Ibn Taymiyya’s contextual biblical hermeneutics in Al-Jawāb al-Ṣaḥīḥ/the correct response (PhD. dissertation)

This thesis, Ibn Taymiyya’s Contextual Biblical Hermeneutics in Al-Jawāb al-Ṣaḥīḥ/The Correct Response (PhD Dissertation, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, 2019), analyses how the renowned Ḥanbalī scholar Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) interprets quotations from the Bible in his voluminous al-Jawāb al-Ṣaḥīḥ li-man baddala dīn al-Masīḥ (The Correct Response to Those who Changed the Religion of Christ). Ibn Taymiyya wrote Jawāb to refute the anonymous Christian Letter from the people of Cyprus. Ibn Taymiyya’s Jawāb and the Christian author’s Letter are not only significant literary compositions representing fourteenth-century interreligious polemical correspondences but, most importantly, these two polemics provide important insights into how late medieval Christians and Muslims understand and read each other’s scripture. The Christian author of the Letter cites extensively from the Qur’ān to argue that Islam is a religion for only pagan Arabs and Christianity is still a valid religion, and that the Qur’ān confirms the soundness of Christian beliefs and doctrines. Ibn Taymiyya, on the other hand, uses biblical citations both to refute these claims of the Christian author and to argue that Christians misinterpret the Bible. According to the expediency of their argumentation, both of the authors use the Bible and the Qur’ān with an intertextual approach forming a scholarship that primarily focuses on appropriating the other’s scripture in the light of their own theological outlooks. Analysed in the context of this particular scriptural scholarship, the Jawāb and the Letter might reveal interesting insights into the hermeneutical character of interreligious polemics, which often remains in the shadow of polemical and apologetic characters of these works. By means of reflection on this interest, this study sets out to analyse the use and interpretation of biblical quotations in the Jawāb, with the purpose of understanding the hermeneutical character of Ibn Taymiyya’s biblical scholarship. The thesis also investigates the use of biblical quotations in the works of five major Muslim authors of refutations of Christianity, al-Ṭabarī’s (d. 865), Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064), Pseudo-Ghazālī (active around 1200), al-Qarāfī (d. 1285), and al-Dimashqī (d. 1327) as a backdrop against which to assess the extent to which Ibn Taymiyya’s biblical hermeneutics is similar to and different from mainstream Muslim biblical scholarship. The key conclusion of this thesis is that for biblical