This, then, is the crux of Ibn Taymiyya’s skeptical attitude: If you are at all like Jews and Christians and you are Muslim, you are following a piety based on conjecture rather than knowledge. This idea echoes across all his writings, not only those composed primarily for polemical purposes. That is, the accu- sation of conjecture does not feature only in his words against Christians. It also features, for example, in his writings on love, that is, God’s love for creation. Here, too, Muslims, following Jewish and Christian conceptions of love, have fallen into error.
The long-standing debates about love in Islam revolve around the divine attributes of will and of love.40 Does God will into existence what he loves?
Does he love what he wills? Some verses in the Qur’an state that all things are the result of God’s will, while others say that God loves piety and right- eousness and hates impiety and sinfulness. Does this mean that God wills both what he loves and what he hates? Muslims were divided on the issue. One group, associated with the school of Mu‘tazilism, claimed that God does not will all things. Humans, they claim, not God, are responsible for their deeds of piety and impiety and will be accordingly rewarded and punished for those deeds. But this was to neglect the verses of the Qur’an that say that all things are the result of God’s will in preference for those that say God loves piety and hates impiety. Was this not to distort the message of God?
The other group, associated with the school of Ash‘arism, emphasized the verses that say that God wills all things, without, however, admitting that he loves all things. (As a result, they were hesitant even to attribute the quality of love to God.) Such a position required a precarious balancing act. To say that God wills all things but still loves piety and hates impiety, this group had to posit that non-existent things were also objects of God’s love and hatred. God does will piety, but for the pious, and he does will impiety, but for the impious: This, in turn, means that he hates impiety, but only for the pious, and that he hates piety, but only for the impious. Such things (the impiety of the pious and the piety of the impious) do not actually exist. However, by arguing in this way, the partisans of this kind of thinking were able to claim that God wills all things while still loving piety (for the pious, which does exist, and for the impious, which does not exist) and hating impiety (for the pious, which does not exist, and for the impious, which does exist).
Ibn Taymiyya had problems with both viewpoints but reserved most of his criticism for the second. He parted ways with thefirst position by emphasiz- ing, in affirmation of scripture, that all things are the result of God’s will (while still managing to affirm human freewill), but he found the second position untenable. Not only did it result in a bundle of theological concoc- tions, as just noted, but more profoundly, its unduly static understanding of God’s will neglects verses that speak of it as wisdom. For Ibn Taymiyya, God does will all things, but he does not do so foolishly. He does not will what he hates for some and what he loves for others.
Ibn Taymiyya took another tact, thinking of God’s will in a twofold manner: God does not will all things in the same way. He does not will good and evil arbitrarily. God wills good things, such as piety, as ends or goods in themselves. He wills evil things, such as impiety, but not as ends or goods in themselves. Rather, they are willed as a means to something else that is pleasing to God. For example, some are willed to be sinners not because sin- fulness is pleasing to God but for others to be saved through their negative example. There is wisdom to God’s will.
Ibn Taymiyya does not resolve all questions with his division of things into two categories: what pleases God for itself (such as piety), and what pleases him not for itself but because of what it produces (such as impiety that causes others to repent). But it does allow him to say that all religious practices do not equally reflect the will of God. If they did all equally reflect the will of God, one might conclude that they are all equally pleasing to him. This would be a way to justify deviant religious practices in the name of God. This is his ultimate concern, and he attributes this type of fatalistic thinking to Ash‘arism: If all things are from God, then correct and incorrect forms of worship are equally valid. For Ibn Taymiyya, it is the height of misguidance to say that since God has created all things, good and evil, he has willed all things equally for a single purpose. That would be absurd, making good and evil alike in the eyes of God. In other words, it would be to suggest that God willed things without the wisdom that the Qur’an attributes to him. This, in
turn, would suggest that God is less than perfect, failing to undertake things with wise purposes. One would have to say that all things, good and evil, are equally part of God’s will, making it possible to say that religious practices based on human conjecture are no less a reflection of God’s will than those that reflect the plain sense of scripture.
It is around the question of corrupt forms of worship that Ibn Taymiyya’s ideas on love flow into polemics. In a treatise on love,41 as in his explicitly
polemical writings, he attributes deviant beliefs in Islam not only to scholarly conjecture but also to the negative model of Christians. For Ibn Taymiyya, love is essentially a motive. We love and thus pursue what gives us pleasure. God also loves what is pleasing to him, taking joy, for example, in a sinner who repents (although divine love for Ibn Taymiyya is not comparable to human love despite the shared language). Humans, of course, are motivated by pleasures. There are pleasures in this world and also in the next that motivate them to do things to realize those pleasures. However, some scholars—Ibn Taymiyya names Fakhr al-Dı-n al-Ra-zı-—have confused the matter.42On the basis of conjecture, they understand pleasure in metaphysical
(that is, non-bodily) terms, denying the physical descriptions of pleasure that according to the Qur’an the inhabitants of paradise will enjoy and also the physical descriptions of pain that the inhabitants of hell will suffer.
Such a view, Ibn Taymiyya claims, brings about the corruption of religion: corrupt beliefs and corrupt practices, including deviant forms of worship and ascetical practices. In short, it is a denial of the truth of God’s promise and threat, that is, his promise of pleasure in paradise and his threat of pain in hell as communicated by his prophetic messengers. As a result, those who hold this view abandon pleasures in this world that are of benefit to them and also turn away from the pleasures in the next world for which they have been created. They misguidedly replace these pleasures with what poses harm to them. All this is the result of philosophical conjecture on the meaning of pleasure! Here, Ibn Taymiyya quotes Q 53:23, “They only follow z.ann and the whims of their souls even when guidance has come to them from their Lord.” As a result, Muslims go astray, pursuing pleasures they mistakenly think will bring them benefit without knowledge of the end for which love exists or the path by which to reach it. Most become absorbed in pleasures that only harm the body and soul. In this respect, Ibn Taymiyya remarks, they are like Christians, denying the promised physical pleasures of paradise and concocting forms of worship with no scriptural basis. By imitating Christians, Muslims go astray, as the Qur’an warns at Q 5:77, “Do not follow the whims of a people that went astray before. They have led many astray, and they have strayed from the straight way.” Led by scholarly conjecture, Muslims now find themselves in a similar situation, confused about true pleasure. Thinking, like Christians, that true pleasure is ultimately spiritual, they succumb to the lusts of sinfulness in this world, permitting themselves food and drink that God has forbidden, just as the Christians have done. For Ibn Taymiyya, all of this is the result of scholarly rationalizations.
Thus, even in his writings on love, Ibn Taymiyya deploys the skeptical language of the Qur’an to accuse his scholarly adversaries of inventing beliefs and practices, associating them with the ignorance that had led Christians into theological error. At another place in the same work, Ibn Taymiyya comments on Q 7:28, “If they commit immorality, they say, ‘We found our fathers doing it. So Allah has commanded us to do it.’ Allah does not com- mand immorality, or do you say things about Allah of which you have no knowledge?” Commenting on the verse, Ibn Taymiyya says that by imitating their forefathers, such people only follow z.ann.43He then applies the verse to
Muslims: devotees of Sufism, scholars of philosophy and theology, and mili- tary commanders and soldiers, who fabricate lies in the name of religion to justify the immoralities they commit against the prohibitions of scripture.
For Ibn Taymiyya, at the bottom of it all is a perverse form of love, namely, passion (‘ishq), which, he claims, Muslims have turned into religion. By his day, scholars had constructed a theory of love to justify divine–human attraction. This was to make a human passion (love) a means for drawing close to God. As a result, Muslims go crazy over beautiful figures, thinking them to be manifestations of God’s beauty and thus a means to incite the heart in worship of God. They even go so far as to consider that their Lord dwells in such figures or is united with them. They then go on to commit immoralities with these figures. (Ibn Taymiyya is insinuating sexual relations with prepubescent males.) But they justify it in the name of religion, claiming that Muslims before them did it. For Ibn Taymiyya, this is the height of polytheism whereby Muslims now resemble Christians. You canfind them, he claims, setting up rivals to God, loving them as they love God, either out of genuine but misguided devotion or from lust—or both. This is the sad situa- tion of the umma even when scripture makes it clear that Muslims should have no love for anything like their love for God and his messenger. Such thinking leads to religiously decadent behavior. Muslims now take pleasure in listening to poetry and song that stir up a base form of love common to all people. It may be the mark of those who love God, but it is also the mark of those who love idols, crosses, their own spiritual brethren, nations, pre- pubescent boys, and women along with God. How can Muslims pursue this kind of polytheism-inducing love while claiming to be monotheists? It begins with human conjecture and culminates in the grossest of theological errors.
Ibn Taymiyya wrote on a wide variety of topics across his voluminous writings. He offered novel views on long-standing conundrums in Islam. For example, as seen in earlier chapters, Muslims had long debated the question of the origin of the world. Had God created it in time or was it coeternal with him? If it was created in time, this suggests that God’s will was sus- ceptible to change, a notion seen to impinge upon his perfection. Before he created the world, he did not will it. Then, upon creating it, he willed it. This means that his will had changed. How could afickle deity be perfect? For this reason, Islam’s scholars were ready to accept the eternity of the world even if it meant contradicting the Qur’an. Ibn Taymiyya offered a
more dynamic perspective: One of God’s attributes is that of creator. As all divine attributes, that of creator characterizes God from eternity. Since God is eternal, everything about him is eternal. It is thus not possible that there might have been a time when God, who is characterized as creator, was not creator. This means that as creator he creates from eternity, even before he created the world in time. In other words, he did create the world in time, but only within a spectrum of perpetual creativity with no beginning and no end.44Ibn Taymiyya offered a similar solution for divine speech, the Qur’an.
Is it created or eternal? The question has constituted the greatest theological controversy in Islam. Ibn Taymiyya argued that it was the best of God’s speech yet still only one point on a continuum of divine speech with no origin and no end. The Qur’an, as divine speech, is therefore uncreated but not necessarily eternal!