God Spatially Above and Spatially Extended: The Rationality of Ibn Taymiyya's Refutation of Far al-Dīn al-Rāzī's Ašarī Incorporealism

Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) wrote his tome Bayān talbīs al-ǧahmiyya to refute Ašarī kalām theologian Far al-Dīn al-Rāzī's (d. 606/1210) argument in Tasīs al-taqdīs that God is not corporeal, located, or spatially extended. Bayān talbīs al-ǧahmiyya is the largest known refutation of kalām incorporealism in the Islamic tradition, and al-Rāzī's Tasīs al-taqdīs was apparently the most sophisticated work of its kind circulating in Ibn Taymiyya's Mamlūk scholarly milieu. Ibn Taymiyya in Bayān talbīs al-ǧahmiyya deconstructs al-Rāzī's rational arguments and explicates an alternative theology of God's relation to space. Translating his understanding of the meaning of the Qurān and the Sunna into kalām terminology and drawing on Ibn Rušd's (d. 595/1198) Aristotelian notion of place as the inner surface of the containing body, Ibn Taymiyya envisions God in Bayān talbīs al-ǧahmiyya as a very large indivisible and spatially extended existent that is above and surrounds the created world in a spatial sense