A Critical Examination of Salafi Physicalist Theology
Subject Areas : Islamic theology
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Abstract :
The understanding of the Salafis in the issue of God's attributes is based on sensory knowledge, and this point is affected by their epistemological method such as appearanceism, lack of attention to interpretation, and negation of the understanding of reason, which without considering the damage in sensory cognition, is the context for deviant interpretation in theological teachings and Especially, it has provided the understanding of divine attributes; God's physicality and belief in God's sensory vision is the result of an error in understanding divine attributes. Ibn Taymiyyah, as the founder of Salafi thought, considered sense as the only way to know external affairs. This view of Salafis originates from a sensuous epistemological base, which places them in line with physicalists. Physicalism, as a naturalist trend, considers everything, not just matter, to be reducible to the properties of physical objects. This article has tried to answer the question whether the Salafists' understanding of God's attributes is not a form of physicalistic theology. In this essay, an attempt is made to consider the nature of physicalist theology, the understanding of the Salafis and especially Ibn Taymiyyah about divine attributes, and its reduction to material things and returning it to tangible phenomena is considered a physicalist explanation and criticizes it.