-text that would in turn shadow the jurists’ consequentialist analysis of this
prohibition.
There will be something more to say in the next chapter about the weighing
of conflictual utility considerations just noted. Here it is worth focusing on the
different types of questions that Ibn Taymiyya calls attention to in framing his
172 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

more specific claim regarding the quantitative supremacy of good over evil in
God’s decisions (“the general good promoted is ‘many times the amount’ (aḍʿāf )
of the partial evil allowed”). The context of this remark refers us precisely to
those vexed questions of theodicy that had preoccupied earlier theologians when
considering the otherworldly destinies of different individuals. Why do some
people believe in God and reap the rewards of paradise, while others disbelieve
and wind up in the fires of hell? Is this a matter of people making different
choices out of their own free will, or is it a matter of God providing special guid-
ance to good-doers or indeed determining their actions? Muʿtazilite theologians
had adopted the first view, ascribing to people a strong moral responsibility for
their acts. Ashʿarites had countered this proposal with a deterministic view of
human action. Ibn Taymiyya himself, as we have seen, highlights God’s deter-
mining activity in self-conscious opposition to Muʿtazilite thought.90 It is the
presumption that God determines who believes and who fails to that shadows
the examples Ibn Taymiyya uses to illustrate his quantitative construal of God’s
wisdom. Consider the case of Pharaoh and his rejection of Moses’s message.
Had Pharaoh accepted the message and thereby escaped divine chastisement,
there would have been no occasion for the divine signs that have brought untold
benefit to humanity and served as an enduring source of spiritual edification.
Thus, “those who benefited from this were many many times [aḍʿāf aḍʿāf] the
amount of those who were harmed by it.” Or consider Muhammad’s prophetic
message. Had many people—including the grandees of Quraysh—not rejected
it, there would have been none of the great miracles and signs or the noble war
effort (jihād) waged by believers. And the saved once again vastly outnumber the
damned.91
Such cases suggest that any moral evil God allows in the world—evil that
translates into suffering for its perpetrators in the next—is outweighed by the
moral good and thus the otherworldly happiness this makes possible for others.
We may restate this by saying:  the happiness of the few is outweighed by the
happiness of the many. This is a criterion that prominent thinkers in our intellec-
tual history, particularly our recent history, have considered a perfectly adequate
conception of morality. Ibn Taymiyya’s account of God’s morality echoes nothing
if not the axiom of utilitarianism articulated by Bentham: “It is the greatest hap-
piness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” This, of
course, is an axiom that has often been thought challenged to accommodate our
ordinary intuitions about justice, bidding us to promote universal welfare with a
single-mindedness that is liable to conflict with constraints of a deontological kind
we would normally place on actions. Our ordinary intuitions, for example, would
suggest that the distinction between persons has real moral weight. In this light,
one could not sacrifice the happiness of one person—all the more when what is
in question is the ultimate and eternal happiness of that person—for the sake of
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 173

the happiness of another without moral loss.92 They would similarly suggest that
punishing those who were not free to do otherwise also entails grave moral loss.
Ibn Taymiyya, on the other hand, has made it clear that our ordinary moral
intuitions cannot be used as a guide to the ethical standards that are applicable
to God. God’s morality is not the morality of human beings. God’s morality, the
above suggests, is framed overwhelmingly in terms of the axiological notions of
“good” and “welfare.” That much seems plain; nevertheless, it will be important
for gaining a fuller insight both into the answers Ibn Taymiyya gives to ques-
tions about God’s wisdom and also into the questions he does not answer even
though they go to the heart of the relationship between God’s “praiseworthiness”
and sovereignty he wishes to recalibrate, to observe that the kinds of consider-
ations that figure in our intuitions are not entirely excluded from view. Such
considerations—or something like them—indeed show up in God’s decision
making as Ibn Taymiyya reconstructs this, and they come up, crucially, as a
negative: as a reason that counts against acting, but that is overridden in favor of
a higher good. Ibn Taymiyya makes this clear in a limpid passage:

God created things for a wise purpose, and He loves that wise purpose and
is well pleased with it [yarḍāhā]. When He creates what He hates, it is for
the sake of what He loves. Those who differentiate between love [maḥabba]
and will [irāda] have said: a sick man wants [yurīdu] medicine but does not
love it; he loves what it results in, namely restored vigor and elimination of
ill health. God created all things according to His will, and He wills every-
thing He has created and the wise purpose that He loves. And even if He
does not love certain entities or actions among the things He has created,
He loves the wise purpose on account of which [li-ajlihā] He created them.

Thus, God may hate acts such as unbelief (kufr), wickedness (fusūq), and disobedi-
ence (ʿiṣyān) with regard to their intrinsic features (bi-iʿtibār mā ittaṣafa bihi min
al-ṣifāt al-madhmūma), but He may love them as a means for achieving something
that He loves as an end in itself (bi-iʿtibār annahu wasīla ilā maḥbūb li-dhātihi). Do
we not, he repeats—reprising the medical metaphor—recognize from experience
that we can love something from one perspective and hate it from another?93
This remarkable passage is important for several reasons. On the one hand,
it brings out a distinction that plays a momentous role within Ibn Taymiyya’s
articulation of God’s wisdom, one that once again takes its context in the com-
peting choices that confronted earlier thinkers approaching the relationship
between God’s justice and God’s sovereignty. The more particular question here
was:  When human beings act in ways that contravene God’s command, how
should we qualify the relationship of such acts to God’s will? Should we say God
willed them—and accept the corollary that God might will evil things? Or should
174 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

we say God did not will them—and accept the corollary that things may take place
that God would have preferred not to? Ibn Taymiyya’s special business would
again be with the position adopted by Ashʿarite theologians, whose fervor for
God’s sovereignty had made them seize the first horn in a dogmatic spirit of
either/or without regard for the consequences. For everything indeed happens
according to God’s will (this Ibn Taymiyya granted); but one may still distinguish
between what God wills and what God loves. The Qur’an itself does not collapse
these two terms but applies them distinctly to God. The acts God loves are those
He commanded, and to thus deny that God loves particular types of acts and
hates others is to undermine the religious Law. However far one pushes the rec-
ognition of God’s sovereignty, one has to make sure one preserves the authority
of God’s command. Criticizing Ashʿarites like al-Juwaynī for collapsing God’s
love into His will, Ibn Taymiyya would make central to his own account a distinc-
tion between two types of will: God’s “ontological” or “determinative” will (irāda
kawniyya/qadariyya) and God’s “legislative” or “religious” will (irāda sharʿiyya/
dīniyya). The latter he would in turn identify with God’s love or good pleasure
(riḍā), to then claim that God may will all actions ontologically, yet He wills legisla-
tively the actions He has commanded—and that is equivalent to saying He loves
those actions.94
This distinction is at the foreground of the passage just cited: God may will
things that He does not love, such as wicked deeds and unbelief. What this brings
out, of course, is that to the extent that the latter show up as a “negative” in God’s
decision making, it is not so much by way of nodding to human moral intuitions
about what is right as of bowing to God’s own express statements about what is
commanded. We will be returning to this point from another direction shortly. For
our purposes, however, more interesting in the above passage will be the remark-
able comparison that drives it. The sick person who shuts his eyes and holds his
nose as he washes down a draft of unpleasant medication is a familiar figure in
discussions of prudential motivation and was also a fixture in classical Islamic
texts. Accept that you must do something unpleasant now, so you can enjoy some-
thing more pleasant later. There will be a loss, but you will see that it is dwarfed
by the benefits. This mode of reasoning, of course, makes perfect sense for a finite
being confronting limited options shaped by the hard facts of the world she inhab-
its. If you want to get well, the only way of doing so is to tolerate something else
you do not want; you can obtain x only if you do y. Yet how can the application of
such reasoning be understood in the context of an unlimited being who shapes
the world itself and makes the hard facts what they are? Why must God suffer a
loss?95 If God’s wise purpose can be achieved only on condition that certain bad
things happen, this appears to imply that God is limited by certain features of real-
ity that are not amenable to His will. Why couldn’t there be a world in which both
goods could be simultaneously achieved?
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 175

This is a question that will seem deeply familiar to students of that long his-
tory of philosophical and theological inquiry devoted to asking “Why?” questions
about the world and seeking to account for its nature in light of its originating
source, often against a sense of discontent with the world as we find it. Why is
the world as it is? Could it have been crafted differently? The negative response to
this question has been associated with Plato, whose work provided the resources
for a philosophical optimism that would travel the length of Western history and
find its best-known expression in Leibniz’s claim that this is the best of all pos-
sible worlds. In the Islamic tradition this view received a powerful articulation in
the work of al-Ghazālī. Yet throughout its history, not only among the medieval
scholastics but also among philosophers closer to our own time, it is a view that
has provoked controversy by appearing to place limitations on God’s will, implying
that God’s choices are dictated by a certain rational order—by a certain sequence
or economy of Forms, in one salient understanding—that is independent of His
will. It is with reference to the demands of this rational order that we can under-
stand why certain imperfections or evils simply must be included in the world God
creates.96 All God can do, at best, is choose among limited possibilities. “Before
God decided which of all possible worlds He should choose to make real,” Susan
Neiman glosses Leibniz’s account, “He looked at all the forms, calculated which
ones would fit together, and chose the best of all possible combinations.” It is as if
we see “God comparing essences in a ghostly supermarket”—an uncanny picture
that brings to the fore the way that Leibniz has “put reason above God himself.”
Al-Ghazālī’s formulation of this view, in the Islamic context, courted controversy
for reasons that resonate with this broader history.97
A similar sense of optimism runs through Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks and emerges
clearly in the oft-made expression that God does not only what is good or what is
better, but indeed what is best (al-aḥsan). Yet what is striking is that Ibn Taymiyya
never appears to squarely confront the implications of this view, namely that there
is something in the nature or reality of things that is independent of God’s will
and that places certain constraints on His options. Having widely emphasized the
responsiveness of God’s will to real features of the world—the “real” (utility-based)
features of actions that necessitate (tūjibu) that God love and command them, the
real cause-effect relations that mean that God must accept some amount of evil
in order to achieve a greater balance of good—Ibn Taymiyya falls silent when it
comes to explaining how this acknowledgment still preserves God from the pecu-
liar impiety the Muʿtazilites had committed in placing God “under a Shari’a” and
thus presuming the existence of something foreign to His will.98
I suggested that Ibn Taymiyya’s understanding of God’s reasons for command-
ing, and of God’s wisdom more broadly, is chiefly specified in terms of the concept
of welfare; then I paused to consider an important implication of his model of
God’s decision making—an implication that brings to view the critical questions
176 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

he leaves unanswered in developing it, and that in doing so provides telling indica-
tions regarding the depth to which he pushes his account. There will be more to
say about the depth of Ibn Taymiyya’s development of these theological ideas in
the next section. Here we need to move on to a different point that is crucial for
providing the main question we have been pursuing with a fuller response. For
the capacity of certain actions to promote human welfare indeed forms a central
answer to the question “Why does God command particular actions?” or “Why
does He love them?”—an answer that Ibn Taymiyya propels to the fore throughout
his work. Yet from Ibn Taymiyya’s perspective, this response remains incomplete,
for reasons that call into sharp focus his relationship to the theological topography
that frames his stance.
In making the promotion of human welfare central to God’s commands, Ibn
Taymiyya, as we have seen, adopts a position that has often been associated with
Muʿtazilite theologians. The principal ground for God’s actions is the motive of
beneficence (iḥsān). Yet it would be one of Ibn Taymiyya’s complaints against
the Muʿtazilites that in confining God’s motives to this sole basis, they left us
with a God who is wise to the point of foolishness—an agent that could seem
only incomprehensible or mad. For rational or wise agents do not act out of pure
beneficence without expecting to get back from their action anything whatsoever.
God himself, when He acts, cannot act for a wise purpose that exhausts itself on
the human level. There is also, there must also be, a wise purpose that redounds
to God himself (ḥikma taʿūdu ilayhi).99 It is tempting here to ask: What might that
purpose be? I feel the terms of this question are liable to mislead us, triggering
complex efforts to uncover deep explanations that answer to the grammar of the
statement “The purpose is—” when the facts lie closer to the surface. For what
Ibn Taymiyya seems to have in mind relates to a seminal distinction between two
fundamentally different ways of considering God.
The first standpoint is the basic human standpoint:  it is the standpoint we
occupy as we look out from our own human lives as shaped by our multiple needs
and desires. Looking out to the world from the perspective of our neediness, we
see everything under its description as useful or beneficial for us. We see God as
the provider, as the one who determines whether we fulfill our needs, achieve our
welfare or fail to. It is a standpoint, as we have seen, that carries strong norma-
tive force, and it is a perfectly legitimate one. Yet there is also, besides this one,
the standpoint of God himself. And God certainly looks at human beings under
the aspect of what they need. But He also looks at them under the aspect of what
they owe to Him. God looks out to the world through the demands generated by
His own intrinsic majesty and the self-love with which He relates to His intrinsic
being. From this higher-order standpoint, God created human beings not merely
to benefit them, as the Muʿtazilites had highlighted;100 He created them to worship
Him, as stated in the Qur’an (Q 51:56). And to worship, simply, is to obey.
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 177

It is a distinction between standpoints that Ibn Taymiyya develops in at least two

different contexts. It emerges as a distinction between two types of praise: “praise
in the sense of thankfulness” (ḥamd shukr) and “praise in the unrestricted sense”
(ḥamd muṭlaq). The first is the kind of praise we give to God for His beneficence
(li-iḥsānihi), and it is relative to our needs; the second is the praise we give to God
for His own intrinsic features (li-dhātihi). This corresponds to two different ways
of loving God:  as a fulfiller of human needs, and as an intrinsic object of love
and admiration.101 The distinction between these standpoints is also at stake in a
distinction between two ways of affirming the unity of God that plays a founda-
tional role in Ibn Taymiyya’s thinking, namely tawḥīd al-rubūbiyya/al-rabbāniya
(affirming God’s unity under the aspect of His lordship) and tawḥīd al-ilāhiyya/
al-ulūhiyya (affirming His unity under the aspect of His divinity). The first involves
an acknowledgment of God in His creative capacity and as the exclusive source of
power, yielding the invocation found in al-Fātiḥa (Q 1:5): “You [alone] we ask for
help” (iyyāka nastaʿīnu). The second involves the acknowledgment of God in His
lawgiving capacity and as the exclusive object of worship and obedience, yielding
the other moiety of al-Fātiḥa: “You [alone] we worship” (iyyāka naʿbudu).102
The two standpoints are not hermetically sealed from each other; it is indeed by
honoring the demands of God’s divinity that human beings realize their highest
good. (“Obedience and worship constitute the welfare of human beings.”)103 Yet the
distinction between them is nevertheless a seminal one, and allows us to flag the
position of paramount importance that the concept of worship (ʿibāda) occupies
within Ibn Taymiyya’s theological vision. When Ibn Taymiyya speaks of the “wise
purpose that redounds to God,” I would suggest, it is simply the second stand-
point—the one constituted by God’s status as an object of intrinsic praise and love
and an object of worship—that he means to affirm. What God “gets back” from the
actions He commands is the fulfillment of the demands of His divinity through
human worship and obedience.
This affirmation is one that Ibn Taymiyya does not take to mark a breach with
the Muʿtazilite viewpoint alone. Turning back to his earlier criticism of Ashʿarite
theologians, we will recall our puzzlement at his accusation that these theologians
analyze command and prohibition only in terms of “that which agrees with peo-
ple’s appetites [mā yulāʾimu al-ṭibāʿ],” which “does not entail, according to them,
that God loves what is right and hates what is wrong.” Ibn Taymiyya’s accusation
becomes more intelligible, however, if we connect it to this distinction. For in fail-
ing to distinguish between God’s will and God’s love and thereby to acknowledge
that God loves actions in a sense separate from their description as agreeing with
human appetite or need, the Ashʿarites had failed to uphold a fundamental per-
spective representing the demands of God’s divinity. This failure was linked to a
larger Ashʿarite failure to acknowledge the status of God not only as a subject of
love, but also as an object of intrinsic love.104 Ibn Taymiyya’s criticism of this failure
178 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

would thus be part of a more wide-ranging venture to recalibrate the emphasis

placed on the notion of love (maḥabba) in approaching the relationship between
man and God and to give it its proper due. And the notion of love, here, comes up
twice, as just indicated. It is a concept, on the one hand, that we must predicate of
God, upholding God’s own self-description in scripture. For God spoke of himself
as loving people (e.g., Q 3:31, 5:54) and more specifically of loving good-doers, the
just, the God-fearing (e.g., Q 2:195, 49:9, 9:7). But it is also a concept that we must
make integral to our understanding of the response that we as human beings owe
to God, forming a core element of the spiritual relationship we seek to establish
with Him. Both aspects come together in the Qur’anic reference to a “people He
loves, and who love Him” (Q 5:54).
The emphasis on the spiritual significance of love is one we will recognize as
a key constituent of Sufi spirituality, and as such must figure prominently in the
way we seek to reconstruct Ibn Taymiyya’s elusive relationship to Sufism.105 Yet
what is important for our present purposes is to consider how the above bears on
the question about God’s reasons for loving or commanding particular actions
that we have been tracking, and more specifically what it has to tell us about how
these reasons relate to actions’ intrinsic characteristics. And here, the simple
answer would seem to be: for the most part, they do not. From this God-centered
perspective, everything is seen under its aspect as an expression of love and obe-
dience, and ultimately reflects back to God’s self-love. God’s own love for human
beings, as one telling passage reveals, attaches to human beings insofar as they do
what He loves and fulfill the demands of His self-love: “God’s love for his servant
is in accordance with the servant’s doing what God loves. And what God loves,
in terms of being worshipped and obeyed, is a corollary of His love of Himself,
and this love is the cause of [His] love of His faithful servants; so His love of the
believers is a corollary of His love of Himself.”106 From this perspective, actions
are simply tokens of worship and obedience: they are loved by God precisely in
their relative character qua commanded. This point cannot be made meaning-
fully regarding those actions that already incorporate a relation to God, such as
faith (īmān) and obedience (ṭāʿa) or disbelief (kufr) and disobedience (ʿiṣyān)—
actions that form the centerpiece of Ibn Taymiyya’s concern in many of his dis-
cussions. These are actions that can be directly counted as forms of honoring or
dishonoring the demands of God’s divinity. It is thus with respect to these actions
that Ibn Taymiyya can be seen as offering the sharpest counter to al-Ghazālī’s (as
al-Juwaynī’s) earlier claim that “disbelief and faith, obedience and disobedience,
are all equal as far as God is concerned.” Actions that do not bear such an internal
relation, however, such as justice or injustice, truth-telling or lying, will be good
or bad in this context not so much because of their intrinsic features but insofar
as God has made them objects of command and prohibition. It may already have
been the case that truthfulness is good and injustice bad. But it is only once God
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 179

commands us to be truthful and forbids us to be unjust that the demands of His

divinity—His rights or claims (ḥuqūq) as God—become entangled with these acts,
thereby investing these acts with the capacity to serve as signifiers of worship and
obedience.107
In the above, I have sought to piece together a fuller picture of Ibn Taymiyya’s
conception of divine wisdom by focusing on a topic of sweeping significance for
his theological vision:  God’s reasons for commanding. Faced with God’s com-
mands, it must be possible to ask “Why?,” refusing to succumb to the grim notion
of divine arbitrariness that Ashʿarites had pressed. Inverting the Ashʿarite empha-
sis on the appearance of wisdom and their denial of its reality, Ibn Taymiyya staked
a claim for a real wise purpose that can be understood on two general levels: one
that redounds to human beings, and the other to God. The former, I suggested,
revolves around the ability of actions to serve human welfare, the latter around the
ability of actions to serve as tokens of submission and love. On this second level,
the value of actions is merely relative, and Ibn Taymiyya’s frequent references
to the “reality” of actions or their intrinsic “attributes” would seem to be intel-
ligible mainly with regard to the first. With this picture in place, we can now turn
to a question that is intimately linked to the one we have just pursued and that
promises to shed new light on Ibn Taymiyya’s understanding of the standards to
which God’s actions respond. “Why does God command particular actions?” The
question “Why does He punish the performance of particular actions?” forms its
natural counterpart.

Thematizing Justice: Why Does God Punish?

It is a question that Ibn Taymiyya foregrounds in several locations in his work and
invites us to bring into connection with the first. And nowhere more so than when
he inscribes it at the heart of the dispute about “the determination of good and
bad.” Writing in his Nubuwwāt, he would state: all parties accept that acts may be
good or bad taken in the sense of what is pleasant and painful, suitable and unsuit-
able. The real “dispute concerns whether [acts] are objects of praise and reward”
or blame and punishment.108 Traveling back to our discussion in ­chapter 1, we will
now remember a crucial point that Ibn Taymiyya had made when enumerating
his divergences from the Muʿtazilite viewpoint. The Muʿtazilites had claimed that
punishment is incurred for actions even prior to the arrival of the revealed Law.
Yet the Qur’an, Ibn Taymiyya countered, clearly states, “We never chastise, until
We send forth a Messenger” (17:15). Ibn Taymiyya’s charge would seem to reflect
a salient aspect of Muʿtazilite analysis, to the extent that the Muʿtazilites included
the desert incurred by actions—not only praise and blame, which are after all inte-
gral to the definition of ethical concepts, but also reward and punishment—within
the dictates of our rational ethical grasp.109
180 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

Readers approaching Ibn Taymiyya’s reflections on this subject, however, will

find that it is his disagreement with the Ashʿarite rather than the Muʿtazilite view-
point that often occupies center stage. This is a disagreement, crucially, that is
organized not merely by the question whether (whether acts are objects of praise
and reward) but why, and by a firm demand for reasons in the face of Ashʿarite
opposition that ties his concern directly to the one we have just studied. While
the notion of wisdom also figures prominently in this concern, it is the notion of
justice that is more strongly highlighted. Leaning closer to Ibn Taymiyya’s view of
the posthumous consequences of actions, my aim will be to scrutinize his demand
for reasons in order to consider how deeply he articulates his response to it. This
is a question, as we will see, that will return us again to the motifs of our preced-
ing narrative by thematizing anew—and indeed by problematizing—the repercus-
sions of Ibn Taymiyya’s circumscription of value in consequentialist terms.
The charge recurs throughout Ibn Taymiyya’s work: Ashʿarite theologians
failed to supply the otherworldly consequences of actions, namely reward and pun-
ishment, with adequate explanatory force. We might put Ibn Taymiyya’s charge
more revealingly by saying: the Ashʿarites had not only denied that people are
punished before the arrival of the Law; they had also denied that, strictly speaking,
people are punished for their actions even after its arrival. For they had refused to
allow that actions and their otherworldly consequences are connected as causes to
effects—asbāb to musabbabāt—and had repudiated the causal language that would
allow one to openly state that a person is punished for or through or because of (bi)
his actions.110 Once again, Ibn Taymiyya traces this back to a failure to properly
balance the imperative of upholding God’s power and the imperative of upholding
God’s Law—the domains, respectively, of qadar and sharʿ, mulk and ḥamd. Out
of excessive zeal to preserve God’s sovereignty, the Ashʿarites had severed any
link between human actions and otherworldly consequences that might register
dangerously as a human claim and a divine obligation. This had led them to claim
that God in His absolute liberty might commit madmen and innocent babes to
the Fire and treat arch-sinners to the delights of eternal reward. In doing so, they
had drastically undermined the divine Law, a great part of whose normative and
motivational force derives from the connection taken to subsist between actions
and their consequences.
Looking at Ashʿarite works, one will hear the grounds of Ibn Taymiyya’s com-
plaint, for example, in al-Juwaynī’s bald statement in the Burhān that God “metes
out torment to whom He wills, and bestows felicity upon whom He wills.”111 These
words find their immediate echo in al-Ghazālī’s Iqtiṣād and appear even more
rebarbatively in his Iḥyāʾ when he states, “God may inflict pain upon people and
torment them with no prior offense [min ghayr jirm sābiq], and with no subsequent
reward, contrary to what the Muʿtazilites hold; for [in so doing] God disposes over
His property [mutaṣarrif fī milkihi] … and injustice consists of disposing of others’
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 181

property without their permission.”112 As the last phrase suggests, this point was
linked to the basic stance Ashʿarite theologians had taken regarding the nature of
evaluative standards, invoking God’s status as proprietor and lord (mālik) of cre-
ated beings and to human beings’ status as owned vassals (mamlūk), and claiming
that God’s status lifted His actions to a value-free domain and foreclosed the pos-
sibility that human beings might have any entitlement He is obligated to honor.
The Ashʿarites, of course, had averred that we know that God will in fact reward
and punish along certain lines on the basis of His explicit statements to that effect
in His revealed message, as we saw in the previous section. Several Ashʿarites,
including al-Ashʿarī himself, had in this respect drawn a distinction between
God’s absolute freedom rationally considered and the way this freedom may be
exercised in the postrevelational order.113 The language of “causes,” similarly, made
crucial appearances in legal works, including the works of Ashʿarite jurists, where
it was made integral to the definitions of legal values. Thus, obligatory acts (wājib),
in al-Ghazālī’s words in the Mustaṣfā, are those that serve as a “cause of punish-
ment in the hereafter” (sabab al-ʿiqāb fiʾl-ākhira).114 Even outside the legal context,
there were instances in which prominent Ashʿarites had made lavish use of the
language of asbāb to talk about the connection between actions and their conse-
quences. Al-Ghazālī’s extensive deployment of this language in the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm
al-dīn is a case in point.115 What both contexts—legal and spiritual—share, to be
sure, is a more practical concern with action. And there have been serious ques-
tions about how the commitments of this practical perspective stand to be har-
monized with the commitments articulated in more theoretical contexts, where
Ashʿarites have often been understood as adopting an occasionalist view of causal-
ity according to which God is the sole cause of events and any apparent causes in
the world are not real causes but merely occasions. As al-Ashʿarī had epitomically
expressed it: “Everything that is created in time is created spontaneously and new
by God, without a reason [sabab] that makes it necessary or a cause [ʿilla] that
generates it.”116
Putting aside the finer print of the Ashʿarite message and taking the Ashʿarites
to have interrogated the relevance of the notion of causality at this juncture suf-
ficiently loudly to justify Ibn Taymiyya’s preoccupation, we will then be inter-
ested to hear how Ibn Taymiyya articulates his own response. “God may torment
without a sin [bilā dhanb],” the Ashʿarites had said; yet “God does not torment or
punish save for/through/because of one’s sins [lā yuʿadhdhibuhu wa-yuʿāqibuhu
illā bi-dhunūbihi],” Ibn Taymiyya would counter.117 Yet just how should we under-
stand the reason-giving “because” that figures in this statement? And more to the
point: how strongly? This is a question that Ibn Taymiyya provides resources for
answering when, in one of his Fatāwā, he is challenged to explain a point that
may seem puzzling coming from the direction of what he has told us regarding
the nature of ethical value. How does the claim that actions are really good or bad,
182 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

it may be asked, hang together with the claim that people are not always pun-
ished for committing bad actions? Not everyone would see the space for a wedge
between these two claims; Ibn Taymiyya does. Challenged to explain his position,
he offers the following reply: actions “are causes [asbāb] for punishment, yet they
depend on a condition [sharṭ]”—namely the arrival of a revealed message to serve
as proof against one.118
If this remark suggests one limitation—cause y requires certain conditions x to
effect z—the wedge is driven deeper in a short epistle that Ibn Taymiyya devotes
to the topic of reward. “Does anyone enter paradise through their works?” reads
the title. It is false, Ibn Taymiyya states in the conclusion of his discussion, to
think that “what occurs through a cause [bi-sabab] cannot occur without it”; death,
for example, may come about through another’s action or through other means.
Thus “the cause does not necessitate the effect [al-sabab lā yūjib al-musabbab],”
and indeed God “may create the effect without the cause.”119 Thus, effect z can be
brought about without cause y altogether; and as Ibn Taymiyya makes clear in this
context, it is God’s mercy and beneficence that provides the ultimate way of filling
the prepositional “through” or “because” that carries one across heaven’s door.
The entire dramatic performance is nothing but a refraction of divine bounty: God
in His bounty creates people; God in His bounty creates their good works; God in
His bounty creates their requital. Everything good that people experience both in
this world and the next is a “pure bounty from Him, without a prior cause which
necessarily confers a right [ḥaqq] upon them.”120 These remarks give us more than
a glimpse into the grounds of Jon Hoover’s strongly worded conclusion concern-
ing Ibn Taymiyya’s understanding of secondary causality. “God’s perspective,” he
writes, “appears to be that of a real but inert world of tools and raw materials that is
wholly dependent upon God’s will for its every movement. God creates by means
of these instruments in accord with his wise purpose. The human perspective is
that of a world of naturalistic cause and effect and reward and punishment into
which God can intervene at any point.”121
The operation of asbāb, the above already suggests, is subject to important
limitations. Yet if we wish to probe the justificatory or explanatory nature of
this causal relation more deeply, there will be a more relevant question to ask
at this juncture. We may put this as follows:  If actions may not always lead to
certain consequences, what is it about actions that makes them lead to such con-
sequences when they do? Thinking about the operation of causes in the natu-
ral world, for example, to affirm that a real causal connection holds between
natural events—and that they are not, as occasionalists would have it, produced
through the direct action of God—would typically involve making some kind
of statement about the properties of the interacting elements. As Ibn Taymiyya
himself rehearses the point in the Radd, if fire burns, or if water has a cooling
effect, if the eye sees, or if eating causes satiation, this is because “there is a
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 183

force [or potentiality:  quwwa] in fire that necessarily produces a heating effect,
there is a force in water that necessarily produces a cooling effect,” and so on.122
Mutatis mutandis, when we affirm that “God does not torment or punish save
for [through, because] of one’s sins,” we need to ask: What is it about the nature
of these actions that renders them a fit object of God’s punishment in the first
place? Why do these actions attract punishment and not others?
It is a question that the Muʿtazilites had answered earlier by pointing to the
various act-descriptions (wujūh) that ground the value of actions and to the desert
entailments or judgments (aḥkām) of praise and blame that are realized when an
act corresponding to a given act-description is performed. The desert of reward and
punishment attracted by actions forms merely a natural extension of the desert of
praise and blame these actions attract. To ask “Why punish?” (and “Why reward?”)
within this scheme is on one level simply to call attention to these act-descriptions
and via these to their entailed deserts. As ʿAbd al-Jabbār had indicatively stated
in the Mughnī, writing about the moral norms known by reason (ʿaqliyyāt): “One
deserves reward and is preserved from punishment through them because of the
qualities [awṣāf] they possess; indeed it is because of these attributes that desert is
realized.”123 The explanatory power of these act-descriptions indeed emerges more
clearly once we recall how these descriptions had been specifically understood.
For they included considerations that went beyond utility to span a number of
deontological grounds, such as lying, ingratitude, and injustice and their contrar-
ies. As I observed earlier, the deontological notion of ḥaqq (right, claim) played an
organizing role in several of these grounds, notably injustice. Injustice, thus, is a
matter of violating the rights of other persons, and it is the violation of such rights
that translates into the right of punishment (ḥaqq fiʾl-ʿiqāb) that God possesses in
the afterlife.124 Reward and compensation, similarly, form human claims that God
is charged with faithfully administering.
Ashʿarite theologians had flatly rejected this view, denying that deserts were
generated by actions themselves in a manner that would place God under moral
obligation to respond to them. With this in mind, it will be interesting to observe
that the remark that gave us our starting point in this section—the real dispute
concerns whether acts are objects of (yataʿallaqu bihi) praise and blame, punish-
ment and reward—was in fact a mirror image of one al-Rāzī had earlier delivered
in his Arbaʿīn. Yet al-Rāzī’s own remark had been rather more nuanced. The real
dispute, he had written, concerns “whether the fact that certain acts are objects of
blame in the present world and punishment in the hereafter [mutaʿallaq al-dhamm
… waʾl-ʿiqāb], and certain others objects of praise in the present world and reward
in the hereafter, is because of a quality of the action [li-ajl ṣifa ʿāʾida ilaʾl-fiʿl] or
whether … it is rather because of the sheer fact that the Law has thus deter-
mined it [ḥukm al-sharʿ bi-dhālika].”125 It was the latter position that represented
the Ashʿarite view—a view that Ashʿarites had then qualified further by claiming
184 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

that actions serve not as causes (ʿilla) of reward and punishment, but only as signs
(amāra) of one’s future fate.126
Crucially, thus, it was as a question about the deeper why of otherworldly
consequences that al-Rāzī’s remark had parsed the backbone of the debate—a
why, moreover, that explicitly thematized the Muʿtazilites’ deontological commit-
ments. In his Nubuwwāt, Ibn Taymiyya mentions the Ashʿarite view of acts as
“signs” only to reject it, objecting to the idea that acts should be “only a sign
of [otherworldly] bliss or misery without there being anything in the respec-
tive actions that is suited to reward or punishment [min ghayr an yakūna fī aḥad
al-fiʿlayn maʿnan yunāsibu al-thawāb aw-al-ʿiqāb].”127 It is a remark that seems
tantalizing in openly conveying a demand for an explanation of otherworldly con-
sequences that would tie them to something inherent in the actions themselves.
Yet what, now, might that “something” be? For Ibn Taymiyya, as we have seen,
has offered an account of the value of actions that is articulated exclusively in con-
sequentialist terms. “Good” actions are those that are beneficial and “bad” actions
those that are harmful, and benefit and harm depend on the consequences that
actions lead to, including their consequences in the otherworldly domain. To ask
“Why punish?,” however, is to ask why certain kinds of actions lead to benefit and
others to harm. And such a question this evaluative account would seem greatly
challenged to answer without falling into circularity—a kind of circularity Ibn
Taymiyya himself exemplifies when he writes: “Since, in the present world, one
hasn’t lived the beneficial life for which one was created … one will also not do
so in the hereafter.”128
Probed more closely, attempts to answer this question on purely consequential-
ist terms would seem doomed to end up in tangles, leading to logical absurdity at
best and blatant injustice at worst. Al-Rāzī had picked up on both of these unwel-
come repercussions when addressing the topic of punishment in his Maṭālib. For
if we take the value of actions to be grounded in their otherworldly consequences
as these impact on the agent’s self-interest, the hapless sinner might well ask, “You
punish me, God, for not doing actions that serve my own interests?” If instead we
appeal to the benefit accruing to third parties from the punishment of given indi-
viduals, especially in terms of its deterring or edifying effect, this, al-Rāzī notes,
would appear to be the “essence of injustice” (maḥḍ al-ẓulm).129 From the perspec-
tive of our ordinary moral intuitions, it seems indefensible that one should sac-
rifice the good of one person for the good of another or indeed of a far greater
number of others. As regards the justification of deterrence, moreover, the mere
belief that punishment will be incurred—as against its actual realization—suffices
for the effect. Al-Rāzī’s discussion, of course, was built on the assumption that the
otherworldly consequences of actions attach to them on no other ground than the
decree of the Law, there being nothing in actions themselves that serves to ground
their value. As al-Ghazālī had earlier put it:  God freely attaches (rabaṭa, anāṭa)
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 185

consequences to actions that “tip” them (rajjaḥa) into the domain of obligation or
into the domain of prohibition.
Now the notion of ḥuqūq-claims that the Muʿtazilites had deployed widely in
their ethical theory, as I mentioned in ­chapter 1, is not entirely absent from Ibn
Taymiyya’s writings. And there are places where Ibn Taymiyya brings the concept
into play in discussing the posthumous domain, reflecting the important scrip-
tural foundations of this turn of thinking.130 Yet overall, these appearances remain
isolated and circumstantial and do not appear to be integrated more programmati-
cally within his viewpoint. Here as elsewhere, deontological notions are not given
the kind of robustness that would allow them to carry real explanatory weight. No
less crucially, Ibn Taymiyya leaves his readers in no doubt that the Muʿtazilite view
of otherworldly consequences stands to be rejected for reasons that mirror those
voiced by Ashʿarite theologians. “Human beings,” he writes in Minhāj al-sunna,
“have no claim over God by themselves and cannot make anything obligatory on
their Lord [inna al-ʿabd lā yastaḥiqqu bi-nafsihi ʿalā Allāh shayʾan wa-laysa lahu an
yūjiba ʿalā rabbihi shayʾan].”131 We will recognize the same stance in his earlier
remark that everything good that people experience both in this world and the
next is a “pure bounty from [God], without a prior cause which necessarily confers
a right [ḥaqq] upon them.”
Affirming a causal “through” (bāʾ al-sababiyya), he elsewhere clarifies, is not
the same as affirming a commutative “through” (bāʾ al-muqābala)—the way we
say, “I bought such-and-such a thing in exchange for [bi] this amount,” or the way
we think of a laborer as working in return for a wage “which he is entitled to
[yastaḥiqquhā] just as the seller is entitled to the price [of a product].”132 Unlike the
employer, God stands to gain nothing from us and we work for our own benefit,
so the model familiar to us from the domain of human commutative transactions
(muʿāwaḍa or muqābala) fails to transfer. Similarly—and echoing a reasoning that
had found a home not only within Ashʿarite polemics but also within Baghdādī
Muʿtazilite thinking about reward—the benefits we receive from God are so pro-
digious that no order of commutation and compensatory parity could ever make
it reasonable to speak of human desert, given the indebtedness that precedes and
underwrites it.133
Ultimately, it is precisely in the extrinsic manner al-Ghazālī had indicated that
Ibn Taymiyya also appears to think of the relationship between actions and their
otherworldly consequences. It is not insignificant that his own vocabulary directly
echoes al-Ghazālī’s when, in a highly telling passage, he compares the connection
between actions and their otherworldly consequences to the causal connection
between natural events such as eating and satiation or drinking and the quench-
ing of thirst, which God firmly bound together (rabaṭa … rabṭan muḥkaman) in an
exercise of absolute freedom unconstrained by the inherent nature of the events
or acts themselves. Reward (thawāb), Ibn Taymiyya explains, receives its name
186 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

from the fact that it comes back to (yathūbu) an agent from his action; punishment
(ʿiqāb) from the fact that it occurs after (yuʿqibu) his act. What this simple picture
of temporal succession, of neutral before and after, pointedly excludes is the stron-
ger normative and explanatory force that Muʿtazilites had packed into the relation
between acts and their consequences.134
Responding to an Ashʿarite view, I began by saying, Ibn Taymiyya voices a
demand for a more robust understanding of the connection between acts and
consequences than the Ashʿarites had established. But in framing this point, I
have been suggesting, he qualifies this connection in critical ways and does not
provide it with a deep explanatory foundation—a fact that reflects not only his
unmarked occlusion of deontological concepts, but also his deliberate exclusion
of desert from his ethical outlook. It is significant, in this respect, that in echoing
al-Rāzī’s formulation of the true focus of the dispute, Ibn Taymiyya does not seem
to register the explanatory level at which al-Rāzī had parsed it. I will come back to
the question of how, if not in such terms, punishment can receive a justification
at all from Ibn Taymiyya’s viewpoint. Yet before doing so, it will be important to
place Ibn Taymiyya’s reason-giving demand in clearer perspective and to consider
how this demand may be most instructively construed.
For all its causal tones, I would argue, the emphasis that Ibn Taymiyya places
on reasons in the context of his critique of the Ashʿarites needs to be read as
a demand for something far less deep, and far thinner, than what we might be
prepared to count as an “explanation” or an explanatory ground. As Hoover has
insightfully pointed out, what piqued Ibn Taymiyya about the Ashʿarite position
was the arbitrariness it appeared to carry. “God may punish whom He wills, may
reward whom He pleases,” the Ashʿarites had said. On the contrary: “God only
punishes those who have sinned.” It is this last formulation that offers us a more
judicious way of hearing Ibn Taymiyya’s central claim, reading it in its concern
to affirm, not so much a “because,” as a stable identifying “who” or “what”; and a
correlative concern, not with explanation, but with regularity. What this delivers is
an assurance of a very particular kind: that there is a regular conjunction between
the characteristics of human beings and God’s actions toward them, and that God
does not act arbitrarily but always treats cases with the same relevant characteris-
tics in identical ways.135
The wise and indeed rational person is one who (also) acts for his own ben-
efit, we heard above when considering Ibn Taymiyya’s conception of God’s wis-
dom and his stipulation of a wise purpose that “redounds to God.” The same
imbrication of standards of morality and standards of rationality is evident in Ibn
Taymiyya’s conception of God’s justice (ʿadl), to the extent that justice is demar-
cated from wisdom. But here it is less the teleological concept of benefit than
the more formal concept of regularity that constitutes the organizing element.
The essential form of rationality, Ibn Taymiyya contends in several locations of
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 187

his work, lies in the ability to join like to like and distinguish like from unlike
(al-jamʿ bayna al-mutamāthilayn waʾl-farq bayna al-mukhtalifayn).136 It is a concep-
tion of rationality that he often deploys in discussing the epistemological faculties
of human beings. Yet it is plain that it also supplies the backbone of what he thinks
we can say about the rationality exhibited by God.
To treat differently cases that share all their relevant features marks a failure of
rationality that is also a failure of justice, as Ibn Taymiyya clarifies in setting out
his view of God’s justice. Once again this is a view Ibn Taymiyya invites us to read
in its character as a via media and as an attempt to balance the Muʿtazilite under-
standing of justice, with its objectionable notion of divine obligation, against the
Ashʿarite understanding, with its problematic refusal of the notion of injustice
as inapplicable to God by definition.137 Against these views Ibn Taymiyya fore-
grounds a third, which already boasted a long presence in the theological milieu.
The notion of “justice” can be applied to God taking justice to mean “putting
everything in its proper place” (waḍʿ kull shayʾ fī mawḍiʿihi). Putting things in
their right place involves an exercise of precisely the form of rationality just out-
lined, as the following statement reveals: “Justice consists of putting everything
in its proper place, and God is a just arbiter who puts things in their proper places
and only puts a given thing in the place that suits it [yunāsibuhu] and that wisdom
and justice demand. He does not differentiate between similar things nor does
He place different things on an equal footing, and He only punishes those who
deserve punishment, and thus puts [punishment] in its proper place.”138
It is this understanding of rationality, then, that Ibn Taymiyya seems most
anxious to defend in his polemics against the Ashʿarite view of punishment.
Yet of course it will be noticed that the type of reason-giving demanded by this
understanding is one fairly limited in kind. All that is needed to satisfy it is the
existence of a regular conjunction between God’s actions and the identifying
descriptions of their human objects. As to why these specific descriptions are con-
joined to these specific actions, that does not enter the equation. To restate: what
this tells us is that people with identical qualities are treated in identical ways; the
question why any of them should be treated in this way or another, on the other
hand—why such a pairing is “suitable” or “proper”—belongs to a different story.
The difference between these two stories, however, comes down to a difference
between two diverging deployments or conceptions of reason: a formal or proce-
dural notion of reason as against a more substantive notion of moral reason such
as the one the Muʿtazilites had employed at this juncture. Bringing up this defini-
tion of justice in his Sharḥ al-Uṣūl al-khamsa, Mānkdīm would reject it precisely
on the grounds of its failure to pick out distinctively ethical considerations.139 The
point can be put even more instructively by drawing on a distinction marked by
John Rawls between two types of justificatory questions that can be asked about
the practice of punishment (or any other practice), one at the level of justifying
188 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

a particular action falling under this practice, another at the level of justifying
the practice itself. The question “To whom may punishment be applied?” and
the answer “Only to an offender for an offense” speak to the first level—and it is
to this level that Ibn Taymiyya’s preoccupation with fixing the identifying “who”
corresponds. But this still leaves open how the practice of punishment could be
justified at all.140
In focusing on regularity without normativity and conjunction without neces-
sity, thus, Ibn Taymiyya appears to leave the justification of punishment in a state
of abeyance. How could punishment then be justified on a deeper level within the
terms of his scheme? One of the few locations where Ibn Taymiyya comes near
to probing this “Why?” more substantively is in a brief discussion that appears
in one of his Qur’anic commentaries. “The only beneficial place” for evil souls is
“the one that is suitable to them,”141 he opens by saying, promisingly resuming the
terms of his definition of justice alongside the characteristic terms of his conse-
quentialism. He then proceeds to place before us a series of concrete cases by way
of comparison:

One who wished to make snakes and scorpions live among people the way
cats do would not be acting well [lam yuṣliḥ]. One who wished to make a liar
a witness for people would not be acting well. The same goes for one who
wished to appoint an ignoramus as a teacher or mufti over people, or to
make a helpless coward a fighter for people… . Things like that necessar-
ily spread corruption in the world, and they might [indeed] be impossible,
as it would be to try to make a stone float on the surface of the water like
a ship or ascend into the sky like the wind, and the like. So it is not fitting
[lā taṣluḥu] for malignant souls to be in the wholesome paradise in which
there is no malignancy to be found, for that would necessarily bring cor-
ruption, or be impossible.142

The invitation seems clear: we should use such cases as models for thinking about
the unsuitability of lodging wrongdoers in paradise (building on a discernment
of the “likeness” that joins them). Yet this argument, it is clear, rests on certain
notions about what is advisable and inadvisable within the ordinary world as we
know it; indeed, as the last line reveals, it more specifically rests on certain notions
about what is possible and impossible that derive from an empirical reflection on
the world we inhabit and the laws that happen to shape it. As with Ibn Taymiyya’s
earlier invocation of the “sick patient” metaphor to describe God’s toleration of
evils in pursuit of a preponderant good, we may therefore wonder how it can be
used to justify the choice of action on the part of an agent who operates outside
these limitations—or how it can do so without implying that He is subject to sig-
nificant limitations.
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 189

To the extent that Ibn Taymiyya does offer us resources for answering the ques-
tion “Why punish?” on a deeper level, in fact, it seems to me that these might be
found by looking, not to the intrinsic features of particular actions themselves,
but to their relative character as signifiers of worship and obedience, and thus
ultimately as expressions of God’s self-love. This is the explanatory level that we
may read Ibn Taymiyya as calling attention to in al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya when he
writes, “Reward and punishment are incurred for doing what the One rewarding
and punishing [respectively] loves and is well pleased with, and is angered by and
hates.”143 It is by reference to God’s love for actions under their description as
objects of command, this remark densely suggests—as objects carrying the claims
(ḥuqūq) of His divinity, and thus as potential tokens of worship and love—that His
response to the human failure to perform such acts can be understood.144 God
loves those who express their love for Him by honoring the demands of His divin-
ity; God hates those who hate Him and who dishonor these demands.
The intention with which one performs acts, Ibn Taymiyya emphasizes
throughout his writings, is what determines their character and their success,
in line with a well-known prophetic tradition (innamā al-aʿmāl biʾl-niyyāt). Only
those acts that we perform for the sake of God (li-wajh Allāh)—not for the sake of
worldly goods, not even for the sake of otherworldly compensation, and not for the
“intrinsic moral value” of the act—create value in the eyes of God. “Human beings
are rewarded for performing good deeds,” we hear elsewhere, “if they perform
them … for the sake of God [ibtighāʾ wajh rabbihi] and in order to obey God and
the Prophet.”145 This, indeed, ties in with what I take to form an important element
of Ibn Taymiyya’s criticism of the Muʿtazilite failure to uphold the claims of God’s
divinity. For one of the corollaries of the Muʿtazilites’ larger failure to acknowledge
that God created people not merely to benefit them but to be worshipped was
their exaltation of a purely moral motivation that failed to “point” acts to God, and
that similarly saw God in His merely instrumental role as dispenser of deserts as
against an object of intrinsic love. If this is correct, acts derive their otherworldly
value from the context of the relationship between man and God rather than from
the nature of acts themselves. It is the normative conception of human motiva-
tion that emerges from this same context, I would also suggest, that provides Ibn
Taymiyya’s pervasive emphasis on self-interested motivation with its conditioning
ideal. Ibn Taymiyya, like many of the Sufi writers whose teachings water his own
thinking here, would call it an ideal of “sincerity” or ikhlāṣ.
Whether this is the understanding that Ibn Taymiyya elsewhere had in mind
when describing punishment as something created by God for a wise pur-
pose, “with regard to which it is an act of wisdom and mercy [al-ʿadhāb … min
makhlūqātihi, alladhī khalaqahu bi-ḥikma, huwa bi-iʿtibārihā ḥikma wa-raḥma],”
seems uncertain.146 His reference to “mercy,” in fact, would point us to the human
rather than the divine level on which God’s wisdom stands to be realized, and one
190 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

cannot help wondering whether what Ibn Taymiyya was considering was precisely
the deterring or edifying effect whose morally problematic character al-Rāzī had
underscored. Overall, the attention Ibn Taymiyya devotes to the deeper justifica-
tion of punishment seems exiguous. This striking reticence may return us to a
distinction he had drawn in Bayān talbīs between the objective existence of a wise
purpose and the human ability to know it. It is a doubt about the possibilities of
human knowledge that he would voice throughout his work. “God does what He
does for a wise purpose that He knows” and may sometimes choose to reveal this
to people, or to some people—such as the prophets and the pious salaf—and other
times He may not.147
This conservative view reflects the spirit of the Qur’anic dictum “He shall not
be questioned as to what He does, but they shall be questioned” (Q 21:23). It is
also reflects the spirit that breathes through Ibn Taymiyya’s account of the divine
attributes more broadly, and that governs his insistence that we should affirm all
the attributes with which God has described Himself in scripture while recogniz-
ing that we may not know their modality (for “like Him there is naught,” Q 42:11).
As Hoover writes: “The modalities of the concrete realities to which the names of
the unseen God refer are unknowable because they are completely unlike refer-
ents given the same names in the created world.” Ultimately, these realities may
be known to none other than God himself.148 The point is expressed in al-ʿAqīda
al-Tadmuriyya in a way that directly includes the notion of wisdom in its scope.
“Human beings do not know the realities [ḥaqāʾiq] of His attributes, may He be
exalted, and the attributes of the afterlife He informed them about, nor do they
know the realities of the wisdom He purposed in His creation and command, or the
realities of the will and power that proceed from Him.”149 Nothing, finally, could
be more in keeping with the traditional Ḥanbalite stance embodied in Aḥmad ibn
Ḥanbal’s renowned bilā kayf: we affirm the divine attributes without asking how.
Ibn Taymiyya’s bilā lima—we affirm divine wisdom without asking why—would
only form a natural extension of this basic stance.150 Certain general answers to
the question “Why?” can of course be given, allowing us for example to connect
God’s commands to His concern for human welfare or to the demands of His own
divinity. A more detailed knowledge of God’s reasons and designs, on the other
hand, lies out of our reach. Applying this insight to our case, we might say: there
must be a wise purpose in punishment, a real answer to the deeper “Why pun-
ish?” that would reveal its necessity. But if so, it may be something human beings
cannot know.
A programmatic wariness about probing God’s wisdom too closely may indeed
be at work in Ibn Taymiyya’s reticence regarding the deeper justification of punish-
ment. Yet there is also a different and broader point that needs to be brought out
at this juncture, one that concerns the organizing aims of Ibn Taymiyya’s theo-
logical exercise and that it is crucial to consider if we wish to place its character as
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 191

well as its limitations in clearer perspective. For what difference, one might ask,
does it after all make whether we talk about God’s wisdom or justice in one way
or another? The simplest answer to this question would seem to be: it matters the
same way it matters to hold true beliefs about any other subject in which there is
scope for getting things right or wrong. And what is at stake in this instance is the
greatest subject of all: the nature of God Himself. It is a purist conception of why
truth “matters” that has often appealed to thinkers. As William James put it: “When
you’ve got your true idea of anything, there’s an end of the matter. You’re in posses-
sion; you know; you have fulfilled your thinking destiny … you have obeyed your
categorical imperative.” Yet this lofty conception of our intellectual life seems to fall
short as an account of the multiple and profound ways in which beliefs may matter
to those who hold them. This is the point to which James himself would try reorient
attention by the focusing pragmatist question: “What concrete difference will [an
idea’s] being true make in any one’s actual life?” and again: “What experiences will
be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false?”151
We might need a more complex train of reflection in order to determine how
we could speak of “experiences” in connection with, say, mathematical truths.
But we will not need much in order to see the relevance of this point for theo-
logical discussion. For on the one hand, in raising questions of theological truth
and contesting others’ versions of them, Ibn Taymiyya places a critical accent on
the fact, as Hoover reformulates this, that “thinking and speaking well of God
is part of the law (sharīʿa)” and that people are obligated to find a way of speak-
ing “that ascribes to God the highest perfection or praise.”152 This is a normative
demand, we might say, a “categorical imperative” in James’s (Kantian) locution.
The qualifier “well” in Hoover’s formulation, it is important to clarify, does not
refer us merely to thinking and speaking truthfully or correctly in an entirely
neutral sense. Speaking well of God is speaking in a way that confers on God
the praise that He is entitled to, the praise that does justice to His merits. Yet
this is a justice—we may say, still in a categorical register—that we owe Him.
Ibn Taymiyya’s affirmation of God’s wisdom and justice can be read in this light.
As he puts it in one place, “To say that [God] creates evil that contains no good,
brings no benefit to anyone and involves no wise purpose or mercy, and that He
torments people without a sin, would not be a praiseworthy description of Him
but the reverse.”153
Yet our ability to confer the more detached response of “praise,” Ibn Taymiyya
makes clear elsewhere, is intimately linked to our ability to confer the rather less
detached response of love. Even if we might, conceivably, be commanded to love
a tyrannical or unjust God, a God who does not care about human well-being and
exercises His power without limitations, establishing this kind of spiritual rela-
tionship would in practice seem highly problematic. No less imperiled would be
our ability to commit ourselves to the obedience of the Law this God has invited us
192 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

to submit to. What we believe about God’s moral attributes is not, thus, immaterial
to our own spiritual well-being. This spiritual concern registers visibly at several
junctures of Ibn Taymiyya’s polemical engagement with the Ashʿarite denial that
God acts wisely, and more specifically that He has human welfare at heart. For “we
know that if a person believes that obeying God and the Prophet’s command may
not be in his interests or to his advantage … but on the contrary may be harmful
and disadvantageous to him … there can be few greater disincentives against his
doing as God and His Prophet have commanded.” Add to this the unqualified
claim that God may act as He pleases without constraints, and your assurance that
it pays to do what God and His Prophet command has been left even more deeply
bruised. Soon you find yourself mouthing the terrible words “There is nothing
more harmful to the creature than the Creator.”154 Don’t just think of the conse-
quences this belief has for the religious life. Think of the consequences it has for
the desire to live life at all.
It is a sensitivity to the pragmatic consequences of theological beliefs that has
often been foregrounded by Ibn Taymiyya’s readers in the past. His theological
practice, as Henri Laoust suggested early on, is best read in light of his governing
preoccupation with what leads to a deeper worship of God and with evaluating
doctrines “through their function and value for action.” Yet “action” here seems
too narrow, as it leaves out the attitudes of the heart that spell out the fuller mean-
ing of worship as a “fullness of submission and love” (kamāl al-dhull waʾl-ḥubb).155
Theological beliefs simply cannot be considered independently of the attitudes of
the heart they enable—the spiritual stance or particular kind of piety they serve
to constitute.
The intimate connection between theological belief and spiritual consequence
emerges starkly, as I have just said, in the question of God’s wisdom and justice.
It emerges equally starkly in other theological contexts, in ways calculated to elicit
more clearly the peculiar repercussions of this pragmatic concern for the character
of Ibn Taymiyya’s theological engagements. The pragmatic standpoint dominates,
for example, several of Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks on the question of divine determi-
nation (qadar), which isolate the notion of “livability” as a criterion of paramount
importance in approaching the topic. There is a certain way of assenting to the the-
sis of divine determination that would subvert ordinary life altogether. To appeal
to God’s determination of human acts, thus, to justify one’s own wrongdoing is
a way of engaging this thesis that “cannot be lived” and through which human
interests are not served (lā yumkinu aḥadan minhum an yaʿīsha bihi wa-lā taqūmu
bihi maṣlaḥat aḥad min al-khalq). At the broadest level, a belief in divine determi-
nation cannot be allowed to jeopardize the commitment to obeying the religious
Law, in which human interests find their highest fulfillment. To the extent that a
belief in divine determination is part of the Law itself, this would make the Law
self-defeating (fa-qad adhhaba al-aṣl).156
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 193

The view we take of God’s determination, however, does not merely affect our
commitment to a life of religious obedience taken in the sense of external con-
formity to the demands of the Law. It similarly affects the spiritual attitudes that
shape our inner life and from which our actions also flow. And here, apparently
competing views may each carry important spiritual ramifications. The belief
that we determine our actions on some level, for example, has the salutary conse-
quence that we experience contrition for our evil acts and take responsibility for
changing. The belief that God determines our acts has the salutary consequence
that we experience gratitude toward God for the good we do, avoiding the evils of
spiritual pride, that we feel humbled by our limitations, and that we trust in God
as the sole determiner of our weal or woe.157 Both beliefs, thus, have far-reaching
spiritual consequences, and it cannot be a matter of upholding one of them so
unequivocally that we entirely leave the other out of view. They have to be sus-
tained in a perpetual tension calibrated to the demands of the spiritual life. Ibn
Taymiyya’s “real” higher-order view of the matter, as noted in earlier chapters, is
that God ultimately determines human acts; yet his concern with keeping spiri-
tual consequences in balance means that this “real” view is not presented without
ambiguity or tension across his work.
Something similar, it may now be said, holds about the connection between
actions and their otherworldly consequences that has formed our focus. That
it was not a question of merely affirming causes—and the status of acts as
causes—simpliciter but also of correctly calibrating the way we affirm them is
something that Ibn Taymiyya signals clearly in several places. There is such a
thing as believing in causes too little, but there is also such a thing as believ-
ing in causes too much. To turn away from causes entirely is to impugn the Law
(al-iʿrāḍ ʿan al-asbāb kulliyyatan qadḥ fiʾl-sharʿ) for it leads to neglect of the acts
God has commanded, declaring them the means for entering paradise. Yet to turn
to causes entirely—to trust in the strength of one’s works alone—is to impugn the
unity of God (al-iltifāt ilaʾl-asbāb shirk fiʾl-tawḥīd).158 For nothing ultimately takes
place without God’s will, and no cause operates wholly independently in neces-
sitating its effect. This is a tension that is mirrored in a number of the scriptural
statements that serve as reference points within Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion. On
the one hand, the Qur’an has said: “Enter paradise for/because of what you used
to do [udkhulū al-janna bimā kuntum taʿmalūna]” (Q 16:32). Yet from the Prophet
we hear: “None shall enter paradise through their works [lan yadkhula aḥadukum
al-janna bi-ʿamalihi].”159
The particular type of “through” that the Prophet meant to deny in this last
statement, Ibn Taymiyya explains, is the commutative “through” (bāʾ al-muqābala)
the Muʿtazilites had affirmed. We do not have claims (ḥuqūq) over God the way
wage laborers do; we are not entitled to anything. The problem with this view of
human action once again lies in its spiritual consequences: it makes people trust
194 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

in their own works instead of trusting (tawakkala) in God, and it feeds spiritual
pride.160 At the same time, human beings need to have a sufficiently robust assur-
ance that God will—a “will” in the experiential register of a “must”—reward them
for their deeds in order to be motivated to undertake them. Bowing to that psy-
chological necessity, Ibn Taymiyya does not therefore entirely exclude the stronger
notion of ḥaqq from his description of the connection between human acts and
otherworldly consequences. It appears distinctly, for example, in the context of
the topos of God’s self-binding we considered earlier, where we hear Ibn Taymiyya
refer to the human right to be rewarded for good deeds and not to be unfairly
punished. Yet it is crucial here that this is described as a right that “God imposed/
took upon Himself through His words,” that is, His vow to justice (hādhā al-ḥaqq
alladhī ʿalayhi huwa aḥaqqahu ʿalā nafsihi bi-qawlihi). God’s originary commit-
ment, thus, must be constantly retained in awareness, ensuring that we always
read our rights as products of God’s free beneficence (iḥsān).161
One must not, thus, rest in perfect assurance of the connection between acts
and consequences; yet too little assurance would be pernicious for the spiritual
life. There is also a further distinction to be drawn depending on whether we
are thinking of reward or punishment. Ibn Taymiyya repeatedly places a differ-
ent emphasis on the force of the causal connection binding these two outcomes
to human action, suggesting that this connection is weaker in the case of reward
than in the case of punishment, and stressing God’s free bounty in the former and
human action in the latter.162 This distinction once again derives its importance
from the spiritual repercussions of believing that evil comes from oneself whereas
good comes from God. Similarly, a powerful conviction of the reliability of the
causal connection between acts and consequences may be motivationally useful
prior to the act. But if we fail to act well, the same belief may lead us to despair of
divine mercy and stray even further from the path.
I have been suggesting that Ibn Taymiyya’s development of his theological
positions takes place against the horizon of a distinct preoccupation with the
impact these positions will have on the spiritual lives of those who entertain them.
Looking back to the starting point of our discussion, the following reflection will
suggest itself. For our discussion of Ibn Taymiyya’s conception of God’s morality
took its point of departure from a critical distinction between the way Ashʿarite
thinkers had approached God’s wisdom and the way Ibn Taymiyya proposed to
treat it. In the reality of things, Ashʿarites suggested, God does not act for rea-
sons, and more specifically for reasons to do with human welfare. The practical
demands of legal reasoning, however, compel us to make use of the notion of rea-
sons and of a purposive “mind of God.” That is merely a heuristic—a reflection
of human epistemic limitations. Ibn Taymiyya, we saw, appeared to invert this
position by claiming the mind-independent reality of God’s reasons. There are,
no doubt, fundamental differences that divide these two viewpoints. Yet it is also
 The Aims of the Law and the Morality of God 195

worth emphasizing what unites rather than what divides them. For the articula-
tion of theological truth, as Ibn Taymiyya pursues this, does not present itself as
a venture to make the mind’s content conform to a mind-independent reality.
It takes place in distinct relation to the vital needs and vulnerabilities—not nar-
rowly epistemic but more broadly spiritual—of the human subject as it engages
this reality.
Ibn Taymiyya’s “pragmatic” concern in pursuing theological ideas is important to
foreground if we are to appreciate the character of his pursuit, providing us with yet
another insight into its special form as against its content. For these spiritual aims,
as I have tried to show, affect the unity and cohesion that Ibn Taymiyya’s theological
views carry, to the extent that the interest in stating theological truths is conditioned by
the need to maintain in balance competing beliefs with different experiential conse-
quences. They would also seem to have a bearing on the depth to which Ibn Taymiyya
is motivated to develop his theological views. It could be debated here whether the
character of his concern with the justification of punishment and the depth to which
he is prepared to push the question “Why?” could be read in this light, reflecting
an assessment that a deeper response to this theological question, for the purposes
of the spiritual life, is simply not required. That God will reliably visit punishment
for some acts and not for others is all we need to lead upright lives; a more probing
exploration of why that is the case can perhaps be left to the mysteries of divine wis-
dom that the human mind cannot plumb. However we engage this point, the above
discussion will have made clear not only the outlines of Ibn Taymiyya’s positive con-
ception of God’s morality, but also the limits of his articulation of these ideas.

I began this chapter with a bid to investigate the real grounds of Ibn Taymiyya’s
conflict with Ashʿarite theology. Making the move from the domain of human
morality to that of divine morality, I suggested that these grounds can be located
by considering the Ashʿarite stance on the role of human welfare within the Law.
This was a point on which Ashʿarite authors had often been accused of failing
to harmonize the contents of legal and theological discourse, and I outlined two
principal sources of tension, one connected with their view of the human mind
and its limited evaluative capacities, the other with their view of the mind of God
and the inapplicability of concepts of purpose to Him. Addressing Ibn Taymiyya’s
positive articulation of God’s morality, I focused on two questions: “Why does God
command certain actions?” and “Why does God punish actions?” Ibn Taymiyya’s
response to the first question looks in two directions: God’s concern with human
welfare and God’s concern with the demands of His own divinity. His response
to the second question turns out to revolve around a thin demand for the regular
conjunction between acts and consequences that speaks to his specific conception
of God’s justice but leaves the deeper question “Why?” in abeyance. This may,
or may not, have to do with the pragmatic concerns that shape Ibn Taymiyya’s
196 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

exposition of his theological views on this and other subjects. Many of the distinc-
tive features of his treatment of both theological questions—as well as some of
their distinctive difficulties—reflect, once again, the primacy of welfare within his
ethical thought.
With the above in place, we may push ahead to the final stage of our story.
We have seen the stance taken by Ashʿarite authors on the ability of the
human mind to engage the human interests that the Law aims to promote. Ibn
Taymiyya’s own stance on this type of question has not yet come into view, yet it
provides a crucial additional setting in which his evaluative epistemology must
be sought. Focusing back on the human domain, the task of the next chapter
will be to consider what Ibn Taymiyya’s legal epistemology has to contribute to
our picture of human evaluative capacities as he understands them. This will
position us for a final reflection on the place and significance of the claim of
ethical rationalism within Ibn Taymiyya’s vision, and also for a broader com-
ment on the view of the relationship of reason and revelation against which this
claim may be located.
 5

Broader Perspectives on Ibn

Taymiyya’s Ethical Rationalism

Ethical judgments, Ibn Taymiyya had said in the Radd, are among the
“greatest certainties of human reason.” These are judgments that he appeared to
construe in exclusively consequentialist terms:  “good” and “bad” come down to
benefit and harm. Probing his ethical epistemology more closely, I  observed in
­chapter 2, one elicits messages that vary significantly in their emphasis. Here Ibn
Taymiyya offers what sounds like a strong claim of reason and indicates that our
judgments about what is beneficial and harmful may be the product of experience
(tajriba). There he narrows down the field and tells us that the Law informs us
of what benefits and harms us. It is “the Law that is the light that distinguishes
between what benefits and harms one,” we heard.
In the context of this particular remark, Ibn Taymiyya had added a crucial
specification: the Law reveals what benefits and harms us both in “this life and
the next” (al-maʿāsh waʾl-maʿād).1 The domain of the present life and the next
here appear together with nothing to distinguish between them, spelling out the
span of the Law in the most comprehensive possible terms. Yet elsewhere Ibn
Taymiyya seemed to draw a distinction between the human ability to make evalu-
ative judgments in one domain as against the other. People can partly grasp what
is beneficial and harmful “through their reason as concerns this-worldly matters
[umūr al-dunyā].” It is rather the consequences of the afterlife (al-dār al-ākhira) that
can be known only by revelation.2 Jurists discussing the aims of the Law, as we
saw in the previous chapter, qualified the human interests at stake as pertaining to
the domain of the present life. To ask how Ibn Taymiyya approaches the notion of
welfare within legal reasoning is thus to open a new question about the operation
of ethical judgments in the realm of ordinary human experience.
In this chapter, my aims will be composite. The aim of the first part of the
chapter will be to consider Ibn Taymiyya’s engagement with the notion of welfare
198 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

in the context of his legal epistemology, focusing on a set of key questions. To

what extent, or in what sense, are the interests promoted by the Law accessible to
human reason? How substantively does Ibn Taymiyya envisage human inquirers
as engaging considerations of welfare in the legal context? And what does this
have to tell us about the capacity of human reason to operate independently of
revealed guidance? Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks on the topic, as I will show, harbor
conflicting tendencies and invite competing interpretations. To the extent that we
can organize these tendencies into a more cohesive whole, I will argue that it is
a conservative stance on the topic that dominates his remarks, underscoring the
textual framework that bounds human reasoning. My aim in the second part of
the chapter will be to provide an additional set of interpretive foils against which
to read Ibn Taymiyya’s emphasis on reason in the ethical domain. Thematizing
the competing tendencies of his work, I will first offer a broader comment on the
interpretive difficulties that hamper the reconstruction of his ethical views and
use this to raise a question about his deeper aims in pressing the claim of ethical
reason. I will then consider the larger understanding of the relationship between
reason and revelation against which this claim naturally asks to be located, con-
cluding with a final reflection on what it means to look for the ethical deliverances
of “pure” reason against the complex background of preexisting religious but also
social practices that frames these.
In order to find the beginning of this argument, we now need to make the leap
from the theological to the legal context to consider the evidence.

Considerations of Welfare in Legal

Reasoning: A Substantive Engagement?
It is a leap, our discussion in ­chapter 4 indicated, that may often be attended by
important consequences. It was in effecting just such a transition between dis-
courses, as we saw—a transition from their theological to their legal writings—that
Ashʿarites were confronted with critical tensions in their viewpoint and came
under pressure to produce new intellectual adjustments. In the case of Ashʿarite
thinkers, the transition between discourses marked an identifiable shift in genre.
For the thematic repertories of these two discourses, to be sure, interfaced at
several points, and uṣūl al-fiqh sometimes provided a fresh stage for continuing
debates that unfolded in kalām; the question of the value of actions was a case
in point. Yet the theological treatise and the compendium of legal theory never-
theless represented distinct genres of writing with their own peculiar structures,
topics, and aims.
The leap between discourses in Ibn Taymiyya’s case confronts us on very differ-
ent terms. For if we except the legal work al-Musawwada fī uṣūl al-fiqh, produced by
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 199

accretion by three generations of scholars of the Taymiyyan family—its unusual

method of composition and fractured authorial identity mirrored in its tentative
title (“A Draft”)—Ibn Taymiyya’s output does not include an extended and sys-
tematic work of legal theory that might have allowed us to seek out his views in
structured ways under familiar headings. For the topic that narrowly concerns
us, namely the place of welfare in the Law, the discussion of “suitability” as a
means of identifying the legal cause in the context of analogy and the discus-
sion of unattested interests (maṣāliḥ mursala) as a source of Law formed two of
the most important rubrics under which competing views had been articulated
in major legal treatises. Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks on legal theory take the form of
short treatises or fatwas on specific themes, many of them compiled in volumes
19 and 20 of his collected Fatāwā, and sometimes appear as excursions woven into
other, often polemical contexts. His theoretical remarks, similarly, are not cleanly
isolated from his more practical discussions of concrete legal rulings.3 The leap in
question is thus less a leap between genres than a leap between topics, and topics
to be tracked down through a variety of topographies.
My account here will focus on three topics that are seminal for piecing together
a clear understanding of Ibn Taymiyya’s engagement with the notion of welfare
in the legal context: his foregrounding of “pragmatic” considerations within his
practical legal rulings; his emphasis on the role of preponderant utility as a deter-
minant of legal rulings; and his theoretical remarks about the role of unattested
interests as a source of Law. In each of these cases, he gives a prominent role
to considerations of welfare in ways that appear to invest him in a substantive
engagement with such considerations and in a robust claim about the human
ability to confront evaluative grounds and undertake evaluative reasoning inde-
pendently. Yet a finer-grained reading of the evidence offers crucial correctives to
this picture, calling attention to the paramount importance of the scriptural texts
in regulating and conditioning this evaluative engagement.
In the previous chapter, I invoked the notion of “pragmatism” as a means of
characterizing Ibn Taymiyya’s approach to theological truth. This same notion has
been invoked by several of Ibn Taymiyya’s readers on a different level as a means
of characterizing his approach to legal decisions. We have already had much to
say about the centrality of “welfare” in his vision of the divine Law. But in talking
about his legal pragmatism, it has often been a more specific inflection of this
concept that has taken the foreground, namely that of necessity or hardship. The
positions advocated by Ibn Taymiyya on a variety of practical legal questions—
many of them highly controversial positions that challenge preexisting legal prac-
tice—often turn out to be unified by one key feature: the cardinal emphasis they
place on considerations of hardship.
Addressing Ibn Taymiyya’s legal thought in a recent essay, Yossef Rapoport
highlights the relevance of this point for approaching several of his distinctive
200 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

legal rulings. His ruling against holding water to be impure when a minimal
impure quantity has dissolved in it, or his ruling in favor of menstruating women
performing the ṭawāf during the hajj, can be seen in this light. So can his con-
tentious ruling permitting the use of all clauses other than those that have been
expressly forbidden by scripture—as against those explicitly permitted—in draw-
ing up different kinds of contracts, or his ruling in favor of using circumstantial
evidence in courts. The same holds for another contentious ruling, in favor of leas-
ing orchards, traditionally frowned upon by jurists due to the element of uncer-
tainty it involves.4 In many of these cases, Ibn Taymiyya issues legal rulings that
antagonize what he sees as an excessively restrictive legal spirit—a restrictiveness
whose absurdity becomes all the more plain when legal stratagems are then widely
devised to enable people to evade it—on account of the hardship this causes. The
Law, we are given to understand, cannot have prohibited something that produces
great hardship. Rapoport here quotes one of the statements Ibn Taymiyya offers
in defending the lease of orchards: “The point is this: the community could not
abide by a prohibition like that [i.e., the lease of orchards], as it brings about intoler-
able harm. It is therefore known that it is not prohibited. … Whatever people need for
their sustenance, and is not caused by sin … then it is not prohibited for them,
because they are like the one who is in need.”5
Considerations of hardship (ḍarūra), to be sure, had been far from foreign
to Islamic legal practice. Such considerations had been enshrined in the widely
endorsed principle of rukhṣa or “license,” which stipulated that the strict demands
of the Law could be relaxed when their observation involved special and unusual
difficulty. Thus, fasting might be deferred or omitted by pregnant women or
travelers, and ritual prayer might be performed in a less rigorous fashion during
illness. The consumption of carrion, normally prohibited, was permitted when
starvation threatened and human life was at risk. The principle of legal license,
as these examples indicate, faced in two directions, justifying the relaxation or
suspension of both obligations and prohibitions. It was a principle that rested on
clear scriptural roots, including the Qur’anic verse that reads, “God desires ease
for you, and desires not hardship for you” (Q 2:185).6
In treating hardship as a consideration vested with normative significance, Ibn
Taymiyya thus leans his weight on a longer legal tradition. Yet his legal positions
seem to take this significance further by calling upon it not merely as a negative
principle for the mitigation of the strict letter of the Law, but also as a positive
action-guiding principle that applies in the absence of contrary legal guidance
and that indeed serves to discourage the gratuitous extension of the Law’s reach,
thereby broadening the sphere of its own application. This point was recently
highlighted by Felicitas Opwis in the context of her larger study of maṣlaḥa in the
classical legal tradition, where she distinguished between two principles at work
in Ibn Taymiyya’s substantive legal decisions that separately highlight the primacy
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 201

of welfare in his thought. One is the principle of legal license, which recognizes
hardship as the basis for temporarily permitting actions that the Law has prohib-
ited or relaxing the performance of actions it has declared obligatory; the other is
its positive counterpart, which recognizes human need as the basis for deeming
permissible actions that the Law has not expressly prohibited.7 The notion of wel-
fare that forms the heart of this more positive application is a broad one, and nota-
bly includes economic interests, as the ruling on the lease of orchards suggests
(“whatever people need for their sustenance” or livelihood [maʿāsh]). An equally
broad notion of interests is thematized by the ruling on contractual clauses, given
the wide range of transactions with a contractual basis, which include not only
economic transactions such as buying and selling but also marital relations,
among others.
What human beings need and what serves their most pressing welfare, such
evidence suggests, carries a distinct normative force. The prohibition of leas-
ing orchards “brings about intolerable harm,” we just heard, and “it is therefore
known that it is not prohibited.” This normative force would seem to find its
natural counterpart in an epistemological transparency which reflects the fact
that these kinds of needs are not simply judged, but felt. “Such-and-such an activ-
ity is acutely needed [inna hādhā mimmā tamissu al-ḥāja ilayhi],” Ibn Taymiyya
tirelessly repeats in this context. This expression will immediately remind us
of a set of very similar locutions that we encountered in the previous chapter
when considering the views of Ashʿarite writers regarding the accessibility of
the Law’s objectives to the human mind. (Al-Juwaynī: masīs al-ḥāja ilaʾl-masākin;
al-Ghazālī: hiya maʿāsh al-khalq wa-hum muḍṭarrūn ilayhā; al-Āmidī: mā tadʿū
ḥājat al-nās ilayhi.) In throwing down bridges to these discussions, Ibn Taymiyya,
on the one hand, invites us to redeploy the conclusions we had reached in that
context to the present one. Here, as there, the notion of “need” and “welfare” at
stake would demand to be read, not as one revealed through or defined by the
external vantage point of the Law, but as one recognized through lived experience
and grounded in a prerevelational grasp as basic as the need for physical survival
and making a living.
Yet in laying down these bridges, Ibn Taymiyya also reminds us of another
crucial context in which the notion of ḍarūra as well as that of ḥāja had appeared
in the writings of jurists before him; and this was in reflecting more systematically
on the objectives of the Law and on the human interests that underpinned legal
rulings. Al-Ghazālī and those who followed in his footsteps, as we saw, had offered
a three-tiered scheme for organizing the interests promoted by the Law, divid-
ing them into “necessities” (ḍarūriyyāt), “needs” (ḥājiyyāt), and “improvements”
(taḥsīniyyāt). With this scheme back in sight, another facet of Ibn Taymiyya’s posi-
tion can now stand out for attention, which brings into view not the similarities
that unite him with al-Ghazālī, but rather an important point of division.
202 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

Talking about classical jurists’ engagement with the notion of welfare in

c­ hapter  4, we saw that this engagement had been conditioned by a fear about
the danger that in seeking to determine the divine Law, human beings would
“remake the law in their own image.” This sense of guard had been manifest in
the way jurists had handled the notion of “suitability” as a method for identifying
the legal cause with a view to extending the Law analogically. Yet it emerged even
more sharply in connection with the hotly contested topic of what were known
as “textually unregulated” or “unattested” interests (maṣāliḥ mursala). Writing in
his Mustaṣfā, al-Ghazālī had provided a useful compass for situating the latter
and for appreciating the special problems they raised. Human interests, he had
written, fall in three different classes, representing three different ways of relat-
ing to the revealed texts. There are interests that the Law has distinctly testified
should receive consideration; there are interests that the Law has distinctly testi-
fied should not; and finally there are interests regarding which the Law has offered
no testimony.8 The operation of analogy, which extended the Law through the
prior identification of legal causes partly by means of “suitability,” looked to the
first class of interests, working on the basis of what the Law had said. Unattested
interests, as their name betrays, represented the last class; they were interests on
which the Law had been silent.
One has little difficulty seeing why this class would give grounds for special
worry to jurists concerned with preserving the purity of the divine Law. For the
human mind’s engagement with the notion of welfare in the context of analogy
was embedded in a textual framework and remained an exercise essentially inter-
pretive in nature. To ask whether a certain interest on which the Law had been
silent should form the basis for prescribing or proscribing a given action, by con-
trast, was to envisage a far more direct confrontation between the human mind
and considerations of welfare. It was to invest human reason with the capacity to
deliver more substantive evaluative judgments, and as such to entrust it with the
performance of legislative offices that many jurists saw as rightfully belonging to
God. Even those who were prepared to accord an important place to human inter-
ests in the context of analogy and to recognize the role of reason in apprehending
these interests expressed greater misgiving when it came to textually unregulated
benefits. Al-Ghazālī would convey his own misgivings in unambiguous tones
when he would conclude his relevant discussion in the Mustaṣfā with the aphoris-
tic admonition: “He who would judge [actions] on the basis of human welfare has
engaged in legislation [man istaṣlaḥa, fa-qad sharraʿa].”9
It is within this context that we must situate al-Ghazālī’s threefold classifica-
tion of human interests into “necessities,” “needs,” and “improvements.” This
scheme, as Benjamin Jokisch points out, was articulated against a clear concern
to find ways of safeguarding the juridical appeal to welfare against abuse.10 For
there are indeed cases where the human interests served by a given action seem so
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 203

compelling that to deny their evaluative force, or the space for decision they open
up, would be absurd. The example often brought up for discussion in this connec-
tion is one that modern readers will recognize as a textbook case of moral conflict.
Suppose Muslims are at war with unbelievers, and the enemy seizes Muslims to
use as shields. If Muslims hold fire, the enemy will overrun their land and slaugh-
ter them en masse without restraint, yet if they turn their fire on the enemy, they
take innocent lives. What should be done? Or to restate this more relevantly, what
should be taken to be the stance of the religious Law on this difficult situation?
Confronting such cases in the Mustaṣfā, al-Ghazālī would say: human interests
must indeed dictate the course of action even without an explicit textual indicant,
in this case ruling in favor of the permissibility of killing Muslim shields, which
is the course of action that preserves the greatest amount of (innocent) life. This
case in fact illustrates three major conditions that must be met if unattested inter-
ests are to form the basis of a ruling:  they must be general (kulliyya), affecting
the community as a whole; they must be epistemically certain (qaṭʿiyya), leaving
no doubt that these interests are under threat and that the action taken will suc-
cessfully protect them; and the choice must be unavoidable (ḍarūriyya). But also
the interest or good at stake must belong to the highest rung of “necessities” in
terms of the threefold scheme we have seen, in this case, the good of life.11 What
is important about necessities is not only that they represent the highest and most
imperative class of human interests but also—and crucially for the concern with
textual safeguarding—that they are confined to five very specific and clearly cir-
cumscribed goods: religion, reason, progeny, life, and property.
Given the explicit thematization of the role of human reason in confronting
welfare considerations in the debate about unattested interests, Ibn Taymiyya’s
own stance on the topic will hold special interest for us. His most concentrated
and oft-cited remarks on unattested interests emerge in an epistle entitled Qāʿida
fiʾl-muʿjizāt waʾl-karāmāt in a broader vicinity that hosts a number of other signifi-
cant remarks regarding the evaluative role of human reason. And what is impor-
tant is that the views he voices there appear to align him with a liberal stance on
the topic, in doing so wedding his theoretical remarks about welfare to the under-
standing suggested by his practical legal decisions.
Opening his discussion with a reference to the fivefold tabulation of
interests—which he lists as religion, reason, life, property, and honor (al-nufūs
waʾl-amwāl waʾl-aʿrāḍ waʾl-ʿuqūl waʾl-adyān)—Ibn Taymiyya criticizes this
scheme for its excessive restrictiveness. Part of this criticism seems to be linked
to a perception that the fivefold scheme as traditionally articulated carries an
overwhelmingly negative emphasis, having been articulated with a focus on
punishments—punishments that serve to deflect harm from positive goods—and
as such singling out only one moiety of welfare: the negative deflection of harm as
against the positive pursuit of benefit.12 Another part seems to reflect the concern
204 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

that such punitive measures attend exclusively to what is external and not internal,
to the acts of the body as against the inner state of the soul. Putting the latter point
aside, it is then worth noting that when Ibn Taymiyya turns to specify the positive
component sidelined by the traditional approach, he refers us to those worldly
“transactions [muʿāmalāt] and acts which are said to serve the welfare of people in
the absence of a legal prohibition.”13
The echo with Ibn Taymiyya’s practical legal discussions will be obvious. The
last phrase (“in the absence of a legal prohibition”), more particularly, will remind
us of what I described above as the positive counterpart of the principle of legal
license:  maṣlaḥa or need forms the ground for deeming permissible human
actions and transactions (such as contractually based acts of sale, marriage, and
so on) that the Law has not expressly prohibited. Yet with the debate about unat-
tested interests in clearer view, it will also be obvious that this is a singularly vague
gesture with which to fill the category of positive benefit that jurists like al-Ghazālī
had stocked in more determinate terms in the interest of closing the door against a
more direct engagement with human welfare. To reject the scheme of “five essen-
tials” and to refer generally to “transactions and acts” and to the broad welfare
they serve without qualifying this more determinately—in Ibn Taymiyya’s usage,
as Rapoport notes, the “definition of maṣlaḥa can potentially encompass all that is
beneficial to human society”14—would seem to open that door in a way calculated
to let in a decided draft. It will then be hard to avoid the conclusion Opwis thereby
draws: by disarming the formal criteria and procedures that had constrained the
juridical engagement with interests, and by additionally failing to give a clear
account of the procedural rules regulating the interaction with the texts, Ibn
Taymiyya has considerably weakened the textual safety valves and taken a big step
toward a more substantive confrontation with human interests than al-Ghazālī
and textualist-minded jurists after him sanctioned.15 And it is a confrontation that
would seem to bring with it a correlative reliance on the resources of reason.
Studying Ibn Taymiyya’s engagement with considerations of welfare through
his fatwas, Jokisch may seem to have offered a corrective to this picture, empha-
sizing the textualist character of Ibn Taymiyya’s enterprise in observing that while
Ibn Taymiyya recognizes maṣlaḥa as a source of Law, he consistently sets it in the
context of analogy. In his hallmark ruling in favor of the lease of orchards, thus,
Ibn Taymiyya does not argue directly on the basis of welfare but rather on the basis
of analogy with other practices already invested with legal sanction, such as the
ʿarāyā contract, which involves trading unripe dates on the palm tree against their
projected value as edible dried dates. Despite the element of risk (gharar) this con-
tract involves, jurists had permitted it by way of legal license on grounds of need
(ḥāja). Yet Jokisch immediately places this textualist commitment in a very dif-
ferent light when he observes that it is nothing more determinate than the broad
notion of need that Ibn Taymiyya invokes as the basis of this analogical transfer.16
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 205

In contrasting a “textualist” with a “substantive” approach to human welfare,

of course, everything will hang on the way we understand the notion of a “textual
indicant” at work. The broad notion of need or pressing welfare that Ibn Taymiyya
invokes, as we have seen, looks back to distinct Qur’anic dictums such as “God
desires ease for you, and desires not hardship for you” (Q 2:185). To the extent
that considerations of hardship have received the Law’s imprimatur through state-
ments of this sort, any decision made on the basis of such considerations, it could
be said, in some sense “derives” from an indicant contained in the revealed Law.
With a sufficiently enlarged conception of what it means for maṣlaḥa to “appear”
in the texts, little need remain outside it. Enlarged this way, however, the notion
of a textual indicant would seem to be in danger of losing its meaning and arbitra-
tive role. What to call “derivation” or “support,” as Malcolm Kerr observes, was
a central question in debating the place of human interests in the Law and in
distinguishing between the different types of relationships in which interests can
stand to the revealed texts. For “to the extent that there is convincing support for a
given consideration in the revealed sources, whether in a general or particular way,
of course such a consideration is not mursala.” Yet to open the notion of “sup-
port” too much in the direction of generality, as certain liberal-minded exponents
of maṣlaḥa proposed to do, would dissolve the relevant distinctions, making it
“appear questionable that in its absolute and literal sense a conception of maṣlaḥa
mursala really existed at all.”17 And in doing so, it would lead straight into the open
sea of an unregulated confrontation with unattested interests that most jurists
shrank from. The controversial case of Ibn Taymiyya’s contemporary and one-time
student Najm al-Dīn al-Ṭūfī (d. 1316) provides the most instructive illustration of
this danger. Drawing on the broad message expressed in the solitary hadith “Do
not inflict injury or repay one injury with another [lā ḍarar wa-lā ḍirār],” al-Ṭūfī
advocated one of the most substantive confrontations with the notion of welfare
that the classical legal tradition would play host to, raising maṣlaḥa to the status of
a supreme law-making principle capable of overriding the very letter of the Law,
and thereby illustrating the possibility that a textual foundation could launch one
out of the orbit of the textual system altogether. Ibn Taymiyya, as Jokisch notes,
does not go as far as al-Ṭūfī in the legislative status he accords to welfare.18 Yet
in opening up the notion of need so widely—a move that, to the extent that it is
grounded in the texts, would have to reflect a highly general construal of what
counts as a textual indicant—his approach pulls strongly in that direction.
The evidence carried by Ibn Taymiyya’s theoretical remarks about unattested
interests and by his practical legal decisions thus appears to press an understand-
ing of his viewpoint that underscores the ability of the human mind to confront
considerations of welfare directly and evaluate them independently of textual
guidance. The same picture receives support from another central feature of his
legal discussions. Studying the notion of divine wisdom in ­chapter 4, we will recall
206 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

that one of the most important characterizations of wisdom that Ibn Taymiyya
had offered was comparative in kind. The wise person is not simply the one who
chooses what is good; it is the one who knows to choose what is best in situations
where good and evil, or different kinds of goods and different kinds of evils, have
to be weighed against each other:  “Wisdom demands giving precedence to the
best of two goods by sacrificing the lesser one.” This view was reflected in Ibn
Taymiyya’s characterization of the Law, which does not simply promote what is
beneficial but rather “gives preponderance to the best of two goods … realizing
the greatest of two benefits [aʿẓam al-maṣlaḥatayn] through sacrificing the lesser
one, and repelling the greatest of two harms [aʿẓam al-mafsadatayn] by tolerating
the lesser one.”19
It is a point, I  noted in the previous chapter, that will remind us of the
cost-benefit comparisons alluded to by the Qur’an itself as the underlying ratio-
nale of its rulings, for example in relation to the prohibition against the consump-
tion of wine and gambling. (“In both is great sin, and [some] utility [manāfiʿ] for
men; but the sin of them is greater than their usefulness” (Q 2:219).) Situations
of conflict, Ibn Taymiyya suggests on numerous occasions across his writings,
are pervasive in human life. There are cases where one good cannot be achieved
without sacrificing another, and other cases where evil cannot be avoided and it
is simply a matter of preferring the lesser one; there are cases where good can-
not be achieved without allowing some evil to be realized, and other cases where
evil cannot be avoided without some good being sacrificed.20 In the case of wine
and games of chance, God Himself executes the task of comparing benefits and
harms and making the call as to which side preponderates, translating this wise
judgment into a clear prohibition of these acts. In several locations, however, this
is a comparative judgment that Ibn Taymiyya signals that human inquirers must
undertake, actively using it as a decision-making tool to determine what should
and should not be done.
We will all be familiar with this decision-making tool as it operates in ordinary
human life: we use it every time we take a draft of bitter medicine in the interest
of preserving or producing health. It is this basic judgment, as Ibn ʿAqīl suggests
in the Wāḍiḥ, that is exercised by the thirsty person who turns away from a source
of water the moment he sees the footprint of a lion on approach.21 Yet what will be
more interesting for our argument is the way this decision-making tool expresses
itself in the religious life and in the application of divinely prescribed precepts.
One of the most important contexts in which Ibn Taymiyya discusses it is the
performance of the well-known duty of commanding right and forbidding wrong
(al-amr biʾl-maʿrūf waʾl-nahy ʿan al-munkar). For to accept that this precept must
generally be obeyed is still to leave much room open for questions about how it
should be applied in particular cases—and even, at times, whether. This is a room
that demands of individuals a highly delicate exercise of judgment regarding the
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 207

balance of benefits over costs. There are times when, weighing up these conse-
quences, we may decide that it is best to abandon the duty altogether—for exam-
ple, when those committing wrong are persons in power or when forbidding a
certain wrong will lead to the breach of a graver right.22
It is in the context of discussing the duty of commanding right and forbidding
wrong that Ibn Taymiyya offers the following remarkable methodological state-
ment in his treatise al-Ḥisba: “If benefits and harms conflict … one must give
precedence to that which preponderates… . So even if commanding [right] and
forbidding [wrong] involves the realization of benefit and the repulsion of harm,
one must examine that which conflicts with it. If the benefit that is forgone or the
harm that is repelled is greater, it [i.e., commanding right and forbidding wrong]
has not been commanded; it has rather been forbidden if the harm it involves is
greater than the benefit.”23 The balance of utility, this suggests, forms a ground,
no less, for concluding that a particular act exemplifying a category that has been
commanded or forbidden by the Law in general terms should be deemed to be
“commanded” as against “forbidden” in that particular instance. This is a balance
that individuals confronted with a choice of acting will have to establish through
their own judgment, using the above methodological principle (qāʿida) as a rule
of proceeding.

Textualism: The Engagement of Welfare

in Its Scriptural Framework
I have been suggesting that there is a considerable body of evidence that appears
to press a liberal understanding of Ibn Taymiyya’s transactions with the notion
of welfare, in doing so highlighting the role of human reason in making sub-
stantive independent judgments about the consequential tendencies of actions.
Yet the evidence in fact does not speak so unambiguously; probed more closely,
these liberal messages turn out to be interlocked with a rather different set
of messages that repeatedly serve to ground them within a more conservative
conditioning frame.
Working our way backward through each of the three topics we have surveyed,
we can see this clearly in connection with Ibn Taymiyya’s emphasis on the impor-
tance of establishing the overall balance of benefits and costs. For a closer reading
of some of his most concentrated remarks regarding situations of conflict shows
that the majority of examples he uses to illustrate this thesis are ones in which the
preferred action has been established on scriptural grounds. A person who must
choose between the good of making expenditure for one’s family and the good of
devoting funds to religious war should choose the former—a prophetic tradition
makes this order of priority plain. A woman faced with the evil of performing the
208 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

hijra without an accompanying male family member and the evil of remaining
in the domain of war should opt for the former—an incident recounted in the
Qur’an (Q 60:10) provides clear grounds for this choice. Killing is an evil, but so
is unbelief, and scripture has clarified that the latter evil outweighs the former so
that it is acceptable to kill when the faith comes under threat (Q 2:217). Stoning
the adulterer and amputating the hand of the thief may be evils, but they prevent
even greater evils from occurring, hence the Law’s prescription of these and other
punishments.24
In all these cases the conflict between the beneficial and harmful tendencies
of particular actions is mentioned only to be immediately referred to scriptural
grounds that arbitrate between these tendencies and deliver a verdict on what
should be done. It is not incidental that the cases Ibn Taymiyya discusses in this
context include the type of conflict that jurists considered under the rubric of
legal license, where it is a matter of choosing between the good of conforming to
the Law and the evil of great visceral harm—for example, when starvation can be
staved off only by eating carrion. Yet the choice of action in these kinds of cases
had once again been elaborated by jurists on the basis of clear scriptural texts
(such as Q 2:173 with regard to carrion).
The duty of commanding right and prohibiting wrong, where the utilitarian
calculus seems to register especially strongly as a decision-making tool, forms
a more complex case, given its deeper links to Ibn Taymiyya’s political morality.
These links are evidenced in his special concern with constraining the practice of
this duty vis-à-vis persons in power, and his cautious stance here points to his dis-
agreement with the aggressive view of this duty taken by other Muslim factions,
such as the Khārijites and the Muʿtazilites, who considered that fulfilling the duty
might even sanction rebellion against the ruling power. In deciding which side of
the equation to privilege and in ruling that the harm may outweigh the benefit in
this case, Ibn Taymiyya invokes an understanding of the proper attitude toward
political rulers that leans on distinct scriptural bases. There is a default duty of
obedience we owe to rulers that is indicated by the Qur’an itself when stating, “O
believers, obey God, and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you”
(Q 4:59), and even more pointedly by the Prophet when advising people, “Give rul-
ers their due, and ask God for your [own] dues,” thereby driving a wedge between
rulers’ rectitude and the allegiance we owe them.25 Yet this political stance, some
commentators have emphasized, ultimately leans on a pragmatic concern with
the deleterious consequences of rebellion and the way it undermines the public
good.26
In analyzing Ibn Taymiyya’s view of this duty, however, it will be important
to attend to the terms in which he himself invites us to construe the cost-benefit
analysis that underpins his approach in some of the most direct remarks he
devotes to the topic. It is in connection with the duty of commanding right and
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 209

forbidding wrong, as we saw above, that he offers a stark methodological state-

ment suggesting that the overall utility of actions must be evaluated substantively
through independent human judgment (even if it “involves the realization of ben-
efit and the repulsion of harm, one must examine that which conflicts with it”).
Yet another reading of the context of this statement places it in a more ambivalent
light. Ibn Taymiyya immediately continues: “Harms and benefits, however, must
be considered using the measuring scales of the Shari’a [mīzān al-sharīʿa].” The
notion of the “measuring scales,” as we will see later in this chapter, is one that Ibn
Taymiyya elsewhere connects with a scripturally circumscribed mode of reasoning
and indeed with legal analogy, betraying that the confrontation with utility he has
in mind is not as substantive as appears but should rather be understood as tak-
ing place on interpretive terms within the regulating framework of scripture. The
ambivalence is not entirely expunged in the ensuing lines: “So when a person can
follow texts,” Ibn Taymiyya continues, “he should not veer from them.” Scriptural
texts may sometimes be unavailable, this suggests, reopening the door to the pros-
pect of a more substantive evaluative judgment. The door swings more decisively
shut, however, in Ibn Taymiyya’s final sentence: “Yet it is rare that one who is well
acquainted with the texts and with their way of indicating qualifications [aḥkām]
should be lacking in textual indicants.”27
Having uncovered the deeper ambivalence present in Ibn Taymiyya’s discus-
sion of the criterion of preponderant utility and the more conservative textualist
emphasis that ultimately seems to underpin it, we will then be more prepared
to notice a similar pattern when we turn to one of the other topics we consid-
ered above—the question of unattested interests. Here, too, the liberal note that
we heard turns out to be far from representative of the overall acoustic pitch of
Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion in his seminal epistle Qāʿida fiʾl-muʿjizāt waʾl-karāmāt.
People have erred both ways, he points out:  by refusing to consider something
a benefit (maṣlaḥa) unless it has been mentioned in the texts; and by deeming a
benefit something that is not, on the assumption that religion supports benefits in
general. The latter diagnosis signals a restrictive attitude that marks a departure
from the more liberal standpoint he appears to express elsewhere. It is the same
attitude that shapes a linchpin statement that commentators have often picked up
on as a crucial token of his view of the place of interests in the Law and the role of
reason in accessing them:28

The inclusive view is that the Law never neglects matters of welfare
[maṣlaḥa] … and when reason considers something to be in one’s inter-
ests even though it has not appeared in the revealed texts, one of two things
must hold:  either revelation has somehow indicated it even though this
particular inquirer has not grasped that, or it is not in one’s interests … for
welfare consists in the total or preponderant benefit, and people often fancy
210 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

that a given thing is beneficial in religious and worldly matters [fiʾl-dīn

waʾl-dunyā] when it involves benefit that is [in fact] outweighed by harm.

This statement carries its meaning on its sleeve, and Opwis spells it out plainly
when she writes: “A legal ruling that is based on other than textual indication
is invalid. Unattested maṣlaḥas, by definition, fall outside the scope of religious
law.”29 With this passage, Ibn Taymiyya thus appears to align himself with the
more textualist view of welfare commonly identified with al-Ghazālī. Interests
have to be read out of the Law; any interest that the Law does not indicate falls
out of consideration. In this light, the first prong of Ibn Taymiyya’s diagnosis of
common error—the refusal to consider as a benefit something that has not been
mentioned in the scriptural texts—turns out to be erroneous on account of its
presupposition: for in fact nothing that constitutes a true benefit can fail to be
mentioned in the texts. Our confrontation with interests is not substantive but
bounded by textual evidence.
It is in fact the chary tones of al-Ghazālī’s discussion of unattested
interests—man istaṣlaḥa, fa-qad sharraʿa—that Ibn Taymiyya echoes almost verba-
tim in yet another seminal if somewhat diffuse remark, which is worth listening
to in full for reasons that will become evident:

To affirm unattested interests is to legislate in religion [yusharriʿu] matters

for which God did not give His sanction. This resembles in certain respects
the question of istiḥsān and al-taḥsīn al-ʿaqlī and arbitrary opinion [raʾy]
and the like, for istiḥsān is to seek what is good and what is best [al-ḥasan
waʾl-aḥsan] … and it is to consider [ruʾyat] something to be good, just as
istiqbāḥ is to consider it to be bad. What is good [ḥasan] is what serves
one’s welfare [maṣlaḥa], so istiḥsān and istiṣlāḥ are close in meaning. And
al-taḥsīn al-ʿaqlī is the claim that reason perceives what is good.30

I have left several terms of this passage untranslated in order to avoid marking
the seams between two different semantic directions, and two separate discursive
habitats, in which these terms can be understood as facing. Taken as a technical
term proper to legal theory, we normally translate the term istiḥsān as “juristic
preference,” often understood as a jurist’s decision to favor a ruling that deviates
from the one derivable from strict analogy.31 Yet it is important not to hear this
term in an exclusively technical register in a way that might mask its etymological
ligaments to the terms ḥasan and taḥsīn appearing in the same vicinity. The latter
pair of terms forges a link with a broader question about the nature of evaluative
judgments and about the “determination of good and bad” (al-taḥsīn waʾl-taqbīḥ)
that had unfolded principally within the theological context. Ibn Taymiyya him-
self, we will notice, draws our attention to this link at the end of this passage.
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 211

The sudden confrontation of these two discursive habitats in the space of

a single paragraph will seem highly suggestive. For the position Ibn Taymiyya
assumed in this theological debate, we will recall, took the form of a strong claim
that people know what is good by reason and that what is good comes down to
what constitutes welfare. Leaping to the legal context with this conception of ethi-
cal knowledge in place, we would anticipate that the ascription of a confident role
to reason in the apprehension of welfare would provide the best fulfillment of Ibn
Taymiyya’s ethical claims. In this respect, Opwis’s comment that “Ibn Taymiyya
backs his rejection of using unattested maṣlaḥas in the legal process with an analy-
sis of the intellect’s ability to grasp that something is good (taḥsīn ʿaqlī),” appears
paradoxical and ultimately misguided. His analysis of the latter would rather offer,
prima facie, the best support for his acceptance of the former.32 Yet Ibn Taymiyya’s
ethical view, as we saw it in that theological context, turned out to be subject to
important qualifications. Similar qualifications, crucially, appear to be in force in
the present context. In both passages cited above, Ibn Taymiyya highlights the fal-
libility of reason taken as a means of identifying what serves our interests, and the
possibility of error recurs in both sets of remarks as a guiding theme. The analysis
of istiḥsān in the second passage in terms of “consider[ing] something to be good”
might, thus, be heard as nothing but a purely linguistic explanation of this term.
Yet in light of the emphasis placed on people’s proclivity to misjudge what con-
stitutes true benefit in the first passage (“people often fancy that a given thing is
beneficial” when it is not)—an emphasis that recurs throughout the epistle and
is here significantly extended to both the secular and religious domain (fiʾl-dīn
waʾl-dunyā)—this will register not so much as a linguistic observation as a pointed
wedge between what we consider to be the case and what really is so.
The dominant thrust of these passages thus lies in diminishing the role of
reason and accentuating our epistemic dependence on the Law in engaging con-
siderations of welfare. With the above in place, we can finally turn to the topic that
opened our discussion: Ibn Taymiyya’s wide-ranging invocation of the notion of
“need” or “hardship” in his practical legal judgments. In invoking this notion, Ibn
Taymiyya appears to go beyond the negative principle of legal license to embrace
human need more positively as an action-guiding principle. Human need is not
only the basis for exceptionally suspending or relaxing the demands of the Law; it
is also the basis for permitting actions that the Law has not expressly prohibited,
telling us how to act in the face of the Law’s silence. As such it carries a norma-
tive force that finds its counterpart in an epistemological immediacy. Yet here too,
I would argue, Ibn Taymiyya’s position cannot be read as simply as it initially
invites. Shadowing his positive invocation of human need, in fact, is a broader
theological context that has to be brought into view if the significance of this move
is to be fully appreciated, and that serves to drastically modify the normative force
and epistemological immediacy we understand the notion of need to carry.
212 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

It will take little to uncover this broader theological context, as it is implicit

in the very language one reaches for in characterizing Ibn Taymiyya’s viewpoint.
Human need is the ground for permitting what the Law has not prohibited,
I just suggested, telling us how to act in the face of the Law’s silence. Readers
familiar with the register of classical debates will not need much encourage-
ment to hear in this last formulation the tones of a theological controversy that
had formed one of the satellite battlegrounds of the debate concerning the value
of actions. Unfolding in works of legal theory, this was a controversy that was
dubbed ḥukm al-afʿāl qabla wurūd al-sharʿ. Its focusing question, as its terms
betray, was: What was the normative status of actions prior to the advent of the
Law?33 This is a question bearing a natural relation to the kinds of questions
discussed under the topic of “the determination of good and bad,” and in many
ways it can be viewed as a continuation of the puzzles that organized the lat-
ter. Ashʿarite theologians, as we have seen, had suggested that God constitutes
the value of acts by commanding or prohibiting them. Yet the arrival of God’s
command and prohibition was a historical event:  there was a time when God
had not yet spoken, and then there was a time when He had. There was a before
revelation and an after, a world before the event of God’s word. How should we
understand the way human life unfolded in that antediluvian “before”? For even
in that antediluvian horizon, people would have acted; and more specifically,
they would have moved to avail themselves of goods present in the world around
them. They would have reached out to eat the fruit of the earth and drink what
their environment offered. Would that have been okay? Would it have been per-
mitted, taking into account that God is the proprietor of the created world and as
such everything in the world rightfully belongs to Him? Or would it have been
forbidden?
The responses given to this question by different theologians traveled the
whole length of the spectrum, with some asserting that such actions were “per-
mitted,” others that they were “prohibited,” and still others declaring that neither
qualification rightly applied and judgment had to be suspended. The close rela-
tions between this question and the questions about ethical value made certain
combinations more natural—if not ineluctable—than others. Ruling that such
acts were permitted meshed more naturally with the affirmation that there are
objective evaluative standards accessible to human reason prior to the revealed
message. Ruling that acts were prohibited or that judgment should be suspended
could both be taken as natural corollaries of the voluntarist claim that God was
the sole author of value. Many Muʿtazilites, thus, had taken the first view, while
prominent Ashʿarites had defended the view that no assessment was possible.
Among the Ḥanbalites opinion had been mixed, yet there were a number of nota-
ble school members who had adopted the first position, including al-Tamīmī and
al-Kalwadhānī. Ibn Taymiyya would thus have important Ḥanbalite precedents in
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 213

staking his claim for this very position, asserting that prior to the advent of the Law,
the default status of actions was “permitted” (al-aṣl al-ibāḥa/ al-ʿafw/ al-jawāz).34
The question animating this debate might seem academic, the product of an
idle hypothesis that may remind us of those other exuberant imaginaries that
pervaded classical theological reflection about ethics. We will recall Avicenna’s
“Imagine yourself into a world before society and you will question what you
think you know about ethical values,” or the Muʿtazilites’ “Imagine yourself into
a desert island and you will be certain of what you know about ethical values.”
Yet this particular imaginary would appear to be rather more idle, as it did to
several jurist-theologians who questioned the wisdom of engaging in this debate.
For there have in fact been cases where people have found themselves on desert
islands or grown up in isolation from society. Yet the world, such thinkers pointed
out, has never been without revelation:  the very first human being, Adam, was
subjected to commands and prohibitions from the moment of his creation. This
question remains a live one, some would propose, to the extent that it is conceiv-
able that “God should create [a person] in the desert knowing nothing about mat-
ters of the Law,” or that one might be born on an island in the middle of the ocean
and might then wonder whether the fruit or plants one finds are there to be freely
enjoyed. More plausibly, it is possible that even in the present time people may fail
to come into contact with the divine message.35
Yet an even more cogent defense for the usefulness of such inquiries was avail-
able elsewhere, which al-Kalwadhānī would spell out in a key statement quoted
by Ibn Taymiyya in the Musawwada. For “supposing the Law36 did not contain a
ruling” regarding certain actions, such as our use of certain goods, there will be
a question to ask as to “what the ruling should be” with respect to these actions.
Yet if one declares the original status of acts to be prohibited or permitted, one
may then say, “I searched for an indicant [dalīl] regarding that [act] in the Law and
I did not find one, and I therefore remain with the original ruling [ḥukm al-aṣl].”
The notion that al-Kalwadhānī invokes in this remark is one that would receive
wide articulation within the legal tradition as the principle of “presumption of
continuity” (istiṣḥab al-ḥāl). “A legal state of affairs,” as Wael Hallaq sums it up,
“is presumed to continue to be valid until there is reason to change this presump-
tion.”37 In this case, the original status of acts, whether permitted or prohibited,
is presumed to be valid until a textual indicant dislodges it. It is this backdrop
that lends the question “What was the original status of acts prior to revelation?”
a more tangible significance for legal practice, translating it from a speculative
question concerning a state of nature in the distant historical past to a practically
relevant question concerning the normative force of actions in the living present.
Not so much the historical “Actions were once permitted before the Law declared
their values” as the normative “We are to judge that actions are permitted so long
as the Law has not declared opposite values.”
214 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

There will be something more to say about the principle of “presumption of

continuity” shortly. What is important here is that it is the same understanding
of the normative significance of this question that is reflected in Ibn Taymiyya’s
own writings and more particularly his substantive legal decisions, which are gov-
erned precisely by the normative principle just formulated and now traced to its
broader theological context. Acts like selling, renting, and making gifts, we hear
in a telling passage, are “customary acts” (ʿādāt) that “people need for their liveli-
hood [maʿāsh], as they do food, and drink, and clothing.” Within these actions, Ibn
Taymiyya continues, the Law came to “prohibit those that lead to harm, to make
obligatory those that are necessary, to declare reprehensible those that should be
avoided, and to commend those that contain preponderant advantage.” Hence
“people [may] go on buying and renting among themselves as they please so long
as the Law has not issued a prohibition [yatabāyaʿūna wa-yastaʾjirūna kayfa shāʾū
mā lam tuḥarrim al-sharīʿa], just as they [may] go on eating and drinking as they
please so long as the Law has not issued a prohibition… . And so long as the Law
does not set any bounds in the matter, they remain within the original state of
liberty [ʿalaʾl-iṭlāq al-aṣlī].”38
“One may do as one pleases so long as the Law has not set any bounds”: it is a
message that is revisited repeatedly in Ibn Taymiyya’s legal discussions and that
comes into play with special clarity in his ruling concerning the use of contractual
formulations. Any formulations may be legitimately used so long as they have not
been expressly prohibited by the Law. This contrasts with the view—a view that
would seem to be naturally affianced to the opposite side of the theological debate
outlined above—that the use of such formulations is contingent on express legal
permission. Putting the point more generally, one might say: people are free to
undertake the contracts they wish on the terms they wish so long as they do not
collide with any limits set by the Shari’a, whether to their form or their content.
To take an example brought up by Ibn Taymiyya that speaks to the second kind of
restriction: slaves may constitute personal property, yet should a person wish to
lend his slave girl to another for sex, the Shari’a would intervene to prevent this
mode of disposing of one’s property, as this is not a form of sexual relationship
that it recognizes as legitimate. The content of one’s transaction, and one’s free-
dom to transact with one’s property as desired, would here be circumscribed by
the Law.39
This way of relating human actions to the divine Law may remind us of a char-
acterization of Islamic Law offered by Johansen that came before us in the previ-
ous chapter: the domain of free contractual exchanges between private individuals
contrasted with the domain of the divine Law represented by the public sphere
and the eschatological sphere of God’s promise and threat; a domain of freely
undertaken obligations bounded by, and upheld through, God’s commands and
prohibitions. Yet for the thread we are pursuing, the focus must fall on the fact
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 215

that the freedom to initiate transactions and contract obligations, as Ibn Taymiyya
presents it, is a freedom governed by practical necessity, which takes its content
from the pursuit and satisfaction of needs and derives its normative status from
the selfsame source. Acts are not permitted on merely negative grounds—namely
the absence of the Law’s statement. Acts are permitted on positive grounds, con-
sisting in the human needs they serve. This normative relation is laid bare with
special distinctness in the following remark, in which Ibn Taymiyya recapitulates
a familiar point regarding the permissibility of contractual terms. Unless a set of
terms is self-defeating or contravenes a legal prohibition, he writes, “there is no
ground for prohibiting it, and it is necessary that it be ruled licit, because it is an action
people desire and need; for were it not for their need, they would not do it [al-wājib
ḥilluhu, li-annahu ʿamal maqṣūd liʾl-nās yaḥtājūna ilayhi idh law lā ḥājatuhum ilayhi
lamā faʿalūhu].”40
Because it is an action people need:  the justificatory force peals out here in
unmistakable terms; and in doing so it prepares our ears to pick out more dis-
tinctly a related message on the epistemic level. For there are all the telltale terms
lined up before us: there is the vocabulary of “need” (ḥāja); there, too, is the notion
of “intention” (maqṣūd); and the term “custom” (ʿāda) was only recently in our
sights. These terms will instantly recall us to the discussion that unfolded in the
previous chapter when considering the stance of Ashʿarite theologians on the
apprehension of the human interests promoted by the Law. Yet this ensemble of
evocative terms delivers its fruit more directly in a broad positioning statement
that Ibn Taymiyya offers us elsewhere. Human actions, he writes, fall in two cat-
egories:  ritual observances (ʿibādāt) that carry benefit in religious matters and
customary or conventional acts that people need in their mundane affairs (ʿādāt
yaḥtājūna ilayhā fī dunyāhum): “And through an inductive reading [bi-istiqrāʾ] of
the sources of the Law, we know that it is only through revelation that acts of wor-
ship … are established as having been commanded [lā yathbutu al-amr bihā illā
biʾl-sharʿ]. As for customary acts, they are [those acts] people need and customarily
pursue in their worldly affairs, and with respect to them the original condition is
the absence of prohibition [waʾl-aṣl fīhi ʿadam al-ḥaẓar], so that nothing is prohib-
ited among them save what God has prohibited.”41
We will recognize many of the themes of earlier remarks, and certainly the
concluding keynote. We may also recognize a distinction that jurists often fore-
grounded in discussing the place of welfare in the Law, connecting rationally
apprehensible welfare with mundane acts and dissociating it from ritual acts.42
More interesting for our immediate purposes will be the notion of “inductive read-
ing” that opens this statement. The notions of need (ḥāja and ḍarūra) invoked by
Ibn Taymiyya at this juncture of his writings, I suggested earlier, demand to be
read just like the Ashʿarites’ before him, pointing to a sense of need that is recog-
nized from the vantage point of experience. One of the ways this prerevelational
216 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

recognition had been parsed among Ashʿarite writers, as we saw in the previous
chapter, was as a question about the “custom” out of which the interests promoted
by the Law can be read. Is it through an inductive reading of the behavior of the
Law and its special textual custom (daʾb al-sharʿ, ʿādat al-sharʿ)? Or is it rather
through a reading of human life and its customs, and thus through the unaided
faculties of human reason? This is the question that Ibn Taymiyya’s invocation of
“induction” appears to flag. And while he does not make his answer explicit, his
governing contrast seems suggestive enough: the imperative for performing ritual
acts may be delivered by the Law; for those acts that serve our mundane interests,
by contrast, we stand in need of no command to experience their imperative and
discover their value.
It is a substantive specification of human welfare that will once again strike
us with the singular openness of its texture. A  starker expression of this open-
ness could scarcely be conceived than the one found in the statement we heard
moments ago: unless a contract contravenes a prohibition it should be deemed
licit, “because it is an action people desire and need, for were it not for their
need, they would not do it.” Ibn Taymiyya continues: “For in the undertaking of
an action lies the presumption of one’s need for it [al-iqdām ʿalaʾl-fiʿl maẓinnat
al-ḥāja ilayhi].”43 Restating this cumbersome last point, we might say: if we act, it
is because we need. Yet were we to hear this as an attempt to isolate a criterion for
identifying needs worthy of consideration, it is hard to see how any action could
fail to qualify. All we seem to have here is the truism: action is motivated by desire.
We couldn’t be further away from the finer-grained distinctions between types of
desire or need—such as those reflected in the three-tiered scheme of ḍarūriyyāt,
ḥājiyyāt, taḥsīniyyāt or in the fivefold enumeration of ḍarūriyyāt—that other jurists
had offered at this same juncture.
The sheer openness of Ibn Taymiyya’s notion of desire or need, I would suggest,
already foretokens that the above understanding of the normative force attaching
to need, and the epistemic commitment involved in affirming it, requires serious
qualification. It is a closer scrutiny of the theological postulate underpinning Ibn
Taymiyya’s views, and of the juridical context of this postulate, that allows the
qualifications to emerge more plainly. For I have spoken of the normative char-
acter of need, and of its force as a “because” that provides positive good-making
grounds. Yet this justificatory force cannot be entirely appreciated without locating
it against the governing logic of the postulate that frames it. This logic, as we have
seen, bears a distinctly conditional aspect. Acts are permitted as long as no express
prohibition has arisen. People may go on buying and selling “as they please, so
long as [mā lam] the Law has not issued a prohibition,” and “so long as the Law
does not set any bounds in the matter, they remain within the original state of
liberty.” Or again, using a different grammatical construction to identical effect:
“Anything that people need for their livelihood and that is not a cause of sin …
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 217

is not forbidden to them.”44 It is this conditional structure that was similarly

reflected in the schema invoked earlier to qualify Ibn Taymiyya’s view: a domain
of freedom bounded by the Law. The implications of this limiting condition on the
normative level are so clear as to hardly require stating. Need or desire is only a
ground of value on condition that no opposing ground happens to be realized by
an action. The value of an action that is grounded in the satisfaction of need is a
defeasible one.45
This conclusion may seem less surprising once we recall that the particular
value that we have been referring to as “grounded” in need is the relatively weak
value of permissibility (jawāz, ḥill, ibāḥa). Ibn Taymiyya himself brings out the
conditional character of this value even more plainly when he elsewhere rephrases
it using a purely negative set of terms, speaking of the “absence of prohibition”
(ʿadam al-ḥaẓar/al-taḥrīm). It is a conceptual turn that may remind us of a point
that has been framed more broadly with regard to the notion of “good” by recent
thinkers. Peter Geach thus observes that “there is a logical asymmetry between
good and bad acts: an act is good only if everything about it is good, but may be
bad if anything about it is bad; so it might be risky to say we knew an act to be good
sans phrase, rather than to have some good features.”46 Yet it will also remind us
of a turn more indigenous to the Islamic tradition, in which the insight stated by
Geach had received an even more direct articulation.
For readers of Muʿtazilite texts may recognize an intriguing affinity between
the analysis that implicitly governs Ibn Taymiyya’s thinking in this context and
the analysis that Baṣran Muʿtazilite theologians had developed more explicitly
to account for the evaluative qualification mubāḥ (permissible) or ḥasan (“plain”
good).47 It was an evaluative category that had reposed with some tension within
the Baṣrans’ overall scheme and their analysis of other core values, such as “oblig-
atory” and “bad,” for reasons immediately connected with its conditional charac-
ter. Other values appeared to be necessarily entailed by their respective grounds
(wujūh). The instantiation of the act-description “injustice” by a given act, for
example, necessarily entailed (iqtaḍā) its qualification as “bad”; the instantiation
of “gratitude for benefaction” necessarily entailed its qualification as “obligatory.”
The grounds that gave rise to the quality of “plain good,” by contrast, seemed to
be defeasible in ways that the causal model applied to the other evaluative catego-
ries was ill equipped to accommodate. An act of truth-telling thus might ordinar-
ily be ḥasan; yet add the discovery that it leads to harm, and it ceases to be so.
Similarly, and more resonantly for our own context: an act that redounds to one’s
benefit might ordinarily be ḥasan; yet enter the fact that this benefit was unjustly
obtained, and it ceases to be so.
Successive generations of Baṣran theologians would advance different propos-
als for ironing out the perplexities of this evaluative category. One of the most
important among these would identify the quality of goodness as the product of
218 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

two considerations, one positive and one negative in nature: the act serves some
kind of purpose (gharaḍ), and the grounds of badness are absent. This conjunc-
tive proposal will instantly remind us of one of the formulations we heard from
Ibn Taymiyya above: an act is licit if it is needed for people’s livelihood and not a
cause (sabab) of sin. A similar sense of recognition will be carried by the terms
in which the Muʿtazilites had construed the positive consideration at stake. For
on the one hand, and despite the connotations of the word gharaḍ, it would be
misleading to understand this consideration in exclusively consequentialist terms;
the example of truth-telling already indicates that clearly.48 Yet the benefit an act
brings to its agent indeed provided one of the most salient ways in which this con-
sideration was specified. This is a specification that we will have no difficulty rec-
ognizing as the counterpart of Ibn Taymiyya’s broad notion of need or welfare. Ibn
Taymiyya himself does not connect his view of the original status of actions to the
Muʿtazilite analysis, yet it is noteworthy that this connection had been flagged in
the same context by his Muʿtazilite-minded predecessor al-Kalwadhānī. So long as
the benefit one derives from certain goods “contains no ground of badness” (wajh
min wujūh al-qubḥ), he had written in his Tamhīd, reason endorses our enjoyment
of these goods as permissible.49
The Muʿtazilites’ analysis of the concept of “permissibility” thus allows the
conditional logic of this concept to stand out with special clarity; yet at the same
time, it drives a sharp wedge into the epistemic implications of this logic. For
if the qualification of “goodness” or “permissibility” is ontologically dependent
on the absence of bad-making grounds, it follows that our knowledge that a
given act is good or permissible will be contingent on our knowledge that these
bad-making grounds are absent. ʿAbd al-Jabbār had spelled this out clearly
in the Mughnī when he had written: “It is not possible, in our view, that we
should know that a given act is good unless we know that the grounds of bad-
ness are absent from it [illā maʿa al-ʿilm bi-intifāʾ wujūh al-qubḥ ʿanhu].”50 The
problems this would pose for Baṣran Muʿtazilite moral epistemology form the
topic of another story, but it already points to the denouement for our own. It
is Ibn Taymiyya himself, however, who moves the plot forward in that direction
when he offers a key statement couched in a juridical term that we encoun-
tered at the outset of our discussion, “presumption of continuity,” and whose
relevance for our topic we can now consider more attentively. The context is
again the discussion of contracts, and the talk is again of the postulate—al-
aṣl ʿadam al-taḥrīm—underpinning Ibn Taymiyya’s stance. Contracts and
their terms, he writes, belong to customary acts, and as such “the original
status is the absence of prohibition; so there is a presumption of continuity
for ‘lack of prohibition’ with regard to them [fa-yustaṣḥabu ʿadam al-taḥrīm]
until a [textual] indicant establishes prohibition.” A few lines down, recon-
firming: “Lack of prohibition is established through rational presumption of
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 219

continuity [al-istiṣḥāb al-ʿaqlī], and through the absence of a legal indicant [intifāʾ
al-dalīl al-sharʿī].”51
The phrasing is awkward in places, yet the meaning can be summed up simply
as follows. The default status (“permissibility”/”no prohibition”) does not suffice
for establishing permissibility; what is additionally required is the assurance that
no prohibition has come to counteract it. Central to this point is the notion of
“presumption of continuity,” which it is thus worth pausing over for a brief addi-
tional comment. This principle, as we have heard Hallaq express it, stipulates that
“a legal state of affairs is presumed to continue to be valid until there is reason to
change this presumption.” The presumption that there are only five prayers, for
example, comes to be firmly established once the sources have been examined and
all textual evidence has been taken into account. Once this presumption has been
set in place, if anyone should think there is a sixth mandatory prayer, the burden
of proof rests on him to establish it. Any existing presumption may be dislodged
only on the basis of evidence. Crucially, the presumption of continuity “must be
sustained by reliable knowledge of the absence of evidence that might otherwise
change this presumption.” And “knowledge of the absence of evidence,” Hallaq
adds, “is to be distinguished from the absence of knowledge of any evidence.”52
Evidence must be shown to be absent; and this, of course, is a demonstration to
be undertaken in conformity with familiar methods of proof and epistemological
criteria as these were articulated in the legal tradition.
The legal example (the five prayers) with which Hallaq illustrates this principle
should not distract us.53 In Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion, the presumption of continu-
ity relates to the status of the kinds of customary actions that stand at the heart of
his concern—buying, selling, renting, and generally contractual activity of a para-
digmatically economic character—as this attaches to them prior to the Law. The
default evaluation for these actions: permissible. Yet to call this a “default” position
may be misleading if what this suggests to us is an epistemic equilibrium only to
be disturbed once sufficient evidence arrives from the outside to query it. For this
equilibrium, Ibn Taymiyya’s last-quoted statements signal, has to be earned before
it is allowed to stabilize, and one may not rest in it until after one has actively
established that no evidence exists to oppose it. Ibn Taymiyya puts the point with
felicitous clarity in a remark that appears later in the same discussion. One may
affirm the absence of prohibition “only after one has undertaken independent rea-
soning [ijtihād] with regard to a given class or question [to establish]: have any
legal indicants appeared that entail prohibition or not?” One may not rule on the
basis of the presumption of continuity and the absence of legal indicants “until
after one has looked into the specific [textual] indicants, assuming one belongs to
those duly qualified to do so. For everything that God and His Prophet have made
obligatory, and that God and His Prophet have forbidden, alters54 this presump-
tion [mughayyir li-hādhā al-istiṣḥāb], so one may not place assurance in it until after
220 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

one has inquired into the indicants of the Law [fa-lā yūthaqu bihi illā baʿda al-naẓar fī
adillat al-sharʿ].”55
One may thus place assurance in the “default status” only after a textual indi-
cant has arisen; one may trust in the normative force of need or desire only after
the Law has had its say—and after one has striven to make the Law speak, trusting
in its ability and intention to make its voice heard. (“He has explained to you in
detail what is forbidden to you,” Q 6:119).56 It is only after obtaining the sanction
of the Law that need or desire can attract its normative status qua desire. To restate
the point again, so that the nucleus of the position can stand before us unob-
scured: desire is good only if the Law has informed us of this fact, though it should
do so by means of its meaningful demonstrated silence. Or again: it is the Law that
normatively orders our desires and discriminates between good and bad ones. As
Ibn Taymiyya tellingly puts it elsewhere, invoking the notion of “permissibility”
and a familiar notion of normative ordering in the same breath: “That one should
obtain a desired advantage [huṣūl al-gharaḍ] from certain things does not entail
that they are permissible [ibāḥa], even though this advantage should [in itself ] be
permissible; for that action might contain harm that outweighs its benefit, and the
Law came to realize and perfect what is beneficial.”57
Peeled down to its skeletal elements, this position will remind us of the view
that emerged from a closer scrutiny of Ibn Taymiyya’s theoretical remarks about
welfare in the Qāʿida fiʾl-muʿjizāt waʾl-karāmāt, where I suggested that the domi-
nant accent was a conservative one: any interest that the Law does not indicate falls
out of consideration; for a knowledge of our true interests, we must wait upon the
Law. Whether we speak of the absence of an opposing indicant, as in the context of
Ibn Taymiyya’s practical legal writings, or the presence of an affirming indicant, as in
the context of his theoretical remarks (“either revelation has somehow indicated it
even though this particular inquirer has not grasped that, or it is not in one’s inter-
ests”), and whether we think of the indicant in terms of the substantiated and thus
pregnant silence of the Law or in terms of the full substantiality of the Lawgiver’s
speech, the bottom line appears to be the same: the demand for a textual indicant.
In both cases, we must look to the Law in order to discover what lies in our true
interest, and from the open field of desire, to sift out those desires that are in our
interest or at least not to our harm.58
Studied against the logic of the theological postulate that underpins it and
the juridical concept of “presumption of continuity” with which it is linked, Ibn
Taymiyya’s invocation of human need turns out to be subject to serious qualifica-
tions. Both the normative force and the epistemological immediacy this notion
carries are weaker than initially apparent, and point us to deeper relations of
dependence to the scriptural text. In doing so, they contribute material toward a
conservative picture of Ibn Taymiyya’s transactions with the notion of welfare that
is painted with several brushes across his work.
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 221

Ibn Taymiyya’s Claim of Ethical Reason

against Its Theological Aims
Our discussion in this chapter began with a question about Ibn Taymiyya’s engage-
ment with the notion of welfare in the legal context. To what extent, I asked, are
the interests promoted by the Law accessible to human reason? How substantively
does Ibn Taymiyya envisage that human inquirers may confront considerations of
welfare in the legal context? And what does this reveal about the ability of human
reason to operate independently of scriptural guidance? On at least three separate
counts—in his emphasis on the criterion of preponderant utility, in his theoretical
remarks about unattested interests, and in his foregrounding of “pragmatic” con-
siderations within his practical legal rulings—Ibn Taymiyya appears to support a
substantive engagement with welfare that gives a strong role to the capacities for
evaluative response that human beings possess independently of revelation. Yet a
closer reading of each topic paints a different picture, bringing out the textualist
commitments that undergird his approach and accentuating the limitations of our
native epistemic resources—of reason, or of that desiderative conception of our
prerevelational perspective that has surfaced in our discussion throughout.
The picture that emerges from this rereading, particularly in its most recent
statement, will provoke in us a critical sense of anagnorisis. For in its essentials,
it coincides with the understanding of Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical view that emerged
from the earlier stages of our inquiry, which had focused on his position relative to
the familiar theological debate about “the determination of good and bad.” There
too, one of his central messages had been that our desires must await the letter of
the Law for a decisive pronouncement on their value, which is vested in long-term
consequences and a broader balance of utility that the Law comes to reveal. Our
leap to the legal context, in this respect, does not appear to have led us far from
our initial conclusions.
In re-adopting this conclusion, it will be important not to lose sight of a point
that had emerged in our earlier discussion, namely that the characterization of
the relationship between native human resources and the resources of revelation
was not a matter of sharply disjunctive either/ors. The most interesting questions
about this relationship did not revolve on the level of whether (whether the former
should be allocated a role) but of how much or how (how extensive or of what kind
this role should be). Many of the prominent participants in this debate, as we saw
in previous chapters, embraced an understanding of this relationship that saw rev-
elation as serving to particularize, and thus complement, our natural resources.
“Human reason may command a view of what is in our interests on a general
level [kulliyyāt],” we heard al-Juwaynī say when considering the Ashʿarite view of
evaluative knowledge, yet “it cannot arrive at its details [tafāṣīl].” “Were it not for
the prophetic message,” as Ibn Taymiyya himself puts it, “reason would not arrive
222 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

at the details [tafāṣīl] of what is beneficial and harmful in this life and the next
[fiʾl-maʿāsh waʾl-maʿād].”59 Left to our own devices, thus, we naturally perceive
our own needs and pressing desires, on Ibn Taymiyya’s terms as much as the
Ashʿarites’. We can also sometimes order our needs and desires through an appre-
ciation of their longer-term consequences—the way we know to drink the bitter
physic in the interests of health or to turn away from the water source upon notic-
ing the footprint of a beast of prey. Yet much of what Ibn Taymiyya says serves to
highlight the limitations of the evaluative knowledge such responses carve out and
to underscore their fallibility and need for substantial supplementation. In balanc-
ing the evaluative assessments we can perform independently against the evalu-
ative assessments for which we must lean on revelation, Ibn Taymiyya attaches
heavy weights to the latter.
Even with this qualification, however, the above conclusion inevitably brings us
up against another and more important point. For this conclusion, as the train of
our discussion has made clear, rests on an interpretive decision as to how to order
the competing tendencies with which Ibn Taymiyya confronts his reader in his
legal remarks, privileging certain of these tendencies over others. Certain features
of his writings suggest a liberal stance on the engagement of considerations of
welfare and a more independent use of our evaluative resources; other features
press a more strongly conservative view. I have outlined what seems to me the
most cogent way of determining the balance between these features, and I am
aware that this is a balancing act that may not persuade those of Ibn Taymiyya’s
readers who, looking to his political morality, have seen him as “more of a moral-
ist, and less of a jurist,” or who, looking to his legal decisions, have emphasized
the priority of his pragmatic concern to “make Islamic law relevant to everyday
life” over his commitment to a more formally stringent exegetical stance.60 I have
not sought to bury the grounds for these alternative interpretations, and my dis-
cussion may do more to open rather than close a debate about how the competing
messages within Ibn Taymiyya’s work could be reconciled. It might be debated,
for example, whether such a reconciliation would require drawing distinctions of
a deeper and finer-grained kind than those I developed above—as between the
concerns that in fact fundamentally animate Ibn Taymiyya’s stances, and the way
Ibn Taymiyya himself understands the basis of his stances or wishes their basis
to be understood.
However we write this particular balance, for our present purposes it is impor-
tant to highlight the characteristics of Ibn Taymiyya’s writing that problematize it
and in doing so to join them to a larger picture that emerged over the preceding
chapters. For a similar picture of competing tendencies, we will now recall, had
emerged when considering Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical remarks in the theological con-
text, and more specifically when approaching the role of reason in the knowledge
of the long-term consequences that constitute the fuller criterion for evaluating
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 223

actions. In certain locations, as in the Radd, Ibn Taymiyya seems prepared to

acknowledge this role more strongly, cuing us to map ethical judgments onto the
operation of empirical reasoning. Elsewhere, it is revelation that appears to be
enthroned as our chief informant of long-term consequences and of the fuller
value of actions.
In both cases—Ibn Taymiyya’s evaluative epistemology in the legal context and
his evaluative epistemology in a more theological context—these interpretive com-
petitions reflect something important about the nature of the texts that confront
us. We meet Ibn Taymiyya’s views about welfare not through concerted discus-
sions of the relevant topics in systematic legal works but through isolated remarks
or through practical applications whose relation to his more theoretical posi-
tionings is not immediately transparent and has to be sought out. We meet Ibn
Taymiyya’s views about ethical knowledge not under the relevant headings of sys-
tematic theological treatises but in a clutch of engagements of a polemical nature
and in a number of recurrent yet limited reprises in different contexts united by
common themes, whose dispersion means that what Ibn Taymiyya thinks often
has to be elicited by stretching unusually long interpretive lines between what he
says in one place and another. Having avowed the rationality of ethical knowledge
in many of his ethical remarks, for example, Ibn Taymiyya himself does not limit
its scope in that context. It is only in conjunction with evidence gleaned in hetero-
geneous contexts that this claim emerges significantly diminished in scope, and it
does so in ways that depend on interpretive activity and logical argument at every
juncture. Given Ibn Taymiyya’s claim in location x that long-term or overall benefit
determines the value of actions, and given his claim in location y that overall ben-
efit is revealed by the Law, ethical knowledge cannot be accessible through reason.
Indeed, Ibn Taymiyya himself not only does not help this argument, but in obscur-
ing the boundaries between some of its central concepts—such as the narrower
and broader evaluative perspectives of pleasure and benefit—he sets obstacles to
its course. In the legal context, the epistemological implications of his view of the
original status of actions demanded a similar exercise of interpretive reasoning
to be brought out. These are among many moments in which his writing forces
the interpreter’s activity to self-consciousness; for while all interpretive activity
constructs, some constructs more than others.
Such interpretive tensions thus pick out an aspect of the form of Ibn Taymiyya’s
ethical remarks that complicates the effort to determine their content and to pro-
vide a unifying account of his ethical thought. Like the complexities brought into
view in earlier chapters when studying the elusive identity of Ibn Taymiyya’s via
media against its theological topography, this is an aspect that it is crucial to fore-
ground in engaging his work, as I have already suggested, viewing it not as an
obstacle to the interpretive task but as an education as to its nature, and as a
positive tool for understanding the character of his thought. The graininess and
224 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

fragmentariness of the interpretable evidence, the multiple directions in which it

pulls, its many moments of elusiveness, may be especially instructive in consider-
ing Ibn Taymiyya’s influence and intellectual legacy, allowing us to see why his
work might provide a breeding ground for plural interpretations and permit itself
to be appropriated in competing ways.
These kinds of features will remind us of the characterizations of Ibn
Taymiyya’s writing that have often been offered by commentators considering his
output more broadly, who have spoken of the “explosive quality,” “digressive” and
“rambling” style, and overwhelmingly negative character of his writing.61 There
are no doubt different ways, carrying varying degrees of depth, with which these
aspects could be understood. Commentators have sometimes read them as a diag-
nostic of intellectual weakness and sometimes of intellectual strength, and have
sometimes referred them to Ibn Taymiyya’s specific intellectual identity (Michot:
“the opinions of a theologian-mufti cannot be expected to constitute a compre-
hensive, integrated system of thought”) and sometimes, in a deeper register, to
his aims (Hallaq: Ibn Taymiyya gave “priority to … showing the weaknesses of
one doctrine or another, not to the elaboration and development of a doctrine of
his own”).62 However these features of Ibn Taymiyya’s writing are understood on
a broader level, I would suggest that when it comes to his ethical writings, they
have something more to tell us about the nature of his engagement with ethical
questions which touches on the deeper and more positive notion of his aims. My
objective in the remainder of this chapter will be to situate his ethical engage-
ment against two contexts that speak to his larger intellectual aims: the theological
vision that frames his ethical engagement (to be discussed in this section) and the
larger vision of the relationship of reason and revelation that governs his work and
also shadows his ethical engagement (to be discussed in the next section). Both
contexts provide important interpretive filters for receiving Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical
rationalism and, more specifically, for reading the substantiveness with which he
is invested in developing it.
Calling attention to the interpretive tensions that adhere to Ibn Taymiyya’s
views in c­ hapter 2, I had suggested that these tensions reveal something about the
fragmentariness of his discussions of ethical epistemology, which is reflected in
turn in the remarkable thinness that his characterization of ethical reason carries.
At the same time, I had suggested, the thinness of this characterization reflects
the particular terms in which he specifies ethical reason, and his overwhelming
focus on utility to the exclusion of deontological considerations. Compared with
deontological requirements such as those that had figured in the Muʿtazilites’
moral tables—“Do not lie under any circumstances,” “Do not harm without just
cause,” “Practice gratitude toward benefactors”—the imperative “Pursue what is
in your welfare” is a thin and indeed merely formal principle, one that carries little
action-guiding significance prior to identifying more thickly how one’s welfare is
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 225

best achieved. Add to this Ibn Taymiyya’s emphasis on revelation as the source for
our understanding of how our welfare is to be achieved, and the picture of ethi-
cal reason becomes thinner still. Thus, while Ibn Taymiyya stakes a claim for the
rational accessibility of evaluative standards, he leaves the moral consciousness of
ordinary agents singularly underdeveloped.
This conclusion stands out starkly when one compares Ibn Taymiyya’s ethi-
cal remarks with the writings of the Muʿtazilites whose position his own initially
appears to resemble, and with the rather more robust picture of ordinary moral
consciousness they had presented. The comparison is instructive on many levels.
On the one hand, as I already observed in c­ hapter 1, it reminds us that the kinds
of interpretive challenges that Ibn Taymiyya’s works pose are far from unexam-
pled, and should not take us by surprise even when the comparison is with those
theologians known for their copious output on moral questions. The dialectical
character (and thus expository thinness) of Muʿtazilite writing, the sheer sprawl
of the textual output that potentially harbors significant interpretive resources,
the serendipity required for alighting in disputational contexts on unique responsa
that provide new interpretive keys to the Muʿtazilites’ views—all features that find
their more or less direct counterparts in Ibn Taymiyya’s writing—are only a few
of the factors that complicate the task of reconstructing what the interpreter then
goes on to call “the Muʿtazilite ethical view.”63 With the Muʿtazilites as with Ibn
Taymiyya, such factors make the interpreter self-conscious about her interpretive
activity and bring home its creative character as a construction.
The comparison with the Muʿtazilites, however, is also instructive in train-
ing the light on those features of their writing that facilitate rather than impede
the interpreter’s task. For even allowing for the historical transformations that
Muʿtazilite theology underwent and the multiple factional divisions that fractured
it internally, Muʿtazilite theologians developed their views against a set of gen-
eral commitments—notably their commitment to the defense of God’s unity and
justice—that picked out their rough boundaries as a school. Even if the bound-
aries of theological commitment might shift with time or vary among different
Muʿtazilite factions (as between the Baṣrans and the Baghdādīs), the school con-
text in which they developed their views meant that positions were articulated
and rearticulated, rehearsed and clarified and refined, in numerous texts and at
the hands of a number of different thinkers, often across generations. Their over-
arching theological commitments, similarly, meant that specific views were often
developed in architectural relation to other known views, and usually in relation
to a clear set of opponents. These features provide strong interpretive facilitators
that constitute a far more hospitable environment for readers seeking to piece
together the Muʿtazilites’ ethical views. All these facilitators are lacking for Ibn
Taymiyya, whose Ḥanbalite affiliation provides no interpretive key to his engage-
ment of ethical questions, who raises his voice to contribute to intellectual debates
226 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

in kalām—as indeed falsafa and uṣūl al-fiqh—without adopting their genres or

distinctive forms, and who distances himself altogether from the affiliations that
organized classical debates about ethics with his headline of a via media and leaves
the identity of his via media to be established case by case. It is little wonder,
in this light, that some of his positions should be hard to read and some of his
claims hard to decide whether to take at face value. His apparent avowal of the
intrinsic human love for morally good actions, which we probed in ­chapter 1, is a
particularly good example here. In the works of the Muʿtazilites, this thesis had
been architecturally linked to the defense of a specific view of God’s moral char-
acter—a view that Ibn Taymiyya, however, rejected, thus compelling one to search
from scratch for the reasons why this thesis is one he might have been motivated
to affirm, despite indeed his overwhelming though unadvertised affinities with
Ashʿarite views that worked against it.
Yet if the comparison between Ibn Taymiyya’s and the Muʿtazilites’ ethical
engagement is instructive on these levels, it is even more illuminating on another.
Because for all its comparative robustness, Muʿtazilite ethical theory, as I  indi-
cated in c­ hapter 2, had developed in relation to a distinct set of theological aims.
In articulating the ethical standards accessible to ordinary moral consciousness
and staking a claim for their objectivity, Muʿtazilite theologians had been primar-
ily concerned with establishing that these same standards governed the action
of God. ʿAbd al-Jabbār made the point plain when opening one of the ethical
volumes of the Mughnī with a simple asseveration of his aim:  to demonstrate
that “God only does what is good, and cannot but do what is obligatory.”64 It was
this programmatic aim that determined the character of the Muʿtazilites’ ethi-
cal preoccupations. Their interest in documenting the content of ordinary moral
consciousness in close detail, in particular, seems highly intelligible in light of
the basic assumption that the moral standards known to human beings are also
standards that apply to God.
There is thus an immediate question to raise about Ibn Taymiyya’s own aims in
pressing the claim of ethical reason and about the relationship of these aims to the
character of his preoccupation and the interest he takes, or fails to take, in a closer
documentation of ordinary moral consciousness. An avowal of ethical rationalism
and ethical objectivism recurring throughout his works—why might Ibn Taymiyya
have cared to make it? This understanding of value, he signals in several locations,
is one that is suggested by scripture itself. The view that actions have intrinsic moral
qualities, we hear in one place, “is indicated by the Qur’an and the Sunna,” for “God
spoke of the actions of unbelievers in ways that entail that they were bad, evil, and
blameworthy before the Prophet had come to them”—for example, in demanding that
they repent of them and ask for forgiveness.65 Pointing elsewhere to Lot’s condem-
nation of his people with the words “What, do you commit such indecency as never
any being in all the world committed before you?” (Q 7:80), Ibn Taymiyya draws the
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 227

conclusion that “this was an act of indecency [or wicked deed: fāḥisha] among them
before [God] had forbidden them [to commit it].”66
This will remind us of the use that Muʿtazilite theologians had earlier made
of Qur’anic passages in the service of a similar argument. Seeking to defend the
claim that moral truths are known by reason and not generated by revelation,
Muʿtazilites had often revisited the Qur’anic verse “God commands justice, the
doing of good … and He forbids all shameful deeds, and injustice” (Q 16:90, inna
Allāha yaʾmuru biʾl-ʿadl waʾl-iḥsān … wa-yanhā ʿan al-faḥshāʾ waʾl-munkar).67 In
employing the notions of justice and injustice, this verse would appear to invoke
a preexisting understanding of their content, and thus a preexisting set of moral
norms. It is the same semantic tunnel that would seem to open up under the
feet of another Qur’anic idiom embodied in the terminological pair maʿrūf and
munkar. Maʿrūf literally means “what is known”; and this, as Michael Cook points
out, refers us to “specific standards of behaviour already known and established.”68
Ibn Taymiyya himself often visits this pair of terms in his ethical remarks in ways
that suggest he is building on the reference to the prerevelational evaluative hori-
zon encoded within them.
Yet of course the resources of scripture had always seemed amenable to differ-
ent interpretations, and different theologians had frequently claimed scriptural
support for their competing positions. It is thus Ibn Taymiyya’s deeper theologi-
cal commitments, just like the Muʿtazilites’ before him, that must interest us at
this juncture. And here, all we need to do is to turn back to consider the larger
theological perspective summoned in the previous chapter to finally situate Ibn
Taymiyya’s ethical concern against it. For like the Muʿtazilites, he insists that
something positive needs to be said about God’s morality: we must affirm that
God is just, and indeed wise. It is the notion of divine wisdom (ḥikma), as we saw
in the previous chapter, that forms the linchpin of Ibn Taymiyya’s theological
vision and the ground of one his most telling disagreements with the Ashʿarite
viewpoint. God’s creative and legislative activity is governed everywhere by wise
purposes that God loves. In the legislative domain, this means that God’s com-
mands are grounded—at least in part, given Ibn Taymiyya’s additional empha-
sis on a wise purpose that redounds to God himself—in the aim of promoting
human welfare.
To say that God is wise is to “speak well” of God, to speak of Him with the high-
est praise. Yet in this case, to secure God as an object of praise is also to secure
ourselves in a belief that is necessary for our own spiritual well-being. If we are
to submit ourselves wholeheartedly to the divine Law and to establish a relation-
ship of love with its Promulgator—seeing Him as the sole object of love and the
sole object of trust, the sole end and the sole means of our action, as the tawḥīd
al-ilāhiyya and tawḥīd al-rubūbiyya respectively demand—we need to believe that
God’s will is not arbitrary and that God has our welfare at heart. The perspective
228 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

we bring to the Law, in one respect, is remarkably simple: we arrive with a prior
set of natural desires and a natural concern for our own welfare. In submitting
ourselves to the religious life, our most basic requirement is that we should be
able to believe that our natural desires and the evaluative standpoint they con-
stitute coincides with the aims the Lawgiver Himself is pursuing. To restate the
point: we should be able to believe that our sense of the good and the Lawgiver’s
sense of the good coincide. “This is the religion that God naturally disposed people
to accept [faṭara Allāhu ʿalayhi khalqahu]; it is beloved [maḥbūb] to everyone,” Ibn
Taymiyya writes elsewhere, reframing a claim of coincidence or concordance that
we already heard in ­chapter 2 in slightly different terms. And the reason for this is
that “it commands the right actions [maʿrūf] that are beloved to human hearts, and
forbids the wrongful actions [munkar] that are hateful to them, and it permits what
is useful and wholesome [ṭayyibāt] and forbids what is harmful and malignant.”69
The actions in question, on the one hand, include prima facie deontological types
of acts such as justice and injustice, truth-telling and lying. But they also include,
even more crucially and fundamentally, actions whose value is understood teleo-
logically, in terms of their promotion of welfare, to which, as I suggested in ear-
lier chapters, the value of deontological acts—and the reason why such acts are
“beloved to human hearts”—ultimately reduces.
It is the concern with affirming this rudimentary concordance, I would sug-
gest, that underpins Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical engagement and his avowal of the
rational accessibility (and objectivity) of ethical norms on an important level. Yet
this claim can be upheld through a far thinner and more limited understanding
of the ethical content of reason than the Muʿtazilites, for their part, had deemed
necessary. So long as some broad agreement can be posited between what the
Law commands us and our ordinary evaluative judgments as just described, the
aim will have been achieved, allowing us to then take on trust the existence of
such an agreement in those cases where it cannot be readily discerned. Taking the
basic content of our ethical reason to be the judgment that the pursuit of benefit
is good, and taking on board the theological affirmation that God intends human
benefit, the coincidence between our sense of value and the one expressed in the
revealed Law will be secure. To the extent that spiritual imperatives here shape Ibn
Taymiyya’s concern, indeed, it may be said that if the imperative of love does not
require an especially substantive specification of ethical knowledge, the impera-
tive of trust in God and the appreciation of the extent of our dependence—the
need for prophetic guidance, we hear elsewhere, is even greater than the eye’s
need for light and the body’s need for food and drink or indeed our need for our
very life—positively requires the reverse.70 As we have also seen, moreover, Ibn
Taymiyya rejects the Muʿtazilite view of divine morality and severs the morality
of human beings from the morality of God. Yet it was the bridge the Muʿtazilites
had erected between these two domains that in great part motivated their more
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 229

substantive documentation of the moral consciousness of ordinary human

beings. Ibn Taymiyya’s relative indifference to this task will thus appear doubly
unsurprising.
In the case of the Muʿtazilites, the theological aims structuring their ethical
theory have sometimes seemed easy or tempting to miss, given the prodigious
output of ethical arguments and analyses in which they issued, which carry an air
of self-sufficiency suggestive of an intellectual task that contains its ends within
itself.71 Ibn Taymiyya’s discussions of moral knowledge, by contrast, bring no such
temptation. It will be clear from the account of the foregoing chapters that Ibn
Taymiyya’s remarks are often limited in length and elliptic in character—a set of
reflections that do not add up to anything we might be prepared to call a full theory
of moral value or a systematic epistemological scheme. His ethical remarks, in
this respect, tell no lies, and deliver more direct testimony to their theological ends
than the Muʿtazilites’ before him, whose painstakingly erected edifice of moral
knowledge would be left standing with all the absurd grandeur of a monument
that had extravagantly outbuilt its genetic aims. For the task of theology once com-
plete, the prescriptions of revelation take over to leave such edifices without use.
With Ibn Taymiyya, this takeover comes more swiftly and the edifice of moral
knowledge only has the modest dimensions of the basic rational assurance our
relationship with these prescriptions requires for its support.

Reason and Revelation in Broader View

The theological vision in which Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical positions are anchored, I
have been arguing, forms a critical foil for considering the character of his ethi-
cal remarks and for appreciating their limitations, providing us with additional
ways of explaining why—besides the reasons that reflect the broader features of
his writing as a whole—his ethical epistemology receives only an allusive devel-
opment and also why a more substantive avowal of reason may not have been a
great concern to him. Having connected Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical claims with this
theological vision, it will now be easier to make the link with another aspect of his
intellectual program that can be summoned as an even more embracing context
for his ethical engagement, namely his view of the relationship between reason
and revelation. This is an aspect of his outlook, as we will see, that is exposed to
interpretive tensions not unlike those we have already witnessed in approaching
his ethical views. Yet once again, it is a more conservative view of reason that
ultimately seems to shape his understanding of this relationship, providing yet
another situating filter for the conservative view of reason he adopts in the ethical
context.
Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical motivations, I just suggested, are partly given in an
insistence that the surface of our evaluative comprehension and of the evaluative
230 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

comprehension carried by the Law—what we rationally or prerevelationally con-

sider good and what the Law enjoins us—coincide. Readers familiar with Ibn
Taymiyya’s writings may have recognized in this formulation the echo of a headline
that runs through his work as a defining frieze. Reason and revelation, put simply,
can never be in conflict. Sound or pure reason (ṣarīḥ al-maʿqūl) and authentic
revelation (ṣaḥīḥ al-manqūl) must always be in agreement. It is a frieze whose very
persistence provides an eloquent token of the reasons why the difficulties of chro-
nology that cling to Ibn Taymiyya’s works are so easy in practice to shrug aside, for
it belongs to a large number of intellectual motifs that recur in, and thereby exert
a unifying influence over, many of his writings. This particular motif is one whose
development we associate most strongly with the period immediately postdating
his imprisonments in Cairo and Alexandria, and more specifically with his monu-
mental work Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql waʾl-naql.
The aim of this work, as its title suggests, is precisely to advance a claim
about the harmony of reason and revelation. What is especially significant for
our context is that this claim emerges as a polemical response to an alternative
view of this relationship implicit in an approach to scriptural interpretation that
had received a number of different expressions among different thinkers, both
mutakallimūn and falāsifa, but that was organized by one basic tendency: to pro-
mote reason to a troubling position of primacy in relation to the revealed texts. It
is the articulation of this view by practitioners of kalām, particularly by Ashʿarite
theologians such as al-Ghazālī and al-Rāzī, that preoccupies Ibn Taymiyya in the
Darʾ with particular intensity. Using the incendiary language of a “law,” such
theologians had proclaimed the “general law” (qānūn kullī) of scriptural interpre-
tation to be: when reason and revelation conflict, it must be the latter that cedes,
not the former, because reason forms the foundation of revelation. When the
meaning of scripture is at stake, thus, it is reason that possesses the role of arbiter
and the claim to priority.72
Ibn Taymiyya categorically rejects the view that human reason can constitute
a “criterion” (miʿyār) for scripture.73 Yet integral to his response is a denial of its
very presupposition: reason and revelation, in fact, can never be conflict. It is a
claim, to be sure, that had not been made for the first time. The drive to estab-
lish this relation of harmony had been shared by theologians of many stripes,
and what had often divided them was not the end, but the means. Despite their
other disagreements, Muʿtazilites and many later Ashʿarites had to a great extent
converged in their view of both the end and the means with regard to one of the
key theological topics that appear in the crosshairs of Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion,
namely the attributes of God. Their common point of departure was a prima facie
sense of conflict between what scripture sometimes said and what human reason
demanded. Scripture, for example, described God as having hands and sitting on
the throne; reason disclaimed this as unacceptably anthropomorphic and sought
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 231

for subtler ways of interpreting the surface meaning, in doing so restoring har-
mony between divine revelation and the human mind.
In repudiating such approaches, Ibn Taymiyya takes a clear step away from the
strong rationalism they stand for and appears to distance himself from the claims
of reason as such. Much of his discussion in the Darʾ taʿāruḍ seems to reinforce
this picture by displaying a series of wide-ranging polemical assaults on the dif-
ferent arguments offered by rationalist-minded theologians on a variety of topics,
including arguments for the existence of God and arguments about the nature of
God’s attributes, such as His speech and His spatial location. A closer examina-
tion of these arguments reveals that the much-vaunted “reason” theologians like
al-Ghazālī and al-Rāzī appointed as their highest arbiter cannot hold its weight.
Reason, as it emerges from Ibn Taymiyya’s critique, appears to be deeply flawed.
Witness, in a similar vein, the disagreements that tear rationalist-minded factions
apart even on the most basic questions, such as the content of the foundational
epistemic notion of necessary or self-evident knowledge (ʿilm ḍarūrī). Putting our
ear to what different theologians have to say about it, we find a welter of contradic-
tory claims. A claims x is known necessarily by reason; B denies it. It is a pattern
we see repeated all over theological writings:

Most people endowed with mature reason [ʿuqalāʾ] say: we know that it is
impossible for a contingent thing [ḥādith] to originate without a contingent
cause, yet a group of them say: that is possible. Most people endowed with
mature reason say: it is known through the immediate necessity of reason
[ḍarūrat al-ʿaql] that it is impossible that an entity should be characterized
as “knowing” without knowledge, “powerful” without power, “living” with-
out life, yet others dispute that. Most people endowed with mature reason
say: it is known through the immediate necessity of reason that a single
thing cannot simultaneously be a command and a prohibition and a state-
ment, while others dispute that.

Thus “every person endowed with mature reason says that reason affirms or
necessitates or provides warrant for what his neighbor says that reason denies
or deems impossible or disallows.” These kinds of disputes reveal that “reason
is not a single thing that is clear in itself,” but “rather exhibits such manner of
fractiousness and disorder.”74 The most immediate conclusion that Ibn Taymiyya
draws from this observation locks onto his main concern in the Darʾ. For reason is
affected by this kind of disorder precisely in those cases in which it has often been
accorded priority over revelation.
This large-scale critique of the uses of reason will seem fundamentally nega-
tive in kind—an exercise in deconstruction. As such, it will remind us of Yahya
Michot’s suggestive commentary on the Darʾ taʿāruḍ, which he proposes that we
232 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

consider in the light of George Saliba’s reading of Arabic astronomy at the end
of the thirteenth century. This was a period marked by an unprecedented level
of intellectual critique of the Ptolemaic system and by a growing sense that the
limits of traditional scientific rationality were being reached—a period that may
thus need to be recognized as a still unresearched “golden age” of philosophy. It
is as a document for a parallel development that the Darʾ taʿāruḍ might be read,
argues Michot, this time concerning the state of religious rationality. What the
Darʾ taʿāruḍ reveals is religious rationality, like its scientific counterpart, begin-
ning to knock against its limits and questioning its foundations as never before. It
is a work that delivers a diagnosis of “the flagrant state of exhaustion and petrifica-
tion” affecting the principal vehicles of religious rationality—kalām, philosophy,
and mystical theosophy—of the time. This state stands on display in the cacoph-
ony of contradictions and disputes, controversies and divergences agitating these
discourses, as just adumbrated, a pandemonium of voices that makes it possible
and indeed necessary to speak of “rationalities” in the plural rather than of a single
shared rationality. (“Reason is not a single thing that is clear in itself,” we just
heard Ibn Taymiyya say.)75
Yet having called attention to Ibn Taymiyya’s critical aim—a negative diagnos-
tic of the uses of reason that appears to distance him from the claims of reason
altogether—Michot then goes on to highlight something more positive: a more
positive aim, and more positive view of reason, to which it is linked. Implicit in
Ibn Taymiyya’s program is not merely a diagnosis but the intimations of a cure.
“Philosophico-theologico-mystical reason, in Sunni Islam,” Michot writes, may
“yet have known at the time the turn conducive to its renewal.” This is a turn that
he suggests we may find in the notion of fiṭra, which figures in the Darʾ taʿāruḍ
as a prominent epistemological theme, and in Ibn Taymiyya’s invitation to return
to our “sound natural constitutions” (fiṭar salīma) to ground ourselves in them
anew.76 Cast in these terms, fiṭra would offer itself as a foundation for thinking
that would replace the exhausted forms of rational thought: as the promise, no
less, of a new (or newly recovered) Islamic reason.
We may recall hearing something about the connection between the notion of
fiṭra and that of reason at an earlier juncture of our narrative (­chapter 2), when
considering Ibn Taymiyya’s double specification of fiṭra in cognitive and desider-
ative terms. This specification comes into the fullest fruition in his discussion of
theological knowledge—a key theme of the Darʾ taʿāruḍ—and in his claim that
we know and love God by our natural disposition. It is a positive claim that he
notably develops in response to the popular kalām view that such knowledge must
be acquired through rational inquiry (naẓar) and that is accompanied by a detailed
deconstructive criticism of the rational arguments mutakallimūn had advanced for
the purpose. In their technicality and dogmatism, he maintains, such arguments
bar ordinary people from the simpler access to theological truth already naturally
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 233

available to them.77 The notion of ordinary or natural rationality is developed even

more directly in the Radd, written in the same period as the Darʾ, this time in opposi-
tion to the technical conception of human reasoning proposed by the logicians, who
form Ibn Taymiyya’s immediate target in this work. Such specialized approaches
offer abstruse “unnatural means” to arrive at “natural matters” (al-umūr al-fiṭriyya …
juʿila lahā ṭuruq ghayr fiṭriyya) and blind us to the fact that we already have God-
given natural abilities to reason about the world.78 The notion of fiṭra is in turn
often deployed by Ibn Taymiyya to frame his hallmark claim regarding the har-
mony between reason and revelation. “The sound, clear and indubitable proofs
of reason—nay, those things we know necessarily through our natural constitu-
tion [al-ʿulūm al-fiṭriyya al-ḍarūriyya]—are in accord with what the prophets have
informed us of and do not conflict with it,” we hear in one place, registering a mes-
sage that traverses the Darʾ taʿāruḍ like a red thread and reappears as an equally
incarnadine theme in others.79
It is a positive embrace of reason that has often been picked up by Ibn
Taymiyya’s readers in the past. Yet given his disavowal of the strong conception
of a “criterial” reason, it has been a matter of some debate just how strongly or
positively to understand the appeal to reason he endorses and incorporates in his
practice. This was the question that Binyamin Abrahamov proposed to broach
in an essay considering the relationship between reason and revelation in Ibn
Taymiyya’s thought, parsing it as a question concerning the extent of reason’s
epistemic independence. His own view was plainly expressed in his concluding
words: Ibn Taymiyya “rejects any rational external doctrine or term and confines
the process of reasoning to the contents and methods of revelation as he under-
stands them. Reason, according to him, has no independent status as is the case in
Ibn Rushd. His general law is that the basis of reason is revelation, and that hence
there can be no disagreement between the two elements.”80 Yet Abrahamov would
later reject this view, affirming that reason indeed serves in an independent role.81
In doing so, he would express a view that Michot would also appear to extend
support to, and that Jon Hoover, in his book-length study of Ibn Taymiyya’s theol-
ogy, would similarly describe as his own. “Revelation embodies true rationality,”
Hoover writes in this context. “Once one has access to revelation, one identifies it
as identical to whatever truth one knew previously through reason.”82
These statements seem to me suggestive, and they do so in ways that point to
the difficulties involved in seeking to determine Ibn Taymiyya’s position with full
assurance. For on the one hand, in several locations, Ibn Taymiyya suggests that
rational considerations, while intimately enmeshed with scriptural grounds, form
a distinct epistemic route that can independently lead us to the truth. As he writes
in the Darʾ taʿāruḍ, “Since the pathway to the truth comprises revelation [samʿ]
and reason and these two are inseparably connected [mutalāzimān], whenever
one follows the path of reason it points one to the path of revelation—namely [by
234 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

pointing to] the truthfulness of the prophets—and whenever one follows the path
of revelation, it clarifies for one the proofs of reason.”83 This epistemic indepen-
dence is most readily illustrated by his claim concerning the knowledge of God.
The preexisting acknowledgment of God, as Ibn Taymiyya presents it, is robust
enough to form the basis of human accountability, making people liable to blame
and punishment when a prophet is sent bringing the monotheistic message. For
“if a rational proof affirming the Creator was not given in the natural constitution
[fiṭra],” the prophet’s message could never serve as a proof of people’s guilt and be
used to condemn them. It is only the testimony of their own reason that can serve
in this role. “The very faculty of reason through which they know the oneness of
God is a proof against polytheism—this stands in no need for a prophet [to inform
them of it].”84
Ibn Taymiyya’s reference to the role of reason in demonstrating the truthful-
ness of the prophets in the above passage can be understood in different ways,
but one of these we have already come across. For as we saw in ­chapter  3, Ibn
Taymiyya invites us to consider our rational knowledge of right and wrong as
nothing less than a criterion for assessing the content of a given prophetic mes-
sage and evaluating the veracity of its bearer. This prerevelational perception of
ethical facts elsewhere appears to work in tandem with a prerevelational percep-
tion of the ethical character of God himself. In Ibn Taymiyya’s Kitāb al-Nubuwwāt,
as Hoover observes, the rational affirmation of God’s wisdom is invoked to play
a cardinal role in supporting our belief in the truthfulness of the prophets. God,
in His wisdom, marks the similarities between like and like just as He marks the
necessary distinctions between like and unlike, and therefore does not equate the
good and the bad, the just and the unjust, or indeed the truthful and the lying. It
is as a consequence of these demarcations—demarcations demanded by God’s
wisdom—that God lends His support to the truthful prophets as against the men-
dacious.85 Our own belief in the truthfulness of the prophets thus requires our
rational belief in God’s wisdom as its epistemic presupposition.
This, in fact, links to a broader and no less important moment within Ibn
Taymiyya’s work where a vigorous emphasis appears to be placed on the ability of
reason to function independently and deliver substantive truths, and this is in pro-
viding access to the attributes of God. For on the one hand, Ibn Taymiyya’s theo-
logical outlook is shaped by the insistence that the way we speak of God must be
grounded in the traditional sources, and that God’s attributes must be affirmed as
scripture affirms them. In a recurring formulation, “God must be described as He
has described Himself, and as His messengers have described Him.”86 Yet having
made this point, Ibn Taymiyya goes on to outline an additional epistemic possibil-
ity. This is a possibility, crucially, that invokes reason as its foundation, suggesting,
in Hoover’s words, that “much of the same information concerning God’s attri-
butes is known by reason independently of revelation.”87 The centerpiece of this
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 235

strategy is the so-called a fortiori argument (qiyās al-awlā), which stipulates that
where a perfection is ascribed to human beings, it should a fortiori be ascribed to
their Creator. On the basis of this reasoning, one may establish, for example, that
God must be speaking, hearing, powerful, knowing, and living, for we consider
such attributes perfections for created beings, and to deny them of God would be
to ascribe imperfection to Him. How should the exercise of reason be understood
in this connection? In a manner we might dignify with the notion of a “natural
theology,” Hoover suggests at the end of his analysis. Ibn Taymiyya, he writes,
“employs a fortiori argumentation to build a kind of natural theology that takes
human perfection as its point of departure for defining God’s perfection while
exonerating God of neediness and creaturely modalities.”88
In addition to these appeals to reason, there is another, which is indeed what
best illuminates Hoover’s above-quoted remark about the rationality “embodied”
in revelation. For the metaphor of embodiment refers us most immediately to
a position that occupies a salient place in Ibn Taymiyya’s understanding of the
relationship between reason and revelation and in his response to the competing
view of this relationship targeted in the Darʾ taʿāruḍ. In rejecting this view, cen-
tral to Ibn Taymiyya’s strategy is an effort to dismantle the rigid polarity of “rea-
son” and “revelation” on which it was premised. Reason is not like a ladder—the
mutakallimūn’s much-vaunted ladder of “rational inquiry” (naẓar)—that leads
us into the universe of revelation by convincing us of certain foundational facts,
such as the existence of God or the truth of revelation, and is then simply thrown
away as we come face-to-face with the majestic nonrational discourse of the Law.
Reason does not solely appear outside revelation, but is also alive inside the uni-
verse of God’s speech. Revelation is not in fact a collection of mere assertions or
reports to be accepted purely on the basis of say-so—mere khabar sustained by
fiat. On the contrary, scripture teems with appeals to our rational judgment and
in many places clearly draws on rational considerations—what might be called
arguments or, with the Qur’an, “similitudes” (amthāl)—to produce conviction.89
Take the way in which God addressed the question of resurrection. This was
not simply handed down to us as a brute fact, but rather was recommended to
our reason through a prior clarification of its possibility—possibility forming the
prerequisite for actuality—by comparing it to the first act of creation and identify-
ing re-creation as a lesser and thus even more eminently possible achievement.
Thus: “Have they not seen that God, who created the heavens and earth, is power-
ful to create the like of them?” (Q 17:99). And again: “And he has struck for Us
a similitude [mathal] and forgotten his creation; he says, ‘Who shall quicken the
bones when they are decayed?’ Say: ‘He shall quicken them, who originated them
the first time… . Is not He, who created the heavens and earth, able to create the
like of them?’ ” (Q 36:78–81). Or take the way the Qur’an establishes the fact of
divine unity. Appealing to our native judgments, it compels us to admit that to
236 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

ascribe to God associates would be to ascribe to Him something we would con-

sider a blemish and weakness for ourselves—that what we own should be taken
as our equal. Thus: “He has struck for you a similitude from yourselves; do you
have, among that your right hands own, associates in what We have provided for
you so that you are equal in regard to it, you fearing them as you fear each other?”
(Q 30:28).90 In these and other ways, revelation can be seen to encompass reason.
In seeking to secure conviction, importantly, these rational proofs would seem
to involve a substantive appeal to our capacities for rational judgment, and to be
expected to work on us not only after, but as a means to, accepting the truth of the
revelation in which they appear.91
Taken together, the above would suggest that Ibn Taymiyya ascribes a substan-
tive and independent role to reason in several areas of his thinking. Yet I would
argue that the picture is more complex, and that Ibn Taymiyya’s invocation of rea-
son is rather less substantive than it appears, and in fact turns out to rest on deeper
scriptural foundations. Hoover’s evocative statement—“Once one has access to
revelation, one identifies it as identical to whatever truth one knew previously
through reason”—already provides a token of this complexity in calling attention
to the responsive character of reason. Ibn Taymiyya directly highlights this point
in an explanatory gloss he offers on the term “rational” (ʿaqliyya) in connection
with the rational proofs contained in the Qur’an. “Those proofs are rational,” he
writes, “in the sense that reason knows [or: recognizes] their soundness when
alerted to them [bi-iʿtibār anna al-ʿaql yaʿlamu ṣiḥḥatahā idhā nubbiha ʿalayhā].”92
Yet the milder element of responsiveness elsewhere gives way to something stron-
ger. For in several locations Ibn Taymiyya signals that revelation does not merely
appeal to our reason, but indeed constitutes reason, and is vested with the power to
arbitrate what rationality—what true or sound rationality—consists in.
One may consider here the crucial discussion of reason that Ibn Taymiyya
offers us in the Radd. In previous chapters we engaged this work as a key stage for
his development of the notion of fiṭra as an element of his moral epistemology—a
development in which, as I suggested, fiṭra is understood mainly in desiderative
terms. Yet this work also serves as the stage for a broader development in which
the notion of fiṭra is given a sharply cognitive inflection, and is associated with a
set of basic cognitive operations that bring it into connection with the notion of
reason. The most basic function of natural reason is specified by Ibn Taymiyya in
terms that we may recall from our earlier account of divine rationality and indeed
divine morality (God’s justice, though also His wisdom). As with God, so with
human beings, the essential feature and truest form of natural rationality consists
in the ability to tell similarity and difference, to join like to like and separate like
from unlike. “The capacity to discern similarity and difference,” Ibn Taymiyya
writes in a series of passages liberally peppered with the vocabulary of both fiṭra
and ʿaql, is “one of the greatest characteristics of reason [min aʿẓam ṣifāt al-ʿaql
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 237

maʿrifat al-tamāthul waʾl-ikhtilāf].”93 This is a form of rationality that he takes to be

paradigmatically exemplified in legal analogy, which aims to discern the features
that unite different actions (al-waṣf al-jāmiʿ al-mushtarak) and to thereby enable
the transfer of legal qualifications from one set of actions to another. In reflecting
the natural pattern-seeking abilities of reason, legal analogy thus presents itself as
a quintessential expression of natural rationality.
Talk of our “natural rationality,” as just indicated, is encouraged by Ibn
Taymiyya’s fluid transitions between the vocabulary of reason and nature in
his discussion, which invite us to think of the mode of cognition he is picking
out as an untutored form of intelligence. Yet this characterization is called into
question in the same discussion when Ibn Taymiyya suddenly introduces a new
concept—that of the “balance” or “scales” (or “measure”: mīzān). This is a con-
cept that derives from the Qur’an, which describes it as revealed by God, and
Ibn Taymiyya notes that it has been interpreted by commentators as a reference
to God’s justice (ʿadl). He goes on to connect this concept to the means of mea-
surement that human beings use for determining similarity and difference: “The
means by which we come to know the similarity between similar things, and like-
wise the difference between different things … derives from [or: “forms part of”]
the scales [min al-mīzān]. Thus, the knowledge that these dirhams or other heavy
bodies weigh the same as those ones is obtained through their means of mea-
surement [mawāzīn] … similarly with the knowledge that this thing is as long
as that one, which is obtained through its standard, namely the cubit.”94 The slip-
page between “scales,” “standard,” and again “means of measurement” in this
translation is symptomatic of a certain difficulty in disentangling the meaning of
Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks, one likewise reflected in the uncertain translation of the
first statement. “Derives” or “forms part of”? Which term might best convey the
way Ibn Taymiyya is interested to cast the connection at stake? Both terms seem
to make for an awkward semantic fit. For what might it mean to say that these
familiar (“natural”) ways of measuring weight and size are either generated by or
subsumed in the Qur’anic scales to which the first occurrence of the term mīzān
appears to refer us?
What is clear is that even as Ibn Taymiyya continues to speak of this
pattern-seeking capacity as an aspect of our natural reason, a new claim has
emerged that holds down the note of “derivation” struck above and ascribes this
capacity to revelation as its product. This is expressed plainly in the following
remark in ways calculated to add fuel to the questions just posed:

The scales that God revealed with the Book—where He said: “God it is who
has sent down the Book with the truth, and also the Balance” (Q 42:17),
and said: “Indeed, We sent Our Messengers with the clear signs, and We
sent down with them the Book and the Balance” (Q 57:25)—is a just scales
238 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

which involves considering a given thing in terms of what it is like and

unlike to, so that it treats similar things alike and discriminates between
different things, through the knowledge of likeness and unlikeness that
God installed in people’s natural constitutions and their rational faculties
[yusawwī bayna al-mutamāthilayn wa-yufarriqu bayna al-mukhtalifayn bimā
jaʿalahu Allāhu fī fiṭar ʿibādihi wa-ʿuqūlihim].95

The seams between these two modes or kinds of measuring—natural and

revealed—merge in this passage without distinction. Both revealed and natu-
rally installed in our reason, both taught and untaught: how could these two go
together? It is this very question that Ibn Taymiyya is called upon to respond to
in the next breath, and in doing so he introduces a distinction that will instantly
seem familiar. Referring to the rational elements contained by revelation, he
writes: it is through such use of rational elements—through similes, arguments,
and examples—that the prophets “showed people the way and guided them to the
means by which they might come to know justice [al-ʿadl] and by which they might
know the sound rational arguments [al-aqyisa al-ʿaqliyya al-ṣaḥīḥa]” or standards
for establishing religious truths. “Thus they perfected the natural constitution
[kammalat al-fiṭra] by alerting and guiding it [bimā nabbahathā ʿalayhi: notice the
echo from our earlier passage] to things the natural constitution was set against;
or the natural constitution had been corrupted [kānat al-fiṭra qad fasidat] through
the corrupt beliefs and desires that had arisen in it, and they removed this corrup-
tion and set out plainly what the natural constitution was set against, so that the
natural constitution came to know the scales which God revealed and his prophets
set out plainly.”96
It is thus in terms of that pivotal relationship we saw in c­ hapter 2 in connec-
tion with evaluative knowledge—by way of perfecting or completing our imper-
fect fiṭra—that the relationship between our natural reasoning and the reasoning
revealed by God might be understood. As in the evaluative context the desires
stemming from our natural disposition turned out to be fallible and to stand in
need of correctives from the revealed Law, so the modes of reasoning that stem
from our natural disposition stand in need of scriptural correctives. Yet it will be
important to observe that in providing such cognitive correctives, the Law would
appear to be providing nothing less than the means of identifying what consti-
tutes our true nature and the true forms of rational thought. Indeed, it would be
providing nothing less than a constitution and authoritative definition of rational
thought.
With this in view, we should notice another crucial element that this account
has introduced, namely a normative distinction between perfect and imperfect,
or sound (ṣaḥīḥ, salīm) as against corrupt (fāsid) dispositions. “If the natural con-
stitution is sound,” as Ibn Taymiyya puts it more explicitly elsewhere, “it measures
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 239

things through the rational scales.”97 A normative distinction between true and
untrue, sound and unsound, had in fact already been clearly signposted in the
Darʾ taʿāruḍ. In framing his characteristic claim of harmony, Ibn Taymiyya’s more
specific view was that sound reason (ṣarīḥ al-maʿqūl) and authentic revelation (ṣaḥīḥ
al-manqūl) could never be found in conflict. It is against this differentiation indeed
that we may partly understand the prodigious energy he expends in this work to
the negative task of criticizing his rationalist opponents’ particular arguments or
the interest he takes in documenting the disagreements that reign between dif-
ferent theological factions. For this critical effort shows that such thinkers rely
on modes of reasoning that do not represent the sound reason that forms the
real partner to revelation in the relationship of harmony. The proofs contained in
the Qur’an are far superior (akmal), Ibn Taymiyya tells us, to the ones offered by
such thinkers in both kalām and falsalfa, which are replete with contradictions and
errors and burdened with unnecessary complexity.98 Yet scripture does not merely
indicate the modes of reasoning that are superior in the sense of being more likely
to secure conviction, but that are indeed to be judged fundamentally acceptable
or sound, particularly when it comes to God. It is thus important to note that the
a fortiori argument that was isolated as the linchpin of Ibn Taymiyya’s strategy
for a “rational” apprehension of God’s attributes is endorsed precisely because
it is employed in scripture itself and by the pious salaf, ultimately reflecting the
Qur’anic dictum that “God’s is the loftiest likeness” (Q 16:60).99 It is the scriptural
endorsement of this mode of reasoning, to restate, that imparts to it its legitimacy
and underpins its status as a “sound” method.
The above has focused on the role of scripture in picking out the methods
by which truths may be rationally established. Yet there is much to suggest that
this role, like the normative distinction between “sound” and “unsound” that sup-
ports it, also extends, no less crucially, to the very substance of the truths them-
selves. For turning back to one of the main topics we considered as evidence for
Ibn Taymiyya’s readiness to acknowledge the role of reason in more substantive
terms—his treatment of God’s attributes—it ultimately seems misleading, as
Hoover himself suggests, to take the notion of independent rational discovery,
or indeed of a “natural theology,” too far: “Although Ibn Taymiyya claims that
independent reason or the natural constitution, exercised without corrupting
influences, will arrive at correct theological doctrine, it is perhaps going too far …
to speak of the shaykh as building a natural theology. Rather, it seems clear
enough that he is devising his rational arguments so as to arrive safely at theo-
logical doctrines held a priori on the basis of the authoritative tradition.”100 Reason
does not confront the realm of intellectual possibility naïvely and carve its way
independently through open epistemic space to arrive at a concrete vision of God.
It begins from the way in which God describes Himself in scripture and works
backward. This seems nowhere more evident than in Ibn Taymiyya’s treatment of
240 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

those attributes that other rationalist-minded theologians had made the focus of
their effort to provide allegorical interpretations of the surface meaning of scrip-
ture in order to obviate its conflict with reason. It had been debated, for example,
whether the notion of “love” can be intelligibly predicated of God, and several
theologians who saw a difficulty in attributing a passion to God had sought to
interpret it in other terms, such as by semantically reducing the notion of “lov-
ing” to that of “willing.” Raising this point in Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, Ibn Taymiyya
simply refers us to the fact that “the obligation every Muslim is under to assent
to everything that God and His Messenger have reported regarding His attributes
does not depend on the possibility of producing a rational proof for a given attri-
bute.” Since scripture speaks of God as “loving,” we must also speak of God in
these terms. A few lines down he continues: “The prophetic route generates the
faith that is beneficial for the hereafter without [the theologians’ analogical argu-
ments (qiyās) or the mystics’ revelations (kashf)], and then [thumma] if an analogi-
cal argument or a revelation should arise which is in agreement with what the
Messenger has said, well and good.”101
Yet it is perhaps Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion of one of the most hotly contested
qualifications of God—the topic of God’s “aboveness” or “elevation” (fawqiyya,
ʿuluww)—that provides the most telling token of the direction of his own rational
argumentation and of the normative distinctions that underlie it. For this is one
of several attributes whose knowledge Ibn Taymiyya in various places refers to our
natural disposition, in doing so claiming the concordance between the require-
ments of our nature and the requirements of scripture. God’s “elevation above
the world is known through the natural disposition and reason, and through the
Law and revealed report.”102 A prime scriptural reference point for this view is the
Qur’anic verse “The All-compassionate sat Himself upon the Throne” (Q 20:5),
which finds its complement in a well-known hadith that describes God as descend-
ing to the lowest heaven (al-samāʾ al-dunyā) in the last part of the night. Yet these
kinds of scriptural descriptions had formed a pivot of rationalist-minded theo-
logians’ concerns given the anthropomorphic implications they appear to carry.
God, such theologians had insisted, cannot be “above” anything because spatial
terms are fundamentally inapplicable to Him, a reflection of His inaccessibility to
material or bodily terms tout court. Reason, which lays down these basic postu-
lates, here demands a different interpretation of the surface meaning of scripture.
“Reason affirms God’s aboveness,” we hear Ibn Taymiyya say. Yet “reason
denies it,” his opponents had asserted. How could such disagreement—a stri-
dent disagreement that resembles the symptoms of the intellectual malaise Ibn
Taymiyya himself targeted in the Darʾ taʿāruḍ—be resolved? There is, no doubt,
a more complex story one could tell about this particular resolution. Yet Ibn
Taymiyya provides us with one of the most important keys to it when at one point
he states: “This premise is ingrained in the natural dispositions of all people whose
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 241

natural dispositions have not been altered through suppositions or willfully adopted
views.”103 The deliverances of a sound natural disposition—one that has not been
corrupted by external factors—will constitute that sound reason whose hallmark
is its agreement with what revelation tells us. It is thus by introducing a normative
distinction at this juncture that Ibn Taymiyya ring-fences the notion of reason’s
deliverances and secures their conformity to the revealed word. In doing so, how-
ever, he gives more than a clue as to the ultimate derivation of the deliverances he
aims to hold down.
It is in fact the theologians’ distance from the revealed texts, Ibn Taymiyya
repeatedly emphasizes in the Darʾ taʿāruḍ, that is responsible for their chronic
disputes. Such disputes can be resolved only by a renewed turn toward the texts.
It is no accident that Ibn Taymiyya’s cataloguing of the contestations of necessary
knowledge by different factions—A claims x is known necessarily by reason; B
denies it—should culminate in the following words, which arrive as balm and
antidote to this disorder:

As for the revealed Law, it is in itself the utterance of the Truthful one,
and this forms its abiding attribute, which does not vary with the varying
circumstances of people; and it is possible to gain knowledge of it, just as
it is possible to refer people to its authority, and this is why revelation bade
us refer people to the authority of the Book and the Sunna should conflict
arise … for were they to turn to anything else—to the minds of men, and
their views and measurements and proofs—they would only reap even
greater disagreement and disorder.104

It is the steady certainty of the unchanging divine speech that stands to still and
replace the clamor of disputing human voices.

Before Revelation: Ethical Reason and Its

Socioreligious Sediments
I have been arguing that Ibn Taymiyya’s invocation of reason turns out to be far
less substantive that it initially strikes us, and is grounded in deeper scriptural
foundations in many of the junctures at which its independence seems to be
particularly loudly advertised. In this respect, the dominant picture we form of
Ibn Taymiyya’s broader view of the relationship of reason and revelation dovetails
with the dominant picture that emerges from a reading of this relationship in
the ethical domain more narrowly. In neither case does reason play a criterial
role. Bringing these two pictures together for one last conversation, I will end
this chapter by addressing one of the more narrowly ethical points enumerated
242 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

above as suggestive of a substantive approach to reason—the appeal to ethical

judgments for the confirmation of prophetic truth—in order to once again bring
out its implicit scriptural backing, using this to raise a larger question about what
it means to look for the ethical voice of “pure” reason and to train a final light on
the criterial role of revelation in the ethical domain.
Ibn Taymiyya, I  noted above, invites us to regard our rational knowledge of
right and wrong as nothing less than a criterion for assessing the content of a
given prophetic message and judging its veracity. We consider the actions a given
would-be prophet commands us against the ethical judgments we make indepen-
dently of revelation, and we ask ourselves: Do these commands conform to our
ethical expectations—to what we know by our “natural disposition and pure rea-
son” (al-fiṭra waʾl-ʿaql al-ṣarīḥ)?105 “Were we to suppose,” as Ibn Taymiyya put it in
a passage of Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya quoted in c­ hapter 3, that someone came along
and “commanded polytheism and idolatry and permitted foul deeds, injustice,
and lying, and did not command the worship of God or belief in the hereafter,”
we would need to look no further for disproof of his prophetic pretensions. Yet
elsewhere Ibn Taymiyya offers several reasons for thinking that the basis for this
assessment—and the source of the expectations against which we scrutinize a
given set of divine commands—may not be quite what his reference to “pure rea-
son” immediately suggests. After all, as he observes a few pages later, “the pro-
phetic office has subsisted among human beings since the time of Adam,” and
people have come to be familiar with “the kinds of things that prophetic messen-
gers enjoin.” Often the veracity of a prophet is known through “the fact that he
brings a similar message” to the one brought by previous prophets. For there are
certain general principles (uṣūl kulliyya, maqāṣid kulliyya), including certain views
of human action, which all prophets converge on.106
There will be a delicate balance to be drawn here between continuity and
novelty, recognition and surprise. If continuity with earlier prophetic revelations
serves to confirm the authenticity of a message, an excess of continuity will render
it otiose, as it will raise questions about the source of Muhammad’s own access
to this message. (Did he receive it through divine inspiration, or did he merely
acquire it from the historical environment he inhabited?)107 These types of con-
cerns would shape the way other Muslim writers would approach the relationship
between the Islamic message and previous prophetic messages. This was a topic
that was thematized at several junctures within legal works, as in debates about
whether the content of different messages could coincide, what it took for a given
revelation to be abrogated, and whether Muhammad himself was subject to the
laws of earlier revelations prior to his own mission. What is important for our con-
text is that such debates reflected and cultivated a distinct awareness that human
life prior to the Islamic message was already long embedded within the universe
of God’s speech. Hence, as we saw earlier in this chapter, the question raised by
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 243

some writers regarding the futility of asking: What was the status of acts prior to
the advent of revelation? “Before this revelation” is always after another, sufficiently
to place in question whether “before revelation” as a category exists at all. In this
light, the appeal to what is before revelation, far from being an appeal to “pure”
reason, is an appeal to the human mind as already informed by the divine speech.
This prior embeddedness will be relevant for approaching Ibn Taymiyya’s invo-
cation of reason in connection with the veracity of prophets. Yet given that this
invocation centers on types of actions that figure prominently in his discussion
of ethical judgments elsewhere—justice, truthfulness, the keeping of oaths—it
will also be relevant for approaching his claim of ethical reason more broadly.
Looking away from these familiar categories of action, here it will be particularly
instructive to consider one rather narrower ethical precept in connection to which
Ibn Taymiyya frames his characteristic claim of reason, the principle of retalia-
tion (qiṣāṣ). This principle already came into view in ­chapter 1 in the context of
an argument about Ibn Taymiyya’s teleological construal of deontological norms.
Some of his most concentrated remarks on the topic, unsurprisingly, appear in
his commentary on the Qur’anic verse al-Baqara—unsurprisingly, given that this
is the primary scriptural locus where this principle receives religious sanction. “O
believers, prescribed for you is retaliation, touching the slain; freeman for free-
man, slave for slave, female for female”; for “in retaliation there is life for you”
(Q 2:178–79).
While the principle of retaliation finds scriptural support in this verse, it will
be interesting to note that Ibn Taymiyya himself, in these remarks, does not sim-
ply present it as deriving its normative force and its epistemic availability from
a divine prescription. Once again, he claims a rational or natural ground for it.
Taken in the sense that a murderer must be put to death—a precept that exercises
a deterrent effect on potential murderers and thus spares the life of both offender
and victim—this is an evaluative knowledge available to everyone and “deeply
embedded in their nature” (maghrūz fī gharīzatihim): 

No human being deems it acceptable that a person should be killed and

the murderer not be put to death, but in fact all of them without exception
allow that the murderer be put to death… . So if this meaning belongs to the
fundaments of human understanding, which human beings know they
cannot live without, it is of a piece with their need for food and drink and
shelter, and it is beneath the dignity of the Qur’an to propose to inform
people of these self-evident things.

What the Qur’an came to inform us of more particularly, Ibn Taymiyya’s special
argument will be, is not so much that it is right to retaliate against murderers, but
rather how this principle should be practiced. It should be
244 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

a free man killed for a free man, a slave for a slave, a woman for a woman;
and making the blood money [diya] the same for both, and the blood of one
as the blood of the other, involves rendering them equal in terms of their
blood and the blood-money. Through this even requital [muqāṣṣa] their life
was preserved [kāna lahum ḥayā] from strife, which would otherwise lead
ineluctably to their ruin, as is well known… . For the term “retaliation”
[qiṣāṣ] denotes parity and equality [al-muʿādala waʾl-musāwā] and it indi-
cates that God prescribed justice and fairness with regard to those killed. 108

What revelation thus came to demand was the observation of parity in the admin-
istration of punishment. This, Ibn Taymiyya explains more fully in the vicinity of
these remarks, notably involves disregarding the social station, importance, or
power of the individual concerned. To observe parity in this manner grants people
life inasmuch as retaliation exacted without fair measure leads to endless blood
feuds.109 We will recall Ibn Taymiyya’s earlier description of the Law as coming to
particularize the evaluative knowledge that is already available to us. Before us we
would seem to have one brilliant example of how this office might be executed.
Through our natural resources—the term gharīza is replaced by the term fiṭra
later in this discussion110—we know that retaliation must take place, and indeed
that it must take place because it serves our vital interests. What revelation tells us
is that observing parity in the practice of this principle is the best means by which
this vital end can be attained. Knowing the that and the why, we are given insight
into the how.
Yet what I would like to call attention to now is the interesting and not a little
paradoxical relationship in which Ibn Taymiyya’s specification of our intuitive
ethical grasp would appear to place him to a discussion that the Ashʿarite theo-
logian al-Shahrastānī had earlier offered in his Nihāyat al-iqdām. Reprising the
debate about the value of actions in this work and bringing down the weight of his
own argument against the Muʿtazilite position, it was precisely the case of retali-
ation that al-Shahrastānī had also made the subject of special focus. He had done
so, however, with a striking difference: for he had taken this to provide a strong
argument against the view that reason can secure ethical conviction. Left to its
devices, he had written, human reason finds itself overwhelmed by dilemmatic
choices and incapable of determining what constitutes the right ethical response
to a given situation. The response to murder is a case in point. When a person
takes the life of another, and

we present this case to pure reason [al-ʿaql al-ṣarīḥ], we find there are differ-
ent views [about how to deal with the case], all of them in conflict with each
other. One of these is that the person should be killed in retaliation [qiṣāṣan]
to deter aggressors from acts they would otherwise dare to undertake; and
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 245

in doing so one also preserves the human species, satisfies the need for
revenge … and appeases human feelings. Yet this thought is opposed by
another—that this is destruction in return for destruction, and violence
in exchange for violence, and that the first person will not come back to
life by killing the other; and while deterrence might preserve [life] through
future anticipation and imagination, retaliation involves the destruction of
a person in the present and in actual fact.

Faced with such conflicting considerations, reason finds itself at a loss. This
ambivalence, for al-Shahrastānī, was an unequivocal sign of our need for a divinely
promulgated Law to serve as a moral arbiter and source of normative direction.
It is only through the action of a divine legislator (shāriʿ) and by way of revelation
(waḥyan wa-tanzīlan) that such moral dilemmas can achieve their resolution.111
Yet what is singular is that, with these remarks, al-Shahrastānī had expressed a
doubt directed against the precise moral proposition that Ibn Taymiyya proclaims
as a certainty of reason: the very that of the deontological principle of retaliation.
This doubt, the passage above suggests, might be understood as the result of dif-
ferent considerations. It may be a doubt as to whether the punishment of retalia-
tion indeed offers the best means to the valued end of protecting human life (for
while it potentially preserves life, it actually destroys it); or it might be a doubt as
to whether it is a means that serves our total interests, which include life but also
other goods (such as a rejection of violence). Whatever its underlying rationale, it
would seem to stand in an orthogonal relation to Ibn Taymiyya’s own claim; and
in doing so it would reproduce a disagreement that both readers of Ibn Taymiyya’s
Darʾ taʿāruḍ but also readers of the broader history of Islamic theological ethics
will find intimately familiar.
“Reason tells us.”—“Yet reason does not.” This confrontation of a thesis and its
antithesis had often featured in the pages of theological disputes about the nature
of moral value and the human knowledge of it. The Muʿtazilites had said: reason
necessarily speaks thus and so; the Ashʿarites had denied this. This debate had
often seemed doomed to descend into a collision of mere say-so. To your claim
“that certain things are necessarily known to be good or bad,” al-Juwaynī had writ-
ten in his Irshād, we simply retort:  “your claim is contested and rebuffed.” For
“those who disagree with your claims have covered the face of the earth,” and it
contradicts the very essence of necessary knowledge that “one faction of rational
beings should be the sole to possess” part of its content.112 It is a collision that
led one to wonder to what extent reason could be invoked as a trustworthy epis-
temic arbiter instead of being a witness in the pay of whatever party called it to
court. Was it possible to confront the contents of reason naïvely and let the oracle
speak in a voice other than that of its tendentious interrogators? How to arbitrate
between competing accounts of reason’s true voice?
246 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

It is a question that would revive itself at this juncture. And for those disposed to
feel that al-Shahrastānī’s argument derives its power from the way it captures their
own experience of moral ambivalence, its immediate effect might be to provoke a
question about Ibn Taymiyya’s notable lack of it. Yet this lack of doubt—and the
implicit ground of Ibn Taymiyya’s arbitration of this dispute—becomes easier to
comprehend once we locate this particular ethical precept against a more compos-
ite understanding of the prerevelational or extrarevelational “reason” it invokes.
For on the one hand, the broad prescription of retaliation had its counterpart in
previous prophetic messages, including the Jewish Law. This is a continuity that
the Qur’an calls attention to (Q 5:45) and that writers discussing the relationship
between the Islamic and earlier divine revelations had in turn frequently picked
up on. Ibn Taymiyya himself explicitly brings out this broader horizon in his own
remarks on the principle.113
The horizon prior to the Islamic revelation that Ibn Taymiyya makes contact
with here may in fact have to be understood in even thicker terms, as a horizon
constituted not only by an awareness of earlier religious practices, but indeed by
an awareness of the concrete social practices that provided the historical back-
drop for the genesis of Islamic Law. Modern commentators have sometimes
voiced strongly worded views regarding the ahistorical manner in which medi-
eval Muslim jurists approached the divine Law. “Law, in classical Islamic the-
ory,” Noel Coulson remarked in his History of Islamic Law, “is the revealed will
of God, a divinely ordained system preceding and not preceded by the Muslim
state, controlling and not controlled by Muslim society. There can thus be no
notion of the law itself evolving as an historical phenomenon closely tied with
the progress of society.” One recalls the distinction often drawn between fiqh and
sharīʿa, taking fiqh to represent the fallible human activity directed toward the
discovery of the ideal eternal Law signified by the term sharīʿa, which ultimately
resides in the “mind of God.” Given this conception of the Shari’a that would
have it “floating above Muslim society as a disembodied soul, freed from the
currents and vicissitudes of time,” it would appear only natural that classical
Islamic jurisprudence should resist notions of historical process and take little
interest in the evolution of the Law—or, to take a step closer to our own concern,
to the relationship between the postrevelational world and the pre-Islamic world
it superseded.114
The rich matrix of connections between these two domains has seemed obvi-
ous to those considering Islamic Law from a more historical perspective, who
have highlighted multiple continuities between Islamic norms and pre-Islamic
Arab practices. It is the Sunna of the Prophet that provided the most immediate
conduit through which pre-Islamic practices entered the postrevelational world of
the Shari’a, which they did, as Hallaq observes, by undergoing a purifying “trans-
formation … from the ‘heretical’ Jāhilī environment to the realm of the divine …
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 247

through the agency of the Prophet.”115 With the exception of explicit Qur’anic legal
reforms, Hallaq notes, the Prophet followed many of the preexisting Arab prac-
tices. These reforms spanned several fronts and included legislation intended to
improve the position of women and the weak, to reduce sexual laxity and limit
private vengeance, as well as more specific prohibitions like those of wine, usury,
and gambling.116
Hallaq himself suggests that, transformed in this manner, this relationship
is one that jurists were prepared to acknowledge. And indeed Coulson’s thesis,
as it stands, seems rather too rough-hewn for approaching the complex ways in
which Muslim thinkers engaged notions of the past in the legal context. The past,
certainly, was directly thematized in one of the debates we considered earlier, the
status of actions prior to the advent of revelation. Like other writers before him,
Ibn Taymiyya develops his position with an emphasis on its normative relevance
for the living present, yet the historical dimension of the debate shadows his dis-
cussion throughout. Given the focus of this debate on the relationship between
the “original” status of actions and the effect of legal rulings on this status, an
attention to the element of change introduced by the Law naturally went hand in
hand with an attention to the preexisting realities it dislodged or preserved.117 It
is clearly an awareness of the human transactions and economic activities taking
place prior to the arrival of the Islamic message—an awareness that people bought
and sold, rented and married, and generally engaged in activities of a contractual
kind that involved determinate notions of what made a contract binding and what
constituted its fulfillment—that informs Ibn Taymiyya’s legal discussions and his
view of the normative status of such activities.
Such an awareness of the pre-Islamic horizon providing the divine Law with its
historical antecedents may also be said to be reflected in Ibn Taymiyya’s account
of the principle of retaliation. For retaliation, as we know, was widely practiced
in pre-Islamic Arab society. The reforming aim of Islamic Law with regard to
this principle, as Joseph Schacht points out, lay in limiting its practice and elimi-
nating blood feuds. Yet the most helpful characterization of this reform comes
from Coulson, who observes that many of the structural features of this principle
remain unchanged between its pre-Islamic and Islamic embodiment. The key
innovation lies in “the moral standard of just and exact reparation” introduced
by Islamic Law.118 This of course corresponds precisely to Ibn Taymiyya’s proposal
for relating our prerevelational evaluative grasp to the evaluative contribution of
revelation. We know the normative that and the why; Arabs of pre-Islamic times
also knew these things, as attested by the pre-Islamic maxim that Ibn Taymiyya’s
student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350) tellingly cites at this juncture: “Killing is
a surer means to eliminate killing [al-qatl anfā liʾl-qatl].” What revelation tells us
is the how that best realizes the ends the principle serves, namely the preservation
of life.119
248 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

Whether we read the prior horizon in which the principle of retaliation is

anchored as one constituted by prior acts of divine speech or by preceding his-
torical practices, however, both readings will heavily modify the way we receive
Ibn Taymiyya’s claim of ethical reason and the way we understand what it means
to speak of this horizon as one of “reason.” “Reason” here turns out to be condi-
tioned by revelation on at least two separate levels. On the first reading, this will be
a reason whose perception of value already stands informed by God’s speech. The
conditioning effect exercised by the second reading may not be as immediately
obvious, but it will take only a moment’s reflection to make it plain. For even if
social views and evaluative judgments support a given practice, as in the case of
retaliation, there is after all a natural question to raise as to whether this suffices to
secure its normative force. Why should the contingent fact that people happen to
hold certain evaluative beliefs—beliefs expressed in their actual practices—serve
as a warrant for their soundness? Concerning any given social practice, one may
always ask: Can it be justified? To do so, of course, involves taking a step away
from these practices to examine them from a critical viewpoint.
This is a critical viewpoint that is also implicit in Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion,
and one that is construed in highly specific terms. As we have seen in considering
Ibn Taymiyya’s view of the original status of acts, all acts and practices, includ-
ing those grounded in need—in which class the unqualified principle of retalia-
tion falls, as Ibn Taymiyya signals: “People cannot live without it”—must receive
the imprimatur of the Law, if only by its pointed silence, before their preexisting
status can be allowed to stand. The principle of retaliation stands justified not
as an actual practice expressive of the rational evaluative judgments of human
beings, but as a practice endorsed and corroborated by the Law, which has permit-
ted it to cross over from the world-before-Islamic-revelation to the postrevelational
universe and thereby confirmed its legitimacy. If, disregarding the sediment that
earlier prophetic guidance has already deposited in human reason, we were still to
speak of “reason” here, this would be a reason sifted and certified for soundness—
a reason rendered pure or ṣarīḥ—by the revealed Law. The normative voice against
which one puts one’s ear is the voice of reason as this reaches one filtered by God’s
speech.120
The conflict introduced by al-Shahrastānī thus mirrors the conflict discussed
in the previous section in connection with the theological question of God’s
“aboveness” by similarly yielding a more accurate diagnosis of the direction in
which reason moves. Ibn Taymiyya’s immunity to the ambivalence conveyed by
al-Shahrastānī may be taken as a sign that reason is confronted not naïvely, but
under conditions calculated to protect it against the doubts produced by the pull
of competing intuitions in the face of complex moral realities. Dwelling in a world
already governed by the revealed Law, the hurly-burly of moral realities is simply
one to which one need not remain attuned.121
 Ethical Rationalism: Broader Perspectives 249

Al-Shahrastānī’s own words, it may now be pointed out, had suggested a rather
different construction of the critical viewpoint that might be summoned on ethi-
cal possibilities. His choice of term had also been ṣarīḥ when he had written: “We
present this case to pure reason [yuʿraḍu liʾl-ʿaql al-ṣarīḥ]” and “we find there are
different views.” These words may make our memory stir. For it was that tell-
tale term ʿaraḍa, with its theatrical connotations—conjuring the image of a judge
surveying, from his lofty position, the data paraded before him for his authori-
tative verdict—that Avicenna and several of his commentators had employed to
frame that potent thought experiment that came into view at an earlier point of
our discussion. If you wish to know the difference between what is merely widely
accepted (dhāʾiʿ) and what is natural (fiṭrī), Avicenna had stated, then simply “pres-
ent your statement ‘justice is fine’ and ‘lying is evil’ to the natural disposition [iʿraḍ
qawlak … ʿalaʾl-fiṭra].”122 From the lofty viewpoint of pure reason constituted by
this thought experiment, it is not merely that the right decision in particular cases
is uncertain. Even more relevant, it is that all ethical judgments, however certain
they might have appeared, are called into doubt, revealed as contingent products
of convention that come to condition the mind so profoundly through the educa-
tive practices of the social world we grow up in that their underlying roots rarely
rise up to conscious awareness.
It is a viewpoint that would thus come to pit itself against Ibn Taymiyya’s yet
again, claiming an ability to tap into the lofty oracle of reason with a purity out-
shining Ibn Taymiyya’s own claim and undercutting that notion of reason—so
heavily layered with social and religious accretions—he invokes, just as it had
undercut the Muʿtazilites’ before him. It is not my intention here to arbitrate
between these two perspectives and to ascribe to Avicenna’s or al-Shahrastānī’s
vantage point the higher ground it would claim for itself. For from what position
could that arbitration be undertaken? Al-Shahrastānī’s perspective may speak to
our own experience of moral ambivalence and our sense of uncertainty about the
existence of hard moral facts anchored in the “fabric of reality” that could resolve
it. The more positive counterpart of Avicenna’s programmatic doubt—its claim to
have secured a rational perspective purified from the influences that have shaped
us, taking us to a vantage point before revelation, prior to the social world, digging
beneath evaluative judgments to discover the genealogy that produced them—will
speak to us no less deeply. The possibility of isolating this kind of higher perspec-
tive has exercised a magnetic appeal over us ever since Plato’s experiments in a
radical transformation of vision that would leave the ordinary human perspective
behind and see reality with the transcending objectivity of the gods. Yet this drive
is after all one we should know better than to trust. Approaching Islamic theologi-
cal debates about ethics and the constructions and deconstructions of reason—the
constructions of reason and its other—that organize it, it is an insight well worth
keeping in mind.
250 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

leaping from the theological to the legal context, in this chapter I proposed
to examine Ibn Taymiyya’s approach to considerations of welfare or utility
(maṣlaḥa) in his legal discussions. Certain elements in these discussions—
notably his pervasive invocation of “pragmatic” grounds of need in his practical
legal rulings, his reference to preponderant utility as a criterion for evaluating
actions, and his more theoretical remarks about unattested interests—appear
to provide evidence for his endorsement of a more substantive manipulation of
such considerations. Yet a closer reading of these same topics brings a differ-
ent picture to light, suggesting that the revealed text provides a strong limiting
framework for this engagement. Human reason does not confront utility with
a significant degree of independence. In this respect, what Ibn Taymiyya tells
us about the mind’s transactions with value in his legal writings dovetails with
what we hear about these transactions in the theological writings examined in
previous chapters.
In both cases, Ibn Taymiyya’s writing compels us to thematize its character,
particularly the interpretive tensions and ambiguities that define it, and that con-
tribute to the notable thinness that adheres to his evaluative remarks. Developing
a long-running comparison with the evaluative writings of the Muʿtazilites, I sug-
gested that some of these features—more broadly, Ibn Taymiyya’s relative indif-
ference to pressing a substantial and substantive account of ethical reason—can
be illuminated by situating his ethical project against its theological aims, and
against the concern with pressing a vision of the wisdom of God that speaks to
human beings’ spiritual needs. Having conjured this interpretive foil, I sought to
situate his project in an even larger one, namely the seminal avowal of a concord
between reason and revelation that shapes his thought. In advancing this claim of
concord, just how independently, I asked, does Ibn Taymiyya think that reason can
be consulted? The answer to this question, I argued, mirrors the one that emerges
from considering the operations of reason in the ethical context. It is revelation
that constitutes, and arbitrates on the identity of, sound reason; and it is revela-
tion that, to a great extent, provides the intellectual ends that, working backward,
reason seeks to defend. Returning to Ibn Taymiyya’s invocation of reason in eth-
ics, we may recognize the conditioning effect of God’s speech on ethical reason
on fresh levels.
 6

Return to the Present

This book, as I explained at the outset, found its original impetus in a response
of surprise provoked by a notion that appears pervasively in contemporary Muslim
discourse and that receives its archetypal expression in the ubiquitous catchphrase,
“Islam is the religion of our original nature.” Leading away from the present, this
surprise led back to the past, and there to a story that took a different turn, stimu-
lating a more direct engagement with Ibn Taymiyya’s thought. With that story in
place, it is now possible to briefly return to the present to reflect on the ground
covered and to consider the new roads that might open out from this position. My
aim here will not be to undertake the full transition between past and present, but
to build a few tentative bridges that may supply a more ambitious venture to nar-
rate this transition with some of its galvanizing beginnings.
The contemporary use of the notion of fiṭra, I suggested at the opening of the
book, appears to carry a set of important commitments—commitments that, once
spelled out, point to a twofold relationship or pattern of correspondences: a cor-
respondence between the commands of the Islamic faith and the demands of
human nature, on the one hand; and a related correspondence between God’s
commands and the nature of actions, on the other. In carrying this freight, the
notion of fiṭra evokes a spirit of moral rationalism familiar to us from the form
in which the Muʿtazilites had cast it, yet in which Sunni theological tradition had
overwhelmingly rejected it. These elements, it can be confirmed, find an immedi-
ate parallel in the works of Ibn Taymiyya. There is the notion of fiṭra—absent from
familiar kalām debates on the value of actions. There too, emblazoned in brilliant
form, is the vision of a concordance between the commands of the Islamic faith
and the demands of human nature; and, with it, a rationalistic approach to ethics
redolent of Muʿtazilite affinities.
Yet it has been a key proposal in this study that Ibn Taymiyya’s rationalism
needs to be read less in its innovativeness—in its discontinuities—than in its
continuities, and more specifically in its continuities with an understanding of
252 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

reason and its evaluative content that owes far more to the intellectual standpoint
of Ashʿarism than might be readily apparent. Human beings know by reason
that it is good to pursue what serves their welfare and best interests. Our very
nature (fiṭra) as embodied beings opens us to characteristic forms of well-being
and ill-being which determine that certain things are good for us and others bad.
But as to what constitutes our truest well-being from a long-term perspective that
takes into account the overall balance of benefit and harm, that is a thicker evalua-
tive knowledge that we look to revealed religion to provide. Even so, we know that
the commands of God have our welfare as their aim. In this respect, our sense of
value and the sense of value manifested in God’s Law coincide.
The understanding of moral knowledge just outlined, which expresses the
commitments of Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical thought as we saw them, found direct par-
allels in Ashʿarite theology. From al-Juwaynī onward, Ashʿarites had also affirmed
that human reason gives its assent to a basic evaluative judgment regarding the
self-interested pursuit of welfare. They had also spelled out their position in ways
that grounded this “judgment” in desire and in the imperatives of our appetitive
nature. The Ashʿarites, it is true, had emphasized God’s freedom from motivat-
ing purposes, a fortiori from purposes connected to human welfare, and they had
showed little interest in the moralized conception of God’s justice and wisdom
that Ibn Taymiyya was concerned to press, securing God as a worthy object of
praise and love. Ibn Taymiyya’s emphatic message of evaluative concordance,
likewise, was one that they had been more reluctant to sound. Yet it was a mes-
sage that they too had been compelled to sound in making the notion of welfare
(maṣlaḥa) central to legal discourse and to their account of the aims of the Law, as
we may recognize from earlier moments in our discussion.
We may thus recall al-Juwaynī’s affirmation, falling on our ears with the air of a
sudden (yet still struggling) intuition: “It is as if the Law harnesses the entailments
of our nature as its support.” We may recall al-Ghazālī’s bolder spiritual conjunc-
tion, in the discussion of marriage in the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, between the demands
posed by our natural drives—themselves a script of divine intentions—and the
demands expressed in the Law—themselves a more explicit script of the same.
More broadly, this message of concordance was implicit in the experiential van-
tage point flagged by the notions of “need” and “necessity” (ḥāja, ḍarūra) deployed
lavishly in the discourse of maqāṣid al-sharīʿa. To recall these moments of the fore-
going account, of course, is to recall the moment that offered itself as yet another
denouement, namely the conclusion that Ibn Taymiyya’s specific epistemologi-
cal vocabulary—that of fiṭra, injected into this debate with such salience seem-
ingly for the first time and vested with positive connotations owed in great part
to its Qur’anic roots—and the Ashʿarite vocabulary of ṭabʿ were divided by only a
slender conceptual distance. Most important, both converged in a view of natural
desire as requiring normative ordering to be provided by the Law.
 Return to the Present 253

Thus, Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical understanding had much to connect it with that of
the Ashʿarites’. But to read Ibn Taymiyya’s outlook in its continuities with these of
his predecessors is also to read the present in its continuities with its past. “Islam
does not conflict with human nature or innate desires,” we heard the Syrian jurist
Wahba al-Zuḥaylī say, “because it is the religion of our original nature [fiṭra] and
the religion of moderation.”1 The first concordance, here expressed, would appear
to find its counterpart in the second concordance captured by al-Qaraḍāwī’s
remark:  “God has made permissibility and prohibition dependent upon intel-
ligible grounds [ʿilal maʿqūla], which relate to the interests of human beings
themselves… . It thus became known in Islam that the prohibition of something
depends on its malignancy and harmfulness.”2 Both types of concordance con-
veyed in these remarks can now be situated clearly against a longer intellectual
pedigree and related to forms of thought that Ashʿarite theology had also achieved
in its increasingly sophisticated development. The language of ʿilal itself points us
to the legal context in which some of the most significant of these developments
had taken place, and to the questions about legal analogy and legal causation that
had provided a crucial setting for Muslim jurists in general for engaging notions
of welfare—and the role of human evaluative judgments—in the Law. The notion
of welfare, occupying a central place in classical Islamic legal thought, has seen its
star rise even more sharply in modern Islamic thinking about the Law, and its per-
vasive presence in the contemporary context on its own should hardly surprise us.
What remains of the divisions between Ibn Taymiyya and the Ashʿarites, as
just noted, is a more decisive emphasis on the message of concordance than the
Ashʿarites had delivered, and a stronger affirmation of God’s wisdom and of the
rationality of the divine Law. Some of what appears to divide them, on the other
hand—such as Ibn Taymiyya’s seemingly louder emphasis on the objectivity of
moral value and the rationality of moral knowledge—gives way on closer exami-
nation. It is an emphasis that exercises an important influence on expectations
in ways that give the eventual discovery of its truer significance the character of a
surprised unveiling. For Ibn Taymiyya’s understanding of moral reality and of the
content of unaided reason turn out to be thinner than his discussion encourages
one to presume, particularly in light of his sidelining of the deontological consid-
erations that shaped Muʿtazilite ethics. Ibn Taymiyya’s embrace of reason turns
out to be more limited in scope, and the rationalism he immediately conveys is
one whose large print is belied by its detail. In this respect and in others, reason
takes revelation as its point of departure, and looks to revelation for its more sub-
stantive specification.
It is important to take this conclusion on board in considering how the
fuller story of the transition between past and present might be told. Given the
far-reaching influence Ibn Taymiyya has exercised on the Muslim theological
scene in the contemporary period, it is highly likely that the diffusion of this
254 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

vigorous message of concordance may owe part of its impetus to his influence. To
that extent, the analysis of his views I have offered might do well to resurface as an
open question: Just how seriously should one take the commitment to reason that
this message appears to carry?
A detailed response to this question lies beyond my scope, and all I hope to
do here is trace out some heuristic comparisons. A particularly suggestive com-
parison in this connection is provided by considering the case of Sayyid Quṭb.
A key protagonist of the modern Islamist movement, Quṭb is a figure who has
cast a long shadow on the contemporary Muslim world, and who in turn labored
strongly under the shadow cast by Ibn Taymiyya. It may thus come as no surprise
that several motifs of Ibn Taymiyya’s thought register their presence equally in
Quṭb’s writings. These include, notably, the language of fiṭra and a claim of moral
rationalism tightly linked with this language. In attending to these more closely,
I take my lights from the illuminating recent discussion by Frank Griffel.
It is a discussion that takes its context in a larger interpretive exchange, as it
emerges as a response to an earlier set of remarks by Emilio Platti, who noted an
apparent paradox, or contradiction, characterizing the Muslim fundamentalist con-
cept of the Shari’a. Discussing the Islamist writer Abuʾl-Aʿlā Maudūdī—another
prominent figure in the formation of the Islamist movement—Platti suggested
that Maudūdī appeared to hold two conflicting views on the relationship between
Shari’a and natural law. Although in one of his works, The Islamic Way of Life,
Maudūdī “had praised the perfect compatibility of the Islamic moral system with
the universal values expressed through the Qur’anic term ‘al-Ma’ruf,’ ” in another
work, The Islamic Law and Constitution, he had rejected the conflation of “the posi-
tive, moral and social Law of God” with any notion of “natural law.” Islam, in this
latter work, is defined as submission to the positive divine Law.3 Both harmony
with universal moral values and Islam as complete submission to the revealed
Law—how could these two be reconciled?
In taking up this question, Griffel turned his attention to Quṭb—who was heav-
ily influenced by Maudūdī—to consider the place of this notion of harmony in
his thought. It is a notion that leaps out of many of Quṭb’s most important works
as a recurring leitmotif. It leaps out in his seminal Maʿālim fiʾl-ṭarīq; it leaps out
again, and more predictably, in his commentary on the Qur’an, Fī Ẓilāl al-Qur’ān.
Commenting on the verse that had served as a linchpin for the traditional articu-
lation of fiṭra (Q 30:30), Quṭb writes: with these words, “the natural disposition
[fiṭra] of the human soul is connected to the nature [ṭabīʿa] of this religion; both are
created by God; both are in agreement with the law of existence [nāmūs al-wujūd];
both are in harmony with each other in their nature and direction.”4 A harmony,
then, involving at least three separate terms: a harmony between human nature
and revealed religion; and between these two and a broader natural order. This
vision finds its counterpart in Quṭb’s Maʿālim fiʾl-ṭarīq, where the Shari’a is cast,
 Return to the Present 255

as Griffel notes, “as the foundation of a holistic normative order that mirrors the
order of the natural world.”5
This claim is in turn interestingly combined with a related claim concerning
the nature of moral knowledge and with an outright affirmation of the rational
accessibility of moral truths. Human beings, writes Quṭb in his commentary, are
“capable of distinguishing between what is good [khayr] and what is evil [sharr],
just as they are equally capable of directing themselves toward good and toward
evil… . This capacity lies within their being, and the Qur’an sometimes refers to
it through the term ‘inspiration’ [ilhām].”6 Quṭb’s statement is couched in terms
in which the classical theological tradition may not have recognized its concerns,
as in the vocabulary of “inspiration” used to refer to the source of our evaluative
knowledge, or “the faculty of (moral) awareness” (al-quwwa al-wāʿiyya). The well-
worn vocabulary of ḥusn and qubḥ has likewise given way to an idiom less reminis-
cent of the classical discussions. Much has happened here in the transition from
the traditional theology still taught at al-Azhar in Quṭb’s time to the new theologi-
cal discourse produced by writers like Quṭb who had not received their formation
through traditional structures of learning. Similarly, several things also seem to
have happened between Quṭb and Ibn Taymiyya, with whom Griffel aligns Quṭb’s
interpretation of fiṭra in its essential features. Quṭb’s embrace of a belief in the
human liberty to choose, for example, is one that Ibn Taymiyya would not have
accepted quite as it stands; Quṭb’s analysis of the opposing tendencies of human
nature (toward both good and evil) would recognize a kind of conflict that Ibn
Taymiyya, in his discussion of fiṭra, tended to occlude.
More important in this context, however, is to note what unites the two think-
ers rather than what divides them; and it is precisely this aspect that Griffel next
provides the material for remarking when he goes on to raise the question of
how Islamists like Maudūdī and Quṭb propose to establish the proposed harmony
between the religious law and our moral judgments. It is not, it seems clear, a mat-
ter of holding up the contents of one against the contents of the other to confirm
their concord. Islamist theologians, he suggests, “make no attempts to establish
the harmony of Shari’a and natural law from a detailed comparison of the two.
When faced with the question, what is the normative law of nature? Islamists
answer that it is represented by the rulings of the Shari’a. This response is not
descriptive but normative. It is based on the prior claim of the harmony between
Shari’a and natural law… . Shari’a is the only point of reference for knowledge
of what natural law is… . Reason can never by the judge (ḥākim) of the truths of
revelation.” Thus, he concludes, the apparent contradiction Platti identified is not
so much a contradiction as a vicious circle: “The claim that Shari’a is in harmony
with natural law is verified with the assertion that natural law follows Shari’a.”7
This, as Griffel observes, is a view that brings telling difficulties, which emerge
when competing claims are made about the contents of reason that bring reason
256 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

into conflict with the stipulations of the Shari’a. One of the examples considered
by Quṭb in illustrating the thesis of harmony provides a case in point. Discussing
the Islamic provision of polygamy, he suggests that this follows a natural ratio in
sexual relations that is not equal between the sexes, in a way that “reflects the real-
ity of the human fiṭra and the reality of life.” Quṭb’s brother Muhammad refers to
the natural division of labor between the sexes in a similar context, explaining the
relatively restricted rights of women in the Shari’a compared to men by pointing
to their natural role in caring for the family.8
In these rulings as in others—the ruling on apostasy, often taken to conflict
with the universal right to freedom of thought and religion, forms one of the most
salient examples—the pronouncements of the Shari’a as traditionally understood
would appear to be in tension with scruples arising from different quarters and
bearing a moral character. In such cases, the claim of harmony between what rea-
son says and what revelation commands could be supported only by discounting
the epistemic status of these contradictory intuitions. And this involves excluding
them from the domain of reason, in a move that serves as a normative arbitration
of reason’s content and, while taking its traction from the presumed harmony
between reason and the Law, expresses a particular understanding of which of the
two terms carries the privilege. Thus: “If Shari’a is truly rational, rationality must
follow Shari’a.”9
The parallel with Ibn Taymiyya’s account may already be plain. For whether we
call it ḥākim or miʿyār, it is the same function that Ibn Taymiyya denied to reason,
even while maintaining as an axiom that reason and revelation must necessarily
be in concord. Over revelation, reason cannot act as arbiter. If the two appear to
be in conflict, it is reason that needs to realign itself with revelation anew—and in
doing so discover its truer nature. The confrontation of reason itself takes place
not naïvely, we concluded, but in terms seasoned by the givens of revelation. On
the ethical plane, this relationship of priority was not immediately evident in
Ibn Taymiyya’s annunciation of the natural constitution as the ground of ethical
knowledge, yet a closer probing brought it into clear view. For fiṭra, as we saw, was
associated mainly with desire in the ethical context, yet natural desire does not
carry normative force and requires to be ordered normatively through an aware-
ness of its consequences and of the overall balance of benefit and harm—and this
is an awareness that only revelation can fully provide. What this entails is that our
actual desires may indeed often conflict rather than accord with the dictates of the
Law; and thus the accord between our nature and the Law is not to be found in
experience but to be realized by aligning our desires with the evaluative vantage
point of the Law and its vision of our truer good.
In neither case, thus, does the claim to harmony involve a comparison between
the actual deliverances of our nature and the commands of the faith that would
support it; and in both cases, the message of rationalism initially evoked by the
 Return to the Present 257

language of fiṭra seems to be belied by a closer consideration of the detail. Also

worth remarking is that in both cases it is a conflict with opposing intuitions that
reveals the direction in which reason moves. The sense of moral dissonance pro-
voked by the stipulations of the Law on apostasy or gender relations, as we saw it
in Quṭb, in this respect mirrors the dissonance—or ambivalence—discussed in
­chapter 5 in connection with the principle of retaliation, on which moral reactions
would appear to be more divided than Ibn Taymiyya was prepared to concede.
And if in this last case reason is read backward with the data of revelation already
giving it form, other examples can be cited that parallel more closely the ones
mentioned by Griffel, to the extent that they reflect not merely scriptural facts
but social realities, prejudices, and norms. A good illustration is Ibn Taymiyya’s
proposed explanation of the legal provision that forbids women to marry their
slaves, which he accounts for by pointing to the natural hierarchy that gives men
the status of masters and lords over women, since “everyone knows by fiṭra that
males are superior to females.”10
It is equally worth observing that in both cases just addressed—in the modern
context as much as in Ibn Taymiyya’s—these conflicting reactions arise with refer-
ence to that area of the religious law in which the deontological notion of rights and
obligations (ḥaqq) comes into play. This was an aspect that, as I suggested earlier,
received second place in Ibn Taymiyya’s account, which focused predominantly
on considerations of welfare and on the character of the Shari’a as promoting the
latter. These deontological considerations, of course, were not so much absent as
indirectly present through the assumption that they too ultimately reduce to teleo-
logical terms, in keeping with the conceptual architecture of the legal discourse of
maqāṣid al-sharīʿa and its view of the place of interests in the Law.
This relationship of subordination—of deontological to consequentialist
notions—is interesting, on the one hand, because it points to ways of responding
to the sense of conflict just described that would build on that relationship to open
up avenues for legal revision, for those at least prepared to embrace a more sub-
stantive view of the place of welfare in the Law. And while in the classical period
many jurists treated such an approach with great distrust—the boldest articula-
tion of this view, by the Ḥanbalite jurist Najm al-Dīn al-Ṭūfī, never achieved wide
appeal—and gravitated toward the more cautious textualist approach represented
by al-Ghazālī, in the modern context this approach has come to the foreground as
a more attractive even if still hotly contested possibility.11
At the same time, this would seem to mark a certain difference between Ibn
Taymiyya’s usage of fiṭra and that of modern writers, who show themselves more
willing to specify the content of fiṭra in deontological terms without directly plac-
ing these in contact with considerations of welfare. The short tract by al-ʿUthaymīn
referred to at the opening of this book—enumerating the varieties of rights and
obligations, ascribed directly to fiṭra in the title—provides a good example of this
258 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

tendency. The writings of the Moroccan thinker ʿAllāl al-Fāsī provide another,
though an example of a more finely textured and reflective kind. In al-Fāsī’s
best-known work, Maqāṣid al-sharīʿa al-Islāmiyya wa-makārimuhā, the notion of
fiṭra appears as a salient motif. Early in the work he addresses it by offering a
distinction between the notions of ṭabīʿa and fiṭra, taking the former to desig-
nate the animal side of human nature and the latter to signify the side in which
our truer humanity is vested, which is both spiritual and, importantly, social in
character. Al-Fāsī then connects fiṭra to the primordial covenant between human
beings and God indicated in the Qur’an (Q 7:172) and to the freedom and respon-
sibility acquired by human beings in entering it.12 The connection between fiṭra
and the so-called covenant of Alast had been made before in the Islamic tradition.
In al-Fāsī’s appropriation, however, the effect is to draw the notion of fiṭra into a
more palpably deontological field and toward the language of rights and obliga-
tions (ḥuqūq wa-wājibāt) used to specify the notion of covenant (ʿaqd or mīthāq).
This is a move that reflects a deeper concern to bring the notion of fiṭra into rela-
tionship with the evaluative concepts organizing contemporary moral discourse.
Welfare, to be sure, plays a central role in al-Fāsī’s conception of the Law and
retains a strong presence in the backdrop of his understanding of fiṭra—as it did
in the classical legal scheme, where the notion of ḥaqq was throughout shadowed
by that of maṣlaḥa. As such, the difference in question might be said to represent
merely a difference between what is spoken and left unspoken, or what takes the
foreground and shapes the gestalt, drawing on a fund of preexisting intellectual
possibilities. A  similarly delicate yet not inconsequential reorganization of pre-
existing possibilities would seem to be in evidence in the way al-Fāsī approaches
the status of fiṭra. For having distinguished between the two notions of human
nature, lower and higher, and having reserved fiṭra for the latter, al-Fāsī’s con-
tinuing discussion brings out more plainly what this distinction already implied,
namely that fiṭra is to be understood in normative terms, as a higher ideal, and
hence not as something all people actually and effortlessly possess but as some-
thing that may require achievement. Al-Fāsī thus talks of fiṭra as something that
we may lack (tanquṣuhu al-fiṭra), whose principles (qawāʿid) we may fail to realize,
which we may need to “discover” or be “reminded of”—precisely by the prompt-
ing of the revealed Law.13 The normative character of fiṭra is directly conveyed in
the statement al-Fāsī offers to clarify the harmony at stake between the Law and
our nature: “What is meant by the fact that Islam is the religion of our original
nature is that it is the religion which makes the acts of human beings natural
[fiṭriyya], thereby rendering them worthy to be considered human beings and not
animals.”14 If fiṭra is an achievement, it is through obedience to the revealed Law
that it stands to be achieved.
Ibn Taymiyya’s paradoxical-sounding notion of “a revealed natural disposi-
tion” (fiṭra munazzala), discussed in ­chapter 5, seems to be in the offing at several
 Return to the Present 259

points in this discussion; and it is worth remarking the prominent presence of the
works of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya in al-Fāsī’s spare bibliogra-
phy. It is similarly Ibn Taymiyya’s tones we can hear in the telling view of reason
voiced by al-Fāsī, which is synopsized in one of two possibilities: reason may agree
with revelation; or reason may serve in an auxiliary and thus subordinate role.15
Yet in Ibn Taymiyya’s own discussion, the normative status of fiṭra stood out far
less certainly, and the tension between the more negative view of nature (par-
ticularly natural desire) present in his work and the positive connotations carried
by the notion of fiṭra were nowhere addressed. Al-Fāsī’s terminological distinc-
tion between different concepts of nature provides an explicit tool for addressing
this tension, though in doing so it highlights even more sharply that the claim
of harmony between human nature and the Law is not one to be established on
experiential grounds.
Such readjustments and reworkings of preexisting intellectual possibilities can
have important effects, some of them more far-reaching than others. As such,
they invite one to attend more closely to the continuities and discontinuities filling
the distance between the modern and classical context and to seek a more finely
tuned understanding of modern developments. If the differences noted above
track some of the potential discontinuities separating modern writers from Ibn
Taymiyya’s context, another has already come into view. Discussing Quṭb’s char-
acterization of the harmony between our nature and the divine law, we saw that
this harmony consisted of an agreement between not just two, but indeed three
separate elements: the religious law; the nature of the human soul; and what Quṭb
referred to as “the law that governs existence.” The last two elements in fact point
us to two different senses in which the term “natural law” can be taken. In the
ethical context, as we saw in ­chapter 2, this term refers us to a multifaceted intel-
lectual tradition in which it has been connected with the moral principles available
to human beings through their inborn reason. In the second and the most famil-
iar sense, “natural law” refers us not to the moral but to the scientific plane, and
to the laws governing the phenomena of the natural world that form the object of
scientific investigation.
It is the latter sense that Quṭb underscores in several parts of his account, as
in the following statement from his Maʿālim fiʾl-ṭarīq: “The Shari’a that God has
ordained for the life of humanity is a universal Shari’a in the sense that it is con-
nected to [muttaṣil bi] and in harmony with [mutanāsiq maʿa] the general law of
the universe. Obedience to Shari’a is necessary for humans in order to bring their
lives into harmony with the movements of the universe they live in.”16 This three-
fold harmony—between the religious law, our native moral judgments, and the
laws of nature—plays a prominent role in Quṭb’s account. But the inclusion of the
last term bears a wider significance in pointing to a theme that has formed a key
motif in the Muslim engagement with modernity, and that manifests as a concern
260 Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological Ethics

to affirm the harmony between Islam and the modern viewpoint by effecting a
rapprochement with natural science, while subordinating the latter to the perspec-
tive of the revealed Law.
This is a concern that we can also see reflected in the work by al-Qaraḍāwī
referred to earlier, al-Ḥalāl waʾl-ḥarām. For if al-Qaraḍāwī employs the traditional
language of maṣlaḥa to assert that God’s commands can be explained through
their aim of promoting human welfare, the rationality of God’s commands is illus-
trated more particularly with reference to consequences brought to light through
a scientific process of investigation. Thus, the wisdom of God’s prohibition of con-
suming pork or the Prophet’s admonition against defecating in sources of water,
on the open road, and in shadows has become more intelligible to us in the light of
recent scientific discoveries concerning the dangers such actions pose to health.17
In this rationalistic approach to the relationship between divine command
and human reason, then, it is more specifically “scientific reason” that comes to
additionally fill the second term of the concordance. It is a naturalistic under-
standing of the Law that has been developing an increasing cultural reach, as
Gregory Starrett has shown in his illuminating study of the teaching of religion
in primary and secondary Egyptian schools in Putting Islam to Work: Education,
Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt. Starrett introduces the notion of
“functionalization” to describe the way Egyptian textbooks present religious teach-
ings. Functionalization, as he puts it, consists of a set of “processes of transla-
tion in which intellectual objects from one discourse come to serve the strategic
or utilitarian ends of another discourse,” such that “traditions, customs, beliefs,
institutions, and values that originally possessed their own evaluative criteria and
their own rules of operation and mobilization become consciously subsumed by
modern-educated elites to the evaluative criteria of social and political utility.”18
Concretely, and most relevant for the present context, functionalization mani-
fests itself as a trend of explaining religious observances and injunctions in overtly
naturalistic terms. The performance of ritual ablution provides a stark illustration
of this point. In the functionalized pedagogical discourse of Egyptian textbooks,
ablution is presented to schoolchildren as an observance ordained for the pur-
pose of promoting hygiene, health, and well-being—a view of its value supported
not just by ordinary good sense but also by modern science.19 Methodically pur-
sued, the reason-giving cultivated in this pedagogical setting seems designed to
cement a naturalistic understanding of the purposes the religious Law aims to
serve. The message implicit in this strategy is that “Islamic practices are to be
examined for their latent functions and their social effect” and that religious com-
mands may be linked with “the observable world, both natural and social.” One
of the corollaries of this approach, as Starrett points out, is that “the ordinary
educated Muslim need not master a complex body of legal or philosophical mate-
rial in order to participate in functionalist discourse; the physician, the engineer,
 Return to the Present 261

and the bureaucrat are equally well-equipped to bring their experiences of social,
mechanical, and natural order into the discussion of God’s nature”—or indeed
His commands.
Such popular presentations serve to reinforce a naturalistic understanding
of the Law, in doing so adding complexity to the twofold notion of “nature”
and “natural law” as modern writers deploy it. This is a complexity, it may
be noted, with important effects on how the concordance between nature and
the religious Law is to be understood in epistemological terms. For this way
of filling the notion of “natural law” would certainly register as publicly and
independently available to human reason, taken in its scientific embodiment.
Given the strong ligaments connecting divinely prescribed norms to human
welfare—ligaments that scientific reason is called upon to illuminate—this
suggests that the epistemological story of the concordance at stake would partly
hinge on the true distance that separates the moral and the scientific specifica-
tions of “natural law.”
To return to our starting question: How to understand the notion of fiṭra as
employed by modern writers? And just how seriously to take the commitment to
reason carried by its modern usage? The above discussion suggests that such ques-
tions stand to be illuminated by considering them in the light of Ibn Taymiyya’s
earlier development of this notion, and that his work can serve both as an index
of the continuities binding the present to its past and as a foil allowing the discon-
tinuities to be thrown into sharper relief. It is an index, as I have highlighted on
several occasions in this study, that does not everywhere speak in a single voice,
and that is fractured by interpretive disunities with important implications for
the way we read Ibn Taymiyya’s message. This, too, is crucial to keep in mind in
effecting the leap from past to present and in reading Ibn Taymiyya’s intellectual
legacy in its full potency. For its greatest potency, and its greatest fertility, may lie
precisely in the complex messages to which his work plays host and in its capacity
to offer itself as a welcoming soil to competing appropriations and plural interpre-
tive possibilities.
 Notes

in t roduc t ion
1. Al-Zuḥaylī, Akhlāq al-Muslim, 21.
2. Al-Qaraḍāwī, al-Ḥalāl waʾl-ḥarām fiʾl-Islām, 28.
3. Taken as a question about the contemporary recrudescence of specifically
Muʿtazilite theological views, this would not be a new question to ask. Much has
been said already about the presumed modern revival of such views and about the
legitimacy of talk of a “neo-Muʿtazilite” movement. For an in-depth examination
of this topic, see Hildebrandt, “Waren Ǧamāl ad-Dīn al-Afġānī und Muḥammad
ʿAbduh Neo-Muʿtaziliten?” and his book-length study, Neo-Muʿtazilismus?
4. Fakhry, Islamic Philosophy, Theology, and Mysticism, 101, and see generally
chapter  8, “The progress of anti-rationalism and the onset of decline.” Cf. the
remarks by Leaman and Rizvi in “The developed kalām tradition,” 83, 84.

c h a p t er   1
1. The phrase (khiyār al-umūr awsāṭuhā) is from Ibn Taymiyya, “Sharḥ ḥadīth innī
ḥarramtu al-ẓulm ʿalā nafsī,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā shaykh al-Islām Aḥmad ibn
Taymiyya, 18: 137.
2. Little, “Religion under the Mamluks,” 180.
3. Laoust, Essai sur les doctrines sociales et politiques de Taḳī-d-Dīn Aḥmad b. Taymīya,
221. See also the remarks in Laoust, “L’influence d’Ibn-Taymiyya,” 15–33, esp.
20. The most direct textual anchor for Laoust’s remarks can be found in Ibn
Taymiyya’s “Al-ʿAqīda al-Wāsiṭiyya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 3: 141. This creed has
been translated by Swartz in “A seventh-century (a.h.) Sunnī creed.”
4. See Michot, Against Extremisms, xx–xi.
5. Ibn Qudāma, Taḥrīm al-nazar fī kutub ahl al-kalām.
264 Notes

6. Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī, al-Naṣīḥa al-dhahabiyya li-ibn Taymiyya, ed. by

Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī (Damascus 1347/1928–29), 33, quoted by
Kügelgen in a piece devoted to investigating Ibn Taymiyya’s philosophical
appropriations:  “The poison of philosophy,” 257–58. The significance of Ibn
Taymiyya’s engagement with philosophical resources and the rational sciences
more broadly has been emphasized by a number of recent scholars, including
Michot in studies such as “A Mamlūk theologian’s commentary on Avicenna’s
Risāla Aḍḥawiyya”; cf. his explicit invitation in “Vanités intellectuelles” to find
in Ibn Taymiyya “the most important reader of the falāsifa after Fakhr al-Dīn
al-Rāzī in the Sunni world” (599). See also on this point Hoover, “Ibn Taymiyya
as an Avicennan theologian.” The emphasis on Ibn Taymiyya’s rationalist com-
mitments marks much of Hoover’s work. It also finds expression, more recently,
in Anjum’s Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought, esp. ­chapter 4.
7. “Fluctuating scepticism”: the description is Bori’s in “Ibn Taymiyya wa-jamāʿatuhu,”
33. For the point regarding Ibn Taymiyya’s influence, see El-Rouayheb, “From Ibn
Ḥajar al-Haytamī (d. 1566) to Khayr al-Dīn al-Ālūsī (d. 1899),” 305 quoted.
8. Swartz, “A seventh-century (a.h.) Sunnī creed,” 96–97.
9. Ibn Taymiyya, Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 180.
10. Several of these familiar formulations will be fine-tuned in the chapters that follow.
For an account of this larger debate, good starting points include Hourani, Reason
and Tradition in Islamic Ethics and Islamic Rationalism; Vasalou, Moral Agents and
Their Deserts; Fakhry, Ethical Theories in Islam, part 2; Frank, “Moral obligation in
classical Muslim theology”; Shihadeh, “Theories of ethical value in kalām.”
11. See Shihadeh, The Teleological Ethics of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, 38–39, for the rel-
evant remarks from al-Rāzī’s Tafsīr.
12. Ibn Taymiyya’s refusal of such a surrender to mystery is emphasized by Hoover
in his account of Ibn Taymiyya’s view of action; see Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of
Perpetual Optimism, ­chapter 4.
13. Throughout the following discussion I will mostly use “good” as a translation for
the term ḥasan; “right” carries a stronger normative or “imperative” force than
ḥasan invites, and as such would obscure some of the issues I raise with regard
to Ibn Taymiyya’s focal evaluative concepts later in this chapter and elsewhere.
14. The quote is from al-Dhahabī’s Nubdha min sīrat shaykh al-Islām Taqī al-Dīn Aḥmad
ibn Taymiyya, edited and translated by Bori in “A new source for the biography of Ibn
Taymiyya,” 341; though al-Dhahabī himself, as we have already seen and this docu-
ment also makes clear, did not have a solely eulogistic attitude to Ibn Taymiyya.
15. “Explosiveness” is Bori’s term in “The collection and edition of Ibn Taymīyah’s
works,” 55. Bori’s discussion casts a very helpful light on both the form and the
formation of Ibn Taymiyya’s writings.
16. Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, al-ʿUqūd al-durriyya min manāqib shaykh al-Islām ibn
Taymiyya, 72.
 Notes 265

17. Michot, Against Extremisms, xxiv.

18. “What distinguishes fatwa literature,” Weiss remarks, “is its basic character as
a collection of discrete units… . Fatwa literature does not attain the degree of
systematization that is found in the great treatises” (“Ibn Taymiyya on leader-
ship in the ritual prayer,” 64). The previous quote is from 63.
19. See Bori’s remarks in “The collection and edition of Ibn Taymīyah’s works,” 56.
20. Michot, “A Mamlūk theologian’s commentary,” 161; and see the structural illus-
tration from the Darʾ taʿāruḍ that follows.
21. Anjum, Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought, 183. His next remark
falls more ambiguously: Ibn Taymiyya, he writes, “was far from being a system
builder; in this lay his greatest strength as well as the limit of all his thought.”
For Hallaq’s discussion, see Ibn Taymiyya against the Greek Logicians, l–lii.
22. Michot, Against Extremisms, xxiv.
23. See my Moral Agents and Their Deserts, 8–9. For the interpretive debates about
al-Ghazālī referred to above, see Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology.
24. Based on a remark in the Minhāj al-sunna, Makdisi suggested that Ibn Taymiyya
composed a separate work on the topic that failed to reach us (“Ethics in Islamic
traditionalist doctrine,” 56). The quoted remark, however, does not seem to me
unambiguous. Many of the passages in which Ibn Taymiyya addresses the ques-
tion of taḥsīn contain tantalizing references to a fuller discussion of the matter
elsewhere; it is unclear to me which of the texts considered in this study Ibn
Taymiyya might have had in mind.
25. Or more accurately: exponents of the view that human beings create their own
acts (qadariyya), generally identified with the Muʿtazilites. On Ibn Taymiyya’s
use of this term, see Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy, 105–8.
26. Correcting the text, which has aḥkām, not afʿāl.
27. The translation is Marmaduke Pickthall’s, with a couple of revisions.
Throughout this work, I  have drawn selectively on three translations of the
Qur’an—Pickthall’s, Arthur John Arberry’s and ‘Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s—using
the one that has seemed to me the most helpful on each occasion, and occasion-
ally introducing small modifications.
28. The phrase is Allāhu ḥarrama al-muḥarramāt fa-ḥarumat, wa-awjaba al-wājibāt
wa-wajabat. Given Ibn Taymiyya’s ensuing argument, the fa that serves as a
syntactic connector cannot denote causation or consequence. My translation
tries to make the best sense of these formulations in light of his argument.
29. The entire passage just translated can be found in Ibn Taymiyya, “Masʾalat
taḥsīn al-ʿaql wa-taqbīḥuhu,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 428–36.
30. Ibid., 428.
31. See, for example, Abū Yaʿlā, al-Muʿtamad fī uṣūl al-dīn, 21–22, 113; cf. 118: God is
not subject to any moral standards known by reason. The quote is from Cook,
Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought, 130.
266 Notes

32. Ibn ʿAqīl, al-Wāḍiḥ fī uṣūl al-fiqh, 1: 12. Makdisi describes this work as a prod-
uct of Ibn ʿAqīl’s “mature years” (Ibn ‘Aqil, xiv). Some of Makdisi’s most con-
centrated remarks on Ibn ʿAqīl’s view of ethical qualifications can be found at
124–30. On Ibn ʿAqīl, see also Makdisi’s earlier work, Ibn ʿAqîl et la résurgence de
l’Islam traditionaliste au XIe siècle. This also seems to have been Ibn Qudāma’s
view: Rawḍat al-nāẓir wa-jannat al-munāẓir fī uṣūl al-fiqh ʿalā madhhab al-Imām
Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, 22: al-ʿaql lā madkhala lahu fiʾl-ḥaẓar waʾl-ibāḥa.
33. See, for example, Ibn Taymiyya, al-Radd ʿalaʾl-manṭiqiyyīn, 420–21.
Al-Kalwadhānī’s view of ethical judgments is expressed in his al-Tamhīd fī uṣūl
al-fiqh, 4: 294–306. Ibn Taymiyya’s list in the Radd includes a number of tra-
ditionists, such as Abū Naṣr al-Sijzī (d. 1052)  and Abuʾl-Qāsim al-Zanjānī (d.
1078/79). The former’s rationalist view of ethical judgments is densely gestured
at in his Risālat al-Sijzī ilā ahl Zabīd fiʾl-radd ʿalā man ankara al-ḥarf waʾl-ṣawt, 95.
I am grateful to Ahmed El Shamsy for directing my attention to this work. If we
wished to build a more holistic view of the Ḥanbalite engagement with this sub-
ject, we would need to include into our scope a number of other thinkers, such
as Ibn Taymiyya’s one-time student Najm al-Dīn al-Ṭūfī (d. 1316), whose Darʾ
al-qawl al-qabīḥ biʾl-taḥsīn waʾl-taqbīḥ was recently edited by Ayman Shihadeh.
34. The claim of majority appears widely in Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion; see, for
example, Radd, 421: akthar al-ṭawāʾif ʿalā ithbāt al-ḥusn waʾl-qubḥ al-ʿaqliyyayn;
cf. Ibn Taymiyya, Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 704: jumhūr al-fuqahāʾ bal wa-jumhūr
al-umma. Yet this claim appears more guarded, and indeed apostrophized, else-
where. Compare, for example, Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql waʾl-naql, 7: 457, 9: 49–50.
35. Al-Kalwadhānī makes that claim of majority explicit: this is the view of “most
[ʿāmmat] of the learned, jurists and theologians alike, and most of the philoso-
phers” (Tamhīd, 4: 295), though this is not what he identifies as the prevailing
view among Ḥanbalites (271); the editor of the text interestingly contests this
claim. The competing claim is more implicit in Ibn ʿAqīl’s remarks in Wāḍiḥ,
1: 12. Ibn Taymiyya might thus be said to be following al-Kalwadhānī in his own
demographical remarks. A  more intelligible parsing of Ibn Taymiyya’s claim
of consensus will come into view in c­ hapter  4. To the extent that this claim
of consensus or majority seems misleading, it will not be without parallel in
Ibn Taymiyya’s work. As Shahab Ahmed notes, for example, in “Ibn Taymiyyah
and the Satanic verses,” Ibn Taymiyya characterizes his position on the Satanic
verses as the view of the majority and the salaf when it is in fact far from repre-
sentative of the mainstream view.
36. Ibn Mattawayh, al-Majmūʿ fiʾl-Muḥīṭ biʾl-taklīf, 1: 236. The text is problematic
in this vicinity, but the basic point is rehearsed in many other passages of both
Ibn Mattawayh’s and other Baṣrans’ writings. Ibn Mattawayh is more specifi-
cally drawing a distinction between deontological and consequentialist types of
grounds that will come into view in the main text shortly.
37. ʿAbd al-Jabbār, al-Taʿdīl waʾl-tajwīr, 57.
 Notes 267

38. Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 1: 255–56.

39. Al-Ghazālī, al-Mustaṣfā min ʿilm al-uṣūl, 1: 56. For another representative state-
ment of this claim, see al-Shahrastānī, Nihāyat al-iqdām fī ʿilm al-kalām, 370.
40. Al-Anṣārī, al-Ghunya fiʾl-kalām, 2: 998.
41. See, for example, al-Ashʿarī’s view (framed with reference to the value of lying)
in Kitāb al-Lumaʿ fiʾl-radd ʿalā ahl al-zaygh waʾl-bidaʿ, 117. Cf. al-Anṣārī, Ghunya,
2: 1002. And see more directly Ibn ʿAqīl, Wāḍiḥ, 1: 129–31, in the context of dis-
cussing the question of abrogation (naskh).
42. Al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā, 1: 56. The two proposals, it may be noticed, share the same
basic structure and organizing terms: al-Ghazālī’s mā wāfaqa al-gharaḍ comes
as a counterpart to the earlier Ashʿarite mā wāfaqa al-amr. For the latter formu-
lation, see, for example, al-Bāqillānī, al-Inṣāf fīmā yajibu iʿtiqāduhu wa-lā yajūzu
al-jahl bihi, 49.
43. For example, Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 3: 180: “Every rational being [or every per-
son who is compos mentis] knows that injustice is bad and justice good [lā ʿāqila
illā wa-huwa yaʿlamu qubḥ al-ẓulm wa-ḥusn al-inṣāf].”
44. Jackson, “The alchemy of domination?,” 186–87.
45. Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy, 38.
46. See, for example, Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj al-sunna al-nabawiyya fī naqḍ kalām
al-Shīʿa al-qadariyya, 1: 447–48; “Qāʿida fiʾl-muʿjizāt waʾl-karāmāt wa-anwāʿ
khawāriq al-ʿādāt wa-manāfiʿihā wa-maḍārrihā,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 11: 353–54;
“Al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 3: 116; “Aqwam mā qīla fiʾl-qaḍāʾ
waʾl-qadar waʾl-ḥikma waʾl-taʿlīl,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 98.
47. Again both points recur in Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical remarks. For the affirmation
of qadar in this context see, for example, “Qāʿida fiʾl-muʿjizāt waʾl-karāmāt,”
in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 11:  354; for the issue of punishment:  “Fī anna al-tawba
waʾl-istighfār yakūnu min tark al-wājibāt wa-fiʿl al-muḥarramāt,” in Majmūʿ
Fatāwā, 11: 677; Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 8: 493.
48. These purely indicative phrases are drawn from Ibn Taymiyya, “Risāla fī maʿnā
kawn al-rabb ʿādilan wa-fī tanazzuhihi ʿan al-ẓulm,” in Jāmiʿ al-rasāʾil, 1: 129.
49. “The question of the determination of good and bad,” he explicitly states, “is
not necessarily connected to the question of qadar” (“Masʾalat taḥsīn al-ʿaql
wa-taqbīḥuhu,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 431).
50. Ibn Taymiyya, “Masʾalat taḥsīn al-ʿaql wa-taqbīḥuhu,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 434–35.
51. A particularly instructive insight into this historical complexity with respect to
later Muʿtazilism is provided by Schwarb in “Muʿtazilism in the age of Averroes.”
52. See, for example, ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taʿdīl, 122. “Ground” was Hourani’s choice of
term: see Islamic Rationalism, s.v. “ground.”
53. Though there are certain qualifications that are generated by the case of lying
with special relevance (if not exclusively). On this topic see Hourani, Islamic
Rationalism, 76–81, and more broadly Marmura, “A medieval Islamic argument
for the intrinsic value of the moral act” and Vasalou, “Equal before the Law.”
268 Notes

54. McNaughton, “Intuitionism,” 271.

55. For this point, see, for example, Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 1: 22, 3: 184–85; and see
my discussion in c­ hapter 2. My main remarks about this “list-like spirit” can be
found at Vasalou, Moral Agents and Their Deserts, 20–23. For the ends of rational
persuasion, one may consider, for example, ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s remarks in Taʿdīl, 18.
56. This distinction can be found in several places, including Ibn Mattawayh,
Majmūʿ, 1: 236, 253, 3: 447; ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taʿdīl, 58 (contrasting what is bad
li-amr yakhtaṣṣu bihi versus li-taʿalluqihi bimā yuʾaddī ilayhi); ʿAbd al-Jabbār,
al-Taklīf, 530–31. This distinction comes into special use in the Baṣran account
of the relationship between rational and revealed standards of action (cf. Ibn
Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 3: 426: laysa wujūb hādhihi al-sharāʾiʿ li-amr yarjiʿu ilā
aʿyānihā wa-ṣuwarihā wa-wujūh lā tanfakku ʿanhā kamā naqūluhu fiʾl-ʿaqliyyāt).
What may seem to muddle this distinction is that in several places the second,
“consequentialist” category is specified using a deontological conception of con-
sequences. See the discussion in c­ hapter 2.
57. Though, as I have noted elsewhere, there is a question as to whether the Baṣrans
conceptualize desert as a consideration that can trump considerations of utility
(Moral Agents and Their Deserts, 92–93).
58. Mānkdīm Shashdīw, Sharḥ al-Uṣūl al-khamsa, 301. And see Vasalou, Moral
Agents and Their Deserts, 44–45, for the presence of the notion of ḥaqq in Baṣran
act-descriptions, and ­chapter 4 more broadly for the notions of ḥaqq/istiḥqāq in
the Baṣran scheme.
59. ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taʿdīl, 18. And see my Moral Agents and Their Deserts, 72–76, for
more on the notion of moral reality (and the relationship between words and
meanings) just invoked, and also on the implicit conditions regulating desert
entailments.
60. ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taklīf, 503, reading lahā for lahu in the last phrase.
61. Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 3: 301; cf. ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taklīf, 513. “At least in part due
to its intelligible moral ground”:  see Vasalou, Moral Agents and Their Deserts,
71–72, for some context on this rider.
62. On this topic, see my “Equal before the Law.”
63. Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 3: 299. The Baṣrans in fact put the point equivocally
when they speak of acting liʾl-wujūb or li-wajh al-wujūb. What does it mean to
act for the sake of wujūb if not to act for the sake of the desert entailments that
constitute this moral quality? To the extent of course that the concern to avoid
punishment will be a prudential motivation, one’s motivation will not consti-
tute “impulsive desire” or shahwa.
64. This point comes across clearly in Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 1:253; cf. ʿAbd
al-Jabbār, Taklīf, 531.
65. I  partly draw here on Ibn Mattawayh’s remarks in Majmūʿ, 1:  244–45. The
one obvious exception to this rule (God acts out of beneficence) is God’s act of
punishment.
 Notes 269

66. For more on this composite nature of injustice, see Vasalou, Moral Agents and
Their Deserts, 59 ff., 92–93; Hourani, Islamic Rationalism, 70–75.
67. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 422.
68. Correcting yaḥṣulu.
69. Ibn Taymiyya, “Risāla fiʾl-Iḥtijāj biʾl-qadar,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 308–9.
70. These terms are obviously not coextensive; the distinctions between them, and
their significance for Ibn Taymiyya’s account, will come into view in the next
chapter.
71. Ibn Taymiyya, Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, 112.
72. Ibid., 65 (the term is again maqṣūd). The last statement is from Ibn Taymiyya,
“Al-Ḥasana waʾl-sayyiʾa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 298.
73. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 436:  al-ʿadl … ḥasan, ay taḥṣulu bihi al-manfaʿa
waʾl-maṣlaḥa; waʾl-ẓulm … qabīḥ, ay taḥṣulu bihi al-maḍarra waʾl-fasād.
74. My use of the term “deontological” to speak of such acts here and elsewhere
may seem awkward. As we often use this term, “deontological” denotes not
types of acts but rather higher-level views about what makes acts ultimately
right (and on a related, albeit not necessarily related, level, about the descrip-
tions under which we should choose them). In this sense many acts, including
the acts named in the main text, could be approached in both deontological and
consequentialist terms. But of course the types of acts named above have often
figured centrally within properly “deontological” theories. And in the context we
are considering, Muʿtazilite thinkers did regard such acts in the more familiar,
higher-level sense of “deontological.” My usage of this term can be taken as a
shorthand reference to this understanding and to the questions it opens out for
Ibn Taymiyya.
75. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 423.
76. Ibid.
77. Love and hate, but also pride and humility, their reflexive counterparts. Hume,
A Treatise of Human Nature, 469, hereafter cited as T.
78. The terms cited are from Mānkdīm’s discussion in Sharḥ al-Uṣūl, 308; cf. Ibn
Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 1: 263. Note that this argument is as much about empiri-
cally known value judgments as about empirically known behavior: the accent
often falls on what people approve of (Mānkdīm: kull ʿāqil … yastaḥsinu irshād
al-ḍāll) as against how people act. At the same time, one should be careful not to
overstate the high-mindedness of the Muʿtazilite vision of human motivation. It
is indicative that several arguments that attempt to establish the reality of moral
motivation betray a striking reluctance to focus on cases where moral action is
chosen despite conflict with self-interest and frame the point in far more con-
servative ways. This is the case with the most famous “truth-versus-lying” proof,
in which one chooses the good (to tell the truth) only after competing considera-
tions of utility have been neutralized. See Vasalou, “Equal before the Law,” and
the passages referred to there, particularly ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taʿdīl, 210 ff.
270 Notes

79. Al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā, 1: 61, 58.

80. This phrase is from Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 429.
81. Cf. the third-person perspective marked in the following passages. Ibn Taymiyya,
Radd, 429: “this faculty inclines toward the person it knows to be just, truthful,
and beneficent”; 430: “human beings as a whole are drawn toward those char-
acterized by fine qualities.” Of course, the third-person perspective is not neces-
sarily the perspective of the beneficiary—it can be the perspective of a party who
personally gains nothing from such acts; and Ibn Taymiyya makes clear that one
may be drawn to virtuous individuals even if one receives no benefit (e.g., 429).
82. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Tuḥfa al-ʿirāqiyya fiʾl-aʿmāl al-qalbiyya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
10: 84.
83. Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 3:  303. The need for desire (shahwa) as a source of
hardship recurs in ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s discussion of the conditions for reward in
Taklīf, 511–19. See also briefly Vasalou, Moral Agents and Their Deserts, 79–80,
and the references there. The connection between the notions of kulfa and
taklīf was by no means a Muʿtazilite preserve and is found widely among other
authors. See, for example, al-Baghdādī, Kitāb Uṣūl al-dīn, 207, using a turn of
phrase very similar to the one just heard from Ibn Mattawayh.
84. Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 3: 141.
85. ʿAbd al-Jabbār, al-Aṣlaḥ/Istiḥqāq al-dhamm/al-Tawba, 334; al-Qarāfī, Kitāb
al-Furūq, 1: 312.
86. Cf. Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 3:  411:  “When we refer to something as a claim
against someone [ḥaqq ʿalayhi], this means it is such that its exaction involves
harm for him.”
87. In Ashʿarite writings the discomfort we feel due to our inescapable sympathetic
entry into others’ suffering is often conscripted to support a self-interested account
of human motivation. Al-Ghazālī’s discussion in the Mustaṣfā is indicative in
stressing the self-referential character of the sympathetic imagination, reducing
the response of sympathy (riqqa) to a self-interested concern for one’s own wel-
fare (1: 59–60). This understanding is echoed by several other writers, such as Ibn
Fūrak, Mujarrad Maqālāt al-shaykh Abiʾl-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī, 142. Cf. Ibn Taymiyya’s
(apostrophized) remarks in “Aqwam mā qīla,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 89–90.
88. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1099a10–15.
89. Frede, “Pleasure and pain in Aristotle’s ethics,” 257, emphasis added. For
al-Ghazālī’s influential reworking of the virtues, see Sherif, Ghazali’s Theory
of Virtue. The end of habituation, al-Ghazālī writes, is that acts should become
pleasurable (ghāyatuhu an yaṣīra al-fiʿl al-ṣādir minhu ladhīdhan):  Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm
al-dīn, 3:  50. There is a real question to be asked, though, as to whether the
Islamic theological reworking of the virtues fully sustains the Aristotelian con-
ception of pleasure, in light of the influence of a Platonic view of the soul (with
its agonistic conception of the inner life), and of an instrumental view of the
relation between action and pleasure and an emphasis on the arduousness of
the ethical life that form pervasive elements of the Islamic intellectual tradition.
 Notes 271

90. Ibn Taymiyya, “Masʾala fīmā idhā kāna fiʾl-ʿabd maḥabba limā huwa khayr
wa-ḥaqq wa-maḥmūd fī nafsihi,” 445. I am very grateful to Ahmed El Shamsy for
calling my attention to this epistle. Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks in the same vicinity
seem to qualify his description of the dominance of such motivation: for exam-
ple, “God might create” in people a love of truthfulness, justice, and so on (445).
91. See, for example, ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s engagement of the aesthetic comparison in
Taʿdīl, 19–20.
92. Ibn Taymiyya, “Masʾala fīmā idhā kāna fiʾl-ʿabd maḥabba,” 446.
93. Ibn Taymiyya, Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, 64. On the next page he relabels these,
using a more distinctive philosophical terminology, as ladhdhāt ḥissiyya, wah-
miyya, ʿaqliyya.
94. The phrase is from ibid., 115. Ibn Taymiyya’s emphasis on sensory or physical
goods will come into view in ­chapter 2 when we discuss the notion of fiṭra, but
it surfaces clearly later in the epistle we have been considering: Ibn Taymiyya,
“Masʾala fīmā idhā kāna fiʾl-ʿabd maḥabba,” 447, last paragraph. As we will see
in the next chapter, he also links ethical judgments to reason, which assesses the
long-term consequences of immediate pleasures. A link with wahm also floats
around in Ibn Taymiyya, Radd (e.g., 429), but there is a question to be asked as to
whether this is a positive or a dialectical use of Avicenna’s epistemological terms.
95. Ibn Taymiyya, “Qāʿida fiʾl-muʿjizāt waʾl-karāmāt,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 11: 358.
The point often emerges in Ibn Taymiyya’s criticism of the Muʿtazilite concep-
tion of disinterested action, which takes shape as a double claim that people
neither in fact act disinterestedly nor ought to do so.
96. A more properly Aristotelian answer, of course, would have to make reference
to the character of the agent, but I  hope the purposes of the discussion are
served by this rough and heuristic comparison.
97. Respectively, Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 431; Ibn Taymiyya, Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, 154.
98. The terms are from Ibn Taymiyya, Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, 64.
99. Ibn Taymiyya, “Ḥaqīqat kasb al-ʿabd mā hiya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 396–98.
100. Ibn Taymiyya, Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, 129. Both sets of consequences interpret Ibn
Taymiyya’s remark apropos evil consequences (qubḥ ʿāqibatihi) in Radd, 431.
101. See, for instance, Ibn Taymiyya, “Suʾila ʿan rajul ukhidha māluhu ẓulman
bi-ghayr ḥaqq,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 30: 364–65.
102. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 423.
103. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Ḥisba,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 28: 100.
104. Reading yafʿalūna instead of yanfūna.
105. Ibn Taymiyya, Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 20: 67. Matters are rather more complex than
my remarks suggest, given that Ibn Taymiyya does not employ the notion of
agreement or convention in this context to isolate those norms that originate
exclusively in the human community, but uses it as an overarching notion that
includes human convention as one of its instances and prophetic agreement as
another. Despite its recurrence, Ibn Taymiyya’s deployment of the notion of a
social convention strikes me as nebulous.
272 Notes

106. Human beings thus “must make obligatory upon themselves the things that they
need, and prohibit to themselves the things that harm them … and this can only
take place through their joint agreement, which is for them to mutually pledge and
contract themselves [al-taʿāhud waʾl-taʿāqud]” (Ibn Taymiyya, Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba,
47–48). Ibn Taymiyya refers to this collaborative project as the “common religion”
(dīn mushtarak) of human beings. Just how seriously he intends this as a sociologi-
cal genealogy of religion is a prickly question that may be sidestepped here.
107. Ibid., 103; cf. 47–48.
108. A similar analysis could be given for other instances in which Ibn Taymiyya
connects human nature to a love of justice, as in the interestingly composite
remark in Bayān talbīs al-jahmiyya fī taʾsīs bidaʿihim al-kalāmiyya, 2: 333, that
one naturally desires justice and benefit (bi-fiṭratihi yurīdu al-ʿadl waʾl-maṣlaḥa).
In the very next breath he refers us to “the natural association that [people] can-
not live without [al-ijtimāʿ al-fiṭrī al-ṭabīʿī alladhī lā yaʿīshūna bi-dūnihi],” sug-
gesting that it is once again the first-person plural, communal perspective on
justice that underpins his thinking.
109. Among Ibn Taymiyya’s immediate interlocutors, this is an assumption that
underpins the thinking of al-Rāzī (Ibn Taymiyya’s multiple debts to whom are
explored in ­chapter 3), at least in his earlier work, though he would later renege
on it when succumbing to pessimism on several fronts. See Shihadeh’s discus-
sion in Teleological Ethics of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, 80–83, 170–81.
110. The characterization is Ibn Mattawayh’s (Majmūʿ, 1: 242).
111. The phrase is from Ibn Taymiyya, “Qāʿida fī anna jins fiʿl al-maʾmūr bihi aʿẓam
min jins tark al-manhiyy ʿanhu,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 20: 121. For Sidgwick’s dis-
tinction, see The Methods of Ethics, 105.
112. Ibn Taymiyya, “Masʾalat taḥsīn al-ʿaql wa-taqbīḥuhu,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
8: 435–36.
113. Ibn Taymiyya does occasionally use the term wajh, but not in a robust sense: for
example, “Masʾala fīmā idhā kāna fiʾl-ʿabd maḥabba,” 447 (wajh al-ḥusn), “Tafsīr
sūrat al-Fātiḥa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 21 (wajh ḥusnihi wa-khayrihi). And see
­chapter 4 for what he does say elsewhere about desert. The language of ḥuqūq of
course makes numerous appearances in Ibn Taymiyya’s practical legal writings.
114. See, for example, Ibn Taymiyya, “Qāʿida fiʾl-muʿjizāt waʾl-karāmāt,” in Majmūʿ
Fatāwā, 11: 354. See also the discussion of this point in ­chapter 3.
115. Ibn Taymiyya, “Qāʿida nāfiʿa fī wujūb al-iʿtiṣām biʾl-risāla,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
19: 95; Ibn Taymiyya, “Faṣl jāmiʿ fī taʿāruḍ al-ḥasanāt aw-al-sayyiʾāt,” in Majmūʿ
Fatāwā, 20: 48.
116. The statements are, respectively, from Ibn Taymiyya, “Ḥadīth innī ḥarramtu
al-ẓulm ʿalā nafsī,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 18: 157 (cf. al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya fī iṣlāḥ
al-rāʿī waʾl-raʿiyya, 134); and Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya,” in
Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 3: 114. Cf. Anjum’s emphasis on the centrality of justice in Ibn
Taymiyya’s thought in Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought, 241–44.
 Notes 273

117. The former kind of demand is highlighted, for example, in Ibn Taymiyya,
al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, 134–35, discussing rulings that include the prohibition
of usury and gambling. Yet it is the latter that is highlighted, with reference
to much the same kinds of cases, in Ibn Taymiyya, al-Qawāʿid al-nūrāniyya
al-fiqhiyya, 171, 169, referring to the corruption or harm (fasād/mafsada) result-
ing from them. Cf. the remarks in Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Qiyās fiʾl-sharʿ al-Islāmī,”
in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 20: 538–39. In raising the question which of these demands
is basic, it is worth noting that this is once more a question Ibn Taymiyya him-
self does not wedge open; he often treats the relevant notions as if there is
no distinction to be marked between them. Indeed in the Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba
(36–37), Ibn Taymiyya explicitly states that terms such as nāfiʿ, ṣāliḥ,ʿadl, and
so on, signify the same thing (asmāʾ mutakāfiʾa musammāhā wāḥid biʾl-dhāt).
118. Ibn Taymiyya, “Qāʿida fīmā yajibu min al-muʿāwaḍāt wa-naḥwa dhālika,” in
Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 29: 188. Cf. Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 28: 183–84; “Ḥadīth innī ḥarramtu
al-ẓulm ʿalā nafsī,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 18: 165 (tellingly lining up ẓulm next to
the more teleological notion fasād).
119. See indicatively Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Qiyās fiʾl-sharʿ al-Islāmī,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
20: 504–5: sound analogy consists in “uniting similar things and distinguish-
ing between dissimilar things … and it forms part of the justice [ʿadl] that God
brought through His messengers.” Cf. Ibn Taymiyya, Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, 36.
120. Ibn Taymiyya, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, 134.
121. Ibn Taymiyya, “Qāʿida fīmā yajibu min al-muʿāwaḍāt wa-naḥwa dhālika,” in
Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 29: 189–90.
122. Ibn Taymiyya, Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, 103: justice in partnerships and commuta-
tive transactions (al-mushārakāt waʾl-muʿāwaḍāt) is necessary for social coop-
eration. Cf. 56 (the context is apostrophized, but this statement seems to be
in Ibn Taymiyya’s own voice): “justice, truthfulness, and the keeping of oaths”
are “among the things without which the welfare of mundane life cannot be
achieved.”
123. Ibn Taymiyya, “Tafsīr sūrat al-Baqara,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 80.
124. Ibid., 79.
125. Though, as we will see in c­ hapter  5, Ibn Taymiyya himself is critical of this
restrictive way of regimenting the aims of the Law.
126. Reinhart, Before Revelation, 161. Ibn Taymiyya refers to Abuʾl-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī
in various locations, notably in the Darʾ taʿāruḍ, e.g., 8:  17 ff., 8:  295–96,
9:  132 ff. His greater familiarity with al-Baṣrī’s work probably reflects the
latter’s influence among some of the thinkers Ibn Taymiyya engages more
directly, such as al-Rāzī. This picture of Ibn Taymiyya’s limited engagement
of Muʿtazilite texts is supported by the helpful list of his bibliographical ref-
erences compiled by al-Shāmī in “Ibn Taymiyya.” One of the few references
to notable Muʿtazilite texts appearing in this list is to ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s works
on prophethood (239).
274 Notes

127. The emphasis should be on “relative” here. See, for example, al-Rāzī, al-Maṭālib
al-ʿāliya min al-ʿilm al-ilāhī, 3: 66, where al-Rāzī notes that in the Muʿtazilite view,
“the question whether something is good or bad is distinct from the question
whether it promotes welfare or undermines it [iʿtibār al-ḥusn waʾl-qubḥ mughāyir
li-iʿtibār kawnihi maṣlaḥa wa-mafsada]”—though this statement marks the dis-
tinction by overshooting the mark, given what was said earlier concerning the
importance of considerations of utility in the (Baṣran) Muʿtazilite scheme. The
notion of wujūh appears in several places in his discussion, e.g., 3: 338, 3: 285, in
a passage very similar to one from al-Rāzī ’s al-Arbaʿīn fī uṣūl al-dīn cited by Ibn
Taymiyya himself in his Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 444. Cf. al-Anṣārī, Ghunya, 2: 1009 ff.
There are places where Ibn Taymiyya gestures toward the distinction carried by
al-Rāzī ’s first quote, for example, Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya,” in
Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 3: 115; this distinction is also to an extent implicit in a related dis-
tinction drawn on the level of motivation, which Ibn Taymiyya discusses in sev-
eral places, between interested and disinterested actions (between actions that
“give something back to the agent” [yaʿūdu ilayhi] and actions that do not: see,
for example, Ibn Taymiyya, “Aqwam mā qīla,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 89–90). But
such gestures do not seem to build up to a thick acknowledgment of the relevant
distinctions on the level of ethical ontology.
128. Hobbes, Leviathan, 39.
129. Al-Rāzī, Maṭālib, 3: 66. “Normative” is a term Shihadeh employs in this context
to speak of a stance he identifies already with al-Ghazālī (Teleological Ethics of
Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, 55). There will be more to say about this in ­chapter  3,
where the Ashʿarite position will come more fully into view.

c h a p t er   2
1. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 423.
2. Though, as Annas points out, Aristotle himself does not flag the notion of
nature in that discussion and does not clearly present the argument as an
appeal to nature; it is in his Politics that the notion of nature is put to work in a
stronger ethical sense (The Morality of Happiness, ­chapter 2, section 4).
3. De republica, III, 33, as translated in Porter, Nature as Reason, 2.
4. Porter, Nature as Reason, 1; though part of Porter’s aim in this work is to inter-
rogate certain aspects of the understanding reflected in this formulation.
5. Many of these new meanings can be considered by looking up the entry on
“ethical naturalism” in almost any recent handbook for ethical theory. Annas
has insightful remarks about the connection between contemporary invoca-
tions of nature and the one at work in ancient ethics (Morality of Happiness,
­chapter 2, section 3).
6. Michot, “La pandémie avicennienne au VIe/XIIe siècle.”
 Notes 275

7. Avicenna, al-Najā min al-gharq fī baḥr al-ḍalālāt, 126, read in conjunction with
al-Ishārāt waʾl-tanbīhāt, maʿa sharḥ Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, 1: 391.
8. Avicenna, Ishārāt, 1: 399.
9. Ibid., 1:  400. My translation is very loosely inspired by Inati’s:  Remarks and
Admonitions, 122.
10. Avicenna, Najā, 117, correcting yūjibu to tūjibu. Black translates this passage
slightly differently, notably placing a weaker emphasis on the element of activ-
ity involved: “Then something occurs to his mind about which he is in doubt”
(“Estimation (wahm) in Avicenna,” 233). But this active note is brought out dis-
tinctly by Avicenna at various places, including his version of the thought exper-
iment in the Kitāb al-Shifāʾ: al-Manṭiq: al-Burhān, 65–66: idhā faʿala dhālika
kullahu wa-rāma an yushakkika fīhi nafsahu amkanahu al-shakk.
11. Avicenna, Najā, 119: innahā ghayr fiṭriyya walakinnahā mutaqarrira ʿinda al-anfus
li-anna al-ʿāda tastamirru [correcting yastamirru] ʿalayhā mundhu al-ṣibā wa-fiʾl-
muwāḍaʿāt al-ittifāqiyya. Cf. the reference to “conventional views” (ārāʾ …
iṣṭilāḥiyya) in Avicenna’s remarks about practical reason in Kitāb al-Shifāʾ:
al-Ṭabīʿiyyāt: al-Nafs, 37.
12. For more on the argument, see Black, “Avicenna on self-awareness and know-
ing that one knows,” and references there. For a reading of its connection
to the thought experiment concerning widely accepted premises, see Black,
“Estimation (wahm) in Avicenna,” esp. 236–39.
13. Singer, “Sidgwick and Reflective Equilibrium,” 516.
14. The notion of fiṭra itself makes several appearances in this work; for more
on this, see Gauthier’s (rather polemical) remarks in his introduction to Ibn
Ṭufayl, Hayy ben Yaqdhân, esp. xii–xvii.
15. Avicenna, Burhān, 65. Al-Rāzī ’s formulation can be found in Ibn Taymiyya,
Radd, 397–99, and also in al-Rāzī, Sharḥ al-Ishārāt waʾl-tanbīhāt, 1: 268–69.
16. Avicenna, Nafs, 183; the relevant discussion begins on 181.
17. Ibid., 183.
18. The quote is from al-Tawḥīdī and Miskawayh, al-Hawāmil waʾl-shawāmil, 317,
read against the preceding discussion. Miskawayh’s conclusion, as I  take it,
is that this variability counts against considering such responses to constitute
judgments of reason. Avicenna’s phrasing, when he refers to the slaughter of
animals and the response of riqqa (Ishārāt, 1: 400), leaves it more ambiguous
whether he is calling attention to the variability of this particular response
(ittibāʿan limā fiʾl-gharīza min al-riqqa li-man takūnu gharīzatuhu kadhālika,
wa-hum akthar al-nās). If the proposal outlined later in the main text is correct,
the fact that such emotions reflect our animal rather than our rational nature
may also account for their exclusion. The case of animal slaughter was the sub-
ject of a familiar challenge to the revealed Law and indeed to the value of proph-
ecy as such on the part of the “Barāhima.” See indicatively al-Anṣārī, Ghunya,
2:  1003, and for some extra context, see Crone, “Barāhima.” Miskawayh’s
276 Notes

argument is interestingly reprised by other participants in the kalām debate

about ethics: see, for example, Ibn ʿAqīl, Wāḍiḥ, 1: 112.
19. Al-Rāzī makes the connection to the social whole plain when he refers to
al-niẓām al-kullī waʾl-maṣlaḥa al-ʿāmma. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 398; al-Rāzī,
Sharḥ al-Ishārāt, 1: 268.
20. Many of these points can be found gathered in Avicenna’s discussion of estima-
tive propositions in Najā, 115–18.
21. Ibid., 117.
22. Black, “Estimation (wahm) in Avicenna,” 254n77.
23. Avicenna, Najā, 117 (cf. his reference to fiṭra fāsida in connection with the esti-
mation on 118). It is tempting to speak of two conflicting uses of nature here,
but we should keep in mind Gutas’s broad point that fiṭra refers us to nothing
thicker than the “natural operation of the mind,” the “natural mode of opera-
tion of each faculty” (“The empiricism of Avicenna,” 408, 409). The positive
aspect of fiṭra is also highlighted in the connection between fiṭra and the notion
of intuition (ḥads) remarked by Gutas in Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition;
see his discussion of intuition 159–76. For a more focused discussion of
Avicenna’s notion of fiṭra, see Griffel, “Al-Ghazālī ’s use of ‘original human dis-
position’ (fiṭra) and its background in the teachings of al-Fārābī and Avicenna,”
though Griffel’s claim that Avicenna “has a much more precise notion of fiṭra
[than Fārābī] that he fully integrates in his epistemological theories” (11) does
not entirely convince me. I owe many moments in my understanding of this
complex paper trail to extensive exchanges with Frank Griffel, who gave me
generously of his time and his superior knowledge of the sources.
24. Avicenna, Nafs, 37.
25. Ibid., 163. These remarks mainly draw on 147–48, 162–64, and Avicenna, Najā,
347. Helpful accounts of Avicenna’s view of estimation that offer a more holistic
view of its operations include Black, “Estimation (wahm) in Avicenna”; Hasse,
Avicenna’s De Anima in the Latin West, 127–41. Another feature of Avicenna’s
notion of the estimation that generates tensions in this context is the fact that
in certain passages he connects the estimation to the emotions (e.g., Nafs, 162,
166). This will seem puzzling in part given that Avicenna elsewhere associates
the emotions with the appetitive side of our animal nature (the emotions of
shame and embarrassment, notably, are referred to as al-quwwa al-ḥayawāniyya
al-nuzūʿiyya in Najā, 330–31). More relevant for us, it makes the inclusion of the
estimation in the thought experiment doubly puzzling given Avicenna’s exclu-
sion of emotional response from this experiment. See Hasse, Avicenna’s De
Anima in the Latin West, 133–34, 139–40, for some pertinent remarks on the
connection between the emotions and the estimation. I  do not find Hasse’s
solution wholly satisfying, but this probably reflects the “sketchy” character of
Avicenna’s discussion and the problems created by his excessive ambition in
 Notes 277

trying “to put too much into the scheme he developed,” as pointed out by Hasse
himself (136, 140).
26. Avicenna’s interest in drawing that distinction is flagged at several moments
in the passage from the Ishārāt cited in part earlier. Ibn Taymiyya himself also
clearly takes this to be central to Avicenna’s aims, as attested by the energy
he devotes to the deconstruction of the class of primary propositions; see Ibn
Taymiyya, Radd, 399 ff.
27. Avicenna, Ishārāt, 1:  401. Cf. Marmura, “Ghazālī on ethical premises,” 263;
Black, “Estimation (wahm) in Avicenna,” 241.
28. Avicenna, Nafs, 37: “if [these propositions] are demonstrated, they also become
part of the premises of reason”—a big if.
29. Avicenna, Ishārāt, 1: 392. Cf. Avicenna, Najā, 121: muqaddimāt taḥduthu fiʾl-insān
min jihat quwwatihi al-ʿaqliyya.
30. Avicenna, Burhān, 65–56. It is also noteworthy that when Avicenna elsewhere
refers to widely accepted propositions, he refers to their difference from rational
propositions (al-muqaddimāt al-ʿaqliyya al-maḥḍa, al-awwaliyyāt al-ʿaqliyya
al-maḥḍa) as having been established “in the books of logic”; see, for example,
Avicenna, Nafs, 37; Avicenna, Najā, 331.
31. The inclusion of sense perception will not seem hard to account for even if we
take Avicenna’s interest to lie in isolating primary intelligibles. Sense perception,
as various commentators have emphasized, is a precondition for the formation
of these intelligibles; in this sense they are not a priori or innate. See, for exam-
ple, Gutas, “The empiricism of Avicenna,” 406–7; cf. Black, “Certitude, justifi-
cation, and the principles of knowledge in Avicenna’s epistemology,” 125–26. It
is doubtful to me whether a similar story could be constructed for the estima-
tion. Avicenna’s explicit reference in the Ishārāt passage to sense perception and
estimation as epistemic arbiters as against mere preconditions (lam yaqḍi bihā
al-insān tāʿatan li-ʿaqlihi aw-wahmihi aw-ḥissihi) certainly creates tension for such
interpretations.
32. Sebti, “Avicenna’s ‘flying man’ argument as a proof of the immateriality of
the soul.”
33. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 428. I have in mind the skepticism al-Rāzī himself would
express about the ability of this thought experiment to achieve the epistemo-
logical position it claims for itself. Confronting a Muʿtazilite response to this
experiment (“I imagine myself free from all these conditions—and still I affirm
this moral judgment”), al-Rāzī suggests that to think you have stepped outside
the human condition and divested yourself from the social contingencies that
shaped you is not the same as having succeeded. We are back to the willful
disputation of necessary knowledge on which debates about ethics often found-
ered. See the instructive remarks in al-Maḥṣul fī ʿilm uṣūl al-fiqh, 1: 39; compare
al-Ghazālī ’s confidence in proposing this experiment in Mustaṣfā, 1: 49.
278 Notes

34. For these arguments, see, respectively, Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 428–29, 432, 424.
Cf. Ibn Taymiyya’s evocation of the ethical dimensions of the estimation in
Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 6: 52–55, raising a question about the distinction between wahm
and ʿaql.
35. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 423–24.
36. Ibid., 429.
37. Ibid., 430.
38. Ibn Taymiyya, “Sharḥ kalimāt min ‘Futūḥ al-ghayb,’ ” in Jāmiʿ al-rasāʾil, 2: 85.
39. Given this context, as just mentioned, it may not seem surprising that it is
in the Radd that the notion of fiṭra figures most prominently within Ibn
Taymiyya’s ethical remarks. It also makes important appearances in other texts,
particularly the Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql waʾl-naql, written in the same period. Yet
there is certainly a question to be asked as to why the use of this notion is
not sustained with unflagging consistency across Ibn Taymiyya’s output. It is a
question one asks, for example, faced with the Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, whose sub-
ject matter would have naturally attracted the language of fiṭra in the Radd and
elsewhere, yet in which this language remains curiously absent. One might ask
similar questions apropos Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks about ethics in works such
as al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya, Kitāb al-Nubuwwāt, or Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, to men-
tion but a few examples. A satisfying explanation of this fluctuating presence
would unfortunately require a firmer chronology of Ibn Taymiyya’s works than
we possess.
40. This is linked to the controversial theological question regarding God’s spa-
tial location, particularly the possibility of describing God as being “above” the
world, which philosophically minded thinkers dismissed as a faulty product of
the estimation. Affirming this characterization of God, Ibn Taymiyya rejects the
latter diagnosis. Some of his most direct discussions of this point can be found
in the sixth volume of Darʾ taʿāruḍ. See also Marcotte, “Ibn Taymiyya et sa cri-
tique des produits de la faculté d’estimation (Wahmiyyāt) dans le Darʾ Taʿāruḍ
al-ʿaql waʾl-naql.”
41. Ibn Taymiyya does not make his position crystal clear. In one of his most direct
remarks (Radd, 428), in fact, he connects Avicenna’s psychological sentiments
to the notion of “agreeability,” which is tied more immediately to our response
to benefit. We also heard Ibn Taymiyya dialectically suggest a link between our
emotional responses and the “inner senses” (432).
42. Similarly, to the extent that the pleasure people take in morally good actions,
as I suggested in c­ hapter 1, ultimately comes down to the awareness of their
consequences—such as the social consequences of people’s hatred and the reli-
gious threat of punishment (Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 431)—this pleasure clearly
rests on prior processes of social and religious education.
43. Ibid., 423–24.
44. ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taʿdīl, 18.
 Notes 279

45. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 422, 429.

46. Ibid., 423–24.
47. Avicenna, Burhān, 95, drawing on Janssens’s translation in “ ‘Experience’
(tajriba) in classical Arabic philosophy (al-Fārābī–Avicenna),” 55.
48. Or more specifically, Gutas suggests, with the practice of medicine (“Medical
theory and scientific method in the age of Avicenna,” 151–52). For more on
Avicenna’s notion of tajriba and its relation to his epistemological scheme
(including the notion of induction or istiqrāʾ), see Janssens, “ ‘Experience’
(tajriba) in classical Arabic philosophy (al-Fārābī–Avicenna)”; McGinnis,
“Scientific methodologies in medieval Islam.”
49. For these points, see in order Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 95, 386, 92 (cf. 386: hādhā
al-jins taḥṣulu bihi al-ladhdha/al-alam), 386. Many of Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks on
mujarrabāt/tajribiyyāt can be found in concentration in Radd, 92–95, 386–88.
For further commentary on Ibn Taymiyya’s treatment of this subject and the
related subject of natural causation, see Kügelgen, “The poison of philosophy,”
306–12.
50. Though whether they necessarily bear such a connection is an issue debated in
the Radd, notably in discussing the relationship between the propositions des-
ignated as ḥadsiyyāt and empirical judgments. See, for example, Radd, 93–94.
51. Ibn Taymiyya, “Risāla fiʾl-Iḥtijāj biʾl-qadar,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 308–9. Cf.
the causal emphasis in Ibn Taymiyya’s specification of what is “agreeable”
(mulāʾim) and “disagreeable” (munāfir) in “Al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya,” in Majmūʿ
Fatāwā, 3: 114–15: “this is for an act to be the cause [sabab] of what the agent loves
and takes pleasure in, and what he hates and suffers harm from.”
52. See especially Ibn Taymiyya’s suggestive remarks in “Ḥaqīqat kasb al-ʿabd mā
hiya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 396–98; see also the discussion in ­chapter 4.
53. For example, the grammar of the sentence “why then are judgments of expe-
rience … while these ones …” seems to imply a contrast between the two that
would count against taking the latter to constitute a subset of the former.
54. Note here Ibn Taymiyya’s formulation at Radd, 423—“Why then should those
propositions belong to the certainties known by the senses and by reason,
such as by experience [al-ʿaql kaʾl-tajriba] …?”—which subsumes tajriba under
reason.
55. Ibn Taymiyya refers the pleasure we derive from esteem to the “internal sense”
(ḥiss bāṭin) in crafting his argument against Avicenna at Radd, 432. Once again,
of course, it is not easy to disentangle Ibn Taymiyya’s dialectical arguments
from his positive views; plus, in the same vicinity he refers this pleasure to the
estimation (wahm), a classification that is in greater accord with the threefold
scheme of pleasures outlined in Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, 64–65. However we clas-
sify this type of pleasure, it seems important to make room for it.
56. See, for example, Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 8:  450 (where the desire for
knowledge is also mentioned), 9: 374–75. For this specification of our fiṭra, cf.
280 Notes

in a different context Ibn Taymiyya, Bayān talbīs, 2:  335. Outside the ethical
context, to the extent that such distinctions can be drawn at all sharply, fiṭra is
defined by a desire or love for God; see the next section.
57. See the discussion in the next sections of this chapter for further documenta-
tion of this usage.
58. Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 9: 22.
59. Ibn Taymiyya, Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 700. This is a point that, raised in more
narrowly religious terms (as a question about the relation between religious
uprightness and worldly happiness: e.g., Ibn Taymiyya, Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, 113
ff.), takes its place within Ibn Taymiyya’s broader polemical engagement with
Ashʿarite theology, particularly the Ashʿarite interrogation of the link between
God’s Law and human welfare.
60. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 92, 386.
61. Ibid., 386.
62. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1: 95 ff.
63. An example is Ibn Taymiyya’s reference to the connection between lethal poi-
sons and illness or death (Radd, 386), a longer causal chain fully at home in the
medical context with which experiential judgments are ranged.
64. For more on this tradition, helpful starting points are Ess, Zwischen Hadith und
Theologie, 101–14, and for its later development, Adang, “Islam as the inborn reli-
gion of mankind,” and references there. A more concentrated treatment of the
notion of fiṭra, though not a uniformly methodical one, is provided by Gobillot
in La conception originelle.
65. See Watt, “Ḥanīf.”
66. For more on these legal dimensions, see Gobillot, La conception originelle, 18–31;
Adang, “Islam as the inborn religion of mankind,” 403–8. See also Macdonald,
“Fiṭra.” These dimensions surface in many places of Ibn Taymiyya’s engage-
ment with this tradition in volume 8 of Darʾ taʿāruḍ. It was in fact A. J. Wensick’s
view that this hadith found its origins in questions concerning conduct in war;
for this view and Ess’s alternative proposal, which stresses this tradition’s exe-
getical nature, see Ess, Zwischen Hadith und Theologie, 101–3.
67. For more on the Muʿtazilite position, see Gobillot, La conception originelle,
32–45, passim. I speak more cautiously of a “positively qualified religious state”
because it does not appear to me from Gobillot’s discussion or from some of the
texts she cites that the Muʿtazilite interpretation of this notion was a wholly uni-
fied one and that this state was predominantly characterized by the Muʿtazilites
as “Islam,” even though this has often been taken to represent the Muʿtazilite
position (e.g., Macdonald, “Fiṭra,” 932).
68. Gobillot, La conception originelle, 45. In taking Ibn Taymiyya to have combined
an affirmation of our natural knowledge of God and a deterministic position,
my view departs from the one defended by Holtzman in “Human choice,
divine guidance and the fiṭra tradition.” Holtzman ascribes to Ibn Taymiyya
 Notes 281

the view that “faith and unbelief are not predetermined but are rather a mat-
ter for human choice” (175), suggesting that the fiṭra tradition “is used by
Ibn Taymiyya to assert the existence of human free will when it comes to
the matter of belief and unbelief” (165). There is much evidence in volume 8
of the Darʾ taʿāruḍ that contradicts this view, most succinctly 8: 361–62:
al-mawlūd yūladu ʿalaʾl-fiṭra salīman thumma yufsiduhu abawāhu wa-dhālika
ayḍan bi-qaḍāʾ Allāh wa-qadarihi; cf. 8: 389, 410; and see generally 359 ff. for
a discussion of Ibn Ḥanbal’s two interpretations and Ibn Taymiyya’s com-
mentary. For further discussion of Ibn Taymiyya’s view of fiṭra, see Gobillot’s
brief remarks in La conception originelle, 64–65, as well as the introductory
remarks to her translation of Ibn Taymiyya’s Risālat al-kalām ʿala-l-fiṭra in
“L’épître du discours sur la fiṭra (Risāla fī-l-kalam ʿalā-l-fiṭra) de Taqī-l-Din
Aḥmad Ibn Taymīya (661/1262–728/1328)”; Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy
of Perpetual Optimism, 39–44; Hallaq, “Ibn Taymiyya on the existence of
God,” focusing on the role of fiṭra in religious epistemology (a discussion
limited by its textual bases, as noted by Hoover); and in the context of Ibn
Taymiyya’s critique of logic, Kügelgen’s remarks in “Ibn Taymīyas Kritik an
der aristotelischen Logik und sein Gegenentwurf,” esp. 194–99. See also
Anjum, Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought, ­chapters 5 and
6, passim; Özervarli, “Divine wisdom, human agency and the fiṭra in Ibn
Taymiyya’s thought.”
69. Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 8: 383.
70. Ibid.
71. Besides the argument outlined next in the main text, other passages that mark
the composite scope of fiṭra include ibid., 8:  463:  al-muqtaḍī fīhā [=al-fiṭra]
liʾl-ʿilm waʾl-irāda al-nāfiʿa qā’im; 7:  425:  al-nufūs fīhā irādāt fiṭriyya wa-ʿulūm
fiṭriyya.
72. See ibid., 8: 456–60 for this argument; the rational arguments for fiṭra extend
from 8: 456 ff.
73. For more on the Muʿtazilite argument, see Vasalou, “Equal before the Law”;
Marmura, “A medieval Islamic argument.” Ibn Taymiyya, on the one hand, has
recrafted the argument in a way that has shorn it of its distinctive edge. For the
Muʿtazilites had framed this as a choice between telling the truth and lying
where self-interest was neutralized, and it was then an interesting question
what human beings would do faced with a choice in which only moral value
remains to distinguish two actions. Ibn Taymiyya, by contrast, stacks both moral
value and self-interest on the same side, tipping the scales so heavily that the
conclusion becomes trivial, as trivial as the proposition—which he strangely
treats as a matter for proof—that we desire what is in our interests. Similarly, it
clearly does not follow from the fact that we desire what benefits us that we in
fact desire everything that benefits us—for we may not know of a given thing
(including God) that it does so. Mutatis mutandis about beliefs.
282 Notes

74. “At least in part”:  this description leaves out the “God-centered perspective,”
which sees God as an object of intrinsic love and worship, as against an agent
for the fulfillment of human needs. See ­chapter 4.
75. This is clearly a theme, for example, in the discussion in Ibn Taymiyya, “Tafsīr
sūrat al-Fātiḥa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 12–15.
76. Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 8: 448.
77. Ibid., 8: 384.
78. In this context the cognitive and affective elements often seem to shade into
each other without distinction, but the relationship between them is explicitly
thematized in places. This relationship is most basically one of logical depend-
ence, to the extent that a judgment of existence is logically implied by emotional
responses that take God as their object. Thus attitudes of “love, humility, fear,
hope, glorification … and so on, are conditional on [mashrūṭ bi] the awareness
of the object of one’s … love, hope, fear, worship,” and thus “the experience of
love, fear, desire and veneration for God is derivative from [or posterior to: farʿ
ʿalā] the acknowledgment of God, and the latter entails [mustalzim] the former”
(Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 3:  136–37). Cf. 8:  450, where love and cognition
are identified as separate forms of entailment (iqtiḍāʾ) of our fiṭra:  lā budda
an yakūna fiʾl-fiṭra muqtaḍin liʾl-ʿilm wa-muqtaḍin liʾl-maḥabba, waʾl-maḥabba
mashrūṭa biʾl-ʿilm fa-inna mā lā yashʿuru al-insān bihi lā yuḥibbuhu.
79. The quotes are from Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 8:  489 (cf. 491:  al-fiṭra
al-ṭabīʿiyya al-ʿaqliyya); Bayān talbīs, 2: 18; Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 9: 171. For the last point,
see Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 6: 105–6.
80. When earlier characterizing this convergence, of course, I  had framed it in
terms of reason and revelation. I will be returning to this characterization, as to
Ibn Taymiyya’s motivations in pressing his ethical claims, in ­chapter 5.
81. On one level at least, relating to God’s legislative will, though not His ontologi-
cal will. See c­ hapter 4.
82. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 26.
83. Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 8: 445. This requirement is closely involved in Ibn
Taymiyya’s analysis of what it means to say we are born “with” knowledge of
God. He seems to understand this claim not in occurrent but in dispositional
terms, so that its truth comes down to the truth of the conditional statement “if
people are/were left to the devices of their sound nature and no obstructions
or corrupting influences arise/arose, they will/would attain actual knowledge
and belief.” He thus frequently uses terms suggestive of capacity or receptivity
(quwwa/qubūl/istiʿdād/ṣalāḥiyya, 8: 446). Yet there is a question as to whether
this disposition requires external causes (asbāb) to be realized, partly parsed as a
question about whether our nature necessitates this knowledge (taqtaḍī/tūjibu/
tastalzimu) if left unimpeded or merely makes it possible (mumkin), and then
external causes are required to actualize it (8: 447). I take it that the onus falls
on the denial of the need for external causes, which Ibn Taymiyya argues would
 Notes 283

nullify the very notion of a specific disposition to belief as against unbelief, for
unbelief is also realized through external causes and belief/unbelief is then
imputed to the cause (uḍīfat ilaʾl-sabab, 8: 448). For more on this, see Hoover,
Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 40–42; Hallaq, “Ibn Taymiyya on
the existence of God”; Anjum, Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought,
221–23. Central to Ibn Taymiyya’s position is the idea that this is the position that
best meshes with the ascription of a commendable or praiseworthy aspect to the
human fiṭra.
84. Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 8: 456–58.
85. See ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Aṣlaḥ, 34–35. This distinction is mirrored in al-Rāzī ’s
remarks in Maṭālib, 3:  22. And see Ibn Mattawayh’s remarks about the bal-
ance of overall pleasure/pain in relation to these notions in Majmūʿ, 3: 166–67
(innamā yūṣafu bi-annahu nafʿ idhā lam yuʿqib ḍararan yūfī ʿalayhi).
86. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 430; Ibn Taymiyya, “Sharḥ kalimat min ‘Futūḥ al-ghayb,’ ”
in Jāmiʿ al-rasāʾil, 2: 85.
87. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 423. Where does the notion of mulāʾama stand relative
to this distinction? The passage from the Radd (430) quoted above contrasts it
with the term ḍarar, aligning it with the more inclusive and less experiential
notion of benefit. Yet elsewhere it appears to be construed in more experien-
tial terms, as, for example, in the following parataxis from Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba,
64: “Love is the efficient cause for attaining that which is agreeable, beloved,
desired [al-mulāʾim al-maḥbūb al-mushtahā].”
88. An example of this we have already seen: “When people say ‘justice is good and
injustice is bad,’ what they mean by this is that justice is beloved to our nature,
so that its realization causes [one’s nature] pleasure and joy, and that it is benefi-
cial for its bearer and for those other than its bearer” (Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 423).
89. Cf. Meier, “The cleanest about predestination,” 318–24; Bell, Love Theory in
Later Ḥanbalite Islam, particularly 89–91. Bell picks up on the evident resem-
blance connecting Ibn Taymiyya’s critique of the monists to his critique of the
Ashʿarites, which will come into view in ­chapter  4; in both cases the charge
is that of undermining the distinction between what God loves and what God
hates. In Ibn Taymiyya’s view, Bell suggests, the Sufis translated into prac-
tice what the Ashʿarites had expressed in dogmatic terms. For Ibn Taymiyya’s
broader critique of monistic Sufism, see Knysh, Ibn ʿArabi in the Later Islamic
Tradition, ­chapter 4.
90. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 3: 117.
91. Ibn Taymiyya, “Risāla fiʾl-Iḥtijāj biʾl-qadar,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 309–10.
92. The phrase is Anjum’s in Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought,
224, speaking of fiṭra. The questions regarding the extent of ethical knowledge
and the ethical status of fiṭra are key themes in Anjum’s discussion, especially
in ­chapters 5 and 6. While my view converges with Anjum’s on a number
of points—he also emphasizes, for example, the conative aspect of fiṭra (221:
284 Notes

“while intellect is a tool, fiṭra is an inclination”) and the role of empirical rea-
soning in ethics (224)—my account also diverges from his in several others, for
example in giving a stronger hearing to the ambivalent role of the natural in Ibn
Taymiyya’s understanding (“fiṭra is a divinely placed inclination in the human
psyche toward all that is good,” 223), as also in giving a stronger hearing to
Ibn Taymiyya’s objectivist emphasis (contrast Anjum’s characterization of Ibn
Taymiyya’s via media on 225). And although Anjum also notes the limitations of
reason in the ethical life (e.g., 201), it seems to me that the description of reason
as “effective” in this domain (207) is too unnuanced.
93. Ibn Taymiyya, “Tafsīr sūrat al-Fātiḥa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 38.
94. Ibn Taymiyya, Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, 36, 130.
95. Ibn Taymiyya, “Qāʿida fī anna jins fiʿl al-maʾmūr bihi aʿẓam min jins tark
al-manhiyy ʿanhu,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 20:  121. Cf. “Al-Ḥisba,” in Majmūʿ
Fatāwā, 28: 143: even if misdeeds such as adultery, theft, or injustice of different
kinds are “disapproved of and considered blameworthy by reason and religion,
they are also coveted [mushtahā].” The distinction between right and wrong
desires sometimes seems to be enshrined in terminological choices, with good
desires referred to using the term maḥabba and bad desires using the term
hawā or shahwa (a negative association with strong Qur’anic roots). Yet this
distinction is not uniformly sustained, as already indicated by Ibn Taymiyya’s
use of the term ishtahā to speak of the infant’s positively valenced natural
desire. The positive valence of maḥabba also disappears elsewhere, as in a pas-
sage from Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba (30), where Ibn Taymiyya draws a distinction
between desiring something as an end and desiring it as a means, which often
means acting in ways that contradict one’s immediate desire. Ibn Taymiyya at
first appears to reserve the term maḥabba for the “higher” desire and the term
hawā for the desire one must forgo, yet in a clear statement he employs the
terms hawā and maḥabba to refer to both desires without distinction: lā yatruku
al-ḥayy mā yuḥibbihu wa-yahwāhu illā limā yuḥibbuhu wa-yahwāhu.
96. Ibn Taymiyya, “Qāʿida fī anna jins fiʿl al-maʿmūr bihi,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 20: 121.
“Nature” is jibilla in the first quote, but the term fiṭra appears straight after it.
97. Al-insān idhā fasidat nafsuhu aw-mizājuhu yashtahī mā yaḍurruhu wa-yaltadhdhu
bihi (Ibn Taymiyya, Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 19: 34).
98. This is also the message of another prophetic tradition widely quoted by Ibn
Taymiyya, which compares the original disposition of people before it is per-
verted with the original physical integrity of animals before they are mutilated.
See, for example, Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 8: 362, 445.
99. Cf. the point made in Ibn Taymiyya, Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 20: 44: “God naturally dis-
posed people toward the truth, and if the natural disposition is not altered, it sees
things as they really are, and knows [or declares] that which is wrong to be wrong,
and that which is right to be right [ankarat munkarahā wa-ʿarafat maʿrūfahā].”
 Notes 285

100. Annas, Morality of Happiness, 137, 177; see generally c­ hapter 2, section 3.
101. Porter, Nature as Reason, 88.
102. As noted by Pope in “Natural law and Christian ethics,” 82.
103. Quoted in Porter, Nature as Reason, 53, though Porter’s aim in the chapter
opened by this quote is in fact to tell a more complex story about the notion
of nature that figures in the scholastic appeal, emphasizing the significance
of “nature as nature” in ways that call attention to the continuities between
human beings and other animals.
104. The first quote (“fabric”) is from Hume’s “Enquiry concerning the principles
of morals,” in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the
Principles of Morals, 170.
105. Schneewind, Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant, 462.
106. Schneewind, “Voluntarism and the foundations of ethics,” in Essays on the
History of Moral Philosophy, 217.
107. Zagzebski, “Morality and religion,” 344.
108. See on this point Schneewind’s illuminating discussion in “Modern moral
philosophy:  from beginning to end?” in Essays on the History of Moral
Philosophy.
109. Porter, Nature as Reason, 17.
110. For a good starting point on this type of debate, see Crone, “Barāhima,” and
references there.
111. Though note that Baṣran Muʿtazilites, crucially, acknowledged that revela-
tion may not always be needed:  see Ibn Mattawayh’s discussion in Majmūʿ,
3: 425–30.
112. See, for example, ibid., 184–85.
113. Mānkdīm, Sharḥ, 565. Cf. ʿAbd al-Jabbār, al-Tanabbuʾāt waʾl-muʿjizāt,
45:  “Revelation [al-samʿ] … reveals the particulars of qualities known by
reason.”
114. The quotes are from Mānkdīm, Sharḥ, 565; Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 3: 446.
For more on this, see Vasalou, Moral Agents and Their Deserts, ­chapter 3, esp. 48
ff.; my discussion there also brings to view a more deontological (ḥaqq-focused)
level on which the Baṣran Muʿtazilites developed their account of the partic-
ularizing role of revelation. For the rather different Baghdādī account of the
relationship between God’s commands and the dictates of reason, see Zysow,
“Two theories of the obligation to obey God’s commands.” I use the impera-
tive language of obligation (“we must seek what serves our welfare”), follow-
ing Mānkdīm’s own reference to wujūb al-maṣlaḥa wa-qubḥ al-mafsada. A more
accurate formulation of the Baṣran view, however, is that the repulsion of harm
is obligatory, whereas the pursuit of benefit is normally only “plain good”
(ḥasan)—a more guarded phrasing that Mānkdīm himself reverts to a few
lines down.
286 Notes

115. Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 1: 22. The idea that prayer is commanded due to its
beneficial ability to “lead us to choose to do what is obligatory” (ʿAbd al-Jabbār,
Taʿdīl, 64) clearly leans on the Qur’anic verse cited above. Cf. Ibn Mattawayh,
Majmūʿ, 3: 434, for a broader proposal for unpacking this causal effect.
116. Ibn Taymiyya, “Qāʿida fī anna jins fiʿl al-maʾmūr bihi,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
20: 121. Another recurrent characterization of this conjunction is in terms of
“ignorance and injustice” (al-jahl waʾl-ẓulm)—a characterization with strong
Qur’anic resonance (Q 33:72). The view that wrongdoing is a result of igno-
rance and need, interestingly enough, had been articulated distinctly by Baṣran
Muʿtazilites; see, for example, ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taʿdīl, 185 ff. In Ibn Taymiyya’s
version, however, it has been sanitized through a reinterpretation of its epis-
temic component as a knowledge not of what is deontologically right and
wrong, but of what is beneficial and harmful.
117. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Ḥasana waʾl-sayyiʾa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 287, reading fa-lam
yafʿal instead of wa-lam yafʿal; cf. Ibn Taymiyya, Kitāb al-Nubuwwāt, 2: 925: one
“mistakenly thinks … that a given act is in one’s interest and [in fact] it is not.”
118. Ibn Taymiyya, “Kitāb Mufaṣṣal al-iʿtiqād,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 4: 45. Compare
Ibn Taymiyya’s reference to the prophets’ divine commission to “perfect our
natural constitution” in “Risāla fiʾl-Iḥtijāj biʾl-qadar,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 312;
cf. Ibn Taymiyya, Bayān talbīs, 2:  18. The examples could be multiplied ad
infinitum.
119. See Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 3:  114–15.
The passage continues: “just as people do not know by reason the particulars
concerning God’s names and attributes which the prophets have informed us
about, even though they might know their generalities [jumal] through reason.”
The comparison is an important one. Compare also the restrictive remark in his
Fatāwā, that “were it not for the prophetic message, reason would not arrive at
the details of what is beneficial and harmful in this life and the next [fiʾl-maʿāsh
waʾl-maʿād]” (“Qāʿida nāfiʿa fī wujūb al-iʿtiṣām biʾl-risāla,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
19: 100).
120. Ibn Taymiyya, “Tafsīr sūrat al-Fātiḥa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 35.
121. For the above, see Ibn Taymiyya, “Qāʿida nāfiʿa fī wujūb al-iʿtiṣām biʾl-risāla,”
in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 19: 99–100.
122. There will be something more to say about the place of such spiritual values
in Ibn Taymiyya’s theological work in c­ hapter 4.
123. Ibn Taymiyya, “Tafsīr sūrat al-Fātiḥa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 37–39.
124. Ibn Taymiyya, “Masʾalat taḥsīn al-ʿaql wa-taqbīḥuhu,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
8: 434–35.
125. I draw on Ibn Mattawayh’s discussion in Majmūʿ, 3: 130 ff.
126. Ibid., 184–85.
127. See my Moral Agents and Their Deserts, ­chapter 3.
128. See the discussion in Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 3: 425–30.
 Notes 287

C h a p t er   3
1. Ibn Taymiyya, “Masʾalat taḥsīn al-ʿaql wa-taqbīḥuhu,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
8: 433.
2. Al-Ghazālī, al-Iqtiṣād fiʾl-iʿtiqād, 195; cf. Ibn Fūrak, Mujarrad Maqālāt al-shaykh
Abiʾl-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī:  “The reward and punishment that attach to acquired
actions … attach to them by way of revealed report rather than reason” (99);
discussing the notion of obligation: “There is no indicant in [reason] regard-
ing the benefits and harms that form the consequences [al-ʿawāqib]” of
actions (286).
3. Ibn Taymiyya’s critical remarks about the Ashʿarites can be tracked in many
of the locations cited in c­ hapter  2. For further expressions of the objections
that opened this section, see “Risāla fiʾl-Iḥtijāj biʾl-qadar,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
8: 343–44; Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 448–49; Nubuwwāt, 1: 459.
4. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 430.
5. Al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā, 1: 56.
6. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 423.
7. Ibid., 422; Ibn Taymiyya, “Risāla fiʾl-Iḥtijāj biʾl-qadar,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
8: 309.
8. The phrase is from ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taʿdīl, 185.
9. Mānkdīm, Sharḥ, 308. The unbelievers’ moral awareness is frequently invoked
by Muʿtazilites in support of their position: see, for example, Ibn Mattawayh,
Majmūʿ, 1: 254; ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taʿdīl, 109 (yaʿrifūna dhālika wa-yukhbirūna bihi
ʿan anfushim). The “desert island” condition often turns up in anti-Muʿtazilite
critiques; see, for example, al-Rāzī, Maṭālib, 3: 67.
10. The text has jamāl (a term that appears elsewhere in the same vicinity) but with
Shihadeh (Teleological Ethics of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, 51) I take the meaning of
kamāl to offer a more natural counterpart to the preceding naqṣ.
11. Al-Juwaynī, Kitāb al-Irshād ilā qawāṭiʿ al-adilla fī uṣūl al-iʿtiqād, 265; Ibn Fūrak,
Mujarrad, 141–42. In reading Ibn Fūrak’s remarks as a psychological claim
rather than a claim about the definition of ethical concepts, my view departs
from the one expressed by Shihadeh in Teleological Ethics of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī,
51; cf. his “Theories of ethical value in kalām.” See also, as part of this same
longer lineage, al-Bāqillānī ’s Kitāb al-Tamhīd, remarking that everyone acts in
order to obtain benefit or repel harm, and “the only kinds of agents one can
conceive in the present realm [al-shāhid] are of this kind” (107).
12. Al-Juwaynī, al-ʿAqīda al-Niẓāmiyya fiʾl-arkān al-Islāmiyya, 36; note the interest-
ing continuation, juxtaposing custom and nature: liʾl-ʿādāt āthār ghayr mankūra
fiʾl-jibillāt. The notion of custom or indeed convention is also present in
al-Anṣārī ’s Ghunya—note for example his reference to right and wrong in the
sense of “that which people agreed upon” (tawāḍaʿ ʿalayhi) or which is grounded
“in their conventions and purposes” (awḍāʿihim wa-aghrāḍihim) (2: 1003)—but
288 Notes

it does not seem to me to be foregrounded. The term ʿāda itself is used to refer
more broadly to the familiar or natural operation of the world, including human
nature (e.g., 2: 998: mā yaʾbāhu al-ṭabʿ … fī mustaqirr al-ʿāda).
13. Al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā, 1: 60.
14. Our irrationality:  al-Ghazālī speaks of the subservience of the soul to the
imagination or “estimation”:  khuliqat quwā al-nafs muṭīʿa liʾl-awhām (ibid.,
1:  59). The appearance of wahm at this juncture will certainly remind us of
Avicenna, whose remarks on the educability of the estimation by “something
like experience” (shayʾ kaʾl-tajriba) al-Ghazālī echoes:  see Nafs, 163–64; cf.
Black, “Estimation (wahm) in Avicenna,” 226–27. Yet the key idea, as well as
its defining vocabulary, had been in the intellectual bloodstream much longer.
See the particularly suggestive remarks in this regard in al-Jāḥiẓ’s epistle
“Min Kitāb al-Masāʾil waʾl-jawābāt fiʾl-maʿrifa,” 322–23. A new edition of this
epistle is forthcoming by Professor James Montgomery, to whom I owe my
closer reading of it.
15. Al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā, 1:  59; cf. al-Ghazālī, Iqtiṣād, 167:  al-ṭabʿ yunaffaru ʿanhu
min awwal al-ṣibā bi-ṭarīq al-taʾdīb waʾl-istiṣlāḥ.
16. See al-Ghazālī, Miʿyār al-ʿilm fī fann al-manṭiq, 193–97; al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā,
1: 48–49, and the discussion of taḥsīn from 55 ff. Compare the reprise of the
terms of the thought experiment in al-Shahrastānī, Nihāyat al-iqdām, 371–72;
also al-Āmidī, Ghāyat al-marām fī ʿilm al-kalām, 235.
17. Al-Shahrastānī, Nihāyat al-iqdām, 373, reading lā ḥaqīqata lahu instead of the
present lahā.
18. Al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā, 1: 48.
19. Ibid., 21, 28.
20. This cadence certainly seems present, albeit discreetly, in the remark found in
Ibn Fūrak’s Mujarrad (142): unless an action brings benefit to a person, “there
is no longer any motivation for him to perform the act, and one does not choose
that act assuming he is wise/rational [ḥakīm].” In my view the notion of “wis-
dom” or “rationality” deployed in this manner clearly registers with norma-
tive tones. I would also hear al-Ashʿarī ’s remarks on the notion of obligation
(285–86) in the same tones, as does Gimaret, La doctrine d’al-Ashʿarī, 213.
21. The remark is in al-Juwaynī ’s abridgment of the work, Kitāb al-Talkhīṣ fī uṣūl
al-fiqh, 1: 159. Cf. the remark in Tamhīd, where, arguing against the view that we
know what is good by reason, al-Bāqillānī distinguishes the possibility that by
“good” one might be referring to no more than our “natural inclination toward
pleasure and natural aversion to pain” (122–23). The text reads, muyūl al-ṭibāʿ
ilā fiʿl al-ladhdhāt wa-nufūruhā ʿan fiʿl al-ālām—a phrase virtually identical with
the one used by al-Juwaynī in the same context in his Irshād—but the notion of
fiʿl must be read in context; the argument seems to refer us to the pleasure/pain
caused by others.
22. Al-Juwaynī, al-Burhān fī uṣūl al-fiqh, 1: 91–92.
 Notes 289

23. See the relevant remarks in al-Juwaynī, Niẓāmiyya, 58–59 (fa-law lam yathbut
ḥaẓẓ al-ʿabd fī tanakkub al-ʿiqāb, la-mā taqarrara fī ḥaqqihi al-wājib). Al-Juwaynī’s
role in the adoption of this position has been remarked by Schmidtke in
The Theology of al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī, 102–103; cf. ʿAbd al-Qādir, al-Masāʾil
al-mushtaraka bayna uṣūl al-fiqh wa-uṣūl al-dīn, 78. It is thus a mistake to credit
al-Ghazālī with the central role in this development, as Frank has suggested
in a couple of works. See his remarks in Creation and the Cosmic System, 67,
where he discusses al-Ghazālī ’s seemingly innovative transformation of “the
juridically obligatory,” which he associates with earlier Ashʿarism, into the
“prudentially necessary.” The argument for this thesis seems to me somewhat
elliptical and obscure, but in any case the above clearly suggests that this trans-
formation had already taken place. Part of Frank’s argument—an argument
that forms part of a broader reading of al-Ghazālī ’s ambivalent relationship
with the Ashʿarite school and his tactic of effecting subtle subversions of tradi-
tional Ashʿarite positions—rests on al-Ghazālī ’s use of the notion of ṭabʿ in his
discussion of obligation in the Iqtiṣād. Frank takes this to introduce the notion
of secondary causation—unfashionable in Ashʿarite theology—into the discus-
sion (Al-Ghazālī and the Ashʿarite School, 34). Yet this reading of the term ṭabʿ
overlooks its longer pedigree in the ethical writings of earlier Ashʿarites, includ-
ing al-Bāqillānī and al-Juwaynī.
24. See n20.
25. Mānkdīm, Sharḥ al-Uṣūl, 68.
26. Al-Ghazālī, Iqtiṣād, 161.
27. Ibid., 190.
28. See, for example, the remark in ibid., 162:  al-iṣṭilāḥāt mubāḥa lā ḥajra fīhā
liʾl-sharʿ wa-lā liʾl-ʿaql wa-innamā tamnaʿu minhu al-lugha idhā lam yakun ʿalā
wifq al-mawḍūʿ al-maʿrūf.
29. Al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā, 1: 66. Here, interestingly, the more subjective notion of
aghrāḍ takes the place of the objective notion of ḍarar that appears more fre-
quently in kalām/uṣūl al-fiqh definitions of obligation. This should caution us
against taking such distinctions too rigidly. In the works of certain Ashʿarites,
such distinctions are indeed even harder to draw; a good example is al-Āmidī,
who seems to use both in Ghāyat al-marām with little distinction.
30. Al-Āmidī, Ghāyat al-marām, 235, 234.
31. Al-Rāzī, Maṭālib, 3: 66.
32. Al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā, 1: 62, 61. See also al-Anṣārī ’s stark comments in Ghunya,
2: 1008.
33. Al-Ghazālī, Iqtiṣād, 194–95. This involves a revised understanding of the role
of reason: not to provide us with knowledge independently of revelation but to
serve as an instrument for understanding revelation. An indicative token of the
slippage noted above, as well as the foundational role assigned to desire in this
transition, is provided by al-Rāzī in his Maṭālib in the context of affirming the
290 Notes

existence of “rational” ethical knowledge: “Pleasure and joy are objects of intrin-

sic desire [maṭlūbatāni biʾl-dhāt], and pain and grief objects of intrinsic repug-
nance [makrūhatāni biʾl-dhāt]… . Our claim is thus established:  namely, that
reason judges [al-ʿaql yaqḍī] that certain things are good and that certain others
are evil” (3: 290). See generally 289–90 for an interesting set of remarks that
distinguish more clearly than has emerged in the above discussion between the
judgments parsed in terms of “good” and those parsed in terms of “obligatory.”
34. Al-Juwaynī, Niẓāmiyya, 61; a variant has tasāwaqat for tashawwafat.
35. Al-Rāzī, Maṭālib, 3: 21. I am indebted to Shihadeh’s Teleological Ethics of Fakhr
al-Dīn al-Rāzī for calling attention to al-Rāzī ’s usage of both terms—fiṭra and
ṭabʿ—in several instances of his writings.
36. It is the notion of ṭabʿ likewise that Shihadeh foregrounds in his account of
al-Rāzī, for example, Teleological Ethics of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, 58–59. It is indic-
ative that when al-Rāzī rephrases the same point elsewhere in the book—as
in Maṭālib, 3: 348—the language of ṭabʿ alone appears. The vocabulary of fiṭra
had certainly made earlier (though seemingly equally isolated) appearances in
Ashʿarite ethical discussions before al-Rāzī ’s time. For example, in dismiss-
ing the Muʿtazilite view of ethical responses as judgments of reason, al-Anṣārī
instead tied them to “the nature with which God vested human beings [jibilla
faṭara Allāh al-ʿibād ʿalayhā]” (Ghunya, 2: 1008); cf. 2: 1030–31: al-fāʿil minnā
… fuṭira ʿalā bunya yajūzu ʿalayhi maʿahā jarr al-manāfiʿ wa-dafʿ al-maḍārr. A
longer study of this paper trail would be needed to trace the fuller trajectory of
the notion of fiṭra in classical ethical discussions.
37. Al-Rāzī, Maṭālib, 3:  347. Elsewhere the conflict between the first- and
third-person perspectives that Ibn Taymiyya obscured is also clearly picked out
by al-Rāzī; see Shihadeh, Teleological Ethics of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, 77. Cf. the
remark quoted by Shihadeh from al-Rāzī ’s Nihāyat al-ʿuqūl, which makes the
impact on self-interest even clearer while still using the key notions of love
and hate: “If the wrongdoer declares [aftā] that wrongdoing is good, someone
else will soon wrong him. Since, in his natural disposition [ṭabʿ], he hates that
anticipated wrongdoing, and since all that leads to what is hated is itself hated
in the natural disposition, wrongdoing will indeed be hated by the wrongdoer.
The same applies to all other [commonly accepted moral norms]” (Teleological
Ethics of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, 81). My thanks to Ayman Shihadeh for providing
me with additional textual detail.
38. Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, 4: 255–56: ḥubb al-qalb liʾl-muḥsin … jibilla wa-fiṭra lā sabīla
ilā taghyīrihā—a continuation with Qur’anic echoes. Cf. al-Anṣārī ’s statement
of this view in Ghunya, 2: 1004. Ibn Taymiyya’s statement to the same effect
(“Al-Tuḥfa al-ʿirāqiyya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 10: 84), quoted in ­chapter 1, can now
be heard as a direct echo of al-Ghazālī ’s view.
39. For the first remark, see al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, 4: 254: kull ladhīdh maḥbūb ʿinda al-
multadhdh bihi wa-maʿnā kawnihi maḥbūban anna fiʾl-ṭabʿ maylan ilayhi. Al-ṭabʿ
 Notes 291

al-salīm: see 4: 255; cf. the typical Taymiyyan conjunctions: huwa muqtaḍāhā biʾl-
ṭabʿ/ muqtaḍā ṭabʿihā (4: 264). The positive connotations carried by al-Ghazālī ’s
ṭabʿ may not seem surprising given his reading of natural desire as a script of
divine intentions, as we will see in the next chapter. The above debts provide
further support for Michot’s recent remarks about Ibn Taymiyya’s extensive
familiarity with (though also critical engagement of) al-Ghazālī ’s work: see his
“An important reader of al-Ghāzalī.”
40. Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj, 1: 450.
41. Al-Rāzī, Maṭālib, 3: 289. Ashʿarites were not the only ones to adopt the strategy
of separating the claim that we know right and wrong by reason from the claim
that right and wrong apply to God. This strategy, for example, seems to be at
work in the spare remarks on the topic by one of the traditionalists that Ibn
Taymiyya refers to, al-Sijzī, in his Risālat al-Sijzī ilā ahl Zabīd, 140.
42. See Gobillot, La conception originelle, 112–29; For al-Jāḥiẓ’s remark, see “Risālat
al-Maʿāsh waʾl-maʿād,” in Rasāʾil al-Jāḥiẓ, 1: 102. Cf. Bernand, “La critique de la
notion de nature (ṭabʿ) par le kalām,” esp. 60–62.
43. As Gutas notes, the term fiṭra is not the only one that appears in Avicenna’s rel-
evant remarks; it neighbors on a number of synonymous terms, such as jibilla,
gharīza, and indeed ṭabʿ (“The empiricism of Avicenna,” 406–7).
44. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 161.
45. Shihadeh, Teleological Ethics of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, 82. For the notion of a social
contract, see 176–81.
46. See al-Rāzī, Maṭālib, 3: 68, 69, and the argument on 291. For further discussion
of these passages, see Shihadeh, Teleological Ethics of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, 77–83.
47. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 398; al-Rāzī, Sharḥ al-Ishārāt, 1: 269.
48. This point emerged clearly in the stage-setting passage cited in ­chapter 1: Ibn
Taymiyya, “Masʾalat taḥsīn al-ʿaql wa-taqbīḥuhu,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 433. See
also the additional remarks about the Qur’anic foundations of Ibn Taymiyya’s
ethical rationalism in ­chapter 5.
49. Ibn Taymiyya, Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 540, 544; it is a theme that surfaces in sev-
eral places in this work, but see especially the discussion at 539–48. Cf. Anjum’s
remarks, discussing the Nubuwwāt, in Politics, Law, and Community, 204.
50. Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 3: 180.
51. Though it is worth noting that some Ashʿarites, such as al-Rāzī, considered
that the content of individuals’ motives may involve direct reference to the con-
sequences of “deontological” acts like justice and injustice taken in the sense
of their impact on one’s self-interest. One acclaims the value of justice because
one knows that to do otherwise would be to expose one’s own person and prop-
erty to threat (al-Rāzī, Maṭālib, 3: 68).
52. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, 3–4.
53. See Schneewind, “Hume and the religious significance of moral rationalism,”
in Essays on the History of Moral Philosophy.
292 Notes

54. Al-Ashʿarī, al-Lumaʿ, 117; cf. al-Bāqillānī, Inṣāf, 50: huwa al-mālik ʿalaʾl-ḥaqīqa,
yataṣarrafu fī milkihi kamā yashāʾu, lā yusʾalu ʿammā yafʿalu wa-hum yusʾalūna.
The phrase can be found almost verbatim in other Ashʿarite works.
55. Quotes are from ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taʿdīl, 20, 25. Cf. Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 3:
140: “Just as if an act constitutes injustice, it is bad for any agent [to perform
it], similarly if the ground of obligation is realized in an act, different agents
should not stand in a different relation to it.” Certain considerations about
persons did of course matter in this context—for example, whether one acted
intentionally or had reached the age of responsibility. See ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s dis-
cussion in Taʿdīl, 87 ff., where his concern is precisely to mark off features
about the agent that are relevant to the value of the action (93: they have a
taʿalluq or connection to the action) and features that are not. As always, the
picture becomes more complex the closer one looks; as I have emphasized
elsewhere, the subject-independence of Muʿtazilite ethics finds an important
qualification in the subject-dependence introduced by the foundational notion
of ḥaqq. See Moral Agents and Their Deserts, ­chapter 4, and synoptically the
remarks on 86.
56. In “Qāʿida fiʾl-muʿjizāt waʾl-karāmāt,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 11: 354, Ibn Taymiyya
appears to embrace the language of essential (dhātiyya) attributes, whereas in
Radd, 422, he rejects this language for reasons that flow naturally from his
consequentialism: whether or not a given act is beneficial is not a fixed feature
of that act but may vary according to circumstances. That the language of ṣifāt
is deployed with a reference to utility is clear from the former passage and is
also made clear in Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 448. Compare also the remark inter-
preting “intrinsic attributes” in terms of utility by ʿAbd al-Qādir, whose discus-
sion in many places reads as an unmarked rehearsal and clarification of Ibn
Taymiyya’s views (al-Masāʾil al-mushtaraka, 80–81). In this respect Anjum’s
characterization of Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical via media as a rationalist episte-
mology combined with a voluntarist ontology (Politics, Law, and Community,
225) seems to me to overlook the complexity of Ibn Taymiyya’s statements on
both topics.
57. For Ibn Mattawayh’s remarks, see Majmūʿ, 3:  447–48; compare Mānkdīm’s
discussion in Sharḥ al-Uṣūl, 564–67. Of course, not all acts whose value
invokes the notion of benefit accrue to the agent and thus depend on his
features—beneficence is a case in point. Cf. Ibn Mattawayh’s distinction
between self-regarding and other-regarding acts (taʿalluq biʾl-fāʿil versus
biʾl-ghayr) in Majmūʿ, 1: 244–45, in the context of circumscribing God’s possible
modes of action.
58. It is not incidental that ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s sentimentalist account of aesthetic
judgments—we call a picture ugly because we are repelled by it—anticipates
not only al-Ghazālī ’s claim that we call acts bad when they disagree with our
purposes but also Ibn Taymiyya’s own claim that we call acts bad because we
 Notes 293

are repelled by them. Notice the pregnant occurrence of the term ṭabʿ in ʿAbd
al-Jabbār’s framing of the point in Taʿdīl, 55: yanfuru al-ṭabʿ ʿanhā.
59. Rachels, “Naturalism,” 87.
60. Though, as we will see in c­ hapter 4, the character of the causal relation invoked
in these remarks was the topic of another important point of friction between
Ibn Taymiyya and Ashʿarite theologians.

C h a p t er   4
1. ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taʿdīl, 3.
2. Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 5.
3. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Ḥasana waʾl-sayyiʾa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 309.
4. Ibn Taymiyya, “Masʾalat taḥsīn al-ʿaql wa-taqbīḥuhu,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
8: 433.
5. Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj al-sunna, 1:  141. Cf. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-ʿAqīda
al-Tadmuriyya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 3: 19. Justice, to be sure, did not form the
only focus of Muʿtazilite reflection, and it is useful to keep in mind that in
the Muʿtazilites’ discussions, as in Ibn Taymiyya’s, the boundaries between the
notions of wisdom and justice are permeable. See indicatively ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s
discussion of these two terms in Taʿdīl, 48–51.
6. Al-Juwaynī, Niẓāmiyya, 36; al-Ghazālī, Iqtiṣād, 187.
7. Al-Qarāfī, Nafāʾis al-uṣūl fī sharḥ al-Maḥṣūl, 7: 3450.
8. See, for example, al-Anṣārī, Ghunya, 2: 1032. Cf. Shihadeh, Teleological Ethics of
Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, 51.
9. See the discussion of this theological point in al-Shahrastānī, Nihayat al-iqdām,
397–416; al-Rāzī, al-Arbaʿīn fī uṣūl al-dīn, 249–53; cf. Gimaret, La doctrine
d’al-Ashʿarī, 447–51.
10. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Ḥasana waʾl-sayyiʾa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 313, stating the
objectionable view wa-lā irādatuhu murajjaḥa liʾl-iḥsān ilaʾl-khalq.
11. Ibn Taymiyya outlines some of the evidence provided by the first kind of docu-
ment in Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 178–79, and some of the evidence provided by
the second kind of document on 698, 700. Both methods of establishing God’s
wisdom can be read instructively against El Shamsy’s distinction between
“rationalist” and “empiricist” approaches to God’s wisdom in “The wisdom of
God’s law.”
12. Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj al-sunna, 1: 141; cf. Ibn Taymiyya, “Tafsīr sūrat al-Baqara,”
in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 144, more broadly: hādhā madhhab aʾimmat al-fuqahāʾ
qāṭibatan wa-salaf al-umma wa-ʿāmmatihā. For the stage-setting phrase, see
again Ibn Taymiyya, “Masʾalat taḥsīn al-ʿaql wa-taqbīḥuhu,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
8: 434.
13. And indeed becomes more intelligible; cf. my discussion in “Ibn Taymiyya’s
ethics between Ashʿarite voluntarism and Muʿtazilite rationalism.”
294 Notes

14. Ibn Taymiyya also refers to “perfection” and “imperfection” (to what is mukam-
mil/munaqqiṣ), but I  set this point aside to avoid complicating our story. Ibn
Taymiyya is probably influenced by al-Rāzī here; see Shihadeh, Teleological
Ethics of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī.
15. Ibn Taymiyya, “Qāʿida fiʾl-muʿjizāt waʾl-karāmāt,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 11: 354.
16. Al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā, 1: 286–88.
17. The quote is from Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories, 132. For more
on the legal development of the notion of maṣlaḥa, see Opwis, Maṣlaḥa and
the Purpose of the Law. And see El Shamsy, “The wisdom of God’s law,” for an
illuminating discussion of the transformation of Muʿtazilite ideas on welfare
among earlier Shāfiʿites by al-Ghazālī. Cf. Chaumont’s remarks in “La notion
de wajh al-ḥikmah dans les uṣūl al-fiqh d’Abū Isḥāq al-Shirāzī,” with reference
to al-Shirāzī: if Ashʿarism triumphs in theological history, it is Muʿtazilism that
triumphs in legal history. This collection of articles appeared late in the prepara-
tion of the present study, and I have drawn selectively on its contents.
18. Al-Ghazālī, Shifāʾ al-ghalīl fī bayān al-shabah waʾl-mukhīl wa-masālik al-taʿlīl, 146.
19. Al-Juwaynī, Talkhīṣ, 1:  151. As al-Bāqillānī ’s ensuing remarks show (160), this
point is linked to an oft-voiced objection to the Muʿtazilite position: certain acts
to which the Muʿtazilites (say we rationally) assign different values—such as
killing by way of retaliation and killing by way of intentional homicide—share
the same intrinsic reality (tamāthuluhumā fī ḥaqīqat al-fiʿl), yet one is bad, the
other good; hence the intrinsic attributes of actions do not ground their value.
(Cf. al-Anṣārī, Ghunya, 2: 1006.) The objection seems weak, as it turns on what
we consider the “reality” at stake; shouldn’t the conditions (asbāb) of the act—for
example, unjust violation of the right to life in the case of qiṣāṣ—be included in
the description of that reality? As al-Rāzī would later point out, the Muʿtazilites
incorporated such distinctions in their account of the act-descriptions (wujūh)
grounding the value of actions, and as such this objection involves a misunder-
standing of their views (Maṭālib, 3: 338–39).
20. Al-Juwaynī, Burhān, 1: 86.
21. The expression is from Weiss, The Spirit of Islamic Law, 171.
22. See, for example, Ibn ʿAqīl, Wāḍiḥ, 4b: 354; Āl Taymiyya, al-Musawwada fī uṣūl
al-fiqh, 365.
23. Ibn Barhān, al-Wuṣūl ilaʾl-uṣūl, 2: 233–34. I read this next to Reinhart’s essay
“Ritual action and practical action,” in which the rationality (or lack thereof) of
ritual action in particular forms a key theme; see the concentrated remarks on
al-Naẓẓām at 76–80.
24. Zysow, The Economy of Certainty, 398.
25. Al-Āmidī, al-Iḥkām fī uṣūl al-aḥkām, 3: 366, 388–89; cf. Ibn ʿAqīl’s use of this
very phrase in Wāḍiḥ, 4b: 363: as we sift through the properties of wine, the
only feature we find that is “fit [yaṣluḥu] to be the cause of its prohibition” is its
transporting effect.
 Notes 295

26. Al-Ghazālī, Shifāʾ al-ghalīl, 143: naʿnī biʾl-munāsaba maʿnan maʿqūlan ẓāhiran

fiʾl-ʿaql yatayassaru ithbātuhu ʿalaʾl-khaṣm biʾl-naẓar al-ʿaqlī.
27. In relation to al-Bāqillānī, of course, the above remarks carry a danger of
anachronism, as the programmatic development of the discourse of maqāṣid
al-sharīʿa still lay in the future. Yet to the extent that al-Bāqillānī ’s statement
reflects a typically Ashʿarite view also expressed by later writers, the juxtaposi-
tion is not unwarranted.
28. Ibn Fūrak, Mujarrad, 286.
29. Zysow’s illuminating discussion of this point in The Economy of Certainty,
esp. 341–47, has formed one of my main starting points here.
30. See, for example, Ibn Taymiyya, Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 705; Ibn Taymiyya,
Minhāj al-sunna, 1: 455.
31. Al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā, 1: 286–87.
32. Ibid., 1: 310.
33. See the remarks in Zysow, Economy of Certainty, 343–47.
34. It is al-Ghazālī in his Shifāʾ al-ghalīl who seems to originate the analogy between
the way we read the Law and the way we read human behavior; see especially
191 ff. The analogical role of the human paradigm is made clear on 191–92:
kaʾl-wāḥid minnā … ka-dhālika maʿānī al-aḥkām tuʿqalu bi-mithl hādhā al-ṭarīq.
This idea is expressed again by al-Rāzī in Maḥṣūl, 2: 332; cf. al-Āmidī ’s refer-
ence to al-naẓar ilā jary al-ʿāda al-maʾlūfa min sharʿ al-aḥkām in Iḥkām, 3: 376;
cf. al-Qarāfī, Nafāʾis al-uṣūl, 7: 3454: al-sharāʾiʿ kulluhā maṣāliḥ liʾl-khalq biʾl-
istiqrāʾ. See also the discussion that follows in the main text.
35. Al-Ghazālī, Shifāʾ al-ghalīl, 162.
36. See Hallaq, “Uṣūl al-fiqh,” esp. 189–91.
37. Al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā, 1: 288.
38. Al-Juwaynī, Burhān, 2: 923, 924, 925, 938. A closer study of the Burhān, how-
ever, would be in order before this could be done with stronger certainty and
greater assurance of their meaning.
39. See Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology, for a conspectus of this debate
and the offer of an irenic solution.
40. Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, 1: 15 ff.
41. Ibid., 2: 19.
42. Ibid., 2: 22.
43. Ibid., 2: 28.
44. This train of reflection can be followed in ibid., 2: 22 ff., where it is (signifi-
cantly, given a Taymiyyan criticism of the Ashʿarites that will shortly come into
view) a notion of what God loves—of procreation as the wise purpose that God
loves—that serves as a guiding thread, revealing God’s love/God’s wisdom as
the ground of the command “Marry and beget!” God gave us the seeds, the
plow, and the arable land, and to let our natural disposition go to waste would
be to waste the instruments God wisely constructed for particular purposes.
296 Notes

The notion of fiṭra makes a pregnant appearance here: in allowing such waste,
we would be offending against “the aim of our natural disposition”: maqṣūd
al-fiṭra waʾl-ḥikma al-mafhūma min shawāhid al-khilqa, al-maktūba ʿalā hādhihi
al-aʿḍāʾ bi-khaṭṭ ilahī (2: 23); cf. 2: 25: al-walad huwa al-maqṣūd biʾl-fiṭra waʾl-
ḥikma waʾl-shahwa bāʿitha ʿalayhi. This reading of the Iḥyāʾ finds its comple-
ment in El Shamsy’s remarks in “The wisdom of God’s law,” 32–33, which
focus on al-Ghazālī ’s discussion of God’s wisdom in al-Ḥikma fī makhlūqāt
Allāh. El Shamsy also comments on the bridges this discussion puts down to
legal theory and offers an interesting proposal (relating to al-Ghazālī ’s engage-
ment with Galen’s work) for understanding the development of al-Ghazālī ’s
“empiricist” approach to God’s wisdom.
45. Al-Āmidī, Iḥkām, 3: 389. Weiss interprets this passage differently; he glosses
it: “The Legislator’s purpose may also become the purpose of the human crea-
ture in that it is especially pertinent to him and in that he, as a rational being,
will embrace it” (The Search for God’s Law, 609–10, emphasis added).
46. Though it is more continuous with the notion of “reading” the natural (includ-
ing human) world found in the Iḥyāʾ, as my next remarks will suggest.
47. Al-Āmidī, Iḥkām, 3: 394, 396.
48. Weiss, Search for God’s Law, 622.
49. See Zysow’s discussion in Economy of Certainty, 343–47. Cf. Jackson’s remarks
in Islamic Law and the State: despite the reluctance of earlier Ashʿarites to admit
“the practical good or utility of God’s commands for the Here and Now … later
Ashʿarites, particularly outside Baghdad, are much more explicit in admitting the
practical utility of God’s commands along with reason’s ability to apprehend this”
(28). This corrects a misperception that, as Jackson notes, has often clung to read-
ings of the Ashʿarite approach and is notably expressed in Kerr’s gloss on the impli-
cations of this approach: “There is really nothing for men to learn in the moral
sphere except the revealed obligations, which have no foundation in a natural order
in the world, nor in a natural order in the human personality, nor in a rational
order of justice” (Islamic Reform, 59). Putting aside the third item on this list, the
above discussion has suggested that Ashʿarite jurists had accepted both kinds of
natural foundation: in the natural order and the order of the human personality (or
nature: ṭabʿ). Kerr’s next remarks (60) evoke a familiar point regarding the tension
between Ashʿarite theology and the practical and legal sphere in this regard. Yet as
we have seen, the acknowledgment of at least one of these foundations, human
nature, had been expressed in theological no less than legal Ashʿarite discourse.
50. Obligation comes down to the preponderance (tarjīḥ) of harm, and it is God who
creates this preponderance (He is the murajjiḥ): see the remarks in al-Ghazālī,
Iqtiṣād, 192–93, and the discussion of obligation on 161–62.
51. Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, 1: 100; al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā, 1: 28. The point would thus encom-
pass all definitions of legal value that make reference to punishment—though
 Notes 297

as Weiss notes, remarking al-Āmidī ’s exclusive reference to blame (dhamm),

not all do (Search for God’s Law, 105). Cf. al-Ashʿarī ’s reference to reward and
punishment as what is established by scripture and not by reason (mimmā
taʿallaqa bihā khabaran lā ʿaqlan): Ibn Fūrak, Mujarrad, 99.
52. Al-Rāzī, Maḥṣūl, 2: 320–21; cf. the remarks in al-Qarāfī, Nafāʾis al-uṣūl, 7: 3404–
5. This characterization may seem paradoxical with regard to some of these
objectives. If the protection of life, family lines, and property clearly pertain
to the mundane domain, it is harder to think of the protection of religion—or
indeed of reason, whose value is partly explained through its significance for
the religious life—as worldly interests. In the most basic sense, these interests
are “mundane” to the extent that they are upheld through specific social and
political arrangements and through provisions enforced by secular powers.
53. See, for example, al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā 1:  62 (al-ṭabʿ … huwa al-bāʿith
al-mustaḥithth); cf. al-Ghazālī, Iqtiṣād, 194.
54. Both elements appear in discussions of the aims of the Law; see, for example,
al-Āmidī, Iḥkām 3: 390; cf. al-Ghazālī, Shifāʾ al-ghalīl, 160.
55. Which is not to say that one’s interests need to be protected solely against the
violations of others: consent is certainly not the only normative principle at
work. Thus, one’s interests may also need to be protected from oneself, as when
the Law protects one’s property by prohibiting one from borrowing money on
interest or throwing one’s own money into the sea. The example is al-Qarāfī ’s
in Furūq, 1: 312.
56. Al-Ghazālī, Shifāʾ al-ghalīl, 160; cf. al-Rāzī, Maḥṣūl, 2: 320.
57. These examples receive discussion in several texts; see Opwis, Maṣlaḥa and
the Purpose of the Law, 50–51, 106, and references there. The expression is from
al-Juwaynī, Burhān, 2: 933.
58. Al-Juwaynī, Burhān, 937.
59. See Hallaq, Islamic Legal Theories, 112; Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic
Law, 61.
60. Though in actual practice this was not so frequently the case. For a helpful
overview of these notions, see Johansen, Contingency in a Sacred Law, ­chapter 4;
“Ḥaqq.”
61. Johansen, Contingency in a Sacred Law, 211–12.
62. See, for example, Ibn Taymiyya, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya fī iṣlāḥ al-rāʿī waʾl-raʿiyya,
57, referring to God’s rights: al-ḥudūd waʾl-ḥuqūq allatī laysat li-qawm maʿniyyīn
bal manfaʿatuhā li-muṭlaq al-muslimīn. Cf. the reference to generalized harm
(al-fasād al-ʿāmm) in speaking of brigandage (muḥāraba) (69); cf. Ibn Taymiyya,
“Bāb al-qaṭʿ fiʾl-sariqa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 34: 239.
63. Abd-allah’s remark in “Theological dimensions of Islamic law,” 243, that “in
Islamic jurisprudence, the purpose of the rights of God is to uphold the ulti-
mate objectives of the law” seems inaccurate in this respect.
298 Notes

64. The preservation of honor (ʿirḍ) was in fact listed as a sixth objective by some
jurists. At the same time, the community has a stake in upholding goods that do
not correspond to divine claims. The value of human life is a case in point: its
preservation is included among the objectives of the Law, yet it is protected
through a type of punishment (qiṣāṣ) that forms a private or human claim.
There is in any case some artificiality in drawing the boundaries between these
two kinds of claims too sharply, for reasons indicated in n144.
65. Zysow, Economy of Certainty, 346–47.
66. This would also question the view expressed by Weiss, quoted in the main text
(Search for God’s Law, 622), which seems to stress the status of these interests
as goods that tend to the well-being of the human community—to the extent at
least that this is intended as a characterization of the prerevelational or “rational”
ethical viewpoint. Additional documentation of the textual grounds for this view
would have been helpful for engaging it further. It is also worth recalling that the
evaluative perspective of the social community was inscribed as a “higher-order”
viewpoint normally inaccessible to the ordinary consciousness of individuals
in the context of the Avicennan thought experiment appropriated by Ashʿarite
theologians.
67. Al-Ghazālī, Shifāʾ al-ghalīl, 204.
68. Al-Qarāfī, Nafāʾis al-uṣūl, 7: 3450.
69. El Shamsy, “The wisdom of God’s law.”
70. See al-Rāzī, Maḥṣūl, 2: 332. Taking this to represent al-Rāzī ’s view involves
taking a stance on the complex phenomena with which the Maḥṣūl presents
one. Al-Rāzī ’s discussion of the causal nature of considerations of suitability is
organized in two parts, representing two alternative explanations of this cau-
sality: one that presupposes that God acts to promote human welfare and one
that does not (see, respectively, 2: 327–31, 332–44). The remarks on 2: 334 (with
their reference to a burhān qāṭiʿ) and a comparison of his defense of the second
position with the discussion of taʿlīl afʿāl Allāh in his Arbaʿīn—which includes
an argument against God’s purposefulness on the basis of God’s creation of
human acts, and thus of evil and disobedience (Arbaʿīn, 251), that is paralleled
in the Maḥṣūl—argues strongly that al-Rāzī ’s sympathies lie with the latter view.
See also on this topic Opwis, Maṣlaḥa and the Purpose of the Law, ­chapter 2.3,
esp. 113–21; her discussion in “Attributing causality to God’s Law” closely follows
the book. Given the complexities of the evidence, Opwis’s indecisive treatment
of the topic—she opens by associating al-Rāzī with the first view (“Rāzī accepts
that God’s purpose in prescribing His rulings is the maṣlaḥa of humankind,”
96) and concludes by hesitantly associating him with the second (120)—is not
too helpful. Al-Raysuni attributes the first view to al-Rāzī in Imam al-Shatibi’s
Theory of the Higher Objectives and Intents of Islamic Law—he adopts a “firm, even
enthusiastic position in defence of taʿlīl in relation to Islamic Law” (204; and
see generally 197–205)—by apparently confining his attention exclusively to the
 Notes 299

first part of al-Rāzī ’s discussion. My own understanding of al-Rāzī ’s position

is aligned to Shihadeh’s; see Teleological Ethics of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, 98–101,
where a translation of the central passage in al-Rāzī ’s discussion is offered.
71. See, for example, al-Āmidī, Iḥkām, 3: 411. Cf. the contrast between obligation
and beneficence in al-Ghazālī, Shifāʾ al-ghalīl, 162; al-Qarāfī, Sharḥ Tanqīḥ
al-fuṣūl fī ikhtiṣār al-Maḥṣul fiʾl-uṣūl, 92. Baghdādī Muʿtazilites construed God’s
obligations even more broadly, ascribing to God a more general obligation to
promote human interests in the mundane domain as well.
72. Al-Āmidī, Iḥkām, 3: 411. The second part of this remark is awkward, yet it seems
clear that the lāzim minhu refers us to our epistemological need to draw such a
conclusion. Cf. Frank’s distinction between the practical and absolute viewpoint
in the legal usage of the notions of reason and purpose in “Moral obligation in
classical Muslim theology,” 214. Al-Āmidī ’s ensuing discussion in the Iḥkām
is perplexing on a different level, though, as he goes on to offer a surprising
affirmation—an affirmation indeed on rational grounds—of God’s wisdom and
purposefulness that would seem to conflict with the Ashʿarite position as he
himself had expressed it in Ghāyat al-marām; see Iḥkām, 3: 411–23.
73. Al-Rāzī, Arbaʿīn, 249.
74. Al-Qarāfī provides an interesting example: having affirmed God’s sheer will as
the uncaused preponderating factor in his Nafāʾis al-uṣūl, as we saw, he appears
to offer a direct disavowal of this view in Sharḥ Tanqīḥ al-fuṣūl, 92, where he
accepts the role of interests in determining legal values.
75. The quote is from Ibn Taymiyya, Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 406. For the point about
istiqrāʾ, see Ibn Taymiyya, Nubuwwāt, 1: 465–66, and also the manuscript vari-
ant in Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 705n6.
76. Ibn Taymiyya, Bayān talbīs, 2: 8, 7. The same point is rehearsed in Ibn Taymiyya,
Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 421.
77. ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taklīf, 59. See also Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 1:  265; cf. 1:  235.
Given these strong expressions of epistemic limitation, I am unsure that Abū
Isḥāq al-Shirāzī ’s expression of a similar point (we may not know the interests
God’s laws serve), noted by Chaumont in “La notion de wajh al-ḥikmah dans les
uṣūl al-fiqh d’Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī,” 47–48, distances him from Muʿtazilism as
much as Chaumont suggests.
78. Ibn ʿAqīl, Wāḍiḥ, 4b: 366, speaking more narrowly of ritual acts: once we know
that God in His wisdom only institutes rulings for the sake of welfare (maṣāliḥ),
we know for certain on the general level (fiʾl-jumla) that all prescribed acts
serve our welfare even if we do not know the wajh al-maṣlaḥa in a given case.
For Ibn Taymiyya’s remark, see Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 8: 55–56; his appropriation of Ibn
ʿAqīl’s view may be placed in the context of a positive (and changed) attitude
to this otherwise controversial Ḥanbalite thinker, as noted by Makdisi in Ibn
‘Aqil, 48–49. In this light it will be interesting to note that in several places Ibn
Taymiyya criticizes the Muʿtazilites—or certain Muʿtazilites—for undertaking
300 Notes

detailed accounts of God’s wisdom (e.g., “Fī qudrat al-rabb ʿazza wa-jalla,” in
Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 38). Perhaps he has in mind the type of proposal developed
by the Muʿtazilite-minded legal theorist al-Qaffāl al-Shāshī, as described by
Reinhart in “Ritual action and practical action,” 74–76.
79. Ibn Taymiyya, Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 449; Ibn Taymiyya, “Risāla fiʾl-Iḥtijāj
biʾl-qadar,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 345.
80. Ibn Taymiyya, “Risāla fiʾl-Iḥtijāj biʾl-qadar,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 363.
81. See, for example, Mānkdīm, Sharḥ al-Uṣūl, 302:  God is essentially knowing
(ʿālim bi-dhātihi), and as such must know all things from the respect, or under
the description, in which it is possible for them to be known; one of these
descriptions (wujūh) is their ethical quality.
82. Ibn Taymiyya, “Ḥadīth innī ḥarramtu al-ẓulm ʿalā nafsī,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
18: 148–49; and see the discussion on the ensuing pages.
83. Note, for example, Ibn Taymiyya’s insistence that God “deserves praise for that
which He bound himself to” and his insistence that “this injustice which God
forbade Himself is indeed injustice without a doubt” (ibid., 18: 151, 156).
84. Ibn Taymiyya, “Taʿāruḍ al-ḥasanāt aw-al-sayyiʾāt,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 20:  48;
“Ḥadīth innī ḥarramtu al-ẓulm ʿalā nafsī,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 18: 157.
85. The particular expression is from Ibn Taymiyya, “Fī kawn al-rabb ʿādilan,” in
Jāmiʿ al-rasāʾil, 1: 141, but similar expressions appear widely, as we have seen.
86. Ibn Taymiyya, Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 449; Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 422.
87. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Ḥasana waʾl-sayyiʾa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 300.
88. Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 8: 475; Ibn Taymiyya, “Suʾila ʿan abyāt fiʾl-jabr,” in
Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 512.
89. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Ḥasana waʾl-sayyiʾa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 276; “Taʿāruḍ
al-ḥasanāt aw-al-sayyiʾāt,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 20: 48.
90. Though there is a more complex story to be told at this juncture. For a
finer-grained study of Ibn Taymiyya’s view of human action, see Hoover, Ibn
Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, ­chapter 4.
91. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Ḥasana waʾl-sayyiʾa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 276, read in con-
junction with Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 8: 476–77.
92. This is a moral intuition that is paradoxically often voiced by Ashʿarite theologi-
ans in polemics against Muʿtazilite views: see, for example, al-Anṣārī, Ghunya,
2: 1042; al-Rāzī, Maṭālib, 3: 325. This is not to say that problematic situations
do not arise in ordinary human life in which we might rule that sacrificing
the fewer for the many is the right choice—as indeed Muslim jurists debat-
ing the dilemmatic wartime situation of “human shields” frequently concluded
(see c­ hapter 5). What will partly make the ethical difference here is whether we
experience this as a loss as against a choice without moral remainder; and part
of the question, as will emerge in the main text shortly, is why God (Himself
not prisoner to the contingencies of the human world that make such tragic
conflicts unavoidable) should be compelled to suffer this loss.
 Notes 301

93. Ibn Taymiyya, “Risāla fiʾl-Iḥtijāj biʾl-qadar,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 362–63.

94. For this distinction and some of Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks on the topic of love
versus will, see indicatively “Fī qawlihi taʿālā innamā qawlunā li-shayʾ idhā
aradnāhu,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 187–90; “Hal arāda Allāh taʿālā al-maʿṣiyya
min khalqihi am lā?,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8:  159–60; “Aqwam mā qila,” in
Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 131; “Qāʿida fiʾl-muʿjizāt waʾl-karāmāt,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
11: 355 ff. The accuracy of Ibn Taymiyya’s representation of the Ashʿarite posi-
tion could be questioned, as the conflation of will and love is associated more
narrowly with al-Juwaynī, whose view, however, did not command uniform
assent among later Ashʿarites. Al-Rāzī is a case in point, having not only dis-
tinguished between will and love but indeed proposed the very kind of dis-
tinction between prescriptive and creative wills that Ibn Taymiyya champions.
Al-Ghazālī, similarly, clearly affirms the distinction between what God loves
and what God hates; see, for example, Iḥyāʾ, 4: 78 ff. (cf. the distinction between
irāda and maḥabba in 4: 77). This distinction also emerges in the discussion of
marriage considered earlier in this chapter. On this point, see Hoover’s survey
at Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 128–29, and Bell’s discussion
of the Ashʿarite position in Love Theory in Later Ḥanbalite Islam, ­chapter 3.
95. Cf. Ibn Taymiyya’s phrasing in Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 8: 476: God did not create some-
thing He had commanded because “it would necessitate [yastalzimu] forgoing
something else He had commanded which He loved more.”
96. On this topic, see Lovejoy’s classic study, The Great Chain of Being.
97. See Ormsby, Theodicy in Islamic Thought and for Neiman’s remark, Evil in
Modern Thought, 27.
98. In one of the few locations where Ibn Taymiyya cites al-Ghazālī ’s view, he does
so approvingly, with what seems like a perfunctory consideration of the chal-
lenge it poses to God’s power and only a glancing proviso to secure the latter: “Fī
kawn al-rabb ʿādilan,” in Jāmiʿ al-rasāʾil, 1: 141–42 (and see the foregoing discus-
sion for several expressions of the view that God does what is best). Compare
Hoover’s remarks in Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 224–27.
99. Ibn Taymiyya, “Aqwam mā qīla,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 89–90, and more posi-
tively “Al-Ḥasana waʾl-sayyiʾa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 309–10, and “Fī qudrat
al-rabb ʿazza wa-jalla,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8:  35–36, which is translated in
Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 97.
100. See, for example, ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taklīf, 134, for a paradigmatic statement of
this point.
101. For the distinction between these types of praise (and love), see Ibn Taymiyya,
“Al-Ḥasana waʾl-sayyiʾa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14:  300 ff.; “Fiʾl-furūq allatī
yatabayyanu bihā kawn al-ḥasana min Allāh,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8:  207 ff.;
“Al-Tuḥfa al-ʿirāqiyya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 10:  47–48, 84–85. The distinction
between types of praise is certainly not original to Ibn Taymiyya. See, for exam-
ple, al-Anṣārī ’s reference to this distinction in Ghunya, 2: 1027.
302 Notes

102. For the distinction between these types of tawḥīd, a good starting place is Ibn
Taymiyya’s commentary on al-Fātiḥa (in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14:  1–40); see also
Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 26–29. The centrality
of worship in Ibn Taymiyya’s thought is likewise stressed by Laoust in Essai sur
les doctrines sociales et politiques de Taḳī-d-Dīn Aḥmad b. Taymīya, 177–78.
103. Ibn Taymiyya, “Tafsīr sūrat al-Fātiḥa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 34.
104. Some of the bases for these remarks can be found concentrated in Ibn Taymiyya,
“Risāla fiʾl-Iḥtijāj biʾl-qadar,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 303 ff., in which the way we
distinguish actions from our perspective as appetitive natural beings (al-farq
al-ṭabīʿī) and the way God distinguishes them from His perspective (al-farq min
jihat al-ḥaqq taʿālā) forms a key theme. A nodal point in Ibn Taymiyya’s criticism
of the Ashʿarites’ failure to represent God as an object of intrinsic love is their
treatment of the beatific vision (e.g., 8: 344–45). Again, there is a question to be
asked about the justice of the above line of criticism. Al-Rāzī, for example, seems
to have acknowledged God both as a subject and an object of love, as suggested by
Shihadeh in Teleological Ethics of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, 113–14. Al-Ghazālī provides
the most obvious counterexample to Ibn Taymiyya’s thesis in eloquently affirm-
ing the human love of God in the Iḥyāʾ. His view of God’s love for human beings
is more open to question, as across different works he presses an image of God’s
indifference; see, for example, Iqtiṣād, 194; Iḥyāʾ, 4: 76: human beings’ “happi-
ness lies in their nearness to [God],” yet “God has no need of them, whether they
draw near or remain far.” Ibn Taymiyya, of course, also affirms God’s needless-
ness; just how this affirmation can be reconciled with the affirmation of God’s
love is a key question in reconstructing his account, as both Bell and Hoover
show.
105. This relationship has sometimes been slow to be acknowledged due to Ibn
Taymiyya’s well-known polemics against particular Sufi tendencies and
schools, notably Ibn ʿArabī ’s monism. The influence of Sufi spirituality on Ibn
Taymiyya’s thought was emphasized by Laoust in Essai sur les doctrines socia-
les et politiques de Taḳī-d-Dīn Aḥmad b. Taymīya, 89–93, and Ibn Taymiyya’s
Sufi credentials have been argued by Makdisi in “Ibn Taymiyya: A Ṣūfī of the
Qādiriyya order,”; but see also here Meier, “The cleanest about predestination,”
309–34, including the remarks on 317–18n9. See also more broadly Makdisi,
“The Ḥanbalite school and Ṣūfism”; Michot, “Ibn Taymiyya’s commentary on
the Creed of al-Ḥallāj” and references there, as well as the commentary and
translations in Michot’s Against Extremisms; and Anjum, “Sufism without
mysticism?”
106. Ibn Taymiyya, “Aqwam mā qīla,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 144. Cf. Bell, Love Theory
in Later Ḥanbalite Islam, 72: “God’s love for himself is necessarily the greatest
of all loves, and his love for certain men and their acts is subordinate to this
first love.”
107. See also in this connection n144.
 Notes 303

108. Ibn Taymiyya does not mention blame and punishment explicitly, yet his
ensuing reference to pleasure and pain signals that he naturally has both in
mind (Nubuwwāt, 1:  453). Cf. the remark in Ibn Taymiyya, “Risāla fiʾl-Iḥtijāj
biʾl-qadar,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 309.
109. This is visible at many junctures of Muʿtazilite discussions of reward and pun-
ishment, which are throughout grounded in arguments of a rational sort; for
example, it is the hardship (mashaqqa) that obligations entail that makes reward
necessary from a rational point of view, as briefly stated by al-Zamakhsharī
in A Muʿtazilite Creed of az-Zamakhšarî, 73. Cf. Mānkdīm’s succinct remark
in Sharḥ al-Uṣūl, 619:  ammā istiḥqāq al-ʿiqāb, faʾlladhī yadullu ʿalayhi al-ʿaql
waʾl-samʿ ayḍan.
110. As the (Baṣran) Muʿtazilites, for example, had; see my Moral Agents and Their
Deserts, 95–102.
111. Al-Juwaynī, Burhān, 1: 308.
112. Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, 1: 99. Compare al-Ghazālī, Iqtiṣād, 185: “If God imposes obli-
gations on people and they obey Him, He is not obliged to reward them—He
will reward them if He so pleases, and He will punish them if He so pleases.”
113. This is what I  take away from the remarks relayed by Ibn Fūrak, Mujarrad,
163; note the description of believers’ versus unbelievers’ respective reward and
punishment as “surely” or “inevitably” taking place (kāʾin lahum lā maḥāla).
Compare Abū Yaʿlā’s remarks in the Muʿtamad, 213–15:  law ʿadhdhaba ahl
samāwātihi wa-arḍihi ibtidāʾan lā ʿalā dhanb sābiq minhum kāna ḥukman
ʿadlan—yet He has in fact made certain promises which it is impossible that He
would renege on (cf. 120).
114. Al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā, 1: 28. Cf. al-Āmidī, Iḥkām, 1: 138: al-wujūb al-sharʿī ʿibāra
ʿan khiṭāb al-shāriʿ bimā yantahiḍu tarkuhu sababan liʾl-dhamm sharʿan fī
ḥāla mā.
115. See, for example, the powerful passage in al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, 4: 77–78.
116. Ibn Fūrak, Mujarrad, 131, as translated in Griffel, Al-Ghazālī ’s Philosophical
Theology, 126, with a small modification. As the above indicates, there are more
probing questions one could ask regarding the relevance of Ibn Taymiyya’s
criticisms, which would require a far closer study of the complex and evolving
Ashʿarite views on the topic. Griffel’s book provides a good gateway to these: see,
for example, the conspectus of pre-Ghazālian Ashʿarite views in ­chapter 5.
117. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Ḥasana waʾl-sayyiʾa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14:  342. Cf. Ibn
Taymiyya, “Fī kawn al-rabb ʿādilan,” in Jāmiʿ al-rasāʾil, 1: 126: lā yajzī aḥadan
illā bi-dhanbihi.
118. Ibn Taymiyya, “Fī anna al-tawba waʾl-istighfār yakūnu min tark al-wājibat wa-fiʿl
al-muḥarramāt,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 11:  686. While this condition affects the
case of punishment, blame and praise are apparently taken to attach to actions
even prior to the Law (686); to deny this would after all involve denying that
people consider actions blameworthy and praiseworthy. Cf. Darʾ taʿāruḍ,
304 Notes

8: 492, where Ibn Taymiyya uses stronger causal language in speaking of these
consequences:  [al-afʿāl] muttaṣifa bi-ṣifāt ḥasana wa-sayyiʾa taqtaḍī al-ḥamd
waʾl-dhamm.
119. Ibn Taymiyya, “Risāla fī dukhūl al-janna, hal yadkhulu aḥad al-janna
bi-ʿamalihi,” in Jāmiʿ al-rasāʾil, 1: 152.
120. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Ḥasana waʾl-sayyiʾa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 261.
121. Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 164.
122. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 94.
123. ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Tanabbuʾāt, 65. Cf. Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 3: 435: “the desert of
reward is pursuant upon the intrinsic obligatoriness” of an act (yatbaʿu wujūbahu
fī nafsihi). I  say “on one level” because there were a number of more general
explanations that Baṣran Muʿtazilites offered in this context, for example, tying
the necessity of reward to the difficulty (mashaqqa) morally good acts involve.
124. For a slower unpacking of these claims, see my Moral Agents and Their Deserts,
­chapter 4.
125. Al-Rāzī, Arbaʿīn, 246. Cf. al-Qarāfī ’s transcription of the contentious Muʿtazilite
view as the claim that evil acts “contain a quality on account of which their
agent deserves blame [al-qabīḥ huwa al-mushtamil ʿalā ṣifa li-ajlihā yastaḥiqqu
ṣāḥibuhu al-dhamm]” (Sharḥ Tanqīḥ al-fuṣūl, 90).
126. Al-Rāzī, Arbaʿīn, 389; cf. Ibn Fūrak, Mujarrad, 99.
127. Ibn Taymiyya, Nubuwwāt, 1:  464–65. Cf. Ibn Taymiyya, “Suʾila ʿan abyāt
fiʾl-jabr,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 468.
128. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Ḥasana waʾl-sayyiʾa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 297–98.
129. See the discussion in al-Rāzī, Maṭālib, 3: 323–36.
130. See Ibn Taymiyya, “Ḥadīth innī ḥarramtu al-ẓulm ʿalā nafsī,” in Majmūʿ
Fatāwā, 18: 187–89. Cf. Ibn Taymiyya, Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, 152, speaking of vic-
tims of adultery: “Victims of justice may exact their rights [lahu istīfāʾ ḥaqqihi]
either in this world or the next.”
131. Ibn Taymiyya, Minhāj al-sunna, 1: 467.
132. Ibn Taymiyya, “Suʾila ʿan ḥadīth … inna Allāh qabaḍa qabḍatayn,” in Majmūʿ
Fatāwā, 8:  70; Ibn Taymiyya, “Hal yadkhulu aḥad al-janna bi-ʿamalihi,” in
Jāmiʿ al-rasāʾil, 1: 148.
133. See “Hal yadkhulu aḥad al-janna bi-ʿamalihi,” in Jāmiʿ al-rasāʾil, 1:  145–52,
for Ibn Taymiyya’s fuller reason-giving. For this kind of Ashʿarite argu-
ment, see al-Juwaynī, Irshād, 382. The reasoning with which al-Juwaynī pairs
it on the next page—our obedience to God is owed to Him by way of grati-
tude (shukr al-niʿma) and cannot generate further claims—reflects that of
Baghdādī Muʿtazilites, who grounded the necessity of human obedience in the
backward-looking obligation to gratitude, so that reward then appeared as an
act of beneficence (jūd) rather than an obligation grounded in human desert.
See briefly Mānkdīm, Sharḥ al-Uṣūl, 617–19. For more on the Baghdādī view, its
 Notes 305

competitors, and its historical fate, see Zysow, “Two theories of the obligation
to obey God’s commands.”
134. Ibn Taymiyya, “Ḥaqīqat kasb al-ʿabd mā hiya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 397. Ibn
Taymiyya tantalizingly refers to God’s enclosing in actions a “feature that leads
to reward” (khāṣṣa tufḍī ilaʾl-thawāb), but this does not receive clarification.
Cf. Hoover’s conclusion in Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 158
(emphasis added): “God has made deeds causes of reward and punishment just
as He has made poison a cause of illness and illness a cause of death.”
135. For Hoover’s point, see Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 219. This
parsing of his concern is in places explicitly brought out by Ibn Taymiyya, as
in the remark in “Ḥadīth innī ḥarramtu al-ẓulm ʿalā nafsī,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
18: 143–44: min al-ẓulm al-manfiyy ʿuqūbat man lam yudhnib. As a conception
of divine justice, this has clear Qur’anic bases:  see, for example, Q 68:  35
(a-fa-najʿalu al-muslimīn kaʾl-mujrimīn), Q 38: 28, Q 45: 21.
136. This phrase is from Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Qiyās fiʾl-sharʿ al-Islāmī,” in Majmūʿ
Fatāwā, 20: 505–6, speaking of legal analogy (which exemplifies this form of
rationality), but it is in the Radd that this view is developed with special direct-
ness. I  would certainly argue that the notions of divine wisdom and justice
often shade into each other; the concept of rationality discussed in the main
text is sometimes associated with both.
137. That is, injustice involves trespassing against another’s property or sovereign
domain or transgressing against an order, and neither is conceivable in God’s
case. See briefly Gimaret, La doctrine d’al-Ashʿarī, 442–43 (though compare the
qualification in Ibn Fūrak, Mujarrad, 148); cf. al-Ghazālī, Iqtiṣād, 183–84.
138. Ibn Taymiyya, “Fī kawn al-rabb ʿādilan,” in Jāmiʿ al-rasāʾil, 1: 123–24. For fur-
ther discussion of Ibn Taymiyya’s view of justice, see Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s
Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 212–24.
139. Mānkdīm, Sharḥ al-Uṣūl, 348.
140. Rawls, “Two concepts of rules.” My formulation in the main text also draws on
Hart’s reprise of this point in Punishment and Responsibility, ­chapter 1.
141. The phrase is awkward: lam yakun maḥalluhā yanfaʿuhu illā mā yunāsibuhā.
142. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Ḥasana waʾl-sayyiʾa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14:  343–44. Cf.
“Kawn al-ḥasana min Allāh,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 226.
143. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 3: 27.
144. The transfiguration of actions into divine ḥuqūq through command and pro-
hibition is after all the reason why the distinction between human and divine
claims is a porous one. As al-Qarāfī points out, God has a claim over everything
He commands and prohibits (Furūq, 1: 312: ḥaqq Allāh amruhu wa-nahyuhu); in
this respect human claims derive their ultimate normative force by forming
objects of God’s command and prohibition: mā min ḥaqq liʾl-ʿabd illā wa-fīhi
ḥaqq li-llāh taʿālā wa-huwa amruhu bi-īṣāl dhālika al-ḥaqq ilā mustaḥiqqihi (312).
306 Notes

Cf. Weiss’s discussion of “higher-order” and “lower-order” obligation in Search

for God’s Law, 12–13.
145. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Ḥasana waʾl-sayyiʾa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 278. This is also
a central theme of the epistle “Masʾala fīmā idhā kāna fiʾl-ʿabd maḥabba”; see
esp. the remark on 450: acting for the sake of the intrinsic value one perceives
in certain actions, as against the sake of God, is insufficient to generate post-
humous reward. Cf. Ibn Taymiyya, Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, 91: “Whoever loves or
esteems something other than God for itself [li-dhātihi] commits idolatry.”
146. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Ḥasana waʾl-sayyiʾa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 273.
147. Ibn Taymiyya, “Aqwam mā qīla,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 93. The specification
of the prophets and the salaf is a brush stroke added in Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ
taʿāruḍ, 8: 57.
148. Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 51, and see generally
48–52; cf. the remarks on justice on 219–20. Note also Hoover’s remarks
about Ibn Taymiyya’s relative reticence (particularly when compared with Ibn
Qayyim al-Jawziyya) regarding God’s wisdom in “God’s wise purposes in creat-
ing Iblis,” 121.
149. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 3: 65.
150. Ibn Taymiyya explicitly brings together the “How?” and “Why?” questions
in Bayān talbīs, 2:  3 ff., leading up to another statement of epistemic limita-
tion: “Human minds are incapable of fathoming the intended end of [God’s]
actions” (8).
151. James, “Pragmatism’s conception of truth,” in Pragmatism and Other Writings, 88.
152. Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 25.
153. Ibn Taymiyya, “Kawn al-ḥasana min Allāh,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 207; cf. 213.
154. Ibn Taymiyya, Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, 140, 114. This reflects the fact that the reli-
gious life often requires taking things on trust—trusting that its prescriptions
will serve our good before we can see this fact for ourselves—as emphasized,
among other places, in Ibn Taymiyya, Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 683, using a famil-
iar analogy with doctors.
155. The phrase is from Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya,” in Majmūʿ
Fatāwā, 3: 89–90. For Laoust’s point, see Essai sur les doctrines sociales et poli-
tiques de Taḳī-d-Dīn Aḥmad b. Taymīya, 158.
156. Ibn Taymiyya, “Aqwam mā qīla,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8: 106.
157. This pragmatic concern is strongly in evidence in Ibn Taymiyya’s commen-
tary on Q 4:78–79, much of it found in volume 14 of Majmūʿ Fatāwā. See, for
example, 14: 223: “If you reflect on [the fact that your good deeds are the result
of divine beneficence], you thank God and He gives you more; and if you know
that evil only has its origin in you, you repent and it is removed.” Cf. 319: one of
the benefits (fawāʾid) of believing that evil comes from oneself is that one does
not trust in oneself (al-ʿabd lā yarkunu ilā nafsihi). As this suggests, the empha-
sis is placed differently depending on whether what is under consideration are
good or bad deeds.
 Notes 307

158. Ibn Taymiyya, “Suʾila ʿan ḥadīth … inna Allāh qabaḍa qabḍatayn,” in Majmūʿ
Fatāwā, 8: 70.
159. Both passages are cited in ibid.
160. Cf. the telling phrase in “Hal yadkhulu aḥad al-janna bi-ʿamalihi,” in Jāmiʿ
al-rasaʾil, 1: 151: allā yuʿjaba al-ʿabd bi-ʿamalihi.
161. The quote is from Ibn Taymiyya, “Ḥadīth innī ḥarramtu al-ẓulm ʿalā nafsī,” in
Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 18: 150. Ibn Taymiyya makes the conditioning role of benefi-
cence clear on 202: laysa wujūb dhālika ka-wujūb ḥuqūq al-nās baʿḍihim ʿalā
baʿḍ, alladhī yakūnu ʿadlan lā faḍlan. There is a real question to be asked as to
how fundamentally this view diverges from the one expressed by Muʿtazilite
theologians. Baṣran Muʿtazilites certainly applied the concept of obligation to
God, but they also articulated this concept in conditional terms—as the product
of a prior act of beneficence. See briefly Ibn Mattawayh, Majmūʿ, 1: 232: ammā
al-wājib fa-lan yathbuta fī fiʿlihi aṣlan ibtidāʾan …; cf. 244: al-wājib yatbaʿu mā
qad tafaḍḍala bihi. Compare also ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s reference to “obligation” as
being predicated of God “to the extent that God made [certain acts] obliga-
tory upon Himself” (Taʿdīl, 34), which seems very close to Ibn Taymiyya’s
own wording. It is only after God imposes obligations on human beings that
certain actions, such as providing them with assistance (luṭf) or rewarding
them, become obligatory on Him. This view was at the forefront of the Baṣran
quarrel with the Baghdādī view of God’s obligation to do what is best, as Ibn
Mattawayh makes clear in his reprise of the debate in Majmūʿ, 3: 130 ff.
162. See, for example, Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Ḥasana waʾl-sayyiʾa,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
14: 260–61. God’s beneficent action is often free and unconnected to humanly
engendered antecedents (e.g., the benefits of life, health, livelihood enjoyed by
the good and bad alike, God’s merciful inclusion of the undeserving in para-
dise), whereas God’s punitive action is always connected to the antecedent of
human action.

C h a p t er   5
1. Ibn Taymiyya, “Qāʿida nāfiʿa fī wujūb al-iʿtiṣām biʾl-risāla,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
19: 99–100.
2. Ibn Taymiyya, “Risāla fiʾl-Iḥtijāj biʾl-qadar,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 8:  311; cf.
“Al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 3: 115: “The knowledge of the end
[ghāya] which will be the resulting consequence of actions—whether bliss or
misery in the afterlife—is only known through revelation.”
3. For a conspectus of those of Ibn Taymiyya’s writings with relevance to uṣūl al-
fiqh, see Al-Matroudi, The Ḥanbalī School of Law and Ibn Taymiyyah, 27–30, and
Krawietz, “Transgressive creativity in the making,” 48–51 for an overview of Ibn
Taymiyya’s legal writings and of past research on his legal theory. Cf. the remarks
by Opwis in Maṣlaḥa and the Purpose of the Law, 181–83; Opwis takes the nature of
this textual basis as a reflection of a deliberate methodological positioning.
308 Notes

4. See Rapoport, “Ibn Taymiyya’s radical legal thought,” for further discussion of
these cases.
5. Ibid., 217 (emphasis added).
6. For a brief overview of the principle, see Kamali, Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence,
436–38.
7. Opwis, Maṣlaḥa and the Purpose of the Law, 184–85. Opwis also refers to the
broader legal precept that in cases where benefit and harm are both realized in
an action, the ruling should be determined by the preponderant element. We
will return to this shortly.
8. Al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā, 1: 284.
9. Ibid., 315. For brief discussions of unattested interests, see Zysow, Economy of
Certainty, 394–99, and Kamali, Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence, ­chapter 13; in
greater detail, see Opwis, Maṣlaḥa and the Purpose of the Law, s.v.
10. Jokisch, Islamisches Recht in Theorie und Praxis, 190.
11. See the discussion in al-Ghazālī, Mustaṣfā, 1: 294 ff. As will be evident, this
case demands precisely the kind of weighing of costs and benefits (tarjīḥ)
foregrounded by Ibn Taymiyya, as will emerge in the main text shortly.
Unsurprisingly, Ibn Taymiyya brings it up in this very context in “Taʿāruḍ
al-ḥasanāt aw-al-sayyiʾāt,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 20: 52–53, notably suggesting
that the deciding interest at stake is religion rather than human life. Given the
discussion to follow in the main text, it is interesting that al-Ghazālī himself
indicates that the principle that the general takes precedence over the particular
(which underpins his resolution of this conflict) is provided by the Law itself
(Mustaṣfā, 1: 303).
12. Cf. Makari, Ibn Taymiyyah’s Ethics, 103–4, in the context of a larger discussion
of Ibn Taymiyya’s jurisprudence; Makari tersely characterizes Ibn Taymiyya’s
stance on unattested interests as one of “less-than-enthusiastic acceptance.”
13. See Ibn Taymiyya, “Qāʿida fiʾl-muʿjizāt waʾl-karāmāt,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
11: 342–43.
14. Rapoport, “Ibn Taymiyya’s radical legal thought,” 199.
15. See the remarks in Opwis, Maṣlaḥa and the Purpose of the Law, 198–99.
16. Jokisch, Islamisches Recht in Theorie und Praxis, 183 (Ibn Taymiyya’s analogical
use of the ʿarāyā contract, Jokisch notes, would have been a highly contestable
one); see also his concentrated remarks on Ibn Taymiyya’s view of maṣlaḥa at
187–95.
17. Kerr, Islamic Reform, 85 (emphasis added). See also Opwis’s related remarks
apropos al-Rāzī ’s approach, in Maṣlaḥa and the Purpose of the Law, 128–29.
18. Jokisch, Islamisches Recht in Theorie und Praxis, 193. For more on al-Ṭūfī ’s
approach, see as a starting point Opwis, Maṣlaḥa and the Purpose of the Law,
­chapter 4.3 and references there.
19. Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 8:  475; Ibn Taymiyya, “Taʿāruḍ al-ḥasanāt
aw-al-sayyiʾāt,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 20: 48.
 Notes 309

20. Ibn Taymiyya, “Taʿāruḍ al-ḥasanāt aw-al-sayyiʾāt,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 20: 51.

21. Ibn ʿAqīl, Wāḍiḥ, 4b:  355, using the expression tarjīḥ aḥad al-ḍararayn
ʿalaʾl-ākhar. Cf. Ibn Taymiyya’s remark (“Taʿāruḍ al-ḥasanāt aw-al-sayyiʾāt,” in
Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 20: 54): “The rational person [ʿāqil] is not the one who can tell
what is good from what is bad; the rational person is the one who can tell what
is the best of two goods and the worst of two evils.” Ibn Taymiyya also invokes a
medical example in the next paragraph, though it seems to refer us to the expert
judgment of the doctor.
22. Ibn Taymiyya, “Taʿāruḍ al-ḥasanāt aw-al-sayyiʾāt,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 20: 58–59;
cf. “Al-Ḥisba,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 28: 127 ff.
23. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Ḥisba,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 28: 129. Compare Baber Johansen’s
translation and discussion of this passage and the relevant duty in “A perfect
Law in an imperfect society,” 281–84. Johansen likewise places the accent on the
importance of such active weighing of consequences, though it seems to me that
his discussion otherwise calls stronger attention to the textualist aspects of Ibn
Taymiyya’s understanding (275: “In all questions concerning governance in the
name of the sacred law, the Sultan uses his power in following the counsel of
the scholar who bases his advice on a concept of … ‘revealed law’ as a complete
and independent normative system that contains solutions to all problems”).
Abou El Fadl also places the accent on this cost-benefit analysis in Rebellion and
Violence in Islamic Law, 271–79, in the context of examining Ibn Taymiyya’s
view of rebellion. For further discussion of Ibn Taymiyya’s view of this duty, see
Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought, ­chapter  7,
esp. 151–57.
24. For all these examples (and the ones that follow in the main text), see Ibn
Taymiyya, “Taʿāruḍ al-ḥasanāt aw-al-sayyiʾāt,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 20: 51–54.
25. This tradition is cited by Ibn Taymiyya in discussing the duty of commanding
right and forbidding wrong in “Al-Ḥisba,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 28: 128.
26. See Abou El Fadl, Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law, 271–79.
27. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Ḥisba,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 28: 129.
28. Opwis, Maṣlaḥa and the Purpose of the Law, 189; cf. Al-Matroudi, The Ḥanbalī
School of Law and Ibn Taymiyyah, 80; Rapoport, “Ibn Taymiyya’s radical legal
thought,” 199. The passage appears in “Qāʿida fiʾl-muʿjizāt waʾl-karāmāt,” in
Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 11: 344–45.
29. Opwis, Maṣlaḥa and the Purpose of the Law, 183. This is also the conclusion drawn
by Meier, without an explicit yet with a transparent reference to this text, in “The
cleanest about predestination,” 312. Cf. Rapoport’s gloss on this remark in “Ibn
Taymiyya’s radical legal thought,” 199: “The definition of maṣlaḥa can potentially
encompass all that is beneficial to human society, as long as it can be supported
by an indicant from the revealed sources.” A conservative stance is also reflected
in the remarks on unattested interests in Ibn Taymiyya, Qāʿida fiʾl-maḥabba, 37.
30. Ibn Taymiyya, “Qāʿida fiʾl-muʿjizāt waʾl-karāmāt,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 11: 344.
310 Notes

31. In this context it is worth noting that Opwis includes as an additional source of
tension in Ibn Taymiyya’s view his rejection of maṣāliḥ mursala and his approval
of juristic preference (Maṣlaḥa and the Purpose of the Law, 182–83). For the lat-
ter, as Kerr notes, involves the preference of one analogy over another for rea-
sons that amount to an appeal to maṣlaḥa (Islamic Reform, 89). See Opwis, “The
construction of madhhab authority,” for further discussion of Ibn Taymiyya’s
approach to istiḥsān.
32. Opwis, Maṣlaḥa and the Purpose of the Law, 190, emphasis added. Opwis’s dis-
cussion of Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical views is not the best guide to the topic, based
as it is on a slender textual basis and hampered by a partial understanding
of the Muʿtazilite position, which cannot be identified with the view that the
value of actions depends on their consequences (192; see also 30). Opwis’s
conclusions are nevertheless close to (albeit more strongly worded than) my
own: good and bad can be known by reason “though only in [the] form of the
meaning given to them in the revelatory texts,” and “independent from the
law, the human intellect is unable to know what constitutes good in the eyes of
God” (195, 196).
33. The terms used to parse the question shift between “actions” (afʿāl) and “things”
(ashyāʾ, aʿyān). But the latter formulation should not obscure the fact that what
was at issue was the human action of enjoying or using these things or goods.
In the following I will simply refer to actions.
34. For more on this question and the relationship of different legal and theologi-
cal schools to it, see Reinhart, Before Revelation. Ibn Taymiyya himself notes
the close connection between questions about the status of actions prior to
revelation and the role of reason in evaluative knowledge, so that taking a
position on the former (a fortiori the position of permissibility) is intelligible
only against a positive stance on the latter. See the remarks in Ibn Taymiyya,
Minhāj, 1: 450–51.
35. Most of the points above draw on the discussion of the question in Āl Taymiyya,
Musawwada, 474 ff. (esp. 485–87); Ibn ʿAqīl, Wāḍiḥ, 4b: 346 ff. Note Ibn
ʿAqīl’s highly evocative language in characterizing the question: hādhā mafrūḍ
mutawahham (3: 195)—precisely the language used by those framing the other
imaginaries referred to in the main text.
36. The edition of al-Kalwadhānī ’s Tamhīd has sharʿ without a definite article; Ibn
Taymiyya uses al-sharʿ, though the editor also gives the indefinite form as a
variant. My interpretation in the main text additionally draws on Ibn Taymiyya’s
reprise in drawing together two points that al-Kalwadhānī himself seems to pre-
sent as separate ones. For this quote and the one that follows, see al-Kalwadhānī,
Tamhīd, 4: 272; cf. Āl Taymiyya, Musawwada, 486.
37. Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories, 113.
38. Ibn Taymiyya, Qawāʿid, 165.
39. The example comes from ibid., 274.
 Notes 311

40. Ibid., 281.
41. Ibid., 163.
42. Zysow, Economy of Certainty, 340; cf. Kamali, Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence,
351–52. Yet note al-Raysuni’s relevant discussion in Imam al-Shatibi’s Theory of
the Higher Objectives and Intents of Islamic Law, 172 ff. And see now in greater
detail Reinhart, “Ritual action and practical action.”
43. Ibn Taymiyya, Qawāʿid, 281.
44. Ibid., 205.
45. There is a linguistic awkwardness here given that we often use the term “need,”
as against “desire,” to pick out a subset of our desires that carries a more author-
itative aspect. But it is of course possible to be mistaken as to whether one needs
something, and thus to make fallible use of that vocabulary.
46. Geach, “The moral law and the law of God,” 166.
47. For more on this, see Vasalou, Moral Agents and Their Deserts, 87–89. Jāʾiz and
ḥalāl were terms also taken by the Baṣrans to refer to the same category; see, for
example, ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s discussion in Taʿdīl, 31–36.
48. For a fuller list of the relevant considerations, see Vasalou, Moral Agents and
Their Deserts, 88.
49. Al-Kalwadhānī, Tamhīd, 4: 272.
50. ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taʿdīl, 59.
51. Ibn Taymiyya, Qawāʿid, 276.
52. Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories, 113–15, emphasis in the penultimate
remark added. Cf. Ibn Qudāma, Rawḍat al-nāẓir, 79: hādhā ʿilm bi-ʿadam
al-dalīl, lā ʿadam ʿilm al-dalīl.
53. For a broader set of examples illustrating the operation of this principle, see Ibn
ʿAqīl, Wāḍiḥ, 3: 190 ff. This principle was also invoked by some, including Ibn
ʿAqīl himself, to argue for the default validity of previous divine laws.
54. On a variant: mufassir.
55. Ibn Taymiyya, Qawāʿid, 289. Compare al-Kalwadhānī ’s remarks on the need
for (but also the limits to) such textual questing in Tamhīd, 4: 253; Ibn Qudāma,
Rawḍat al-nāẓir, 79–80.
56. This is a verse with clear significance for this context; it is cited by Ibn Taymiyya
in Qawāʿid, 276. It is worth keeping in mind that Ibn Taymiyya’s view of the
original status of actions is throughout grounded in considerations of a scrip-
tural sort. The normative force of need is indicated in the Qur’an in several
places, as we have seen, both in those verses that speak of the general concern
of the Law to alleviate distress (rafʿ al-ḥaraj) (e.g., Q 22:78, Q 2:185, Q 4:28,
cited in Qawāʿid, 204) and those that indicate the effect of necessity (ḍarūra)
on legal strictures (e.g., Q 2:173, Q 5:3, cited in Qawāʿid, 205). The Qur’an
also criticizes the introduction of unwarranted legislation that restricts peo-
ple’s enjoyment of licit goods—a criticism that Ibn Taymiyya’s affirmation of
the “permissibility” status was twinned with—for example, in the verse “O
312 Notes

believers, forbid not such good things as God has permitted you” (Q 5:87; cf.
Q 10:59, Q 42:21, cited by Ibn Taymiyya in this context in Qawāʿid, 164). It is
also worth noting that several writers took the status of ibāḥa to have been
indicated by scripture, in statements such as “He it is Who created for you
all that is in the earth” (Q 2:29) and “Who has forbidden the beautiful (gifts)
of God which He brought forth for His servants, and the good things of His
providing?” (Q 7:32). See al-Kalwadhānī, Tamhīd, 4: 281; Ibn Qudāma, Rawḍat
al-nāẓir, 22. In this respect, as I take it, endorsing this qualification need not
entail abandoning the view that revelation constitutes the qualifications of
actions.
57. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Tawassul waʾl-wasīla,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 1: 264–65.
58. This account tries to unify tensions that find their reflection in the wavering
readings that Ibn Taymiyya’s commentators have offered on this aspect of his
thought. A good example is provided by al-Badawī ’s Maqāṣid al-sharīʿa ʿinda
Ibn Taymiyya; see esp. his discussion of the rational knowledge of interests
at 291–98 and the discussion of unregulated interests at 351–59. On the one
hand, al-Badawī takes Ibn Taymiyya (1) to affirm that reason provides us with
an independent knowledge of certain interests, specifically where “customary”
or “empirical” matters (ʿādat, khibrāt, aʿrāf) are concerned, and that it is per-
missible to take unattested interests into consideration in such matters. On
the other hand, working with the well-thumbed passage of the “Qāʿida fiʾl-
muʿjizāt waʾl-karāmāt,” he takes Ibn Taymiyya (2) to deny that our rational
understanding of welfare can serve as a legislative basis and to assert that rea-
son must instead look to the Law to ascertain what the latter adjudges an inter-
est. These readings seem to be in open tension; yet it is clear that al-Badawī ’s
(1) rests heavily on some of the key passages of the Qawāʿid studied above, and
as such is subject to the above reading of their epistemic limitations. Despite
these ambivalent notes, al-Badawī ’s viewpoint falls in with the one I have out-
lined when he speaks of revelation as the foundation of reason (al-naql huwa
asās al-ʿaql, 297).
59. Ibn Taymiyya, “Qāʿida nāfiʿa fī wujūb al-iʿtiṣām biʾl-risāla,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
19: 100.
60. The first remark is Abou El Fadl’s in Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law, 278;
the second is Rapoport’s in “Ibn Taymiyya’s radical legal thought,” 212.
61. For some expressions of this point, see c­ hapter 1.
62. Michot, Against Extremisms, xxiv; Hallaq, Ibn Taymiyya against the Greek
Logicians, li.
63. See my remarks on this point in Moral Agents and Their Deserts, 8–11.
64. ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taʿdīl, 3.
65. Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 8: 493; the explanation is from Ibn Taymiyya,
“Al-Tawba waʾl-istighfār,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 11: 679.
 Notes 313

66. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Tawba waʾl-istighfār,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 11: 680; see also the
vicinity of this remark. Elsewhere Ibn Taymiyya ascribes this view to the “pious
ancestors” or salaf, as we heard in ­chapter 1.
67. For an example of this kind of deployment, see ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Taʿdīl, 113.
68. Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought, 15; cf.
Izutsu’s discussion of these terms in Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur’ān,
213–17. See also here Hourani’s discussion of the objectivist commitments of
Qur’anic language in “Ethical presuppositions of the Qur’an,” in Reason and
Tradition in Islamic Ethics, 23–48.
69. Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 8: 456. The term maʿrūf is normally tied to actions,
but note that elsewhere Ibn Taymiyya includes faith in God in its scope (e.g.,
9: 375, aʿraf al- maʿrūf).
70. Ibn Taymiyya, “Qāʿida nāfiʿa fī wujūb al-iʿtiṣām biʾl-risāla,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā,
19: 101.
71. For discussion of this, see Vasalou, Moral Agents and Their Deserts.
72. For a succinct presentation of this “law,” see Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ,
1:  5; and see 8–13 for an exposition of the distinction between theological
and philosophical interpretive approaches. For more on Ibn Taymiyya’s
key hermeneutical position in the Darʾ (and the view of reason and revela-
tion it involves), see Heer, “The priority of reason in the interpretation of
scripture”; Abrahamov, “Ibn Taymiyya on the agreement of reason with tra-
dition”; Anjum, Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought, ­chapter 5.
Several papers in the volume edited by Rapoport and Ahmed, Ibn Taymiyya
and His Times, cast light on Ibn Taymiyya’s polemics with the mutakallimūn
on the question of hermeneutics. See particularly Özervarli, “The Qur’ānic
rational theology of Ibn Taymiyya and his criticism of the mutakallimūn”;
el Omari, “Ibn Taymiyya’s ‘theology of the Sunna’ and his polemics with
the Ashʿarites.” For a discussion of Ibn Taymiyya’s own exegetical approach
based on his Muqaddima fī uṣūl al-tafsīr, see Saleh, “Ibn Taymiyya and the rise
of radical hermeneutics.”
73. This term features in a statement that appears in the Darʾ taʿāruḍ (9: 51) embed-
ded in a characteristically thick wrapping of exegetical layers—as a commentary
on a view of Ibn Ḥanbal’s cited and commented on by al-Kalwadhānī, whose
work Ibn Taymiyya is citing and commenting on—where Ibn Taymiyya distin-
guishes between “those who make out human reason to be a criterion [miʿyār]
on the Sunna [man jaʿala ʿuqūl al-nās miʿyāran ʿalaʾl-sunna]” and “those who
make out reason to be in agreement with the Sunna [man yajʿalu al-ʿuqūl
muwāfiqa liʾl-sunna],” aligning Ibn Ḥanbal’s view with the latter and implicitly
claiming it as his own.
74. For all the above, see Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 1: 144–46; cf. 1: 156 ff., 1: 194
for a similar message.
314 Notes

75. Michot, “Vanités intellectuelles,” 601, 600.

76. Ibid., 601. Cf. Anjum’s similar reading of the significance of the epistemology
of fiṭra in Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought, ­chapter 5.
77. Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion of this topic extends over volumes 7 (352 ff.) and 8
of the Darʾ taʿāruḍ. See 8: 17–18 for a quotation of Abuʾl-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī that
provides a particularly telling illustration of the dogmatic view of the progress
of rational inquiry Ibn Taymiyya objects to.
78. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 249. For more on Ibn Taymiyya’s project in the Radd, see
Hallaq’s introduction to Ibn Taymiyya against the Greek Logicians; Kügelgen,
“Ibn Taymīyas Kritik an der aristotelischen Logik und sein Gegenentwurf,”
particularly the remarks on fiṭra at 192–99. Ibn Taymiyya’s argument in
the Radd reads like a direct response to the statement that appears early in
Avicenna’s Najā (9)  regarding logic:  “It is possible for sound human nature
[al-fiṭra al-salīma] and sound taste to dispense with the need for learning gram-
mar and prosody. Yet no human nature engaged in the employment of the
reflective faculties can dispense with the effort to develop this instrument
[āla].” The common denominator in both projects, theological and logical,
is a strong drive against elitist approaches to human knowledge, an aspect
of Ibn Taymiyya’s program emphasized by several writers:  see, for example,
the expressions in Anjum, Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought,
228–29; Michot, “A Mamlūk theologian’s commentary on Avicenna’s Risāla
Aḍḥawiyya,” 171–72.
79. Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 1: 133; cf. indicatively 1: 147, 1: 155.
80. Abrahamov, “Ibn Taymiyya on the agreement of reason with tradition,” 272. A sim-
ilar note seems to be struck by Heer in “The priority of reason in the interpreta-
tion of scripture,” yet his categorical conclusion that “as a Ḥanbalite traditionalist
Ibn Taymīyah held firmly to the position that scripture was in no way dependent
on rational arguments, either for the establishment of its truth or for an explana-
tion of its meaning” (191–92) is certainly too one-sided, for reasons to be set out
shortly. Cf. Tamer’s remarks in “The curse of philosophy,” 370–74, in the context
of an interesting discussion of contemporary presentations of Ibn Taymiyya as a
philosopher.
81. See Abrahamov, Islamic Theology, 51.
82. Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 31. For Michot’s
remarks, see his introduction to Lettre à Abû l-Fidâ’, 18. Michot describes the
Qur’an and the prophetic Sunna as the peak “upon which the twin roads of
reason and revelation meet again—and from which they depart.” Talk of a
“meeting place” suggests the independence of these roads, yet this seems
to be immediately modified by talk of scripture as their common point of
departure.
83. Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 7: 394.
84. Ibid., 8: 491.
 Notes 315

85. See Ibn Taymiyya, Nubuwwāt, 2:  904 ff., and also Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya,
698–701; in both contexts he emphasizes the empirical basis of this knowledge.
Cf. Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 219.
86. Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 3: 3.
87. Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 56; and see Ibn
Taymiyya, “Al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 3:  88 ff. for a clear
development of this claim.
88. Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 68. For brief exposi-
tions of the a fortiori argument, see Ibn Taymiyya, Bayān Talbīs, 2: 345–50; Darʾ
taʿāruḍ, 7: 322–24. The point is also cast more expressly in the vocabulary of
fiṭra; it is by fiṭra, for example, that we know that God is truthful (ṣādiq) and that
we know God’s location above the world (His “aboveness”). See, respectively,
Ibn Taymiyya, “Tafsīr sūrat Āl ʿImrān,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 191–92; Bayān
talbīs, 2: 454; Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 6: 12 (and ff.), to be read in its context.
89. Cf. Michot, Lettre à Abû l-Fidâ’, 17–19; Anjum, Politics, Law, and Community in
Islamic Thought, 203–4.
90. A  concentrated account of these kind of immanent Qur’anic proofs can be
found, among other places, in Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 1: 30–38.
91. This point registers with special directness in Ibn Taymiyya, “Tafsīr sūrat
al-Nisāʾ,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 437.
92. Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 8: 37.
93. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 370.
94. Ibid., 371–72. Kügelgen discusses and translates some of the passages of the Radd
relating to the notion of the “balance” or “scales” in “The poison of philosophy,”
316–18; as she points out, Ibn Taymiyya’s remarks on the topic are intended partly
as a counter to the view that logic constitutes the scales for rational thought.
95. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 382.
96. Ibid. The term qiyās of course also refers us to legal analogy, which is else-
where linked to the notion of justice, with the privileged (sound) analogy said to
have been revealed by God. See, for example, Ibn Taymiyya, “Al-Qiyās fiʾl-sharʿ
al-Islāmī,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 20: 504–505: al-qiyās al-ṣaḥīḥ huwa alladhī wara-
dat bihi al-sharīʿa … huwa min al-ʿadl alladhī baʿatha Allāh bihi rasūlahu.
97. Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 375. Cf. the remark that “the foundation of reason is sound
nature [mabnā al-ʿaql ʿalā ṣiḥḥat al-fiṭra]” (323).
98. Ibn Taymiyya, Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 180. Note Ibn Taymiyya’s qualification of
these proofs elsewhere as “known only through the Prophet,” emphasizing our
dependence on revelation for access to them (Bayān Talbīs, 2: 137).
99. See the Qur’anic evidence cited in Ibn Taymiyya, Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 395. The
embrace of this particular method, Ibn Taymiyya makes clear in this context
and others, involves the rejection of the methods typically used by theologians
and philosophers—what he here refers to, respectively, as qiyās al-tamthīl and
qiyās al-shumūl.
316 Notes

100. Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism, 56, and see the continu-
ation for Hoover’s finer-grained view; his earlier discussion of Ibn Taymiyya’s
method in “Perpetual creativity in the perfection of God,” as I understand it,
also picked up on its responsive or apologetic character (see esp.  295). This
conclusion seems to me to flow naturally from the opening passage of Ibn
Taymiyya’s relevant discussion in “Al-ʿAqīda al-Tadmuriyya” (in Majmūʿ
Fatāwā, 3: 88): even though God’s attributes can also be known by reason, it
is the Qur’an that provides us with these rational arguments, and thus also
with the facts they serve to establish. It is worth noting that the theological
knowledge acquired by reason, whatever its direction or liberty, is one that Ibn
Taymiyya construes in very limited terms given his view that only revelation
provides a particularized knowledge of God’s names and attributes (maʿrifat
Allāh bi-asmāʾihi wa-ṣifātihi ʿalā wajh al-tafṣīl) (Bayān talbīs, 2: 137).
101. Ibn Taymiyya, Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 39, 41.
102. Ibn Taymiyya, Bayān Talbīs, 2:  454. Note Ibn Taymiyya’s qualification in
this context that while God’s elevation above the world is known by reason,
God’s sitting on the throne (istiwāʾ) is known by revelation. Cf. “Al-ʿAqīda
al-Tadmuriyya,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 3: 49.
103. Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 6: 14. The more complex story of Ibn Taymiyya’s
views would have to pass through a closer study of this particular volume of the
Darʾ taʿāruḍ (and also of its counterpart discussions in the Bayān Talbīis), in
which Ibn Taymiyya engages, among others, the philosophical deconstruction
of this intuitive judgment as a false judgment of the estimation (wahm).
104. Ibn Taymiyya, Darʾ taʿāruḍ, 1: 146–47; cf. 166–68 (and circa), following another
exposition of the disagreement and uncertainty reigning among philosophers
and theologians: the cause of people’s perception of conflict (muʿāraḍa) between
reason and revelation lies in their willful distance (iʿrāḍ) from revelation—and
the solution must lie in a return to it. Compare also the remarks in Ibn
Taymiyya, Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 431–32: the further away different groups are
from prophetic guidance, the greater their internal disagreements.
105. The phrase is from Ibn Taymiyya, Sharḥ al-Iṣbahāniyya, 572.
106. Ibid., 548, 685, 687.
107. Hence the emphasis placed by Ibn Taymiyya and other writers on the pagan and
corrupted forms of religion dominating the environment in which Muhammad
grew up, and indeed on Muhammad’s illiteracy (ibid., 687); cf. the emphasis
on novelty at 550–51: “Has anyone said the same thing before him?”
108. Ibn Taymiyya, “Tafsīr sūrat al-Baqara,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 79–80.
109. See, for example, ibid., 77–79; cf. Ibn Taymiyya’s reprise of this account in
al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, 125–26. Compare al-Ghazālī ’s similar suggestion con-
cerning the teleological purpose of the “parity” principle in the practice of qiṣāṣ
in Mustaṣfā, 1: 288.
110. Ibn Taymiyya, “Tafsīr sūrat al-Baqara,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 84.
 Notes 317

111. Al-Shahrastānī, Nihāyat al-iqdām, 387–88.

112. Al-Juwaynī, Irshād, 260; cf. al-Bāqillānī ’s remarks in Tamhīd, 122, referring to
the Muʿtazilite claim that it is known necessarily that it is obligatory to thank
the benefactor:  “What is the difference between you and those who say you
know necessarily that this is not so?” Such doubts had surfaced much earlier;
al-Jāḥiẓ’s epistle “Min Kitāb al-Masāʾil waʾl-jawābāt fiʾl-maʿrifa” already pro-
vides a good document in this regard.
113. Ibn Taymiyya, “Tafsīr sūrat al-Baqara,” in Majmūʿ Fatāwā, 14: 73, 84–85.
114. For Coulson’s remarks, see A History of Islamic Law, 1–2. Cf. Weiss’s remarks
on the distinction between fiqh and sharīʿa in The Search for God’s Law, 13–16.
115. Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories, 13. Two examples Hallaq considers
are the pre-Islamic practice of qasāma and the charitable distribution of surplus
money (faḍl al-māl), noting Ibn Haẓm’s acknowledgment of the Jāhilī origin of
the former.
116. See the overview in Schacht, Introduction to Islamic Law, 13.
117. This attention is in evidence in many places in Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion,
which is peppered with references to pre-Islamic practices and the prerevela-
tional horizon. See, for example, Qawāʿid, 277, referring to the pledges made in
the Jāhiliyya period and which people were commanded to fulfill; 282, talking
about the validity of contracts and acquisitions after the transition into Islam.
118. Coulson, History of Islamic Law, 17–18.
119. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Iʿlām al-muwaqqiʿīn ʿan rabb al-ʿālamīn, 2: 103.
120. In this respect the simplest fact—that Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion of retaliation
takes the form of a Qur’anic commentary—is also the most revealing.
121. It is interesting in this connection to note the remarks Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya
would later offer on the same topic, which emerge in the context of a broader
discussion of the wise purposes underlying God’s prescription of particular
punishments—a discussion replete with Taymiyyan themes, including the
emphasis on God’s wisdom, on the human interests served by the Law, and on a
concordance between what our reason or nature (al-fiṭar waʾl-ʿuqūl) indicates and
what the Law commands. It is in this context that Ibn Qayyim is challenged to
justify the practice of retaliation as an expression of divine wisdom—a wisdom,
importantly, that we can recognize as such—given all the reasons that, ration-
ally considered, seem to militate against it. In confronting this challenge, it is
precisely the kind of ambivalence al-Shahrastānī earlier picked up on that Ibn
Qayyim appears to engage directly. The crux of his reply is the following: in the
balance of countervailing considerations—which are cast in terms of utility, as
competing benefits and harms—there is greater benefit in the practice of retalia-
tion than in its omission (Iʿlām al-muwaqqiʿīn, 2: 103: al-mafsada allatī fī hādhihi
al-ʿuqūba khāṣṣatan waʾl-maṣlaḥa al-ḥāṣila bihā aḍʿāf aḍʿāf tilka al-mafsada). And
here he refers to several of the considerations al-Shahrastānī discussed, such
as deterrence, satisfaction of the desire for revenge, preservation of the human
318 Notes

species, the exacting of justice (2: 104; and see generally the discussion on 100 ff.).
Ibn Qayyim’s view amounts to a simple claim: the conflict between benefit-harm
considerations that al-Shahrastānī had taken to be irresolvable can in fact be
rationally resolved. Another juxtaposition of an assertion and its denial? All
I would note are the commitments at work in both positions. Al-Shahrastānī: to
claim that reason has no access to the value of actions, and revelation is required
to inform us of the latter. Ibn Qayyim: to claim that reason does have such access
and that what it informs us of agrees with what revelation prescribes.
122. Avicenna, Najā, 119. The same term appears in many other versions of the
thought experiment, including al-Rāzī ’s (Ibn Taymiyya, Radd, 398; al-Rāzī,
Sharḥ al-Ishārāt, 1:  269), as well as al-Shahrastānī ’s own reprisal in Nihāyat
al-iqdām, 371–72.

C h a p t er   6
1. Al-Zuḥaylī, Akhlāq al-Muslim, 21.
2. Al-Qaraḍāwī, al-Ḥalāl waʾl-ḥarām, 28.
3. Platti, “La théologie de Abū l-Aʿlā Mawdūdī,”, 250.
4. Quṭb, Fī Ẓilāl al-Qur’ān, 5: 2767.
5. Griffel, “The harmony of natural law and Shari’a in Islamist theology,”, 55. See
Quṭb, Maʿālim fiʾl-ṭarīq, particularly the chapter “Sharīʿa kawniyya,” 93–104.
One reproach to be registered against Griffel’s otherwise illuminating essay is
a habit of anachronistic reference, and more particularly of projecting the term
fiṭra backward into the classical theological debates about value, for example,
in his gloss of the Ashʿarite view as the claim that “Shari’a cannot be part of
fitra” (45) and his gloss of the Muʿtazilite and early Shi’ite view as the claim that
“fiṭra … contain[s]‌the same rulings and laws that have been revealed by the
divine law of Islam” (44). The term fiṭra, however, had been absent from the
characteristic expressions of these views in the classical period.
6. Quṭb, Fī Ẓilāl al-Qur’ān, 6: 3917.
7. Griffel, “The harmony of natural law and Shari’a in Islamist theology,” 59–61.
8. Ibid., 53–54.
9. Ibid., 61.
10. Ibn Taymiyya, Nubuwwāt, 2: 890–91.
11. See Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories, ­chapter  6, particularly 214–31
(“Religious utilitarianism”), for an overview of such modern engagements.
See also Opwis, “Maṣlaḥa in contemporary Islamic legal theory”; Johnston, “A
turn in the epistemology and hermeneutics of twentieth century uṣūl al-fiqh,”
though his reading of the relationship of this “turn” to the classical theological
field would benefit from a more nuanced view of the evaluative commitments
of Ashʿarism as explored in this study.
 Notes 319

12. See al-Fāsī, Maqāṣid al-sharīʿa al-Islāmiyya wa-makārimuhā, 8–9. The sharp dis-
tinction between fiṭra and ṭabīʿa will be interesting in light of our discussion
in ­chapter  3, though al-Fāsī does not seem to sustain it with full consistency
throughout the work. For further discussion of al-Fāsī ’s views, see Johnston,
“ʿAllal al-Fāsī.”
13. See, for example, al-Fāsī, Maqāṣid al-sharīʿa, 9:  mā kāna lahā an tastaqilla
bi-nafsihā li-idrāk qawāʿid al-fiṭra; cf. 19: iktishāf al-fiṭra. The distinction between
actual and ideal is central to the distinction between fiṭra and ṭabīʿa al-Fāsī
draws at the outset; the latter, he notes, consists of “what belongs to things
intrinsically, and is not to be detached from them” (9).
14. Ibid., 74.
15. Ibid., 68. One is certainly reminded of Ibn Taymiyya’s “revealed natural dispo-
sition” by a remark such as jāʾat al-fiṭra taḥuddu min ghulawāʾ al-ṭabīʿa, which
casts fiṭra as an event. Cf. the telling phrase on 11–12:  al-khurūj ʿan al-ṭāʿa …
khurūj ʿan al-fiṭra. A more thorough study of al-Fāsī ’s account would be needed
to read these tokens more confidently in their significance.
16. Quṭb, Maʿālim fiʾl-ṭarīq, 99–100, as translated in Griffel, “The harmony of natu-
ral law and Shari’a in Islamist theology,” 56.
17. Al-Qaraḍāwī, al-Ḥalāl waʾl-ḥarām, 29–30.
18. Starrett, Putting Islam to Work, ­chapter 1.
19. Ibid., ­chapter 3, section 5. See also the functionalized discussion of prayer and
fasting in ­chapter 3, section 6.
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 Index

ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Abuʾl-Ḥasan, 18, 25, to God, 141, 144, 153–54, 161–64;
30, 31, 32, 41, 71, 84, 110, 133, 134, on the arbitrariness of God’s
137, 166, 183, 218, 226, 292n55, command, 140–41, 178–79; on
292–93n58 the connection between acts
ablution, 260 and otherworldly consequences,
Abou El Fadl, Khaled, 309n23 156–57, 180–81, 183–85; on God’s
Abrahamov, Binyamin, 233 will versus God’s love, 175,
Abū Dharr, 169 177–78, 301n94; on the harmony
Abū Yaʿlā. See Ibn al-Farrāʾ between human nature and
adultery, 143, 153, 157, 158–59, 161 the Law, 151, 252; on the inap-
aesthetic reactions, and ethical value, plicability of ethical standards to
43, 47, 134, 292–93n58 God, 134, 181; on the knowledge
ahl al-sunna waʾl-jamāʿa, 12, 28 of the interests promoted by
Ahmed, Shahab, 266n35 the Law, 148–61; on maqāṣid
Albert the Great, 91 al-sharīʿa, 143–64; on reason
Al-Āmidī, Sayf al-Dīn, 118, 147, 154–56, as a source of ethical guidance,
161, 163–64, 201, 289n29, 299n72 115–20, 147, 289–90n33; on
Anjum, Ovamir, 4, 18, 283–84n92 self-interested desire as the basis
Annas, Julia, 90, 274n2 of value, 26–27, 111–13, 115–19,
Al-Anṣārī, Abuʾl-Qāsim, 26, 54, 157, 289–90n33; semantic versus
140, 290n36 normative approach to ethical
apostasy, 256 concepts, 114–18; on the social
Aquinas, Thomas, 91 origin of ethical norms, 111–14,
Aristotle, 35, 41, 42, 57, 274n2 124–27; tension between theolog-
Al-Ashʿarī, Abuʾl-Ḥasan, 27, 111, 115, 116, ical and legal views, 143–48; view
134, 147, 181, 288n20, 297n51 of God’s wisdom, 141; views of
Ashʿarites, 3, 15, 71, 245; on the appli- scriptural interpretation, 230–31
cation of intentional concepts Augustine, 91
336 Index

Avicenna, 5, 36, 42, 71, 78, 83, 84, 124, Cicero, 57, 91

125, 126, 249, 288n14, 314n78; commanding right and forbidding
view of ethical propositions, wrong, 206–209
58–65, 275n18, 276–77n25, conflict, of evaluative grounds, 170–75,
277n31; Ibn Taymiyya’s response 203, 206–209, 244–45, 248,
to ethical view of, 66–70; influ- 300n92, 308n11
ence on Ashʿarite ethics, 110–13 consequences, consequentialism. See
utility
Al-Badawī, Yūsuf, 312n58 contractual clauses, 200–201, 214–215,
Baghdādī Muʿtazilites, 29, 102, 185, 216, 218
299n71, 304n133, 307n161 convention, 60–61, 111, 113, 114, 124, 249,
Al-Bāqillānī, Abū Bakr, 115, 144–45, 147, 271n105, 287n12
288n21, 294n19 Cook, Michael, 24, 227
Baṣran Muʿtazilites, 19, 29–30, 47, Coulson, Noel, 246, 247
102–103; on the cost of ethical custom (ʿāda), 60, 61–62, 111–114,
action, 40–41; emphasis on deon- 124–27, 287–88n12; customary
tological considerations, 31–33, acts (ʿādāt), 214–215, 218–219; as
99–100; ethical objectivism, 25–26, a means of knowing the aims
133–35; on good or permissible of the Law, 149, 155–56, 163, 165,
acts, 217–218; on moral reasoning, 215–216
94, 103; on the relation between
rational and revealed norms, desert (istiḥqāq), 31–33, 49, 53, 108, 183,
93–95, 116, 120; role of desert in 185–86, 193
ethical theory, 31–33, 179, 183; role desire, as a focus of Ibn Taymiyya’s
of utility in ethical theory, 31–33, 95, ethical epistemology, 68, 120,
134–35; on the self-evidence of ethi- 129–31, 133; good versus bad,
cal norms, 110–11; understanding of 87–90, 220, 284n95; justice as an
God’s obligation, 307n161; view of object of human, 36–48. See also
God’s wisdom, 141, 166, 176; view love; fiṭra
of moral motivation, 38, 269n78; Al-Dhahabī, Shams al-Dīn, 13, 16, 104
view of reward and punishment, divine determination, 15, 16, 28, 80,
179, 183 108, 172, 192–93
Al-Baṣrī, Abuʾl-Ḥusayn, 29, 53,
273n126, 314n77 egoism, 27, 39, 44, 104, 107, 111–12, 113,
Bell, Joseph Norment, 283n89 116, 122
beneficence (iḥsān), 33, 36, 37, 98, El Shamsy, Ahmed, 152, 293n11,
292n57; God’s, 141, 170, 176, 177, 296n44
182, 194, 307n161 empirical propositions (mujarrabāt,
Bentham, Jeremy, 35, 92, 172 tajribiyyāt), 58, 72–73, 75, 77
Black, Deborah, 63 Ess, Josef van, 280n66
causes, acts as, 73–74, 75, 180–89, estimative propositions
193–94, 279n51 (wahmiyyāt), 60
 Index 337

estimation (wahm), 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 147, 148–58, 162–64, 175, 180–81,
66, 67, 69, 271n94, 276–77n25, 184–85, 201–204, 210, 230–31,
277n31, 279n55, 288n14, 316n103 277n33, 289n23, 301n94, 302n104
evil, explanation of, 170–75 Gobillot, Geneviève, 80, 124
experience (tajriba), 59, 67, 70, 288n14; God, “aboveness,” 240–41, 278n40;
as a paradigm of ethical knowl- human knowledge of, 78–84,
edge, 72–77, 96, 98–99 232–33, 234–35, 282–83n83; inap-
plicability of ethical standards to,
Fakhry, Majid, 4 28–29; two standpoints on, 176–79
Al-Fāsī, ʿAllāl, 258–59 God’s command, demands of God’s
fatwa, as a vehicle for theological divinity as the ground for, 176–79;
writing, 16–17 human welfare as the ground for,
fiṭra (natural disposition, human 142, 168–76
constitution), 36, 37, 41, 109–10, God’s justice, 180, 186–88, 191–92, 227;
244, 278n39; in Ashʿarite usage, conflict with God’s power, 14–16,
113–14, 121–25, 290n36, 296n44; 28, 137–38, 140; and the notion of
Avicenna’s conception of, 60–65, God’s self-binding, 169, 194
78, 249, 291n43; cognitive God’s love, distinction between will
content, 80–81, 82–83, 232–33, and love, 173–74, 177–78, 240; of
236–39, 282n78; in contemporary particular acts, 86, 140, 167–68,
Islamic usage, 1–3, 251–61; and the 173–74, 177–79, 189; self-love, 176,
desire for benefit, 68–70, 74–75, 178, 189
81–83, 85, 91, 124; harmony with God’s will, determinative versus legisla-
revelation, 88–89, 96–97, 228, tive, 173–74; grounded in reasons,
233, 240–41; and the knowledge 140, 167–68, 175
of God, 78–84, 123, 232–33, God’s wisdom, 140, 186, 191–92, 205,
234–35, 282–83n83, 315n88; 227–28, 234; and the demands
Muʿtazilite interpretations, of God’s divinity, 176–79; human
79–80; non-normative status ignorance of particulars of, 165–66,
of, 84–90; positive connota- 190; objective reality of, 165–66,
tions, 83–84, 87–88, 89, 232–33, 194–95; and the promotion of
282–83n83; relation to reason, human welfare, 141–42, 170–71;
74–75, 236–39; sound versus and the weighing of conflicting
corrupt, 89–90, 238–39, 240–41, goods, 171–75
284n98, 284n99 Griffel, Frank, 254–56, 276n23, 318n5
flying man argument, 60, 65 Grotius, Hugo, 57
Frank, Richard M., 289n23 Gutas, Dimitri, 276n23
Frede, Dorothea, 42
habituation. See custom
Geach, Peter, 217 ḥadd, 160–61
Al-Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid, 18, 19, 26–27, ḥads (intuition), 276n23
39, 42, 104, 106–23, 140, 143–44, hajj, 94, 135
338 Index

Hallaq, Wael, 18, 143, 213, 219, Ibn Rushd, Abuʾl-Walīd, 233

224, 246–47 Ibn Sīnā, Abū ʿAlī. See Avicenna
Ḥanafites, 24, 146, 160 Ibn Taymiyya, Taqī al-Dīn, interpretive
Ḥanbalites, 12–13, 24, 190 challenges in approaching, 6–7,
ḥaqq (right, claim), 31, 47, 49, 50, 51, 158, 16–21, 77, 99, 131–32, 195, 222–25;
170, 179; and the concept of fiṭra, via media as an intellectual ideal,
1–2, 257–58; deontological versus 11–16, 19, 21, 27, 29, 53, 123, 138,
consequentialist character, 41, 52; 187, 226
ḥuqūq Allāh versus ḥuqūq al-ʿibād, Ibn Ṭufayl, Abū Bakr, 61
87–88, 160–61, 305n144; and ignorance, as a cause of wrongdoing,
reward and punishment, 183, 185, 95, 286n116
189, 193–94 induction (istiqrāʾ), 59, 61, 75; as a
hardship (ḍarūra). See need means of knowing the aims of the
Hasse, Dag, 276–77n25 Law, 149, 163, 165, 215–16
Al-Ḥillī, ibn al-Muṭahhar, 17, 53 injustice (ẓulm), 23, 33, 35, 36–48;
Hobbes, Thomas, 27, 39, 46, 54 Baṣran Muʿtazilite view of, 30, 31,
Holtzman, Livnat, 280–81n68 33; God’s ability to commit, 169
honor (ʿirḍ), 298n64 intention, 189
Hoover, Jon, 4, 182, 186, 190, 191, 233, intoxicants, consumption of, 143, 144,
234–35, 236, 239 145, 161, 171, 206
Hourani, George, 134 intuitionism, 30
human nature. See fiṭra intuitions, 60, 102, 172–73
Hume, David, 38, 41, 43, 46–47, 92, 93, istiḥsān (juristic preference),
133, 135 210, 310n31
istiṣḥāb al-ḥāl (presumption of continu-
ʿibādāt (ritual observances, acts of wor- ity), 213, 218–220
ship), 94, 146, 160, 215–216
Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, Abū ʿAbd Allāh, 17 Jackson, Sherman, 27, 296n49
Ibn ʿAqīl, Abuʾl-Wafāʾ, 24, 25, 166, 206, Al-Jāḥiẓ, Abū ʿUthmān, 124
266n35, 294n25, 299n78 James, William, 191
Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyī al-Dīn, 11, 13, 85–86 Johansen, Baber, 160, 214, 309n23
Ibn al-Farrāʾ, Abū Yaʿlā, 24, 303n113 Jokisch, Benjamin, 202–203, 204, 205
Ibn Fūrak, Abū Bakr, 111, 115, 147, Al-Jubbāʾī, Abū Hāshim, 29
287n11, 288n20 justice (ʿadl), 23, 33, 35, 98, 169, 187;
Ibn Ḥanbal, Aḥmad, 12, 80, 190 Baṣran Muʿtazilite view of, 31;
Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Shams al-Dīn, human motivation to, 36–48, 122;
247, 259, 317–18n121 primacy of utility over, 49–53
Ibn Qudāma, Muwaffaq al-Dīn, al-Juwaynī, Abuʾl-Maʿālī, 111, 112, 115–16,
12, 266n32 118, 120, 140, 143, 145, 151, 159, 174,
Ibn Mattawayh, Abū Muḥammad, 25, 180, 201, 245, 288n21, 301n94,
26, 31, 32, 40, 94, 103, 135 304n133
 Index 339

Al-Kalwadhānī, Abuʾl-Khaṭṭāb, 24, 25, maṣāliḥ mursala. See unattested

212, 213, 218, 266n35 interests
Kant, Immanuel, 93 maṣlaḥa. See utility
Khārijites, 208 Maudūdī, Abuʾl-Aʿlā, 254, 255
Kerr, Malcolm, 205, 296n49, 310n31 Michot, Yahya, 4, 12, 17, 18, 58, 224,
233; on Ibn Taymiyya’s critique of
Laoust, Henri, 12, 192 religious rationality, 231–32
Law, religious. See revelation Meier, Fritz, 308n29
lease of orchards, 200–201, 204 Mill, John Stuart, 35, 92
legal cause (ʿilla), 142, 143, 147, Miskawayh, Abū ʿAlī, 62, 275n18
148, 202 moral sentiments, 59, 61, 276–77n25,
legal license (rukhṣa), 200–201, 204, 278n41; social origin of, 61–62,
208, 211 69–70, 125. See also love
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 175 muʿāmalāt (practical transactions), 146,
logic, 58, 104, 314n78 204, 215–216
love (ḥubb, maḥabba), 68; human love munāsaba (convenience, suitability),
of ethical acts, 36–48, 122, 142–44, 146–47, 149, 154–55, 199,
290n37; human love of God, 202, 298n70
80–82, 123, 177–78, 189, Muʿtazilites, 3, 15, 70, 81, 93, 102–104,
191–92, 227–28 110, 128, 134, 140, 141, 168, 189, 208,
Lovejoy, Arthur, 131 225–29, 230, 245. See also Baṣran
luṭf (divine assistance), 100, 307n161 Muʿtazilites
Luther, Martin, 90
lying, 30, 32, 36, 37, 103, 112, 267n53; natural disposition or constitution.
al-Ghazālī on the absolutist view See fiṭra
of, 112; Muʿtazilite argument from, natural law, 57, 90–91, 93; and
81, 269n78, 281n73 contemporary views of Shari’a,
254–55, 259–61
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 125 nature, ethical appeal to, 57,
Makdisi, George, 265n24, 266n32 90–92, 93
Mālikites, 24 Al-Naẓẓām, Abū Isḥāq, 146
Mānkdīm Shashdīw, Abuʾl-Ḥusayn, 31, necessary or self-evident knowledge
94, 111, 115, 116, 118–19, 187 (ʿilm ḍarūrī), 30, 71, 82–83, 231,
maqāṣid al-sharīʿa (aims of the Law), 245, 277n33, 317n112
52; Ashʿarite accounts, 143–64; need, as a normative ground, 199–201,
threefold classification, 143, 204, 205, 211–220, 311n56
201–203, 216 Neiman, Susan, 138, 175
marriage, 152–54
maʿrūf (right, what is known), 89, 128, obligation (wujūb), 47, 91;
227, 228, 254, 313n69; al-amr Ashʿarite view of, 115–18, 181,
biʾl-maʿrūf, 206–209 289n23, 296n50
340 Index

optimism, 175 Al-Rāzī, Fakhr al-Dīn, 15, 18, 36, 53,

Opwis, Felicitas, 200–201, 204, 210–11, 54, 58, 61, 69, 70, 104, 113, 118,
298n70, 310n31, 310n32 121–26, 143, 149, 157, 158, 163–64,
183–86, 230–31, 274n127, 277n33,
Plato, 40, 42, 175, 249 294n19, 298–99n70, 301n94,
Platti, Emilio, 254, 255 302n104
pleasure, immediate pleasure versus reason, 3, 36, 56, 67, 69; broader
future consequences, 44–45, relation to revelation, 229–41;
73–74, 84–87, 89, 97–98; three contemporary appeal to, 254–61;
types of, 43–44. See also utility and the engagement of welfare
polygamy, 256 in the legal context, 197–220;
Porter, Jean, 90, 93 formal versus substantive,
pragmatism, in Ibn Taymiyya’s legal 187–88; harmony with revela-
practice, 199; in Ibn Taymiyya’s tion, 13–14, 94–95, 228, 230–31,
theological practice, 191–95 239, 240–41; Ibn Taymiyya’s
prayer, 94, 286n115 engagement with the rationalist
primary propositions (awwaliyyāt), 58, sciences, 4–5, 12–13; and the
64–65, 69, 277n26 knowledge of God and His attri-
prophecy, 93, 275n18; ethical knowledge as butes, 234–35, 239–41; practical,
a proof of, 128–29, 234, 242–49; role 63; purity of prerevelational
of reason in proving the truth of, 234 ethical content, 241–49; rational
Pufendorf, Samuel von, 57 proofs in the Qur’an, 235–36,
punishment, 115–16; dissociation from 238, 239; rationality as the per-
ethical value, 28, 108; justification ception of likeness, 187, 236–39;
of, 179–90, 193–95 role in scriptural interpretation,
230–31; as a source of ethical
qadar. See divine determination knowledge, 70–77, 95–104,
Al-Qaffāl al-Shāshī, Abū Bakr, 300n78 108, 197; theological aims of
Al-Qaraḍāwī, Yūsuf, 2, 253, 260 Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical appeal
Al-Qarāfī, Shihāb al-Dīn, 41, 143, 149, to, 224–29
157, 158, 162 Reinhart, Kevin, 53
qiyās (legal analogy), 50, 143, 145–47, retaliation (qiṣāṣ), 51–52, 143, 159, 257,
202, 204, 209, 273n119, 315n96 298n64; grounded in reason ver-
qiyās al-awlā (a fortiori argument), sus revelation, 243–49, 317–18n121
235, 239 reward, 182, 185–86, 189, 193–94
Quṭb, Muhammad, 256 revelation, concept of “before revela-
Quṭb, Sayyid, 254–57, 259 tion,” 241–49; constitutive of ratio-
nality, 236–38, 255–56; harmony
Rachels, James, 135 with reason or nature, 13–14,
Rapoport, Yossef, 199–200, 88–89, 94–97, 228, 230–31, 239,
204, 308n29 240–41; indicating the preexistence
Rawls, John, 187–88 of ethical standards, 226–27;
 Index 341

particularisation of intuitive ethical ṭabʿ, 27, 39, 40, 108–109, 111–12,

norms by, 94–95, 96–97, 99–100, 115, 117, 157, 288n21, 289n23,
116, 120, 159, 221–222, 243–44, 247; 290n36, 293n58; relation to fiṭra,
as a source of ethical knowledge, 109, 120–25
95–104; status of actions before the al-taḥsīn waʾl-taqbīḥ, 3, 16, 112, 142, 210,
advent of, 212–220, 247 212; as a subject of Ibn Taymiyya’s
concern, 19–20
salaf, 12, 25, 138, 239 Al-Tamīmī, Abuʾl-Ḥasan, 24, 212
Saliba, George, 232 tawakkul (trust in God), 99, 194, 228
Schacht, Joseph, 247 tawḥīd al-ilāhiyya versus tawḥīd
Schneewind, Jerome, 92, 103, 133 al-rubūbiyya, 16, 177, 228
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 76 thought experiment, 59–65, 112, 125,
Sebti, Meryem, 65 126, 249, 275n10, 277n33
sense perception (ḥiss), 61, 63, 65, 66, Al-Ṭūfī, Najm al-Dīn, 205, 257
72–74, 86, 98, 277n31; internal
versus external, 76, 279n55 Al-ʿUthaymīn, Muḥammad ibn Ṣāliḥ,
Shāfiʿites, 24 1–2, 257
Al-Shahrastānī, Tāj al-Dīn, 113, 126, unattested interests (maṣāliḥ mursala),
244–46, 248–49, 317–18n121 199, 202–205, 209–11
Shihadeh, Ayman, 54, 126, utility, as the aim of the Law, 49, 142,
287n11, 290n36 168–76; context-dependence, 135;
Sidgwick, Henry, 47 distinction between immediate
ṣifāt (real attributes), Ashʿarite denial and long-term, 44–45, 73–74,
of evaluative qualifications as, 84–87, 89, 97–98; as the ground
26, 144–45; Baṣran Muʿtazilite of value, 34–35, 129–31; as the
view of ethical qualities as, object of human desire, 35, 42; ori-
26–27, 31–32; Ibn Taymiyya’s view entation of fiṭra to, 68–70, 74–75,
of ethical qualities as, 29, 49, 81–83, 85, 91, 124; priority over
134–36, 292n56 justice, 49–53; public or
al-Sijzī, Abū Naṣr, 266n33, 291n41 communal, 45–48, 51, 70, 100–102,
sincerity (ikhlāṣ), 189 113, 125–26, 130–32, 160–61; reason
social contract, as origin of ethical as an epistemic source for, 71–77,
norms, 46, 51, 126, 127, 271n105. 95–104, 194, 197–220; relation of
See also convention; custom justice to, 36–48, 273n117; revela-
Socrates, 137–38, 167 tion as an epistemic source for,
Starrett, Gregory, 260–61 95–104, 197–220; weighing of
Stoics, 57, 91 conflicting considerations, 170–75,
Sufism, 98, 99, 178, 189, 302n105 206–209, 308n11. See also unat-
syllogism, demonstrative, 58, 64 tested interests; need
sympathy, 41, 47, 59, 62, wajh (ground, act-description), 30, 49,
270n87, 275n18 53, 71, 130, 183, 217–218, 272n113,
Swartz, Merlin, 13, 19, 27 274n127, 294n19
342 Index

Weiss, Bernard, 17, 145, 155–56, 298n66 Voltaire, 92, 93

welfare. See utility
Wensick, A. J., 280n66 Zagzebski, Linda, 93
widely accepted propositions Ẓāhirites, 146
(mashhūrāt), 58, 64–65, 112, Al-Zanjānī, Abuʾl-Qāsim, 266n33
113, 126 Al-Zuḥayli, Wahba, 1, 253
worship (ʿibāda), 176–79, 189, 192 Zysow, Aron, 146, 147–48, 149, 161