| Abstrakt: |
After the collapse of the Abbasid Empire as a result of the Mongol conquest of Bagdad in 1258, a number of Sunni Muslim scholars perceived the sudden absence of the caliphate, an important Islamic political institution, as an experience of contingency. The emergence of the Mamluk dynasty (1250-1517) in Egypt and Syria caused an additional experience of contingency: the crisis of legitimacy of the Mamluk rulers. Furthermore, the Mamluks and their legal scholars did not assiduously apply the Shariʿa provisions to practical politics - theoretically, however, they accepted it in order to legitimize their rule over the so-called Islamicate regions. In some of his works, the Damascene Muslim scholar Taqī ad-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn Taymīya (d. 1328) faces up to these three experiences of contingency. This article therefore examines how Ibn Taymīya perceived these three phenomena and sheds light on the complex layers of strategies that he uses in order to cope with the experiences of contingency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
