Ibn Taymiyyah, in full Taqī al-Dīn Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd al-Salām ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad Ibn Taymiyyah, (born 1263, Harran, Mesopotamia—died September 26, 1328, Damascus, Syria), one of Islam’s most forceful theologians, who, as a member of the Ḥanbalī school founded by Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, sought the return of the Islamic religion to its sources: the Qurʾān and the Sunnah, revealed writing and the prophetic tradition.
Ibn Taymiyyah was born in Mesopotamia. Educated in Damascus, where he had been taken in 1268 as a refugee from the Mongol invasion, he later steeped himself in the teachings of the Ḥanbalī school. Though he remained faithful throughout his life to that school, of whose doctrines he had an unrivalled mastery, he also acquired an extensive knowledge of contemporary Islamic sources and disciplines: the Qurʾān (Islamic scripture), the Hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad), jurisprudence (fiqh), dogmatic theology (kalām), philosophy, and Sufi (Islamic mystical) theology.
Ibn Taymiyyah left a considerable body of work—often republished in Syria, Egypt, Arabia, and India—that extended and justified his religious and political involvements and was characterized by its rich documentation, sober style, and brilliant polemic. In addition to innumerable fatwas (legal opinions based on religious law) and several professions of faith, the most beautiful of which is the Wāsiṭiyyah, two works merit particular attention. One is his Al-Siyāsat al-sharʿiyyah (“Treatise on Juridical Politics”), available in French and English translations. The other, Minhāj al-sunnah (“The Way of Tradition”), is the richest work of comparative theology surviving from medieval Islam.
Ibn Taymiyyah desired a return to the sources of the Muslim religion, which he felt had been altered too often, to one extent or another, by the different religious sects or schools. The sources were the Qurʾān and the Sunnah: revealed writing and the prophetic tradition. The ijmāʿ, or community consensus, had no value in itself, he insisted, unless it rested on those two sources. His traditionalism, however, did not prevent Ibn Taymiyyah from allowing analogical reasoning (qiyās) and the argument of utility (maṣlaḥah) a large place in his thought, on the condition that both rested on the objective givens of revelation and tradition. Only such a return to sources, he felt, would permit the divided and disunited Muslim community to refind its unity.
In theodicy (the justification of God as good when evil is observable in the world), Ibn Taymiyyah wished to describe God as he is described in the Qurʾān and as the Prophet did in the Sunnah, which led him to side with theological schools in disagreement with contemporary opinion. This position was the point of departure for a critique, often conducted with very subtle argument, of the ideas of such dogmatic theologians as Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī or Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, such philosophers as Avicenna and Averroës, or such mystics as Ibn al-ʿArabī.
Concerning praxes (practices), Ibn Taymiyyah believed that one could only require, in worship, those practices inaugurated by God and his Prophet and that one could only forbid, in social relations, those things forbidden by the Qurʾān and the Sunnah. Thus, on the one hand, he favoured a revision of the system of religious obligations and a brushing aside of condemnable innovations (bidʿah), and, on the other, he constructed an economic ethic that was more flexible on many points than that espoused by the contemporary schools.
In politics Ibn Taymiyyah recognized the legitimacy of the first four caliphs (the rāshidūn), but he rejected the necessity of having a single caliphate and allowed for the existence of many emirates. Within each emirate he demanded that the prince apply the religious law strictly and rely on it for his legal opinion, and Ibn Taymiyyah demanded from those under the prince’s jurisdiction that they obey the established authority except where it required disobedience to God, every Muslim being required to “will the good and forbid the bad” for the benefit of the common welfare.
Though Ibn Taymiyyah had numerous religious and political adversaries in his own time, he has strongly influenced modern Islam for the last two centuries. He is the source of the Wahhābiyyah, a strictly traditionist movement founded by Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (died 1792), who took his ideas from Ibn Taymiyyah’s writings. Ibn Taymiyyah also influenced various reform movements that have posed the problem of reformulating traditional ideologies by a return to sources.
