The Taymiyyan Turn in Early Twentieth-Century Islamic Reform and the Controversy over Cursing Muʿāwiya

In the early twentieth century, a debate arose among reform-oriented Islamic scholars on whether the first Umayyad Caliph Muʿāwiya b. Abī Sufyān deserved to be cursed (laʿn). The debate started with a fatwa from Rashīd Riḍā in his journal al-Manār in 1905, but in subsequent years spread to Southeast Asia, where reform-oriented Ḥaḍrami-ʿAlawī scholars wrote several treatises on the issue. It was urgent to them, because the issue was closely related to their claimed special social status as descendants of the Prophet. The arguments of Ibn Taymiyya in favor of Muʿāwiya from his recently published Minhāj al-Sunna would play a key role as the controversy unfolded and became a touchstone for the legitimacy of the arguments made by the different camps. This debate proves that it was not yet clear to Islamic reformers globally in this age which method to follow in source criticism, legal reasoning, and proper disputation. This was actively negotiated with each other in an increasingly connected as well as diverse international network of reform-minded scholars, in which the works of Ibn Taymiyya slowly but steadily became a touchstone of correct method. In that process, they did not shy away from re-assessing seemingly long-settled disputes within Sunni Islam.