The primary impetus for this book, as the author explains in her introduction, was tracing the historical roots of the modern claim that Islam is “the religion of our original nature”, fiṭra, and specifically to see if it carried a message of moral rationalism independent of religious input. The focus is on Ibn Taymiyya because in his writings – as is often recognized today – the concept of fiṭra assumed unusual importance, especially with regard to ethics. The answer this book has for the initial research question is in the negative. In Ibn Taymiyya's thought, reason is far less substantive and far more dependent on revelation than it appears on first reading, and his ethics are more directly indebted to al-Rāzī or al-Ghazālī than he cares to admit. But in the course of the quest, this turns out to be a book devoted to a critical, often intimate, engagement with Ibn Taymiyya's ethical thought, set against a rich background of medieval Islamic theology as well as the writings of Bentham and Hume.
The book begins with the morality of actions. Ibn Taymiyya seems, prima facie, to argue that the values of actions can be known by reason as well as by revelation, and thus to be close to the Muʿtazilite objectivist position of ethical value. But while the Muʿtazila argued that reason can determine whether actions are just or unjust, Ibn Taymiyya replaces the criterion of justice with the notion of utility. We know something to be good because it serves our interests, and we desire good actions because our innate nature is to love justice. Ibn Taymiyya's fiṭra is not a duty to do justice but a desire “that has benefit as its primary object” (p. 69).
The problem is, of course, that people desire some very bad things. Ibn Taymiyya solves this by arguing that our natural desires are inclusive of a desire for our overall welfare, an understanding of the longer-term consequences of our actions that balances immediate and longer-term pleasures. It is only when a person becomes corrupt that “one craves and takes pleasure in things that harm one” (p. 89), and one becomes corrupt by not following the natural disposition towards God. It is then that we lose sight of our long-term interests, knowledge of which ultimately comes from revelation. The definition of long-term interests is broad, and sometimes means public rather than individual interests. It is not in the interest of the individual to suffer certain punishments, but the punishments serve the long-term interests of the community.
It also follows that the aim of God's law is to promote a broadly conceived notion of human welfare. For Ibn Taymiyya, God's law is not arbitrary but has a specific concern with human interests and a wise purpose (ḥikma). We can ask why God commands us to do some things and avoid others, and when Ibn Taymiyya does explain God's wisdom, it is again in utilitarian terms: “When He creates what He hates, it is for the sake What He loves” (p. 173).
It is implicit here that there is something in the nature of actions that is independent of God's will, but Ibn Taymiyya is not interested in confronting this challenge. As Vasalou rightly explains, his agenda is overwhelmingly pragmatic in nature. The believer should not be tasked with following arbitrary commands and prohibitions. The Divine purpose of the Law has to fit with what humans understand to be to their benefit: “We should be able to believe that our sense of the good and the Lawgiver's sense of the good coincide” (italics in original, p. 228).
What are the practical implications of this view of God's wise purpose for the substance of the law? Since Ibn Taymiyya is adamant that knowledge of the overall and long-term welfare of humankind has to come from revelation, the legal principle of benefit (maṣlaḥa) has limited scope: it can only affirm what is already in scripture. Coming back to the ethical dimension of Ibn Taymiyya's thought, it also means that the Law tells us which of our desires are natural and which are corrupt. In that sense, Vasalou argues, Ibn Taymiyya's fiṭra is never independent or objective as it may appear. In reality it is much closer to Ash'arite ethics, which accept the appearances of a Divine purpose while rejecting its reality.
As a legal historian, I have two caveats with regard to this rich and engaging book – one concerns law and the other history. In terms of law, Vasalou concedes the interpretive possibilities of Ibn Taymiyya's utilitarianism, but too easily glosses over the gap between scripture and legal interpretation. True, the application of maṣlaḥa should always be in conjunction with an indicant from scripture, but for an innovative interpreter such indicants can be quite easy to come by. I do believe that Ibn Taymiyya's utilitarian purpose of the Law opens radical avenues of reinterpretation, as is demonstrated by his unorthodox rulings on questions of practice.
Vasalou rightly argues that Ibn Taymiyya can be fragmentary, contradictory and unsystematic. At the same time, she does not provide a systematic or chronological overview of the corpus she is using. It would be illuminating to follow the development of Ibn Taymiyya's concept of fiṭra over time, a task which is, I believe, possible given the amount of biographical data at our disposal. These twin caveats notwithstanding, this is a stimulating book that goes beyond the surface of the texts to create new insights and new connections in the study of ethics across time and place.
