Shaykh al-Islam Taqi al-Din Abu al-ʿAbbas Ahmad Ibn Taymiyyah, together with a mention of some of his merits and some of his writings.” Al-Dhahabi’s own words confirm this assessment: the Shaykh’s biography, he says, could easily be set in two full volumes. (1)

More than ten years ago I, together with the learned editor Muhammad ʿAzīr Shams, published The Compendium of the Life of Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah over Seven Centuries in a single large volume. That work is now being reissued—God willing—within this blessed project, with the omissions duly supplied. Our teacher, the eminent scholar Bakr ibn ʿAbd Allah Abu Zayd—may Allah have mercy on him—stated that a sound biography of Shaykh al-Islam may be drawn from five sources. The first of these is that Compendium, now, praise be to Allah, in print. The second is al-ʿUqūd al-Durrīyah; the Shaykh called for a new critical edition of it, saying: “In my view, al-ʿUqūd al-Durrīyah ought to be re-edited and reprinted, and whatever additions are found in the other dedicated biographical monographs should be incorporated as marginal notes at the appropriate places in this book, so that those works become unnecessary.” (2)

Within this blessed project, then, we have first gathered the material contained in the biographical works into the Jāmiʿ, followed it with al-ʿUqūd al-Durrīyah as the most important stand-alone volume, and appended to its margins the material to which the Shaykh alluded. In this way the biography of Ibn Taymiyyah is completed, together with three further complementary works that the Shaykh mentioned in the introduction to the Jāmiʿ (p. 35) and in al-Madākhil ilā Āthār Shaykh al-Islam (pp. 12–13).