Reddit reply in r/MuslimAcademics: ibn taymiyyah an example of racism in traditional — September 24, 2025 | Ali Shukri Amin

Ibn Taymiyyah is trying to reconcile what seem to be two facially contradictory concepts:

1. That superiority is solely based on righteousness
2. That the Arabs are the best

The first concept is attested to with much clearer evidence. However, since he is a textualist more on the literal side (analytic versus syncretic) he defers much more to the apparent meaning of texts - even upholding the facial meanings of more obscure narrations.

So he's left in a situation that many of the traditional scholars are, saying that the Arabs are the best while affirming only righteousness matters.

There are a few ways traditionalists try to explain this:

1) While being Arab or not doesn't make any one individual better than another, overall the Arabs are the most righteous in our time in aggregate
2) The culture of the Arabs before Islam was most accommodating to Prophethood meaning the Arab culture was the most superior and that's why Allah chose them to have the final Messenger
3) Being Arab is not a race or ethnicity only, it is a language and a culture anyone can adopt. All Arabic speakers are Arabs
4) All scholars must learn Arabic and aspects of Arab culture in order to access the Revelation, therefore it is superior and Allah has elevated the Arabs

I don't know of anywhere where ibn Taymiyyah was pressed on this issue and forced to explain the details of his reconciliation. He most likely would have adopted one of the above points that later scholars did, and he did indeed most of if not all of these points in contexts unrelated to the issue at hand.

No one found the idea that the Arabs were superior to be problematic before modernity probably because there was no systemized understanding of race and therefore racism. We don't see what we conceive of as chattel slavery and race based slave trade among the Arabs until the discovery of the new world.

I'm not suggesting that ibn Taymiyyah had a totally egalitarian modern understanding of racial equality. I am suggesting that our ideas of race would have been alien to him, both positively and negatively. It was just not something they thought about the way we do now.

However I cannot imagine ibn Taymiyyah himself actively discriminating against someone over their ethnic background. There is just nothing in the information we have about him that would suggest a propensity to do that.