Ibn Taymiyyah on Creation ex Materia
DESCRIPTION:
This book is the second in an envisioned series of translations from Ibn Taymiyyah’s theological works that cover a wide range of topics from the evidences of God’s perfection to the signs of Prophethood, and from the meaning of God’s creative agency to the compatibility of divine predestination with human moral agency.
The series aims to provide readers from the English-speaking world access to Ibn Taymiyyah’s articulations of these important matters of the Faith in an effort to demonstrate the superior rationality embodied in Islamic Faith over the conflicting claims of rationality offered by other religions, philosophies, and theological positions.
Such an English series is much needed nowadays, especially in response to current challenges posed by growing trends of atheism. Ibn Taymiyyah’s exceptional insight and distinguished explanations of Qurʾanic arguments have helped many Muslims remain intellectually satisfied in the face of doubts and challenges presented by competing world views.
In Bayān Talbīs al-Jahmiyyah, Ibn Taymiyyah provides a rational argument against the philosophical position that creation ex materia is necessarily a rearrangement of already existing matter. In his other work Kitab al-Nubuwwat, he promotes a more scriptural definition of creation ex materia that involves the origination of substances in place of other substances. The concept is very similar to ex nihilo creation but with the subtle difference that the substantial origination must be accompanied by the annihilation of a prior material that carries the potential for that origination.
This intuitive conception implies that the creations come into actual existence out of prior material conditions that cease to exist entirely, allowing Ibn Taymiyyah to successfully argue for the eternal Originator using direct empirical observations of animals and trees without any need to commit to the further assertion that this world was originated ex nihilo in the unobservable past.
DETAILS:
ISBN: 9781739294014
AUTHOR: Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Abd al-Halim al-Harrani
TRANSLATOR: Imran Rahim
LANGUAGE: Bilingual Arabic-English
BINDING: Paperback
PAGES: 285 Pages
DIMENSIONS: A5 Size
PUBLISHER: Dar Al-Arqam Publishing
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Shaykh Al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah was born in, 661 AH (1263 AC) in Haran, which is now in Eastern Turkey, near the border of northern Iraq. His family had long been renowned for its learning, among his teachers, was Shams ud-Din Al-Maqdisi, first Hanbali Chief Justice of Syria following the reform of the judiciary by Baibars.
The number of Ibn Taymiyyah's teachers exceeds two hundred. Ibn Taymiyyah was barely seventeen, when Qadi Al-Maqdisi authorized him to issue Fatwa (legal verdict). Qadi remembered with pride that it was he who had first permitted an intelligent and learned man like Ibn Taymiyyah to give Fatwa. At the same age, he started delivering lectures. When he was thirty, he was offered the office of Chief Justice, but refused, as he could not persuade himself to follow the limitations imposed by the authorities.
Imam Ibn Taymiyyah's education was essentially that of a Hanbali theologian and jurisconsult. But to his knowledge of early and classical Hanbalism, he added not only that of the other schools of jurisprudence but also that of other literature. He had an extensive knowledge of Quran, Sunnah, Greek philosophy, Islamic history, and religious books of others, as is evident from the variety of the books he wrote.
