المختلف" في الفكر الإسلامي مقاربة تاريخية تحليليّة في موقف ابن تيمية من المختلف الديني القريب والبعيد"

Abstract

This study examines the position of Islamic thought on Muslims who are non-Sunnis and the non-Muslims who live in Muslim societies. It considers the scholar Ahmad Ibn ‘Abd al-Halim Ibn ‘Abd al-Salam Ibn Taymiyyah al-Harrani (661 AH/ 1263 AD - 728 AH/ 1327 AD) as a case to illustrate this position, in the medieval Islamic era, during the era of the Mamluks and their conflict with the Franks, Tatars, Ismailis, and others. The research problem hinges upon the multiplicity of Salafi and non-Salafi readings of Ibn Taymiyyah. Therefore, this study researches Ibn Taymiyyah's theoretical and practical positions toward the religiously different, by adopting the historical and analytical approach, and by a qualitative research method based on collecting and analyzing historical events and texts. The study argues that historical and contextual reading is the best approach for understanding Ibn Taymiyyah’s controversial positions and argues that the “non-historical” reading of his views and fatwas leads to the creation of an unrealistic “imagined” image of Ibn Taymiyyah, as is the case in the reading of Salafi-jihadism, and others. This study concludes that Ibn Taymiyyah's positions were restricted and affected by political and social events in his era, and that his judgment on the religiously different was, too, restricted and influenced by those events, and that his views were changing according to different circumstances. This study also concludes that Ibn Taymiyya's positions can only be understood most accurately by knowing their historical causes, and that they varied between softness and intensity according to the context and circumstances; and that Ibn Taymiyyah is more “compositional” than what his followers and opponents see together, and that what he called the “consensus” of the righteous ancestry is in some opinions an imaginary consensus, and that the non-historical reading of Ibn Taymiyyah also makes Ibn Taymiyyah imaginary. Finally, the main conclusion of this study is that the historical reading of Ibn Taymiyyah’s views and positions solves the problem of what appears to be contradictory in his views towards those who are religiously different from the Sunnis and toward those outside of Islam altogether.