OBLIGACIONES DE LOS TRABAJADORES AUTÓNOMOS

It was under Mamluk rule that Taqı- al-Dı-n Ah.mad Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), the focus of this chapter, would struggle to maintain the supremacy of Islam over the hearts of believers at a time when its supremacy over its own lands was in question.2_{The challenge was twofold: to demonstrate that only}

Islam’s beliefs were true and also to defend its sovereignty in its own lands against external forces. A religious scholar of vast learning, Ibn Taymiyya, who spent most of his life in Damascus, called for—and would also partici- pate in—jihad against unbelievers. Even after the Mongols had converted to Islam, he still sought to convince Mamluk rulers of the need for jihad against them. In his view, the law of the Mongols was based not on divine revelation but on customs devised by the human mind. Application of human reasoning to divine affairs was for Ibn Taymiyya evidence of polytheism, making the Mongols, though Muslim in name, rebels against God.3

However, for Ibn Taymiyya, the greatest threat was not the military advance of infidels into the Abode of Islam but the religious decadence among Muslims. The scholarly leaders of the umma had become so enam- ored of rationalizing approaches to knowledge of God that they could no longer think clearly about the message of God in its scriptural form. Such approaches amounted to mere conjecture, making them no better than Christians, who, Ibn Taymiyya claimed, had no certain knowledge of God since they based their theological reasoning on conjecture rather than scrip- ture. Tragically, in his view, Muslims were now guilty of the same error, and Ibn Taymiyya set out to show Muslims where they had gone wrong.

It seems odd to associate Ibn Taymiyya with skepticism in any sense. He certainly had no doubts about the revelation of Islam. Rather, the problem was the way in which the logic of the Greeks and philosophy in general had been increasingly absorbed into Islam’s scholarly discourse.4 _{Ibn Taymiyya}

saw this development as a radical inversion of the standards of knowledge that should prevail in Islam. He thus mounted skeptical attacks on the rationality of logic. It had no place in clear thinking about God. His attacks were by no means unreasoned, and his strong suspicion of the power of logic as a means of acquiring knowledge of God marks him with a kind of skepti- cism found in other contexts.5_{A key feature of skepticism in its ancient ori-}

gins was suspicion of logic as a means to truth. Of course, in contrast to doubts about the power of logic in the ancient world, Ibn Taymiyya accepted a revealed body of knowledge, but that is no reason not to try to specify the

skeptical aspect of his thinking. It also does not mean that we should seek to trace Ibn Taymiyya’s skepticism in a direct line to Sextus Empiricus, the common rejection of logic notwithstanding. As we will see, Ibn Taymiyya sought to find terminology specific to Islam’s revealed message to give expression to this kind of skepticism, making it essential to include him in a study of skepticism in Islam.

There were some Muslims whose beliefs Ibn Taymiyya held to be entirely corrupt. The worst offenders were partisans of Shi‘ism and Sufism who deified their leaders in the manner of Christians. However, in some respects, Ibn Taymiyya sought to relax the criteria by which one was judged to be a Muslim. To this end, he criticized scholars for placing unnecessary rationalist expectations on believers, as if one could be a Muslim only by mastering demonstrable proofs for the existence of God. Ibn Taymiyya sought to remind his fellow believers that it was not necessary to have expertise in the logic of Aristotle to be a Muslim. It was not philosophical reasoning that determined one’s standing as a Muslim but rather the words of scripture as conveyed and interpreted by Muhammad. To validate one’s standing as a member of the umma, one need not have command of the scholastic terms used to demonstrate the existence of God through philosophical argument. One need not train one’s mind in the metaphysics of beings and the relation of their“accidents” to their “essences.” One need not know why the premise that a thing with originated parts in its being is itself originated has anything to do with belief in God.

Ibn Taymiyya was by no means rejecting rationality but rather the excessive confidence that Islam’s scholars had placed in philosophical speculation— speculation that did not necessarily bring certainty but only greater confusion and division among Muslims. Rationality, Ibn Taymiyya argued, was con- siderably simpler than what scholars made it out to be with all their scholastic acrobatics. What is it that a person should know in order to qualify as a Muslim? God is clear on the matter: The Qur’an says people should know that God is one and that they will be held accountable for their acts. If Islam’s scholars considered the matter, they would see that such knowledge as revealed by God is exactly what humans naturally espouse even without all the rarefied terms and perplexing concepts of philosophy.

Still, even if he did not quite accuse Muslims of manifest infidelity, Ibn Taymiyya felt that things had gone terribly wrong. Muslims were at risk of going the way of the Christians, who had so utterly distorted the message of scripture that they could no longer be said to be worshipping God. Muslims, like Christians, were in danger of worshipping a concept they had conjured up in their minds, not the God of the Qur’an. This put them, like Christians, close to idolatry, risking their standing as true worshippers of God. For this reason, Ibn Taymiyya would spend considerable energy trying to convince scholars of the waywardness of their excessively philosophical approaches to knowledge of God. In his view, they had gone astray and were now prac- ticing a deviant form of religion that had little to do with the message of

Muhammad. The situation was so dire that apart from a remnant of righteous believers, it was not clear that Muslims were still fit to be called Muslims. Ibn Taymiyya was not alone in castigating the religious deviation in his day,6 _{but he differed from others in aiming his critique at the religious}

establishment as a whole.