Ibn Aqil

Ibn Aqil
Ibn Aqil
Personal
Born	AH 431 (1039/1040); Baghdad
Died	AH 513 (1119/1120)
Religion	Islam
Era	Islamic golden age
Denomination	Sunni Muslim
School	Hanbali
Creed	Ash'ari
Main interest(s)	History, Tafsir, Hadith and Fiqh
Occupation	Muslim scholar

Abu al-Wafa Ali Ibn Aqil ibn Ahmad al-Baghdadi (1040–1119) was an Islamic theologian from Baghdad, Iraq. He was trained in the tenets of the Hanbali school (madhhab) for eleven years under scholars such as the Qadi Abu Ya'la ibn al-Farra'.^[1] Despite this, Ibn Aqil was forced into hiding by the Hanbalis for frequenting the circles of groups who were at odds with the Hanbali tradition.^[1] In one of his reminiscences, he remarks that his Hanbali companions wanted him to abandon the company of certain scholars, and complains that it hindered him from acquiring useful knowledge.^[1]

Ibn ‘Aqil studied with Hanbalis, Hanafis, Shafi'is, Mu'tazilis, and Sufis, and was described by Ibn Taymiyya as more knowledgeable than al-Ghazali.

His early teachers included three women scholars: al-Huraniyya, Bint al-Junayyid, and Bint al-Gharrad.

Ibn ‘Aqil had completed five years of undergraduate study and seven years of graduate study in law, but at that time, for a candidate to qualify for a professorial position in law, one normally needed fifteen years of graduate level study in jurisprudence. Ibn ‘Aqil, despite being younger than all the other professorial candidates, was selected to occupy the professorial chair at the Mosque of the Caliph al-Mansur, and with this, Ibn ‘Aqil became the head of the Hanbali school in Baghdad.^[3]

Creed

Ibn 'Aqil leaned strongly toward Ash'arism; he had signed, around 455, the fatwa protesting against its persecution, and it was he who, in 476, performed the ablutions on the body of his friend, Abu Ishaq al-Shirazi, the Ash'arite rector of the Nizamiyya. His forced retraction represents one episode in the struggle carried on by conservative Hanbalites against Ash'arite Shafi'ites, who got back at them five years later when Abu Ishaq al-Shirazi succeeded in getting Abu Ja'far ibn Abi Musa arrested.^[2]

Works

Among his works of jurisprudence that have survived are Wadih fi usul al-fiqh and (in part) Kitab al-funun, a huge collection of anecdotes about the attitudes and customs of his times, in one hundred volumes.^[2]^[4] In it he writes:

Truly, it is not lawful for me to waste a single moment of my life; so that when my tongue is not engaged in instructive conversation and disputation, or my sight in studying, I engage my mind in meditation in my moments of rest, lying down, only to rise with some thought having occurred to me which I then commit to paper. In the eighth decade of my life, I do indeed experience a zeal for learning more intense than that experienced when I was a young man of twenty.^[5]

Notes

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g Lewis, B.; Menage, V.L.; Pellat, Ch.; Schacht, J. (1986) [1st. pub. 1971]. Encyclopaedia of Islam. Vol. III (H-Iram) (New ed.). Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. p. 699. ISBN 9004081186.
^ ^a ^b ^c Louis Massignon (2019). The Passion of Al-Hallaj, Mystic and Martyr of Islam, Volume 2: The Survival of Al-Hallaj. Translated by Herbert Mason. Princeton University Press. p. 158. ISBN 9780691657219.
^ Abou El Fadl, Khaled. "Chapter 59, The Scholar's Road, from The Search for Beauty in Islam: A Conference of the Books".
^ John L. Esposito, The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, Oxford University Press, 2003, and George Makdisi (ed.), The Notebooks of Ibn 'Aqil: Kitab al Funun, 2 vols., Beirut 1970-71
^ Makdisi, George (1997). Ibn ‘Aqil: Religion and Culture in Classical Islam. Edinburgh University Press. p. 14.