Jeroen Vanwymeersch

Jozef Plateaustraat 22, Room C0.11

Address: Jozef Plateaustraat 22, B-9000 GHENT (Belgium)

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T +32 (0)9 264 41 33
F +32 (0)9 264 42 71

Research

After his master’s degree in Classical Philology, Jeroen Vanwymeersch pursued Arabic and Islamic Studies, also at the University of Ghent. He graduated with a MA thesis on apostasy (irtidād) and blasphemy (sabb) in the Islamic World, two crimes which are traditionally punished by death by the Sharia, and which may lead to all sorts of punitive measures in most of the modern Islamic countries. Now, he is continuing a PhD research on the theories of Taqī ad-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) about these two phenomena and the narrowly related concept of bidʽa (innovation; the opposite of sunna or tradition). Today, the Syrian Islamic thinker Ibn Taymiyya remains one of the writers with the greatest influence on contemporary Sunni Islam. He left a lasting impression on major Muslim reformist thinkers as Mawdūdī en Quṭb, not only regarding their ideas about apostasy. More recently, he is also of significant value for the views of the most popular Islamic TV preacher al-Qaraḍāwī about sabb and irtidād, and for some of the related views of the ideologists of the al-Qaeda network. In addition to that, a study of Ibn Taymiyya’s theories concerning innovation, apostasy and blasphemy is likewise indispensable for the understanding of the issue in his own era, because the man is considered as one of the most important single figures of the whole Mamluk history (1250-1517). The result will be a diachronic study and reconstruction of the content of Ibn Taymiyya’s doctrine about bidʽa, irtidād and sabb, and the evolution therein, by embedding it in its own intellectual and sociopolitical framework.