Ibn Taymiyyah and Sainthood

From Diego R. Sarrio’s article,  “Spiritual anti-elitism: Ibn Taymiyya’s doctrine of sainthood (walāya)”…

As we have seen, Ibn Taymiyya dismisses as forgeries the hadiths often invoked to justify the invisible hierarchies of saints that were so popular in Sufi literature. Contrary to any tendency to consider God’s friends a group apart from the rest of the Muslim community of believers, Ibn Taymiyya defends an ideal of walāya within everyone’s reach, no matter what one’s particular occupation or station in life: God’s friends are simply the pious and God-fearing believers whose degree of love and closeness to God is determined by their degree of faith and piety, and not by any special knowledge that friends supposedly share with prophets, or by miraculous feats or ascetic exploits.

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Another way in which Ibn Taymiyya makes sanctity an ideal within the reach of the ordinary believer is by his insistence that inerrancy and impeccability are not prerequisites for friendship with God. Ignorance and sin can get in the way of one’s advance towards spiritual maturity, but they are not insurmountable obstacles. Believers may ignore some aspects of revealed law or be confused about certain aspects of religion, or even be genuinely deceived by Satan’s allies, but none of these will be held against them. As for sin, God is Merciful and wants us to seek his forgiveness. Moreover, God has placed a light in the heart of believers to help them walk the Straight Path and has offered them guidance in the Qur’an.

In the last analysis, the revealed law of Islam – perfectly embodied in the prophetic model – is the surest guide to friendship with God, available to any Muslim of whatever walk of life. The author repeats again and again that there is no other way to God except through the sharīʿa.

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To conclude, by the time of Ibn Taymiyya and his disciple Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, the Sufi tradition of Islam had already acquired a substantial vocabulary of technical terms (muṣṭalahāt) to give expression to mystical states and spiritual realities (Schallenbergh 2008, 557–8). Both master and disciple can be seen as engaged in an effort to articulate their vision of Islam by employing the religious jargon of the time, including popular Sufi terminology such as ‘spiritual path’ (ṭarīq), ‘intoxication’ (sukr), ‘ecstasy’ (wajd), ‘self-obliteration’ (fanāʾ), or ‘friendship with God’ (walāya). Ibn Taymiyya’s reformulation of the Sufi meaning of walāya in Al-furqān supports Schallenbergh’s remark that ‘Ibn Qayyim and Ibn Taymīya professed possibly a Sufism that was inspiring and moving in its phrasing, but aimed foremost to a spiritualization of the šarīʿa’ (Schallenbergh 2005, 474).