Ibn Taymiyyah’s al-Radd `ala al-mantiqiyyin

Introduction to Classical Islamic Texts Diploma

By Shaykh Dr Mohammad Akram Nadwi | Dean of Cambridge Islamic College

Supplementary Class Notes #10

The great British philosopher, logician and mathematician, Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) wrote in his
Autobiography (1950, p. 395):

When I survey my life, it seems to me to be a useless one, devoted to impossible ideals. My activities
continue from force of habit, and in the company of others I forget the despair which underlies my
daily pursuits and pleasure. But when I am alone and idle, I cannot conceal from myself that my life had
no purpose, and that I know of no new purpose to which to devote my remaining years. I find myself
involved in a vast mist of solitude both emotional and metaphysical, from which I can find no issue.

Russell’s reflections are typical of those who trust in a particular style of reasoning as the means by which
human beings can know and understand themselves and the world they live in. After a lifetime devoted to
this style of reasoning, they become disappointed with reason altogether because it is unable to account for
the most general, fundamental and most obvious of all realities: namely, that humans are intelligent and the
world is intelligible to them, that the world seems to demand and reward human curiosity. Reason cannot
account for the existence of reason. It is so, but reason cannot tell us why and how it is so.

Reason also cannot account for how and why we understand and respond to notions of value, like love,
justice, truth, beauty, happiness, and their opposites. Notions like these form the basis of all the important
practical judgements we make in life: who and what we like or dislike, what we strive for, our own
behaviours and lifestyle and how we respond to others. We cannot define these values in any way that
will apply to all situations or be agreed and accepted by all people. And yet in judging actual, particular
situations we somehow know when these values are adequately expressed and when they are not.

All human beings understand these values and have words for them. They also have the competence to
express themselves generally: they have the competence to hold in their own minds and convey to other
minds, their perceptions of the real world outside them, and the feelings prompted by those perceptions.
More than that, they can think, remember and imagine many things that are not directly prompted by
anything in the world outside their minds. All human beings have this ability to express themselves,
spontaneously and uniquely, with or without a prompt from someone else or from the world outside
the mind. This ability takes different forms in different environments: humans do not all speak the same
language, but they do all speak.

Our competence to hold perceptions and impressions in the mind, within the system of signs that we call
language, and to hold them independently of any condition in the world outside the mind, enables us to
compare this and that, to see patterns, to make analogies, to make suppositions, to plot and plan. This is how
we learn: we make mistakes in perceptions and judgements, then we work through the errors and improve
our perceptions and judgements; our plans go wrong, and then we try to make better plans. Because we can
store what we have learnt in our language, what we learn and how fast we learn gathers pace and volume.
Again, it is a mystery on top of a mystery that we can keep doing this and yet never seem to run out of
storage space: our minds and language systems are, for all practical purposes, unbounded. Human beings

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do not just collect the food given in the world like nuts and berries and cereals, and the flesh of hunted or
reared animals, they combine flavours and textures and fragrances: they cook, and so enlarge their own
appetite as well as their ability to survive in different environments. This applies in all domains of human
activity.

Nevertheless, for all its curiosity, its linguistic and rational competence, the human mind cannot see the
whole of itself in action. We cannot predict or control all the conditions that affect our thoughts, feelings,
attitudes and actions; we cannot predict or control all the consequences of our actions, not even upon
ourselves and those near us, let alone upon people far removed from us in place and time, not to speak of
the earth’s life-system as a whole. We can watch other people looking but we cannot, ourselves, see ourselves
in the act of looking. That is how it is. We can know that we will die, but we cannot, so to speak, live through
our own death. We can live through other people’s death, never our own. It is at this boundary that we
experience our deepest need to know and understand, and the reason and language that seemed to serve us
so well here fail us. This is the boundary of the seen and the unseen.

The need to cross this boundary is the root of the religious impulse. If there were no input from the unseen,
this impulse could not exist. But it does exist. We are flooded with feelings of uncertainty, about why we exist
at all if we are to die, why we have feelings, motives and effects in the world that we cannot fully understand,
why we are followed by our past though it is no longer there, why we are thrown towards our future in great
rushes of hope and fear. If there were no input from the unseen these feelings would paralyse us. But there is
input: it is this that we call religion. Of this there are numerous forms in the world. The believers say the only
reliable form of religion is what has been conveyed by the Prophets, men informed by God from the unseen
and informed about the unseen. Muslims are exceptionally fortunate in that what our Prophet informed us
about is perfectly preserved in the Qur’an, and almost as reliably preserved in the record of his teaching and
example, the Sunna.

Because religion informs us about what we have not directly perceived, and more importantly, because it
begins in an act of affirmation -- we must affirm the truthfulness of the Prophets and their teaching before
we begin to live by that teaching and its truth becomes a certainty for us – there is a human tendency to
resist religion, to rebel against the Prophets, to distract from their message. This can take the form of an
outright denunciation of the Prophet’s message as a fairy-tale or nonsense. But it can also take the form of
an approval of the Prophet’s message as a necessary comforting delusion for the masses, but still a delusion.
This approval is expressed in two ways: either the delusion is corrected by re-stating the Prophet’s message
in the language of philosophical propositions which convey the message in abstract concepts, rigorously
assembled as an argument. Or it can take the form of a thoroughly subversive alternative to the Prophet’s
message, which claims insight into the unseen just as the Prophet’s message does, but is fundamentally
contrary to the Prophet’s message: so if the Prophet teaches that God is absolutely other than His creatures,
the alternative teaches that God and His creatures are essentially one and the same; if the Prophet teaches
that Pharaoh was a wicked tyrant who is punished in this life and in the hereafter, the alternative teaches
that Pharaoh understood the reality that he and God are essentially the same, and so he, Pharaoh, is entirely
forgiven.

These two ways of resisting the Prophet’s message have in common the idea that this message is not
expressed as it should be, that what it says in fact is not what it means; what it says is not how things really
are. In short, both these ways believe that the revelation does not establish the truth, rather it establishes
the rules and norms of a civic religion, a way useful to the elites for keeping the masses in order. The truth
is something else, known to the philosophers, or known to the ittihadi Sufi shaykhs. These two ways have
something else in common, namely the legacy of Greek philosophy, albeit the falasifa and the mutakallimun
depend more heavily upon Aristotle, and the ittihadi Sufis depend more heavily upon Plato. Ibn Taymiyyah’s
Radd ‘ala l-mantiqiyyin is a reasoned polemic against both, and one of the most vigorous defences of realist
thinking ever written. Needless to say, he defends realist thinking, not for its own sake, but for the sake of

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defending Islam as a belief and as a way of life.

Imam Ibn Taymiyyah (661-728/1263-1328) was a great Muslim thinker of Damascus. Besides his excellence
in the traditional Islamic sciences, he was a great expert in logic, philosophy, theology and linguistics. He
admits that had there been no Prophets, the philosophers would have been the best people on the face of the
earth. He appreciates that philosophers raise and think about the right questions. But they do not have the
right tools to get the answers that will benefit them or humankind. This is a point that he has elaborated in
most of his major works, like Dar’ al-ta`arud bayna al-`aql wa-l-naql, al-Radd `ala al-mantiqiyyin and many
of the essays and articles collected in Majmu` al-Fatawa.

In al-Radd `ala al-mantiqiyyin, he discusses in detail the methodological problems of philosophical logic,
which is praised by the philosophers as the criterion or measure of right thinking, i.e., it has the same
importance for reasoning as grammar has for language. His argument is that a methodology which can
work within the domain of any narrowly defined discipline cannot necessarily work in other domains, and
certainly does not hold for human reasoning as whole. His criticism against Greek logic is not that it cannot
work in a limited disciplinary context, but that it should not be applied as a sort of test to every science
and every effort of reasoning. (The philosophers and theologians explicitly deployed it in the discourse
on metaphysical and theological questions, and in the argumentation used in jurisprudence and Arabic
grammar.)

In the Radd Ibn Taymiyyah focuses on four claims of the logicians: (1) that tasawwur (conceptualisation)
cannot be attained except through hadd (a particular style of definition); (2)that tasdiq (affirmation,
judgement) cannot be established except after qiyas al-shumul (syllogism; a particular style of reasoned
demonstration); 3) that the hadd leads to reliable tasawwur; and (4) that the qiyas leads to certain or near-
certain tasdiq. Ibn Taymiyyah demonstrates the errors of the logicians in all four points in their theoretical
discussions and practical application. We will go through in some detail his core arguments against the
Greek ways of thinking as deployed by the falasifa and the theologians who followed them while trying to
stay on the path of fiqh, and by the speculative Sufis, who also followed the falasifa but along a different path.

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