Abstract

This thesis,Ibn Taymiyya’s Contextual Biblical Hermeneutics in Al-Jawāb al-Ṣaḥīḥ/The Correct Response, analyses how the renowned Ḥanbalī scholar Ibn Taymiyya interprets quotations from the Bible in his voluminous al-Jawāb al-Ṣaḥīḥ li-man baddala dīn al-Masīḥ. Ibn Taymiyya wrote Jawābto refute the anonymous Christian Letter from the people of Cyprus. Ibn Taymiyya’s Jawāband the Christian author’s Letterare not only significant literary compositions representing fourteenth-century interreligious polemical correspondences but, most importantly, these two polemics provide important insights into how late medieval Christians and Muslims understand and read each other’s scripture. The Christian author of the Letter cites extensively from the Qur’ān to argue that Islam is a religion for only pagan Arabs and Christianity is still a valid religion, and that the Qur’ān confirms the soundness of Christian beliefs and doctrines. Ibn Taymiyya, on the other hand, uses biblical citations both to refute these claims of the Christian author and to argue that Christians misinterpret the Bible. According to the expediency of their argumentation, both of the authors use the Bible and the Qur’ān with an intertextual approach forming a scholarship that primarily focuses on appropriating the other’s scripture in the light of their own theological outlooks. Analysed in the context of this particular scriptural scholarship, the Jawāband the Lettermight reveal interesting insights into the hermeneutical character of interreligious polemics, which often remains in the shadow of polemical and apologetic characters of these works. By means of reflection on this interest, this study sets out to analyse the use and interpretation of biblical quotations in the Jawāb, with the purpose of understanding the hermeneutical character of Ibn Taymiyya’s biblical scholarship. The thesis also investigates the use of biblical quotations in the works of five major Muslim authors of refutations of Christianity, al-Ṭabarī’s, Ibn Ḥazm, Pseudo-Ghazālī, al-Qarāfī, and al-Dimashqī as a backdrop against which to assess the extent to which Ibn Taymiyya’s biblical hermeneutics is similar to and different from mainstream Muslim biblical scholarship. The key conclusion of this thesis is that for biblical interpretation, Ibn Taymiyya employs a contextual theory of meaning that is inspired by the hermeneutics of Islamic legal theory and Qur’ānic exegesis, and guided by his wider theological principles. This thesis argues that Ibn Taymiyya’s contextual biblical hermeneutics clearly distinguishes him from the other five Muslim scholars who use a theory of literal-nonliteral meaning for biblical interpretation. It will be shown that the originality of Ibn Taymiyya’s biblical hermeneutics lies in his use of the technical apparatus of Islamic Legal theory and Qur’ānic exegesis, and in the modification of this hermeneutics to make it accord with his wider theological and intellectual framework. It will become apparent that in relying on this modified version of Islamic hermeneutics, Ibn Taymiyya reads and interprets the Bible in a similar way to his reading and interpreting the Qur’ān.