Ibn Taymiyyah on Divine Simplicity

Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah

This book is the third 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 trends of atheism. Ibn Taymiyyah’s exceptional insight and distinguished explanations of Qur’anic arguments have helped many Muslims remain intellectually satisfied in the face of doubts and challenges presented by competing world views.

In one of the sections from Sharh al-Asfahāniyyah, Ibn Taymiyyah fully dismantles Avicenna’s compositional argument from seven different angles. By doing so, he invalidates the primary justification for the existence of the Avicennian God—a simple, attribute-less Cause of the universe, speculated to be identical with absolute existence. This allows Ibn Taymiyyah to affirm the Tawhid of Asma’ and Sifat in a following section, establishing the scriptural vision of the God of Abraham—a concretely existing Creator who exists above all things and is defined by the various attributes of maximal perfection.