Ibn Taymiyya's Theological Ethics

Icon of modern-day fundamentalist movements. Firebrand religious purist. Tireless polemicist against the intellectual schools of his time. Ibn Taymiyya is a thinker often associated with dogmatism, but who also valued moderation and considered himself a defender of the harmony between human reason and religious faith. By closely examining the tenets of his ethical thought, Sophia Vasalou sheds fresh light on Ibn Taymiyya's intellectual identity.

Ibn Taymiyya's predecessors debated ethical values by considering questions such as: "What makes an action right or wrong? How can we tell the difference? And what is God's relationship to the evaluative standards of the human mind?" Vaslou investigates Ibn Taymiyya's engagement with these questions and focuses particularly on the role of reason and the concept of human nature (fitra) within Taymiyya's ethics, while also considering features of Taymiyya's writings that fracture our present-day efforts to unify his thought. Finally, this book also situates Taymiyya's ethics within the intellectual landscape of his time, revealing a rich tapestry of ethical discussions across the fields of theology, philosophy and legal theory during the classical period.

Sophia Vasalou is a Library of Arabic Literature Fellow at NYU Abu Dhabi and an Honorary Research Associate at Oxford Brookes University.