Ibn Taymiyyah: Significance for Current-Day Islamism?

Ghazan Kahn (1271-1304) Converts to Islam (1295)

. . . but fails to satisfy Ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328)

(Image from Wikipedia)

For my course on Islamism, I've recently read Shmuel Bar's article "Jihad Ideology in Light of Contemporary Fatwas" (Hudson Institute, Monographs Series No. 1, Paper Number 1, August 15, 2006), published by the Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World, which also offers many other articles on contemporary Islamism.

I've found Bar's article very useful in clarifying the role that fatwas, i.e., Islamic legal rulings, play in justifying the violent actions carried out by Islamist militants. Bar explains a central point that can easily escape our notice if we imagine that we can appeal to ethical arguments to dissuade jihadist violence, for "questions that are commonly deemed 'moral' and 'ethical' are subordinated to legal casuistry" (page 1a).

Bar notes that Islamists interpret jihad primarily in military terms and enjoin it as a duty:

According to this viewpoint, not only is jihad a duty, but at least under the present circumstances it may only take the form of a Military jihad, and cannot be interpreted as a spiritual struggle. Furthermore, military jihad -- and of course martyrdom -- has added both spiritual and temporal value. It "implies all kinds of worship, both in its inner and outer forms. More than any other act it implies love and devotion for Allah, [Who is exalted,] trust in Him, the surrender of one's life and property to Him, patience, asceticism, remembrance of Allah and all kinds of other acts [of worship]. And the individual or community that participates in it finds itself between two blissful outcomes: either victory and triumph or martyrdom and Paradise."

According to Bar's footnote 20 (page 17), this quote comes from Ibn Taymiyyah, al-Siyaasa al-shar'iyya fee Islah al-raa'ee wa al-raa'iyya (Governance According to Allah's Law in reforming both the ruler and his flock).

On a website maintained by Ted Thornton, I have found the same passage, albeit in more complete form (cf. the phrase "Who is exalted" in brackets above), citing pages 47-49 of Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1996). Perhaps Bar is borrowing the quote from Peters and if so ought to give credit, but perhaps some citations were abbreviated when Bar crafted this article to summarize his book, Warrant for Terror: The Fatwas of Radical Islam (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

Be that as it may, Thornton quotes Ibn Taymiyyah further:

"Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God's entirely and God's word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought." (page 49 of Peters)

These quotes from Ibn Taymiyyah begin to clarify for me the importance that this Muslim scholar has for contemporary Islamist thinking. Another quote supplied by Thornton clarifies Ibn Taymiyyah's significance for the Wahhabi Islam practiced by Saudi Arabia:

"The religion of Islam turns on these two principles: worshipping God alone and worshipping Him by what He prescribed. He is not served by innovation . . . . It is not permissible when guilt has been established by proof or by witness to suspend the legal punishment, whether by remitting it or by substituting a fine or any other thing: the hand of the thief must be cut off, for the application of the punishments is one of the acts of religion like the jihad in the Way of God."

Thornton borrows this quote from John Alden Williams, The Word of Islam (Austin, Texas, 1994), 164f). This fits with Bar's point that in Islamism (or broader Islam itself?), "questions that are commonly deemed 'moral' and 'ethical' are subordinated to legal casuistry" (page 1a). To think beyond what Allah has prescribed, which would require ethical rethinking, constitutes innovation, such that one is no longer worshipping Allah properly. Ibn Taymiyyah's influence on Ibn Wahhab may be at work here, for the Wahhabist form of Islam found in Saudi Arabia is of this strict sort.

One begins to suspect that the individual in Islamist circles is not encouraged to think at all but merely to listen and obey.

I suppose that there's always a reason for everything, and Thornton gives his speculation for the rigidity pervading Ibn Taymiyyah's views:

Possibly behind much of the conservatism, literalism, and fundamentalism in his thought are the following facts. The Islamic Middle East had just passed through one of its severest ordeals: it had for two centuries been menaced from the West by the Crusaders (eight waves of them). Moreover, the Mongol threat from the East had been neutralized only three years before Ibn Taymiyya's birth in Harran (in Mesopotamia).

The threat re-emerged in the 1290s, despite the Kahn's coversion to Islam. Hence my decision to post the above image of Ibn Taymiyyah's archenemy, Ghazan Kahn.