Ibn Taymiyya on Reason and Revelation

Mise en Scènemise en scène Yet over the centuries, the clear and unencumbered plains of God's Holy Word had slowly but steadily been encroached upon from beyond the horizon, and foreign troops had come to occupy many a Muslim thinker's mind.The mass translation of Greek and Hellenistic medical, scientific-but especially philosophical-texts into Arabic from the time of the Abbasid caliph al-Maʾmūn in the early third/ninth century onward brought a host of new and strange ideas and modes of thinking into the Muslim intellectual landscape.The works on logic, metaphysics, and other disciplines by Aristotle and various Neoplatonic thinkers fascinated and enticed, yet also discomforted and repelled; for here was a sophisticated, brilliantly exposited view of the world, carefully elaborated over the course of centuries by some of the most brilliant minds the world had ever known.Provocatively, it was a view of the world, a vision of reality, that pretended to far-reaching coherence and comprehensiveness and that presented itself, quite compellingly, as based on, as growing out of, as being derived from nothing less than reason itself.And what cause was there for worry?For does not the Qurʾān itself, in numerous passages, beseech its followers to reflect, to ponder, to exploit their God-given intellects, to employ their minds that perchance they might better fathom the purpose of their existence?"A-fa-lā yaʿqilūn" (Will they not then understand?);1 "A-fa-lā yatadabbarūn" (Do they not consider [the Qurʾān] with care?);2 "Laʿallahum yatafakkarūn" (Perchance they may reflect).3 Yet what to make of it were one to comply with God's behest to use one's intellect only to discover, unsettlingly, that what reason has delivered is somehow discordant with what God-Creator of all things, including man and his intellect-has Himself declared in revelation?For the Greeks spoke of man as well.They too spoke of the heavens and the earth, and of God.Reason, Aristotle tells us, perceives that God is a perfect being.Now, all may agree that God is perfect.But reason, Aristotle tells us further, judges that a perfect being must be, among other things, perfectly simple, indivisible, non-composite.So, while revelation may very well seem to predicate certain qualities or attributes of God-such that He is living (ḥayy), self-subsisting (qayyūm), mighty ( jabbār), lovingly kind (wadūd), omniscient (ʿalīm), all-seeing (baṣīr), and all-hearing (samīʿ)-reason, for its part, avers that God cannot in reality possess any such attributes, for then He would no longer be perfectly simple, as reason requires 1 Q.Yā Sīn 36:68.All translations in this work, whether from Arabic or from European languages, including translations of the Qurʾān and ḥadīth, are mine except where otherwise indicated.2 Q. al-Nisāʾ 4:82 and Muḥammad 47:24.(Trans.ʿAbdullāh Yūsuf ʿAlī, The Meaning of the Holy Qurʾān.Hereafter Yusuf Ali.) 3 Q.al-Aʿrāf 7:176, al-Naḥl 16:44, and al-Ḥashr 59:21.Him to be, but composite; that is, He would be "composed" of His uniquely indivisible essence and His alleged attributes or qualities.Similarly, we are told, the dictates of sound reason affirm that God cannot be held to have knowledge of any particular, individual, instantiated thing in the world, as all such things are impermanent, springing into existence one day only to succumb to their demise the next.It follows by rational inference, therefore, that God cannot be held to know any such ephemera, for to know them would imply a relational change (and therefore an imperfection) in His knowledge.But, does not God Himself say in revelation, "Wa-mā tasquṭu min waraqatin illā yaʿlamuhā" (And not a leaf falls but that He knows it)?4 Indeed, He does.And so the lines are drawn, and the battle is on.4 Q.al-Anʿām 6:59.

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