A Critical Consideration of Maxims of Specific Takfīr in the View of Ibn Taymiyyah

Ibn Taymiyya is the greatest Salafi theorist, whose excommunicative (takfīrī) fatwas are still appealed to as pretexts for slaughtering certain groups of Muslims. He regarded the issue of belief and disbelief as a judicial problem, defining disbelief as lack of belief. In a general classification, he divides excommunication into general and specific: in general excommunication, he merely talks about grounds of disbelief and its general attributes, without restricting it to a particular person. However, in specific excommunication, the ruling is directed at a specific individual or group who said or did something that is in contradiction with Islam. In his analysis of this classification, he seeks Quranic evidence for specific excommunication: Quranic verses in which God has characterized certain people as disbelievers. However, Ibn Taymīyya requires certain maxims for the issuance of excommunication. In this paper, we outline and criticize these maxims, showing that he is not committed to his own maxims of attributing belief and disbelief, since he easily excommunicated some Muslims and issued fatwas as to the obligation of killing them.