Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya: Jurist, Moralist and Student of Ibn Taymiyya

Shams al-Din Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ibn Ayyub, known as Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya and frequently as Ibn al-Qayyim, lived from 1292 to 1350 and was the most important student of Ibn Taymiyya. He was a Hanbali jurist, a writer on legal theory, a moralist and a scholar of the spiritual life, and the author of a body of work whose readership in the modern Muslim world exceeds that of his teacher.

His name requires explanation, because it is a title rather than a patronymic in the usual sense. His father Abu Bakr was the qayyim — the superintendent or steward — of the Jawziyya, a Hanbali college in Damascus, and the son was accordingly "son of the superintendent of the Jawziyya". He also carries the nisba al-Zar'i, from Zar', a town in the Hawran from which the family came.

The relationship with Ibn Taymiyya shaped his whole career. He became his student in 1312 and remained closely associated with him until his teacher's death in 1328, studying under him, transmitting his teaching, and developing it in his own writing afterwards. Modern scholarship, gathered in Caterina Bori and Livnat Holtzman's volume of essays on him, A Scholar in the Shadow, has drawn attention to him as a substantial thinker in his own right, with his own interests and emphases and a most characteristic body of work that has no close counterpart in Ibn Taymiyya's output.

The clearest instance is his treatment of the spiritual life. Ibn al-Qayyim wrote a long commentary on a classic Sufi manual, engaging its stations of the soul in detail and with evident sympathy, and giving his own readings where he judged them warranted by the evidence — work examined below, and a mark of the breadth of his interests.

Life

Ibn al-Qayyim was born in Damascus on 7 Safar 691 of the Hijra, corresponding to 1292. His family were Hanbalis of scholarly connection but not of the first rank; his father's post at the Jawziyya college placed the household within the institutional world of Damascene learning without making it prominent in it.

He was educated in that world from childhood, studying the Quran, hadith, Arabic, Hanbali law and legal theory with the teachers available in the city — which, as the articles on al-Nawawi and Ibn Kathir also indicate, meant access to the densest concentration of religious scholarship in the Sunni world. His teachers included his own father, the Hanbali jurist Ibn Abi al-Fath al-Bali, the Damascene hadith scholars of the generation of al-Mizzi, and Ibn Taymiyya's brother.

The decisive event was his becoming a student of Ibn Taymiyya in 1312, when Ibn al-Qayyim was about twenty and his teacher had returned to Damascus after years in Egypt. From that point until 1328 he was Ibn Taymiyya's closest associate. He shared his teacher's residence in the citadel of Damascus during the confinement of Ibn Taymiyya's final years, remaining with him until his death there in 1328, and the sources record that he had earlier been detained in connection with a legal opinion on the visitation of tombs, a question on which he held the position associated with his teacher.

After 1328 Ibn al-Qayyim's life was that of a settled scholar and teacher. Birgit Krawietz's study of his life and works describes a man devoted above all to books and study. He taught at the Jawziyya college, where his father had been steward, and at the Sadriyya; he led prayers and preached; and he wrote, on a scale that accounts for most of what is known about him.

He performed the pilgrimage more than once and is reported to have spent extended periods at Mecca. He died in Damascus in Rajab 751 of the Hijra, corresponding to 1350, aged about fifty-eight, and was buried beside his mother in the Bab al-Saghir cemetery. Among those who studied with him were Ibn Kathir, the exegete and historian, and Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali, who became the leading Hanbali scholar of the following generation and wrote the principal biographical notice of his teacher.

Legal Theory: I'lam al-Muwaqqi'in

I'lam al-Muwaqqi'in an Rabb al-Alamin — "Instruction for Those Who Sign on Behalf of the Lord of the Worlds", the title referring to the responsibility of the jurist who issues legal opinions — is his most important contribution to Islamic legal thought.

The work addresses the foundations of legal reasoning: the sources of law, the status of juristic opinion, the conditions under which a jurist may issue a ruling, the relationship between the letter of a rule and its purpose, and the limits of following established authority. Several of its themes have attracted sustained modern attention.

It argues strongly against unreflective adherence to inherited school doctrine — taqlid — where the evidence points elsewhere, insisting on the jurist's obligation to return to the Quran, the sound hadith and the practice of the earliest generations. This is the Taymiyyan position, and Ibn al-Qayyim gave it its most systematic statement.

It develops an account of legal reasoning attentive to purpose and consequence. Ibn al-Qayyim treats the law as directed at identifiable human welfare and holds that rulings should be applied with regard to circumstance, discussing at length how a formally correct application relates to the underlying purpose of a rule. Related to this is his extended treatment of legal stratagems — devices by which the form of a rule is satisfied while its intent is set aside — on which he sets out a considered position.

It contains a substantial treatment of the sources of evidence and of the reasoning available to a judge, including material on circumstantial evidence and administrative regulation that modern scholars have found of considerable interest for the practical operation of Islamic law. Wael Hallaq's account of the theory and practice of the sharia draws on this material, and the question of how far Ibn al-Qayyim's purposive reasoning relates to later developments has been widely discussed.

A point on reading him belongs here. Ibn al-Qayyim's thought is grounded throughout in a traditionist framework that assumes the authority of the transmitted evidence — the Quran, the sound hadith and the practice of the earliest generations — at every point. His argument is that the jurist should return to that evidence rather than follow inherited school doctrine without reflection; it is a call to ground reasoning in the sources, not to reason apart from them, and he is most accurately read within that framework.

The Spiritual Life: Madarij al-Salikin

Madarij al-Salikin is his longest and, for the assessment of his thought, his most revealing work. It is a commentary on Manazil al-Sa'irin, a concise Sufi manual on the stations of the spiritual path written by the eleventh-century Hanbali Sufi Abdallah al-Ansari al-Harawi.

The choice of text and the manner of treatment both matter. Ibn al-Qayyim takes the stations of the path — repentance, vigilance, self-examination, patience, gratitude, fear, hope, trust, love, contentment, and the rest — and expounds each at length, drawing on the Quran, hadith, the sayings of the early ascetics, and the Sufi tradition itself. The exposition is sympathetic, psychologically acute, and detailed. On certain points — particularly the doctrines concerning the annihilation of the self and the unity of existence — he sets out his own reading, holding to what he took the transmitted evidence to establish, and differing there from al-Harawi.

The work therefore occupies a position of its own. It engages the disciplined interior life — the examination of motive, the cultivation of the states of the heart, the ethics of the spiritual path — as a subject proper to a traditionist scholar, expounding it fully while keeping within the bounds he understood the sources to set. Alexander Knysh's history of Islamic mysticism and the essays in Bori and Holtzman's volume both treat the work as showing that the engagement of Ibn al-Qayyim's circle with Sufism was rich and considered.

Several of his other works belong to the same enterprise. Ighathat al-Lahfan treats the diseases of the heart and the workings of temptation; Al-Da wa al-Dawa, sometimes titled Al-Jawab al-Kafi, addresses spiritual affliction and its remedies; Al-Ruh deals with the soul, its state after death and related questions; Tariq al-Hijratayn and Miftah Dar al-Sa'ada treat the path to God and the pursuit of felicity. Taken together they constitute the largest body of writing on the interior life produced by a scholar of his school, and they are the principal reason for his wide modern readership.

Prophetic Guidance: Zad al-Ma'ad

Zad al-Ma'ad fi Hady Khayr al-Ibad — "Provisions for the Hereafter, concerning the Guidance of the Best of Servants" — is a large work on the practice of the Prophet, organised as an account of his conduct across the whole range of life.

It treats his biography and campaigns, his worship, his dealings with people, his manner of judging disputes, his diet, dress and daily habits, and derives from each the guidance the author considers established. Its method is to move from the transmitted report to the practical norm, with attention to the soundness of the reports used.

A substantial portion of the work deals with the Prophet's practice in matters of health and treatment, and this section has circulated separately under the title Al-Tibb al-Nabawi, "Prophetic Medicine". It should be described accurately: it is a compilation of transmitted material on remedies, diet and regimen, combined with the medical assumptions of the fourteenth century, and Ibn al-Qayyim presents it as guidance derived from prophetic practice rather than as a treatise in the tradition of Ibn Sina or the physicians of the Islamic Golden Age. Modern editions and popular use have sometimes blurred that distinction.

His remaining major works include Al-Sawa'iq al-Mursala, on the interpretation of the divine attributes; Hidayat al-Hayara, a work of comparative religion; Jala al-Afham, on the invocation of blessings upon the Prophet; Kitab al-Salah, on prayer; and Al-Kafiya al-Shafiya, a long didactic poem on creed known as the Nuniyya from its rhyme — running, in the printed editions, to several thousand verses, and read across the centuries since as much for its versified clarity as for the doctrine it states. The choice of verse for a work of creed was itself a pedagogical decision consistent with everything else about his method: a position that could be memorised in metrical form travelled further, and survived in more minds, than the same position stated in prose.

A further work, sometimes titled al-Kawn wa al-Falak or grouped with his cosmological writing, addresses the structure of the heavens and the natural world in terms drawn from Quranic and hadith description rather than from the mathematical astronomy of al-Biruni or the tradition descending from Ptolemy; its attribution and precise scope are less securely established than his major works, and it belongs with the wider caution this article has already entered about the instability of some titles in the bibliographical record surrounding him.

Historiographical Note

The evidence for Ibn al-Qayyim is good, and the interpretative situation has changed substantially in recent decades.

His life is recorded by his own student Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali in the biographical dictionary of the Hanbali school, and by Ibn Kathir, al-Safadi, Ibn Hajar and others — near-contemporary, well-informed, and specific. His works survive in quantity and are the principal evidence for his thought. The factual outline is not in dispute.

Two problems of interpretation are.

The first concerns his relationship to his teacher. For much of the modern period Ibn al-Qayyim was read chiefly as the transmitter of Ibn Taymiyya's positions. The scholarship of the past two decades — Krawietz's survey of his life and writings, the Bori and Holtzman collection, Holtzman's biographical treatment — has drawn attention to a distinct authorial project of his own: a gift for systematic, ordered exposition, a sustained interest in ethics and the interior life, and a literary manner aimed at instructing his readers. The current view reads him as a full member of a scholarly circle with a voice of his own.

The second is that Ibn al-Qayyim is widely read and quoted today, and modern citation tends to draw on some parts of his work more than others. The fullest picture of him comes from the texts themselves, in which the legal theory, the writing on the interior life, the engagement with the Sufi tradition, and the Hanbali scholarly formation all stand together as parts of one body of thought.

Specific points: attributions of works to him in the later bibliographical literature are numerous and not all securely established, and the boundaries of some works are not fixed, with Al-Tibb al-Nabawi being the clearest case of a section of one book circulating as an independent title.

Assessment

Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya's importance rests on making a difficult body of thought usable, and on extending it into territory its originator had largely left alone.

The first achievement is systematisation. Ibn Taymiyya's large body of writing took many forms — responses to questions, treatises occasioned by particular questions of the day — and its positions are distributed across a wide and varied corpus. Ibn al-Qayyim took the same commitments and produced ordered, argued, readable books, of which I'lam al-Muwaqqi'in is the outstanding example in legal theory. Much of the influence of this tradition in later centuries flowed through his formulations, which were well suited to reading and teaching.

The second is the interior life. The body of writing he produced on the states of the heart, the diseases of the soul, temptation and its remedies, and the stations of the spiritual path has no equivalent in Ibn Taymiyya's work and little in the Hanbali tradition before him. Madarij al-Salikin in particular is a serious engagement with the Sufi tradition from within a traditionist framework, and it complicates the standard account of that tradition's relation to Sufism in a way that recent scholarship has found valuable. This is where he is most clearly an original writer rather than an expositor.

The third is legal reasoning. His treatment of purpose, consequence, circumstantial evidence and the abuse of legal form is among the more sophisticated bodies of practical legal thinking in the medieval Islamic tradition, and it is why he is cited in modern discussions of Islamic law far more than his position in the medieval hierarchy of jurists would predict.

His work has a distinct character within his tradition. His writing on creed and the divine attributes holds to the position of his school on questions that the theologians of his age discussed at length, and his call to ground legal reasoning in the transmitted sources was directed at a legal culture built largely on settled school doctrine — a relationship between fresh recourse to the evidence and established authority that later jurists continued to reflect on.

His posthumous position is among the most striking things about him. A scholar who spent much of his life as the student of a more famous teacher, who devoted himself to books rather than office, is now among the most widely printed and quoted authors in the Muslim world, and his books on the spiritual life reach readers well beyond students of Hanbali jurisprudence. The scholarly literature has turned to appreciate the full range of his work only recently, and that reassessment continues.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• Quran — the first source of law and of spiritual instruction in all his writing, and the text he insists the jurist must return to
• Quran, Surah al-Fatihah (1:5) — "You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help"; the verse from which Madarij al-Salikin takes its structuring theme
• Quran, Surah al-Shams (91:7–10) and Surah al-Shu'ara (26:88–89) — on the purification of the soul and the sound heart, the scriptural basis of his writing on the interior life
• Quran, Surah al-Nisa (4:59) and Surah al-Nahl (16:43–44) — on the sources of authority and the obligation to seek knowledge, central to his legal theory
• Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, the books of Iman, Riqaq (Softening of Hearts) and Ahkam — the hadith material underlying both his ethical and his legal work
• Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya. I'lam al-Muwaqqi'in an Rabb al-Alamin — his principal work of legal theory
• Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya. Zad al-Ma'ad fi Hady Khayr al-Ibad — on the practice of the Prophet

Classical Islamic Sources

• Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya. Madarij al-Salikin — his commentary on al-Harawi's manual of the spiritual stations
• Al-Ansari al-Harawi, Abdallah. Manazil al-Sa'irin [11th century] — the Sufi text on which Madarij al-Salikin comments
• Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya. Ighathat al-Lahfan, Al-Da wa al-Dawa, Al-Ruh, Miftah Dar al-Sa'ada — his principal works on the interior life
• Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya. Al-Sawa'iq al-Mursala and Al-Kafiya al-Shafiya (the Nuniyya) — his theological writings
• Ibn Taymiyya. Majmu Fatawa and Muqaddima fi Usul al-Tafsir — his teacher's corpus, the framework of his own commitments
• Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali. Dhayl Tabaqat al-Hanabila [14th century] — the biographical notice by his own student, the principal source for his life
• Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani. Al-Durar al-Kamina [15th century] — a further near-contemporary biographical source

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• Krawietz, Birgit. "Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyah: His Life and Works." Mamluk Studies Review X.2 (2006). — the standard survey of the life and the corpus
• Bori, Caterina and Holtzman, Livnat, eds. A Scholar in the Shadow: Essays in the Legal and Theological Thought of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah. Rome: Istituto per l'Oriente, 2010. — the collection that established the modern reassessment
• Holtzman, Livnat. "Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya." In Essays in Arabic Literary Biography, 1350–1850. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
• Rapoport, Yossef and Ahmed, Shahab, eds. Ibn Taymiyya and His Times. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2010. — on the circle and the period
• Hallaq, Wael B. Sharia: Theory, Practice, Transformations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. — on his legal reasoning in the wider development of the discipline
• Knysh, Alexander. Islamic Mysticism: A Short History. Leiden: Brill, 2000. — on his engagement with the Sufi tradition
• Chamberlain, Michael. Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• Hoover, Jon. Ibn Taymiyya's Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism. Leiden: Brill, 2007. — on the theological positions Ibn al-Qayyim inherited and restated

Further Reading

• Hurvitz, Nimrod. The Formation of Hanbalism: Piety into Power. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002.
• Makdisi, George. The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981.
• Irwin, Robert. The Middle East in the Middle Ages: The Early Mamluk Sultanate 1250–1382. London: Croom Helm, 1986.
• Melchert, Christopher. Ahmad ibn Hanbal. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.
• Ephrat, Daphna. Spiritual Wayfarers, Leaders in Piety: Sufis and the Dissemination of Islam in Medieval Palestine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.