IBN 'AQIL

in full Abu Al-wafa' 'ali Ibn 'aqil Ibn Muhammad Ibn 'aqil Ibn Ahmad Al-baghdadi Az-zafari born 1040, Baghdad died 1119 Islamic theologian and scholar of the Hanbali school, the most traditionalist of the schools of Islamic law. His thoughts and teachings represent an attempt to give a somewhat more liberal direction to Hanbalism. In 105566 Ibn 'Aqil received instruction in Islamic law according to the tenets of the Hanbali school. During these years, however, he also became interested in liberal theological ideas that were regarded as reprehensible by his orthodox Hanbali teachers. These ideas represented two diverse trends within Islamic thoughtthat of the Mu'tazilites, those who sought to understand and interpret religion according to the canons of logical inquiry and reason, and that of the teachings of the mystic al-Hallaj, especially his concept of wahdat ash-shuhud (unity of phenomena), a doctrine that attempted to accommodate the idea of unity (tawhid) of Sufism (Islamic mysticism) and the orthodox theologians' concern with the revealed law (shar'). Ibn 'Aqil's attraction to these ideas weakened his standing in the conservative Hanbali community of Baghdad. He aroused further animosity when in 1066, at the relatively young age of 26, he attained a professorship at the important mosque of al-Mansur, at least partly as a result of patronage. The professional jealousy of those theologians who had been passed over, coupled with his espousal of innovative and controversial doctrines, led to Ibn 'Aqil's persecution. After the death of his influential patron, Abu Mansur ibn Yusuf, in 1067 or 1068, he was forced to retire from his teaching position. Until 1072 he lived in partial retirement under the protection of Ab u Mansur's son-in-law, a wealthy Hanbali merchant. The controversy over his ideas came to an end in September 1072, when he was forced to retract his beliefs publicly before a group of orthodox theologians. This retraction may have been based on expediency and was in keeping with the recognized practice of taqiyah (precautionary dissimulation). Ibn 'Aqil spent the rest of his life in the pursuit of scholarship. His most famous work was the Kitab al-funun (Book of Sciences), an encyclopaedia of knowledge dealing with a large variety of subjects. This work was said to have included between 200 and 800 volumes, all but one of which have been lost.