Unlike most Ḥanbalī theologians before him, Ibn Taymiyya was thus not opposed to engaging in reason-based arguments when it came to theology or borrowing the very conceptual frameworks and terminology of the rationalist theologians. Much as he made room in Ḥanbalī theology for investigating the meanings of God’s attributes, he widened its scope to include rationalist argumentation, allowing him to clarify and translate the meanings of the revealed texts into another idiom and to engage his theological opponents on their own terms.
