Abstract
This chapter examines Taqī al-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), the leading figure of the Ḥanbalī/Atharī tradition, whose theology combines strict textualism with a distinctive realism about God, nature, and knowledge. Ibn Taymiyya's epistemology recognises sense perception, reason, and report as the main sources of knowledge, all grounded in the fiṭra, the innate human disposition that enables recognition of both truth and moral value. Ibn Taymiyya maintains that belief in God is intuitive and non-inferential, though it can also be supported by rational argument from contingency and origination. God acts perpetually and voluntarily, creating and sustaining the world in time without beginning, and all divine acts proceed from His wisdom and purpose. Rejecting Ashʿarī occasionalism, he affirms that God creates natural bodies with real causal powers that operate within His will, giving rise to stable natural regularities and allowing a dynamic relation between divine and created agency. Miracles are exceptional signs that confirm prophethood by breaking the normal course of nature, but they remain acts of God within His created order. Ibn Taymiyya's hermeneutics rejects both figurative reinterpretation and consignment of meaning, affirming that divine attributes such as God's hand or settling on the throne are real yet unique to Him and ontologically unlike the corresponding attributes of creation. Human beings, endowed with will and power, act freely within divine determination and fulfil their purpose through worship and moral formation, reflecting God's wisdom on earth. Ibn Taymiyya's outlook accommodates a pragmatic form of methodological naturalism, seeing scientific enquiry as a way of discerning the regularities and wise purposes that God has placed in creation while insisting that divine agency remains the ultimate ground of all causation.