The conflict between Ibn Taymiyyah and his opponents:
Imam Ibn Taymiyyah lived in an age when the intellectual and moral state of the Muslim Ummah had undergone a drastic change. That decline began the moment it drifted away from the Book of Allah and the Sunnah of His Messenger, peace and blessings be upon him; as a result, it forfeited the leadership role Allah had assigned to it and commanded it to pursue along the path of jihad… The more it abandoned those two primary sources of Islamic law, the more it absorbed foreign ideas that acknowledged neither Book nor Sunnah.

Sincere voices therefore rose up, urging the Ummah—its rulers and subjects, its scholars and ordinary people—to embrace the program of reform that had once secured its well-being: a return to the Qur’an and the Sunnah, guided by the understanding of the righteous predecessors and by their application of the constructive principles these two sources contain for revival and rectification.

The malady that had struck the Ummah was intellectual distortion and the spurious innovation foisted upon Allah’s law and the Sunnah of His Messenger. That counterfeit innovation led to a bitter struggle between the reformers, who called for a return to the way of the Companions and the Followers, and those who claimed for themselves the liberty to add or omit whatever they pleased—even in matters where no truth lay.

This struggle led to the emergence of numerous schools that revolved around creed and conduct, the twin engines of Islam’s movement. The clearest and most prominent of these battles were the cries raised by Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah in