and, after his reputation had spread throughout the world, he began on Fridays to interpret the Noble Qur’an while seated on a chair, reciting it entirely from memory.
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What Ibn Baṭūṭah relates also contradicts what the Shaykh states in all his writings: that Allah’s names and attributes must be affirmed without likening them to created qualities, and declared transcendent of any resemblance without nullifying them. What Ibn Baṭūṭah reports is plain anthropomorphic assimilation, something Shaykh al-Islām vehemently forbids and warns against in the strongest terms.
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Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah devoted a separate work to the subject of the Divine Descent, entitled Sharḥ Ḥadīth al-Nuzūl. The treatise is published and widely available, and it contains nothing of what Ibn Baṭūṭah alleges; on the contrary, it categorically refutes and invalidates his claim from the ground up. All praise belongs to Allah, Lord of the worlds.
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They also accused him of opposing scholarly consensus (ijmāʿ). Shaykh Muḥammad¹ Bahjat al-Bayṭār answered this charge, saying: “Ibn Taymiyyah became known for a number of issues transmitted from him, and many people imagined that he stood alone in those matters, even assuming that in some of them he contradicted consensus. Yet these are questions of juristic reasoning in which disagreement among scholars naturally occurs. It is well established that Ibn Taymiyyah had reached the rank of ijtihād in matters of the Sacred Law, and that he issued legal opinions according to the conclusions his ijtihād reached². In those fatwas he agrees with some of the Companions, the Successors, one of the four Imāms, or other scholars who lived before, during, or after his time.”
The distinguished scholar Burhān al-Dīn Ibn al-Qayyim said: “We do not know of any issue in which he violated consensus; whoever claims otherwise is either ignorant or lying.” What is attributed to him as being uniquely his divides into four categories: The first is something considered highly unusual, so that, because the view is rarely held and little known, some have claimed he opposed consensus owing to the scarcity of those who espoused it and its obscurity among people, as reported by certain narrators