Ibn Aqil

Ibn Aqil (1040–1119) was an Islamic scholar and theologian from Baghdad, Iraq. He was trained in the tenets of the Hanbali school for eleven years under scholars such as the Qadi Abu Ya'la ibn al-Farra'.

Creed

Ibn 'Aqil leaned strongly toward Ash'arism; he had signed, around 455, the fatwa protesting against its persecution, and it was he who, in 476, performed the ablutions on the body of his friend, Abu Ishaq al-Shirazi, the Ash'arite rector of the Nizamiyya of Baghdad. His forced retraction represents one episode in the struggle carried on by Hanbalites against Ash'arite Shafi'ites, who got back at them five years later when Abu Ishaq al-Shirazi succeeded in getting Abu Ja'far ibn Abi Musa arrested.

Works Among his works of jurisprudence that have survived are Wadih fi usul al-fiqh and (in part) Kitab al-funun, a huge collection of anecdotes about the attitudes and customs of his times, in one hundred volumes. In it he writes:

Truly, it is not lawful for me to waste a single moment of my life; so that when my tongue is not engaged in instructive conversation and disputation, or my sight in studying, I engage my mind in meditation in my moments of rest, lying down, only to rise with some thought having occurred to me which I then commit to paper. In the eighth decade of my life, I do indeed experience a zeal for learning more intense than that experienced when I was a young man of twenty.