| Summary: | This dissertation seeks to further advancements in the study of controversial Muslim theologian Ibn Taymiya, who died in 1328 in Damascus, Syria. Providing a framework for understanding his thought within the prevailing scholarly lineages and intellectual paradigms of his time, we are able to understand how seemingly contradictory elements of his profile, as unearthed by previous contributions in the research, are unified in his personage. These elements, causing some to characterize him as alternatively literalist, rationalist, fundamentalist, and philosophical, are in need of recontextualization, which can be achieved by means of the proper philological tools.
Ibn Taymiya can be placed at the intersection of multiple scholarly "discursive traditions" with different visions of normativity for Islam, particularly on the nature of "reason," "scripture," and the early forebears of Islam, or salaf. The historical particulars of these traditions themselves being subjected to historical analysis, a great deal of complexity emerges within which unqualified terms such as "rationalism" and "traditionalism" are insufficient on their own to explain the scholarly or social profile of their respective historical advocates. As their respective methodologies, interpretive frameworks, and even historiographical visions crystallized in 13th century Damascus, however, they have become paradigmatic for much of how these terms are definied for subsequent Islamic history.
This will be demonstrated by an analysis of the paradoxical growth of anti-traditionalist theology called kalam in the Sunni scholarly sphere over the 10th-11th centuries juxtaposed with a study of the social mediation of orthodoxy in key centers of Muslim scholarship characterized by a general orientation towards the emulation of the past, as safeguard of doctrine in time of political crisis. As debates both intellectual and sectarian ensued, surrounding the necessity of particular hermeneutic practices as guarantor of reason-based orthodoxy, the normative role of the salaf or forebears of Islam was negotiated through the same intellectual lens, and consequently the contours of history.
Ibn Taymiya ultimately combined various methodological and historiographical considerations together in a way intimately linked to his temporal and geographical specificities, in a conscious effort to resolve many of the theological controversies which left their imprint on the scholarly discourse of his times. His advocacy of the forebears of Islam, was not a fideist naive return to text or the past, but an attempt to redeem older scriptural interpretations in the realm of theology as being in accordance with rationality, though not the particular rationality formulated by dominant traditions of its practice. The perceived rejection of reason, spirituality, or hermeneutic assumptions of a greater Muslim tradition often attributable to Ibn Taymiya can be explained as the result of tensions, real or implied, with the prevalent actors of religious authority in which those paradigms were socially embodied, which have obscured the discursive underpinnings of the questions at stake in Ibn Taymiya's scholarly production.
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