First: Introducing Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah
He is Shaykh al-Islam, the ḥāfiẓ and independent jurist, Taqī al-Dīn Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm ibn ʿAbd al-Salām ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Abī al-Qāsim ibn al-Khiḍr ibn Muḥammad ibn Taymiyyah, a native of Ḥarrān and a Hanbalī by school.

He was born in Ḥarrān on Monday, the 10th of Rabīʿ al-Awwal in the year 661 AH. When the Tatars overran the region, his father brought him and his two brothers to Damascus in 667 AH.

His teachers and his scholarly formation
He studied jurisprudence and legal theory with his father and heard hadith from many scholars, among them Shaykh Shams al-Dīn, Shaykh Zayn al-Dīn Ibn al-Manjā, and al-Majd Ibn ʿAsākir. He learned Arabic with Ibn ʿAbd al-Qawī, after which he took up Sibawayh’s Book, pored over it, and mastered it. He applied himself to hadith, listening repeatedly to the Six Books and to the Musnad. He turned to Qurʾānic exegesis and excelled in it. He perfected the principles of jurisprudence, the laws of inheritance, arithmetic, algebra and equation-balancing, along with many other sciences. He examined speculative theology and philosophy, surpassed others in those fields, and refuted the leading theologians and philosophers. Before reaching twenty he was already qualified to issue legal verdicts and teach. He became thoroughly versed in hadith and memorized it; he was quick-witted, sharp of understanding, a marvel of intelligence, foremost in knowledge of the Qurʾān and Sunnah and of scholarly disagreements, an ocean in transmitted reports, with a wide command of the legal views of the Companions and the Successors.

His engagement in teaching
His father was among the foremost Hanbalī Imams. When he passed away, Ibn Taymiyyah succeeded him in his posts at the age of nineteen; his reputation spread and his fame became renowned throughout the world, and he began to