Ibn Taymiyya's Theological Ethics

Among the topics that played a foundational role in classical Islamic debates about value, two stand out: What makes actions good, and how do human beings know it? In the Islamic milieu, different theologians offered sharply diverging answers to these questions, respectively a question about ethical ontology and ethical epistemology. Using these questions as a focus and drawing on a number of key texts, this book offers a reading of Ibn Taymiyya’s ethical thought that is analytically rigorous yet sensitive to its ambiguities. In doing so, it sheds fresh light on the status of reason in Ibn Taymiyya’s evaluative understanding and on the conception of human nature that animates it. At the same time, it seeks to locate Ibn Taymiyya’s thought within its intellectual context, situating it against the rich tapestry of discussions about ethical value taking place within theology, philosophy, and legal theory. Read against the competing approaches of Muʿtazilite and Ashʿarite theologians, Ibn Taymiyya’s ethics betrays multiple debts to Ashʿarite thought, both in its consequentialist understanding of ethical value and in the conception of reason and human nature that it deploys on the epistemological level. More distinctive in Ibn Taymiyya’s approach is the theological vision that drives it, which finds expression in a specific understanding of God’s morality and the purposes of the divine Law. In exploring Ibn Taymiyya’s ethics, this book also seeks to reflect on the character of his writing as a whole and the hermeneutical challenges it poses.