The Muslim World Book Review, 42:2, 2022 46 Philosophy, Theology and Sufism IBN TAYMIYYA ON REASON AND REVELATION, by Carl Sharif el- Tobgui. Brill, Leiden/Boston, 2020, pp. 444. ISBN: 9789004412859. In the book under review, Carl Sharif el-Tobgui offers a painstaking study of the great seventh-/fourteenth century Muslim polymath Ibn Taymiyyah’s magnum opus, Dar’ ta[arud al-[aql wa’l-naql. This magisterial text centres on one of the thorniest questions in Islamic theology: How to interpret Qur’anic descriptions of God that are couched in anthropomorphic imagery? Responses to this question varied from assigning a literal meaning to such verses—and thus affirming bodily characteristics for God (tashbih)—to interpreting them completely in metaphorical terms (ta’wil) to denying any positive attributes to God (nafy). Hadith scholars, the muhaddithun, emphasized strict adherence to the path of the earliest generations (Salaf) who adhered to the plain meaning of these expressions but also resisted ascribing corporeality to God. However, the muhaddithun were faced with a nagging dilemma: How to justify linguistically the refusal to metaphorize the verses in question and at the same time deny that God had human-like bodily characteristics? As Ibn Khaldun put it, These people do not realize that it comes under the subject of anthropomorphism for them to affirm the attribute of sitting, because according to the lexicographer, the word “sitting” implies being firmly settled in a place, which is something corporeal. (Ibn Khladun, The Muqaddimah, Translated by Franz Rosenthal, vol.3, p. 66) It was this dilemma that Ibn Taymiyyah sought to resolve in Dar’ ta[arud al-[aql wa’l-naql in a way that would not entail admitting any contradiction between rationalism and the apparent meaning of revelation. El-Tobgui sets himself the task of carrying out a thoroughgoing study of Ibn Taymiyyah’s argument and presenting it in a well-knit and lucid narrative. The book’s first chapter provides an overview of the trajectory that the discourse on reason and revelation took in Islamic disciplines, such as law, philosophy and discursive theology, from the formative era up to the seventh Islamic century, at which point Ibn Taymiyyah sought to subject the whole discourse to a penetrating investigation. El-Tobgui pays special attention to