Science and the Occult in the Thinking of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya

The Ḥanbalī theologian Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (1292-1349) was one of the most prolific defenders of traditional religious propriety in the Arabic-speaking lands of Islamdom. In face of the apparently increasing popularity of the occult sciences which he perceived to be undermining the sharʿī traditions of Islam, he devoted a large section of his book, Miftāḥ Dār al-Saʿāda to disproving these pseudo-sciences, particularly alchemy, astrology, and augury. The weightiest part of his attack is directed against astrology, queen of the occult, which he refutes on three levels: (1) on the historical, by examples of important Islamic dynasts whose court astrologers advised them to act in accordance with a horoscope that in the event turned out to be wrong; (2) on the technological, by arguments of earlier authoritative scientists that the tools of observation and tables of planetary positions failed to meet the exactitude required by a possible science of astrology; (3) and on the scientific, revealing the arbitrary conventions and contradictions of the principles underlying astrology. His arguments, adduced from scientists themselves, call for both science and religion to be purified of the occult. A knowledge of the sharʿī sciences sharpens the mind for the study of true natural science, preserved from the curse of metaphysics. Reminiscent in form and substance of al-Ghazzālī's refutation of Ismāʿīlī gnosticism, Ibn al-Qayyim's refutation of the occult reveals a breadth, depth, and flexibility of mind equal to his famous predecessor.