İbn Kayyim el-Cevziyye’nin Tahrîf Anlayışı/Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Understanding of Taḥrīf

Abstract

Taḥrīf is one of the most fundamental Islamic arguments against the Jews and Christians for falsifying their Scriptures and one of the most critical issues discussed in the polemical tradi-tion. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350) is one of the leading polemicists of the Islamic world in the Middle Ages. One of the issues that he examined in his work, Hidāyat al-Ḥayārā fī Ajwibat al-Yahūd wal-Naṣārā, which he wrote as a refutation to Jews and Christians, is the distortion of the Tanah and the New Testa-ment. This article examines and analyzes Ibn Qayyim’s views on taḥrīf and biblical criticism to determine its place and importance in the Islamic refutation tradition. For this purpose, his understanding of taḥrīf and his opinions in his polemic have been analyzed and revealed by descriptive and comparative methods. His views influenced the falsification conception in the Islamic tradition and scholars after him, which was also reflected in tradition. Based on Islamic sources and the Jewish and Christian scrip-tures, Ibn Qayyim concluded that most of the authentic texts of the Jewish and Christian scriptures had been distorted textually (taḥrīf al-lafẓ/al-nass) and interpretively (taḥrīf al-maʿnā). And he revealed his claims with theo-logical and rational proofs in detail.

Keywords

• history of religions
• islam
• ibn qayyim al-jawziyya
• qur’ān
• torah
• tanah
• bible
• taḥrīf
• biblical criticism