Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328)

Harran, a line of Hanbalite jurists

Ibn Taymiyya was born on 10 Rabî' I 661 AH (January 22, 1263) in Harran, a city of Upper Mesopotamia today located in south-eastern Turkey, then under Mamluk control.^[7] His father, Shihâb al-Dîn 'Abd al-Halîm ibn Taymiyya, and his grandfather, Majd al-Dîn Abû al-Barakât ibn Taymiyya, were both renowned Hanbalite jurists, authors of reference works still studied today.^[8] His mother, Sitt al-Ni'am bint 'Abd al-Rahmân al-Harrâniyya, came from a Kurdish family of the same city.^[9] This double line of jurists placed the young Ahmad, from childhood, at the heart of a scholarly milieu devoted to the study of Hanbalite law and theology — the most literalist school, and the least inclined to speculative reasoning, among the four great Sunni legal schools.

1269: exile to Damascus

In 1258, Hülegü's Mongol armies sacked Baghdad and ended the Abbasid caliphate; the Mongol Ilkhanate settled in Iraq and Persia, while the Mamluks of Egypt and Syria halted the Mongol advance southward at the battle of 'Ayn Jâlût in 1260.^[10] Harran, exposed to recurrent Mongol incursions, became a dangerous city for a family of religious notables. In 1269, when Ahmad was six or seven, the Ibn Taymiyya family fled a fresh Mongol incursion and settled permanently in Damascus, under Mamluk administration.^[11] Damascus would remain Ibn Taymiyya's home city until his death — apart from several forced stays in Cairo and Alexandria, imposed by his successive imprisonments.

Precocious training and a prodigious memory

In Damascus, the young Ibn Taymiyya studied under dozens of recognized masters of his time, beginning with his own father.^[12] His biographers unanimously describe his memory as prodigious: he is said to have memorized the Qur'an very early, then a considerable corpus of hadiths, Hanbalite law and theology.^[13] His training also included a critical reading of the great authors of the rationalist theology he would later combat, notably the Muhassal ("The Sum of Knowledge") of Fakhr al-Dîn al-Râzî, the Ash'arite luminary of the previous century — a reading that would nourish his reasoned, and not merely polemical, critique of kalâm.^[14] On his father's death in 1284, when he was only twenty-one, Ibn Taymiyya inherited his teaching chair at the Umayyad Great Mosque of Damascus, an early sign of the recognition he already enjoyed in the city's scholarly circles.^[15]

The divine attributes read without allegorical detour

The heart of Ibn Taymiyya's theological system concerns the question of the divine attributes. Against the Ash'arites and Maturidites, who allegorically interpret (ta'wîl) the Qur'anic expressions lending God "hands," a "face," or the act of "sitting" upon a throne, Ibn Taymiyya defends a reading that affirms these attributes in their obvious sense, without denying them (as the Mu'tazilites do) or likening them to the attributes of creatures (anthropomorphism, or tashbîh, which he explicitly rejects).^[16] This position, known as the doctrine of bilâ kayfa ("without asking how"), goes back to earlier traditionalist theologians such as Ibn Kullâb, but it is Ibn Taymiyya who systematizes and defends it with the greatest argumentative rigor.^[17]

In his reference treatise Al-'Aqîda al-Wâsitiyya, written in a single sitting after the afternoon prayer at the request of a judge of the Iraqi city of Wâsit, Ibn Taymiyya thus explains the meaning of the divine Throne: the Arabic word for "throne" literally denotes "the elevated seat," and if the Qur'an attributes a throne to God, this throne is not, with respect to Him, comparable to a mere roof — it must be understood as an elevated seat relates to the one who sits upon it, without implying a corporeal localization comparable to that of creatures.^[18] Against Fakhr al-Dîn al-Râzî, the leading figure of late Ash'arism, who held that philosophical reason must, in case of apparent conflict, prevail over the obvious sense of revealed texts, Ibn Taymiyya wrote after 1313 a massive eleven-volume treatise, the Dar' ta'ârud al-'aql wa-l-naql ("Averting Contradiction between Reason and Tradition"), in which he rejects this "universal rule" in forty-four distinct arguments.^[19]

"The Creator of all things is above all things and encompasses them." — Ibn Taymiyya, Bayân talbîs al-Jahmiyya, book IV, p. 52, quoted in the doctrinal analysis of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy^[20]

The divine Throne and the accusation of corporealism

This insistence on the literal sense of the divine attributes — God "above" the Throne, God who "descends" in the last third of the night according to a classical hadith — very early earned Ibn Taymiyya the accusation of corporealism (tajsîm), that is, of lending God a body or a spatial localization comparable to that of creatures.^[21] A first trial on these grounds took place in Damascus as early as 1298; it ended without conviction, but the controversy would never fully die out in the theologian's lifetime.^[22] Ibn Taymiyya systematically replied that his position was not anthropomorphism (tashbîh), since he simultaneously affirmed God's radical incomparability — "Nothing is like unto Him" — but that it equally refused the Ash'arite strategy of emptying revealed texts of their obvious sense in the name of a philosophical reason deemed superior.^[23]

The Aqîda al-Wâsitiyya, a creed that triggers a trial

The very treatise meant to clarify his doctrinal position, Al-'Aqîda al-Wâsitiyya, became the source of a new trial: three sessions held in Damascus in January and February 1306 reached no definitive conclusion, but Ibn Taymiyya was then summoned to Cairo, the Mamluk capital, where he was condemned for corporealism in April 1306 and imprisoned for eighteen months.^[24] This first great Cairene incarceration marked the beginning of a series of detentions that would punctuate the last twenty-two years of his life — more than six cumulative years, detailed below in the section devoted to the Mamluk jails.^[25]

The following table situates Ibn Taymiyya's Atharite position relative to the two other great Sunni theological schools on three major doctrinal questions.

Conquerors converted, yet deemed heretical

Between 1300 and 1304, the Mongol Ilkhanids, converted to Islam since the reign of Ghâzân Khân, nonetheless continued to threaten Mamluk Syria militarily.^[29] Ibn Taymiyya, who had lived through the terror of the Mongol invasion of Harran as a child, refused to regard this conversion as sufficient to exempt the Ilkhanids from jihad: he reproached them for continuing to apply, alongside the sharî'a, the Mongol customary code inherited from Genghis Khan, the Yasa, and for occasionally allying with Christian powers against other Muslims.^[30] On this basis, he held that a Muslim may — and sometimes must — fight populations outwardly Muslim but whose practice remains, in his view, tainted by heresy and practical infidelity to the revealed law.^[31]

The battle of Chaqhab and breaking the Ramadan fast

This theological position found concrete application during the 1303 campaign. On April 20-22, 1303, the Mamluk army faced the Mongol forces and their Armenian allies near Kiswah, south of Damascus, in the battle known as Chaqhab or Marj al-Saffâr.^[32] According to the account given by the historian Ibn Kathîr, one of his disciples, Ibn Taymiyya joined the nightly patrols on Damascus's ramparts in the days before the clash, encouraged the population with Qur'anic verses on jihad, and accompanied the volunteers setting out to fight the Ilkhanids — a role of religious and moral encouragement, which modern historiography is careful not to turn into direct military command.^[33]

As the battle took place during the month of Ramadan, Ibn Taymiyya issued a fatwa authorizing the fighters to break the fast in order to preserve all their strength for the clash, arguing that the Prophet and his companions had likewise not fasted when meeting the enemy in Ramadan.^[34] The battle ended in a decisive Mongol defeat, which put an end to their attempts at lasting invasion of the Levant.^[35]

The fatwas of Mardin, a text trapped by its modern readers

It is in this context of war against theologically suspect Mongols that Ibn Taymiyya wrote several fatwas concerning the city of Mardin, in the south-east of present-day Turkey, then under Mongol administration.^[36] The question posed was direct: is Mardin a "territory of war" (dâr al-harb), which would oblige its Muslim inhabitants to emigrate to the "territories of Islam," or does it remain, despite Mongol domination, a territory where one may lawfully remain?^[37] Ibn Taymiyya answered that Mardin is neither entirely a territory of war nor entirely a territory of Islam, but a composite category — and that emigration is not obligatory if one can continue to practice one's religion there.^[38]

The Belgian Islamologist Yahya Michot, in his reference work Ibn Taymiyya: Muslims under Non-Muslim Rule, demonstrates that this nuanced fatwa has been systematically misread by both certain Orientalists and contemporary Islamist movements, who retain only the term yuqâtal ("must be fought") isolated from its context of defensive war against a hostile Mongol power, to conclude that any Muslim territory not governed by Islamic law is, in principle, a territory of war legitimizing offensive jihad.^[39] Osama bin Laden repeatedly cited this Mardin fatwa in his calls to overthrow the Saudi monarchy and for jihad against the United States; the Islamic State and other jihadist-Salafist movements have invoked it comparably to justify takfîr (excommunication) of Muslim governments deemed impious.^[40]

Ibn Arabi, a danger deemed greater than the Mongols

While Ibn Taymiyya recognized an authentic Sufi tradition — he himself belonged to the Qâdirî path, commented on a treatise by the founder of that order, 'Abd al-Qâdir al-Jîlânî, and praised ancient spiritual masters such as al-Junayd or Ibrâhîm ibn Adham^[41] — he tirelessly fought the monist current popularized by Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) under the label, forged by Ibn Taymiyya himself, of wahdat al-wujûd ("the unity of Being").^[42] According to the analysis proposed by the historian Jamileh Kadivar, Ibn Taymiyya pronounced an unambiguous takfîr against Ibn Arabi and his disciples, holding that the spiritual harm they cause to believers' souls is more grave still than the material harm inflicted by the Mongol invasions then ravaging the Muslim world.^[43]

"Their harm is more grave, in matters of religion, than that of the Mongols." — Ibn Taymiyya, quoted and analyzed by Jamileh Kadivar, "Exploring Takfir, Its Origins and Contemporary Use: The Case of Takfiri Approach in Daesh's Media," Contemporary Review of the Middle East, vol. 7, no. 3, 2020, pp. 259-285^[44]

This severe judgment concerns Ibn Arabi's ontological doctrine, which Ibn Taymiyya accuses of assimilating, through the thesis of the unity of Being, God's substance to that of the created world — a form, in his view, of shirk (associationism) and kufr (unbelief).^[45] The article devoted to Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) develops the whole of this controversy, its metaphysical stakes and its contrasting reception to this day; it suffices to note here that it occupies a considerable share of Ibn Taymiyya's polemical work and illustrates his constant method: fighting first, not the most visible external enemy, but the doctrinal deviation deemed most corrosive to Islam's internal orthodoxy.

The Minhâj al-Sunna against Twelver Shiism

In his treatise Minhâj al-Sunna al-Nabawiyya, written in refutation of the Twelver Shiite theologian al-'Allâma al-Hillî, Ibn Taymiyya likewise shows extreme severity toward Shiism, which he deems "religiously bankrupt" and whose adherents he accuses of favoring non-Muslim enemies over the Sunni Muslim community.^[46] This work, still widely circulated today, remains a reference source for anti-Shiite polemics in certain contemporary Sunni currents.^[47]

The Refutation of the logicians: syllogistic deemed sterile

On philosophical ground, Ibn Taymiyya frontally attacked the Aristotelian logic inherited from al-Fârâbî, Ibn Sînâ (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in his treatise Al-Radd 'alâ al-Mantiqiyyîn ("Refutation of the Logicians"), composed around 1309-1310.^[48] There he argues that the categorical syllogism brings, in reality, no additional certainty compared to the reasoning by analogy already practiced spontaneously by the human mind, and that Avicennan real definitions are impossible to verify empirically.^[49]

"Analogy and the categorical syllogism are equivalent." — Ibn Taymiyya, Al-Radd 'alâ al-Mantiqiyyîn, §§ 116-157, quoted in the doctrinal synthesis of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy^[50]

For Ibn Taymiyya, certain knowledge of universal truths comes neither from Greek philosophical speculation nor from sensible experience alone, but from a combination of four sources: sensible perception (external and internal), reliable report (khabar, in particular prophetic revelation), natural reason, and the innate constitution of the human being (fitra).^[51] This theory of knowledge, marked by a frontal rejection of philosophical elitism — which he accuses of reserving truth for an elite while deceiving the people with simplified corporeal images^[52] — makes Ibn Taymiyya one of the most systematic internal critics of falsafa in the whole history of Islamic thought.

The corporealism trials

After the first 1298 trial and the April 1306 Cairene condemnation already mentioned, Ibn Taymiyya suffered a new imprisonment in Cairo from April 1308, this time for sixteen months, following a dispute with Sufi circles of the Mamluk capital.^[53] He was then transferred to Alexandria in August 1309, where he remained under house arrest for eight more months, until April 1310.^[54] Only in 1313 did he durably return to Damascus, where he would spend most of the rest of his life teaching and writing within a small circle of disciples.^[55]

The dispute over the repudiation oath

A new controversy erupted in 1318 over a question of matrimonial law: Ibn Taymiyya held, against the received opinion of the four Sunni legal schools, that repudiations not conforming to the sunna — triple repudiation pronounced at once, repudiation during menstruation — are void, and that a repudiation oath pronounced in anger does not necessarily produce an irreversible legal effect — positions deemed heretical by certain official jurists of Damascus.^[56] The question gave rise to three successive councils, in 1318, 1319 and 1320, without definitive conclusion: Ibn Taymiyya maintained his position despite a letter from the sultan forbidding him to rule on this subject.^[57] It was the conjunction of this dispute with the controversy over visits to tombs that led, a few weeks after the third council, to his incarceration of August 1320 (see below).

The fatwa on journeys to tombs and the 1320 incarceration

In 1310, Ibn Taymiyya wrote a treatise, known as Ziyârat al-qubûr or Shadd al-rihâl, in which he strictly limited the legitimacy of journeys undertaken specifically to visit tombs, including the Prophet's: in his view, only a courtesy visit, without a journey organized for that sole purpose, is lawful, any other practice being in his eyes a blameworthy innovation (bid'a).^[58] This position, deemed extreme by some Hanafite jurists such as Mullâ 'Alî al-Qârî, who reproached him for having gone, on this precise point, to the opposite of all other Sunni legal currents, triggered a major new controversy.^[59]

After one of his disciples, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, preached in Jerusalem on the intercession of the prophets in terms deemed provocative, a group of Ibn Taymiyya's supporters was arrested; at the end of the three councils held between 1318 and 1320 on the repudiation oath, and in the wake of the controversy over tombs, Ibn Taymiyya was imprisoned in the Damascus Citadel on August 26, 1320.^[60] He was released only five months and eighteen days later, on February 9, 1321, by order of Sultan al-Nâsir Muhammad.^[61]

A death deprived of ink and paper

In Jumâdâ II 728 AH (April 1328), following a complaint filed by Judge al-Ikhnâ'î, the Mamluk sultan ordered that Ibn Taymiyya be deprived of all paper, ink and pens during his final incarceration.^[70] The philosopher Oliver Leaman holds that this deprivation of the means of writing — for a man whose entire work rested on continuous writing — directly hastened his death, which occurred on September 26, 1328, at the age of sixty-five.^[71] According to the Hanbalite biographical tradition, transmitted notably by his disciple Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya in his work Al-Wâbil al-Sayyib, Ibn Taymiyya had held, well before this final ordeal, words whose content, paraphrased here rather than quoted literally, sums up his constant disposition in the face of adversity and imprisonment: what could his enemies do to him, since his paradise and his garden were in his breast and accompanied him everywhere, imprisonment becoming a retreat for worship, a putting to death martyrdom, and exile a journey.^[72]

These words, reported by the Hanbalite biographical tradition and widely repeated in the literature devoted to Ibn Taymiyya, accord with all of his documented conduct in the face of his repeated imprisonments.^[73] At the announcement of his death, a considerable crowd gathered in Damascus: according to the chronicles of the time, between two hundred thousand men and fifteen to sixteen thousand women are said to have attended his funeral prayer — a sign that, despite the repeated official condemnations against him, Ibn Taymiyya enjoyed massive popular support in the Damascus of his day.^[74]

The letter of the Christians of Cyprus

In the early 14th century, an exchange helped crystallize the tense relations between Christian and Muslim theologians of the Levant: an anonymous apologetic letter in defense of Christianity, written shortly before 1316 among the Christians of Cyprus and known as the Letter of the People of Cyprus, was addressed to the Muslim theologians of Damascus.^[75] Its anonymous author — probably a Melkite Christian — took up and developed an earlier epistle by Paul of Antioch, Melkite bishop of Sidon, addressed a century earlier to a Muslim friend.^[76] Ibn Taymiyya answered it with a work of quite another scale: Al-Jawâb al-Sahîh li-man baddala dîn al-Masîh ("The Sound Response to Whoever Altered the Religion of Christ"), a massive six-volume text totaling several thousand pages, constituting one of the most systematic and longest Muslim refutations of Christianity ever written.^[77]

A Trinity deemed logically incoherent

Ibn Taymiyya's central argument against Trinitarian doctrine concerns its internal logical coherence. According to the analysis proposed by the Islamologist Ismail Abdullah, Ibn Taymiyya holds that if the Son is supposed to be "uncreated" and "equal to the Father in substance," then nothing is equal to the Father in substance but a substance itself — which would make the Son a second substance and the Spirit a third, thus arriving at three substances, hence three gods, directly contradicting the Christian claim to monotheism.^[78] Ibn Taymiyya develops this refutation in six distinct doctrinal points against the Trinity, mobilizing both scriptural-authority arguments and rational-coherence arguments.^[79]

The crucifixion denied, the Gospel deemed falsified

In line with the classical Qur'anic reading (Qur'an 4:157), Ibn Taymiyya holds that Jesus did not die crucified, but that God raised him to Himself, another having been substituted in his place before his executioners' eyes.^[80] He further holds, in the line of the Islamic doctrine of tahrîf, that the present Gospels have undergone alteration (textual falsification or distortion of meaning) relative to the original revelation given to Jesus, which allows him to reject on principle any Christian scriptural authority invoked against him.^[81]

The status imposed on the Christians and Jews of Damascus

On the legal rather than merely theological plane, Ibn Taymiyya defended in 1299 the closure of several churches of the Mamluk sultanate, holding that the Pact of 'Umar — the traditional protective status granted to Christians and Jews (dhimmis) — no longer had binding value since it had been written, in his view, several decades after the era of the Prophet's Companions.^[82] In his treatise Iqtidâ' al-Sirât al-Mustaqîm ("The Requirement of the Straight Path"), written around 1321, he defended a strict separation between Muslim and non-Muslim practices and held that a sovereign has the right to have any church destroyed if circumstances require.^[83] He also recommended that Jewish and Christian communities remain confined to their own quarters.^[84] The historian Sona Grigoryan, in her thesis devoted to Ibn Taymiyya's anti-Christian polemics, stresses that these legal positions belong to a broader climate of hardening relations between the Mamluk authorities and the Christian minorities of the Levant in this period.^[85]

A relative silence after his death

According to several contemporary historians, the Sunni scholarly community as a whole largely set aside Ibn Taymiyya's most radical positions in the decades following his death in 1328: his theological school remained a minority, while Ash'arism and Maturidism kept their dominant position in classical Sunni teaching until the 18th century.^[86] Three disciples nonetheless ensured the transmission and circulation of his work: Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, his closest pupil, Ibn Kathîr, the exegete and historian who took up some of his exegetical principles, and al-Dhahabî, who is said to have gathered more than five hundred volumes of his writings.^[87]

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and the 18th-century Najdi refoundation

In the 18th century, the Najdi preacher Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhâb (1703-1792) drew abundantly on Ibn Taymiyya's work to found the religious reform movement known today as Wahhabism, advocating a return to the doctrinal purity of the first three Muslim generations (al-salaf al-sâlih) against the innovations (bid'a) he deemed to have multiplied in popular Islamic practice — devotion to tombs, intercession of saints, Sufi practices judged superstitious.^[88] The political alliance forged between Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhâb and Muhammad ibn Sa'ûd, emir of Najd, gave this doctrine a lasting territorial and dynastic anchoring, which would lead to the founding of the modern Saudi kingdom.^[89]

The reformist Salafism of the 19th and 20th centuries

In the 19th century, the Taymiyyan tradition spread more widely through the Ahl-i Hadîth movement in South Asia and the reformist salafiyya movement in Iraq, Syria and Egypt, carried notably by figures such as Muhammad Rashîd Ridâ, who republished and circulated a substantial part of Ibn Taymiyya's work through his journal Al-Manâr.^[90] In 1962, the creation of the Muslim World League, based in Mecca, enabled a worldwide diffusion of Ibn Taymiyya's works alongside those of Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhâb.^[91]

An authority cited — and distorted — by contemporary jihadism

Since the late 20th century, Ibn Taymiyya has become one of the most frequently invoked references of radical Islamist movements, including Salafist jihadism: his doctrinal positions on the takfîr of the Mongol Ilkhanids and on the legitimacy of jihad against outwardly Muslim yet impious-deemed rulers are cited, often out of their precise historical context, by the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.^[92] The following table summarizes the main stages of this doctrinal filiation, from the Damascene theologian to contemporary uses of his legacy.

Several contemporary specialists of Ibn Taymiyya, foremost among them Yahya Michot, Jon Hoover and Ovamir Anjum, stress that this modern instrumentalization systematically distorts texts written in a precise historical context — the war against a hostile Mongol power — to derive general principles their author never formulated in that absolute form.^[94] The synthesis by Jon Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya (Oneworld Academic, 2019), hailed by the Islamologist Frank Griffel of Yale University as the first quality critical introduction to this theologian in a Western language, is thus summarized by the historian Yossef Rapoport (Queen Mary University of London): "Hoover shows that Ibn Taymiyya is not always what his modern admirers and detractors make of him."^[95]

"Hoover shows that Ibn Taymiyya is not always what his modern admirers and detractors make of him." — Yossef Rapoport, professor of Islamic history (Queen Mary University of London), text quoted on the book's presentation page, Oneworld Academic, 2019^[96]

Thomas Michel, S.J., and the scholarly study of the anti-Christian polemic

As with Ash'arite kalâm studied by the Jesuits Richard McCarthy and Michel Allard, Ibn Taymiyya's anti-Christian work found, on the Catholic side, a learned and scrupulous reader in Fr. Thomas F. Michel, S.J. (born 1941). Ordained a priest in 1967 and entering the Jesuits in Indonesia in 1969, Thomas Michel devoted his doctorate, defended in 1978 at the University of Chicago under the direction of the famous Islamologist Fazlur Rahman, to an in-depth study of Al-Jawâb al-Sahîh.^[97] He published a commented translation of it in 1984 under the title A Muslim Theologian's Response to Christianity: Ibn Taymiyya's Al-Jawab Al-Sahih, a work that remains the English-language scholarly reference on this text.^[98] From 1981 to 1994, he headed the office for relations with Muslims within the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, before spending fourteen years teaching Christian theology to Muslim students in Turkey.^[99] This scientific and pastoral work illustrates what a serious dialogue of reason with Islam can be: first understanding in depth the most systematic objection ever formulated against the Christian faith by a Muslim theologian, before discussing it.

Why the argument against the Trinity misses its true target

Ibn Taymiyya's central argument — if the Father, the Son and the Spirit are each a substance equal to the Father, then there are three substances and hence three gods — rests on a premise Catholic theology has never held. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches on the contrary that the three divine Persons are not three distinct substances, but one and the same substance distinguished only at the level of relations of origin:

"The divine persons are really distinct from one another [...] They are distinct from one another in their relations of origin [...] Because it does not divide the divine unity, the real distinction of the persons from one another resides solely in the relationships which relate them to one another." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§ 254-255^[100]

In other words, the Father is not one substance and the Son a second numerically distinct substance: the three Persons subsist in the one divine substance, and are distinguished solely by the relation of origin relating them to one another — paternity, filiation, procession.^[101] Ibn Taymiyya's argument, however formally rigorous, thus refutes a tritheism the Church herself condemned from the earliest councils, not the authentic Catholic Trinitarian doctrine, which affirms with the same intransigence as Islamic theology the radical unity of the divine substance.^[102]

The denial of the crucifixion against extra-Qur'anic sources

On the crucifixion, Ibn Taymiyya's demonstration rests entirely on the authority of the Qur'an (4:157), which states that Jesus's enemies "did not kill him, they did not crucify him, but it was made to appear so to them." This argument has no force, however, for a reader who does not recognize Qur'anic authority in advance — and Jesus's death by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate is, independently of any Christian source, a fact attested by several independent extra-Christian witnesses: the Roman historian Tacitus (Annals, XV, 44, c. 115), the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (Jewish Antiquities, XVIII, 63-64, c. 93-94), as well as Mara bar Serapion and Lucian of Samosata.^[103] This body of evidence is what historians call a minimal event of ancient history, on a par with the death of Julius Caesar — a historical consensus depending on no Christian authority, which the Qur'anic objection therefore does not suffice to overturn. The reader will find the whole of this historical argumentation in detail in Did Jesus really exist? and in The Resurrection of Jesus.

A rare point of convergence: the reality of secondary causes

One point deserves to be noted honestly, for it nuances the otherwise radical doctrinal fracture between the two theologies. Unlike the Ash'arites, whose atomist occasionalism denies any real secondary causality — God alone would act, at each instant, with creatures exercising no causal power of their own — Ibn Taymiyya affirms, like Thomist theology, that created secondary causes act really, instrumentally, under God's continuous creation.^[104] The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, in terms not without distant echo of this position: "Far from diminishing the dignity of the creature, this truth enhances it" (CCC § 308).^[105]

This partial convergence on the reality of secondary causes must not, however, mask the fundamental theological gap remaining between the two systems: the Catholic doctrine of secondary causality belongs to a theology of Trinitarian creation and deifying grace, absent in principle from Ibn Taymiyya's unitary theology, for whom the very affirmation of a mediation of Christ the Son of God constitutes the major deviation to which he devotes several volumes of refutation. The substantive disagreement thus concerns not only the technical question of causality, but the very nature of God and the reality of the redemptive Incarnation — the point on which the file Islam and the Catholic response develops the full argumentation.

• Muhammad (c. 570-632) — the life of the prophet of Islam, claimed by the whole theological and legal tradition Ibn Taymiyya defends against innovations.
• Islam and the Catholic response — the overall doctrinal file on the Qur'an, Qur'anic Christology and the Catholic apologetic response.
• What does the Church say about Islam? — the contemporary magisterial position, from Vatican II to the Catechism.
• Al-Ash'ari (874-936) — the founder of Ash'arite kalâm, whose rationalist legacy Ibn Taymiyya systematically combats.
• Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) — the great heir of Ash'arism, whose synthesis with Sufism would likewise be discussed by Taymiyyan posterity.
• Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) — the Sufi master whose doctrine of the unity of Being is the object of Ibn Taymiyya's fiercest controversy.
• Malik ibn Anas (711-795) and Abu Hanifa (699-767) — the founders of the legal schools of which Ibn Taymiyya's Hanbalism represents the most literalist branch.
• Did Jesus really exist? — the extra-Christian sources attesting the historicity of Jesus and his death by crucifixion.
• The Resurrection of Jesus — the complete historical argumentation on Christ's death and resurrection.