(6) Sources of the Book
The sources upon which Imām Ibn al-Qayyim—may Allah have mercy on him—relied can be divided into three categories.
- Ibn al-Qayyim’s personal observations
He says (p. 135):
“Something very close to the foregoing debate happened to me with one of the scholars of the People of the Scripture (1). We were alone together in a private gathering, and the conversation reached the point where the Christians’ reviling of the Lord of the worlds was mentioned—a revilement the like of which no human being has ever uttered. I said to him, ‘By your rejection of Muḥammad’s prophethood, peace and blessings be upon him, you have directed an even greater insult at the Almighty.’”
He also says (pp. 141–142):
“In every respect their method is the very opposite of the Qur’an’s. The Qur’an’s method is truth presented with the finest exposition and the clearest wording, whereas their method consists of false notions cast in the most convoluted, prolix, and inaccessible language. A thirsty man wears himself out chasing after them until his strength is gone, only to find that he has arrived at a mirage in a barren plain… Allah knows that we do not say this by imitating others, but rather in reporting what we have personally witnessed and seen.”
And he remarks (p. 1004):
“As for the ugly, derisive expressions they employ, they do not shy away from them. They openly declare, ‘What is there in the mushaf (written copy of the Qur’an) besides ink and paper?’ They say, ‘There is no speech of Allah in the mushaf; no divine speech has ever descended to earth, and what the Muslims recite is not truly the speech of Allah.’ We—and others besides us—have actually seen such people with our own eyes and heard some of the statements we have just quoted. These subsidiary ideas and necessary implications all branch out from that same false root.”