Tag Archives: Candiard

Ibn Taymiyya and the God of the Philosophers

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Adrien Candiard, O.P.

PhD candidate and IDEO member

icon-calendar Tuesday April 23ʳᵈ, 2019

In the ninth volume of his large book Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql wa-l-naql, which constitutes a precise and extremely informed refutation of rationalist ideas, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) devotes almost fifty pages to the refutation of Aristotle’s metaphysical ideas, as presented by Ṯābit b. Qurra (m. 288/901) in his Talḫīṣ.

Unlike philosophers who all presuppose an autonomy of reason in relation to the revelation, Ibn Taymiyya defends the idea that revelation is reason and the starting point of all reasoning.

God cannot be the final cause only (Aristotle’s “unmoved mover”), but must be considered at the same time the efficient cause, which contradicts Aristotle. For Ibn Taymiyya, revelation teaches us that God is both Ilāh (“God”, the final cause as an object of adoration) and Rabb (“Lord”, the efficient cause as a creator). Ibn Taymiyya also refutes the idea that the world is eternal, which is incompatible with revelation, regardless of what philosophers who claim to be Muslim say. Finally, he defends the non-Aristotelian idea that there is willingness in God, as a primary cause. It is by His willingness, and not driven by his desire or by any need, that God creates the world.

The “God of the philosophers”, to use Blaise Pascal’s phrase, is not the revealed Creator God, but only the fruit of the error of a human reason that would be abandoned to itself.

Muslim perspectives on interreligious dialogue

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Djamel Djazouli, Denis Gril and Omero Marongiu-Perria

A round table leaded by Adrien Candiard, OP (IDEO)

At the French Institute in Egypt

icon-calendar Friday November 30ᵗʰ, 2018 at 6:00 p.m

It is true that interreligious dialogue has long been the initiative of Christians, however, more and more Muslim voices are now being heard, calling for specifically Qurʾānic and Prophetic foundations of the encounter with non-Muslims to be unearthed. Brother Adrien Candiard, a PhD student in Islamic studies and member of IDEO, led a round table discussion between three French-speaking Muslim scholars: Djamel Djazouli, a Qurʾān specialist and director of the An-Nour Institute in Cergy-Pontoise, Denis Gril, a Sufi specialist and professor emeritus at the University of Aix-Marseille, and Omero Marongiu-Perria, a sociologist of religions and researcher at the Institute for Religious Pluralism and atheism (IPRA).

 icon-video-camera Watch the video (mostly in French).

If the Qurʾānic message is centered on the unicity of God, it is to better highlight the diversity that God wanted for humanity, a human diversity of communities and rites that can truly express the richness of the divine unicity. Beyond the dialogue that we can have among ourselves, and in a more fundamental way, God is in dialogue with the universe.

This infinite divine depth cannot be said in simple and unambiguous words, which is why the verses of the Qurʾān often take the form of paradoxes, holding at the same time apparently contradictory expressions: the Qurʾān is the ultimate truth and, at the same time, only God knows who is well guided; or the only religion is Islam and, at the same time, the Prophet Muḥammad will intercede for all communities on the judgment day.

We are therefore called upon to reconsider our conceptions of what truth is, not as a univocal content that we could assert to others, but as a reality that everyone must receive, and in front of which everyone must take positions and make choices, that will necessarily be different for everyone. Islam therefore calls everyone to move forward without fear on this path that ultimately leads to God, and to make their own choices, in dialogue with one another.

The issue of the existence of God in Ibn Taymiyya

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Adrien Candiard

Member of the IDEO and PhD student in Islamic studies

icon-calendar Tuesday May 22nd, 2018

For Heidegger (1889‒1976), if metaphysics failed in its project, it is because it identified the “Being” with God, transforming into a sterile onto-theology. This description undoubtedly applies to Avicenna (d. 428/1037), for whom the proof of God’s existence finds itself in the necessity that there be an end to the chain of causalities. God is the necessary Being who has no cause other than himself.

This proof of the existence of God is repugnant to Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), not only because it is rooted in logical human tools, incapable by definition of reaching the divine being, but also because it is valid only inside the world of logic, without saying anything about the actual existence of God.

Among all of Ibn Taymiyya’s philosophical refutations, his refutation of al-Siǧistānī (d. after 361/971) in Darʾ al-taʿāruḍ bayna al-ʿaql wa-l-naql is particularly interesting. In his Kitāb al-maqālīd al-malakūtiyya, al-Siǧistānī criticizes the Avicennian definition of the existence of God as the ‘necessary being’ (wāǧib al-wuǧūd) because it makes God a composite being, as he would share the fact of “being” with his creatures, yet would have his own kind of being, the “necessary being.” Al-Siǧistānī then explains that the “being” of God has nothing to do with the “being” of creatures. Ibn Taymiyya criticizes this position, which ultimately amounts to saying that God does not exist, because we cannot say of him that he is nor that he isn’t, which is contradictory according to the laws of logic itself.

For Ibn Taymiyya, this contradiction is based on an error shared by all philosophers, namely that they believe that existence, which is only a concept, has real existence.  “Existence,” like all universals, does not exist outside our mind. It is meaningless to seek to demonstrate God by a conceptual way that can only reach concepts without real existence; we must find a direct way. However, precisely, man knows that God exists because of an innate natural faculty, the fiṭra. There is no need to mediate concepts to know that God exists. In addition, if someone refuses to recognize that God exists, it is simply because his fiṭra is sick.

The problem with such a solution (a nominalist one for sure) is that it cannot be refuted. Anyone who questions Ibn Taymiyya’s thinking would only prove that his fiṭra is deficient.

L’Egitto sciita

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Adrien Candiard, « L’Egitto sciita : la dinastia fatimide » in: Luciano Vaccaro (éd.), Popoli, religioni e Chiese lungo il corso del Nilo, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Città del Vaticano, Gazzada Schianno : Fondazione Ambrosiana Paolo VI, 2015, p. 189−299.

The theory of knowledge and religious polemics according to Ibn Ḥazm al-Andalusī

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Adrien Candiard

PhD candidate in Islamic studies, Paris

icon-calendar Wednesday June 15ᵗʰ, 2016

20160615_Seminaire_Adrien_CandiardThe theory of knowledge according to the Andalusian theologian and jurist Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064) seems to be paradoxical at first glance. On the one hand, he is an enthusiastic defender of the use of reason in theological discussions. And on the other hand, he has a literalistic reading of the revealed and transmitted texts.

In fact, Ibn Ḥazm adopts Aristotle’s theory of knowledge, based on axioms and on the logical demonstration of new knowledge derived from these axioms, with the difference that he considers the revealed texts to be axioms, not knowledge that should be tested by reason.

The logical result of this theory of knowledge is that the demonstrative evidence is the reason itself, not its exercise, implying that there is no more difference between faith and knowledge, between God and the science of God, and generally speaking, between science and the mere accumulation of knowledge.

For Ibn Ḥazm, if the non-Muslim and the deviant Muslim refuse the demonstration of the truth of Islam, they cannot be but liars or hypocrites, because their very own reason has to tell them that Islam is the truth.

Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849-1905): Historian of the Decline of Islam

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Adrien Candiard

Alumnus of the French École normale supérieure, Paris

icon-calendar June 16, 2015

CandiardMuḥammad ʿAbduh identifies the reality of Islam and its rationality, and opposes the tradition he sees as rehearsed. In this, he is an heir of the Enlightenment and their pretention in inventing a unique universal system of reasoning, ignoring multiple types of reasoning.

Adrien Candiard, O.P.

photo Libé1Adrien Candiard is French and lives in Cairo.

He completed his studies in history and political science, and he joined the Dominican Order in 2006.

He graduated in theology and then settled in Egypt in 2012. He studied Arabic and completed his Master’s Degree in Islamic studies at the American University of Cairo. He is currently preparing a PhD from the École pratique des hautes études (Paris).

His research focuses on the classical Islamic theology (kalām) and the relationship between reason and revelation in Islam. He is the author of En finir avec la tolérance? Différences religieuses et rêve andalou (Paris, PUF, 2014), and Comprendre l’islam. Ou plutôt : pourquoi on n’y comprend rien (Paris, Flammarion, 2016).