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Welcome to the University of Nottingham and the Department of Theology and Religious Studies
and you are watching another video in the series “Why Study?”
With me today I have Dr Jon Hoover who is our expert in Islamic studies
and he is also an expert in the work of Ibn Taymiyya
who is a famous Arabic historian and Jon, why Study Ibn Taymiyya?
Well, Ibn Taymiyya is well known for many reasons, let me start with the security reasons.
He is quoted as an authority by Osama Bin Laden and that tends to get people’s interest immediately
and then he is also famous for having written a large work on Shi'ism
which is feeding into a lot of Sunni Shia polemics today,
he himself was a Sunni, he lived most of his life in Damascus
and there were Shia Sunni tensions in Damascus at that time.
He also wrote the largest refutation of Christianity in the whole Islamic tradition,
he has written a refutation of Aristotelian logic and coming out of this
he is quite a modern figure actually in terms of his epistemology
and the way in which he approaches texts and so on.
He has written a very huge work arguing that the revelation of Islam agrees with reason
so the agreement of revelation and reason.
He has talked about Sufism and the spirituality of Islam
and he is well known for his critique of saint worship, shrine worship or the shrine cult.
So he has covered all kinds of things and there are different groups of Muslims and non-Muslims today
who have taken interest in his work on any one of these counts and gotten quite into his thought,
but he has something to say about a lot of different things.
He stands about midway between the beginning of Islam and the present day.
He lived in the late 1200s, early 1300s, he died in 1328.
So, standing at that juncture, half way between the beginning and the present of the Islamic tradition
and then having captured the interest of so many people today that makes him a very fascinating figure to study.
So in other words, here is someone who in Islam is as significant in the range of his work as Augustan
or Aquinas is in the Christian tradition.
Or even more so, I like to say sometimes
you know if you walk the streets of Cairo you can find Ibn Taymiyya’s works
or especially the works of his disciple Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya
who writes a bit more poetically and a bit more beautifully.
You find them in almost any Islamic bookshop
where you are not going to find Augustan and Aquinas in any bookshop in the UK.
[Laughter]
Yes, unfortunately not!
So there is a sense in which Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya
his student, are more present in the centres of Cairo.
So studying him is not just studying the historical thought in the way that
we might study the historical thought of some great thinker in the past
it is actually studying a living force in Islamic understanding today.
Yes, studying Ibn Taymiyya is indeed studying a living force in the Islamic tradition, in the present day Islam,
and I want to emphasise as well that studying him ….
I mean he is so highly controversial, you can’t study him without studying his opponents today
and in his own time and as you begin exploring
what he said and then what people are saying in response
you branch out into the whole of the tradition, the whole of present day Islamic thought as well.
If you take almost any book on contemporary Islamic politics and you look in the index
or some reference to him, but the book itself may not have much to do with him.
Or if you refer to a book on Islamic law today there might be a couple references to him.
He comes into the picture in so many different ways, in discussions of Islam,
both in medieval times and in the present
it is an excellent way to begin unpacking the whole of the tradition even.
I want to pick up a particular aspect of his thought
which I know that you are a particular expert on.
Religious people are always fascinated by the problem of the goodness of God
and yet the suffering that exists in creation and for many people
the very fact that there is an earthquake or there is a tsunami or whatever, say
“Oh, how can there be religious people?”
And this is, to use the jargon – theodicy.
Now, I know that you have actually written a book on Ibn Taymiyya's theodicy - since this is such a key question
would you just explore that with us for a moment?
Yes, Ibn Taymiyya's facing this question of the rationality of life, of the rationality of the Islamic doctrinal content
and he is very exercised by the people in his time who say
“Well, you know I sinned today, but God made me do it and it doesn’t matter.
You know God just determines what God determines and doesn’t have any impact on our moral life”.
So he is very exercised by this question and he wants to say that
‘No! It does matter what you do and you are going to have to
you are going to be called account to that… for that before God’.
And so you would expect him to have a strong sense of freewill
that we humans are accountable, we have a free will.
But that then contradicts or puts him in tension with God’s power
which is fundamental in his belief but if God is all powerful and God is also good
as he strongly affirms, then you have the whole problem of evil and sin
and all of that and you can’t just blame God for everything.
So he is trying to say that everything that happens is good
but you have to look at it from a certain perspective.
That the goodness of God is never compromised by any kind of evil
but the evil is somehow real for the person who experiences it and they should try to overcome it.
As I articulate in the book, I am not sure he does this that well, sorts this problem out that well.
But he deeply affirms the goodness of God, the power of God and our responsibility
and he tries to hold that together, that is what he is trying to do.
Ibn Taymiyya ends up in the same place that Jewish and Christian thinkers who deal with this
they are struck by the reality of the goodness, the reality of God and the reality of God’s goodness
but also the reality and the agony, as it were, of human suffering and the human condition
Yes, and he interprets it much as some traditional thinkers, he is saying that evil is ultimately non-existent.
It comes from… God didn’t create it.
It is our, evil arises and suffering arises out of our not doing we were created to be doing.
It is our backing out of what God created for us to do, which is nothing, that act is nothing
it is a withdrawal of what we should be.
And so he is deeply troubled by suffering to a degree
perhaps I would say not quite enough, but he explains suffering as just a case of God’s education
perhaps of expiation of sins as a type of lesson, you know
to teach us that we should pay closer attention to God.
There are all these ways in which Ibn Taymiyya explains suffering
and that for some people may not be satisfactory
but it is education that he sees in the picture here.
To what extent is Ibn Taymiyya today, we spoke earlier about him being a living force.
What would you say is the most salient of his thoughts that is active today.
He really believed firmly that religion … the religion of Islam was rational and agreed with reason
and he worked hard to show that - so he is an apologist.
And I that connects closely with what many modern Muslims, not all Muslims
but many modern Muslims are seeking is a rationalisation and an attempt
to explain the Qur'an and the tradition of the prophet Muhammad
which in a way makes sense; he is trying to make that make sense, it’s reasonable.
Ok. We have tried, in this short film, to introduce the thought of a great thinker.
I hope you found it interesting and I hope that it has helped you to discover more
and whet your appetite to study even more.
Jon, it has been great having you, thank you.
Thank you for watching and from the Department of Theology and Religious Studies
here in the University of Nottingham, Goodbye.
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