Responding to the Philosophers and Mutakallimin

Al-Aqeedah al-Hamawiyyah contains a sustained critical engagement with the approaches of the philosophers (falasifah) and the practitioners of speculative theology (kalam) — particularly the Mu'tazilah and the later Ash'ariyyah — who departed from the way of the Salaf in their treatment of divine attributes. Ibn Taymiyyah's critique is both methodological and substantive: he challenges not only the conclusions these schools reached but also the intellectual foundations on which those conclusions rest.

The Mu'tazilah, following the lead of Greek-influenced theology, argued that affirming real attributes for Allah would compromise divine unity (tawhid) by introducing a kind of multiplicity into the divine essence. If Allah truly has knowledge, power, will, and life as distinct attributes, they reasoned, then He is in some sense composite — which they considered incompatible with true transcendence. Their solution was to deny that these attributes are real and distinct, reducing them to descriptions of the essence itself rather than genuine characteristics. This led to the doctrine that the Quran, being an attribute of speech, is therefore created — the position that triggered the famous Mihna.

Ibn Taymiyyah argues that this reasoning, while appearing philosophically sophisticated, is in fact deeply flawed. The premise — that real attributes imply composition in a problematic sense — is borrowed from Aristotelian categories that were never established as universal truths applicable to God. What is true of created composite beings need not be true of the Creator. The error of the Mu'tazilah was to allow a philosophical axiom to override explicit revelation, rather than the reverse.

The Ash'ariyyah, whom Ibn Taymiyyah treats as a more moderate but still problematic departure from the Salafi way, accepted seven attributes for Allah — life, knowledge, power, will, speech, hearing, and sight — but rejected or reinterpreted the attributes of actions, particularly those involving what they called spatial or directional connotations: istiwa', nuzul (descent), and similar attributes. Their method of ta'wil — interpreting istiwa' as dominion (istila'), and nuzul as the descent of divine command or mercy rather than a real descent — is what Ibn Taymiyyah criticizes as an innovation unsupported by the Salaf.

His critique of ta'wil on epistemological grounds is particularly important. He asks: by what principle does one determine which attributes require ta'wil and which do not? If the criterion is that attributes suggesting spatial location or movement are incompatible with divine transcendence, then why stop at istiwa' and nuzul? The attributes of speech, hearing, and sight could equally be subjected to the same philosophical critique, yet the Ash'ariyyah retained them. Ibn Taymiyyah argues that the line they drew was arbitrary — determined more by how philosophically unfamiliar the attributes felt than by any principled distinction derived from revelation.

Furthermore, Ibn Taymiyyah points out that the very premise motivating ta'wil — that affirming these attributes implies corporealism (tajsim) or direction (jiha) for Allah — is not entailed by the affirmation itself. The Salaf affirmed the istiwa' and never understood it to mean that Allah is a body occupying physical space. The philosophical concern is a product of imposing Greek categories onto Arabic theological language, categories that the Arabic Quran does not require and that the Companions never employed.

The chapter concludes with Ibn Taymiyyah's broader point about the relationship between reason ('aql) and revelation (naql). He is not anti-rational — he argues extensively using logical reasoning throughout the treatise. But he insists that sound reason, properly employed, will always accord with correct revelation rather than contradict it. When apparent conflicts arise, the error lies either in the understanding of the revelation or in a flawed philosophical premise — not in the revelation itself. The role of sound reason is to understand revelation, not to override it.