of evil and the necessity of restraint in a world that has emanated from the divine? This problem he faces bravely. Our world must be the best of all possible worlds; otherwise God would have made it better. Difference, then, among men and things belongs to its essence and necessity. Next, justice must consist in accepting these different things and adapting them to their situations. To try to make all things and men alike would be to leave some out of existence altogether. That would be a great injustice. Here, again, religion enters. Its object is to rectify this difference in qualities and gifts. Men are not responsible for these, but they are responsible if they do not labor to correct them. In the hereafter all will be reabsorbed into the divine being and taste such bliss as the rank of each deserves. For those who need it there will be a period of purgatorial chastisement, but that will not be eternal, in sha Allah.

Like his predecessors, Abd ar-Razzaq divides men into classes according to their insight into divine things. The first is of men of the world, who are ruled by the flesh (nafs) and who live careless of all religion. The second is of men of reason (aql). They through the reason contemplate God, but see only His external attributes. The third is of men of the spirit (ruh) who, in ecstasy, see God face to face in His very essence, which is the substrate of all creation.

In his cosmogony, Abd ar-Razzaq follows, of course, the neo-Platonic model and shows great ingenuity in weaving into it the crude and materialistic

phrases and ideas of the Qur'an. Like all Muslim thinkers he displays an anxiety to square with his philosophy the terms dear to the multitude.

To Ibn Taymiya, all this was the very abomination of desolation itself. He had no use for mystics, philosophers, Ash'arite theologians, or, in fact, for anyone except himself. A contemporary described him as a man most able and learned in many sciences, but with a screw loose. However it may have been about the last point, there can be no question that he was the reviver for his time and the transmitter to our time of the genuine Hanbalite tradition, and that his work rendered possible the Wahhabites and the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi. He was the champion of the religion of the multitude as opposed to that of the educated few with which we have been dealing so long. This popular theology had been going steadily upon its way and producing its regular riots and disputings. It is related of a certain Ash'arite doctor, Fakhr ad-Din ibn Asakir (d. 620), that, in Damascus, he never dared to pass by a certain way through fear of Hanbalite violence. The same Fakhr ad-Din once gave, as in duty bound, the normal salutation of the Peace to a Hanbalite theologian. The Hanbalite did not return it, which was more than a breach of courtesy, and indicated that he did not regard Fakhr ad-Din as a Muslim. When people remonstrated with him, he turned it as a theological jest and replied, "That man believes in 'Speech in the Mind' (kalam nafsi, hadith fi-n-nafs), so I returned his salutation mentally." The point is a hit at the Ash'arites, who contended that thought