Ibn Taymiyyah 1263 – 1328

Taqi al-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah was a Sunni Muslim theologian, jurist, and reformer of Mamluk-era Syria and one of the most controversial and influential thinkers of medieval Islam. Born in Harran and trained in the Hanbali school, he spent his life in Damascus and Cairo defending what he understood as the original creed and practice of the early Muslim community against innovations from Greek philosophy, kalam rationalism, and certain forms of Sufism. His voluminous fatwas and treatises, including the Refutation of the Logicians and the Dar Ta'arud al-Aql wa-l-Naql, argue that authentic reason and authentic revelation cannot truly conflict. He spent long years in prison for his outspoken stands and shaped many later Sunni reform movements.

Taqi al-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah was born at Harran in upper Mesopotamia in January 1263 into a family of distinguished Hanbali scholars. The family fled the Mongol advance to Damascus around 1268, and there he was raised and educated; by his late teens he had memorised the Qur'an and a vast body of hadith and law and on his father's death in 1284 succeeded him as professor of Hanbali jurisprudence at the Sukkariyya madrasa. He combined teaching and prolific authorship with active resistance to Mongol incursions and a series of long imprisonments in Cairo, Alexandria, and finally the citadel of Damascus, occasioned by his fatwas and theological polemics.

His enormous output includes Minhaj al-Sunna, his refutation of Twelver Shi'a theology; Dar' Ta'arud al-'Aql wa'l-Naql, against the alleged conflict of reason and revelation; the creedal letters al-'Aqida al-Wasitiyya, al-Hamawiyya, and al-Tadmuriyya; al-Siyasa al-Shar'iyya on Islamic governance; al-Radd 'ala al-Mantiqiyyin against the Aristotelian logicians; al-Furqan bayna Awliya' al-Rahman wa Awliya' al-Shaytan on true and false saints; and an immense fatwa collection preserved in some thirty-seven volumes as Majmu' al-Fatawa.

Ibn Taymiyyah argued for a return to the methods of the earliest Muslim community against Ash'ari and Maturidi kalam, philosophical Sufism in the line of Ibn 'Arabi, the falsafa of Ibn Sina, and the popular cult of saints' tombs, while affirming a literal and 'transmitted' reading of the divine attributes. He died in the citadel of Damascus in September 1328 and was buried in the Sufi cemetery; later Salafi and Wahhabi movements have repeatedly invoked his authority.