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9780199397839

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Ibn Taymiyya is often misunderstood as a simplistic textualist. Sophia Vasalou's masterly book shows that his thought has several surprises in store. Her highly analytical engagement helps us to get at the bottom of his kind of rationalism; a rationalism that has influenced almost all branches of modern and contemporary thought in Islam. --Frank Griffel, author of Al-Ghazali's Philosophical Theology Vasalou's book grapples seriously, even intimately, with the ethical questions that animated Ibn Taymiyya, the larger-than-life intellectual figure who is often - and wrongly, as Vasalou shows - portrayed as a sui generis thinker. Vasalou traces the genealogies of Ibn Taymiyya's ethics in Sunni thought and provides thoughtful analyses of his creative departures from it. This is a major contribution to the study of Islamic ethics that significantly deepens our understanding of its historical genesis. --Ahmed El Shamsy, author of The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History This is the fullest and most philosophically sophisticated discussion to date of Ibn Taymiyya's utilitarian ethics and vision of human nature (fitra). Taking Ibn Taymiyya's prima facie alignment with the ethical objectivism characteristic of Mu'tazilism as her starting point, Vasalou masterfully shows that he in fact owes far more to medieval Ash'arism than he acknowledges. --Jon Hoover, author of Ibn Taymiyya's Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism

Sophia Vasalou's book sets very high standards for future scholarly research on Ibn Taymiyya's intellectual legacy. The book proposes an alternative story of Ibn Taymiyya's relationship to the classical debates about ethics. Caterina Bori, Quaderni di Studi Arabi

Author Information

Sophia Vasalou is currently a Library of Arabic Literature Fellow at NYU Abu Dhabi and an Honorary Research Associate at Oxford Brookes University, and will be a Senior Lecturer and Birmingham Fellow in Philosophical Theology at the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham as of 2016. Her books include Moral Agents and their Deserts, which won the Albert Hourani Book Award in 2009.

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