And on account of these and other virtues, were someone to claim that performing the prayer there is merely disliked, the implication would be to place it on the same footing as all other mosques and to strip it of those special merits—something that is plainly impermissible.
We extracted this understanding from Ibn Taymiyyah’s earlier words ⦗168⦘, where he explains the reason prayers performed for a specific cause (salāt dhāt al-asbāb) are allowed during times in which prayer is normally forbidden. Just as those prayers were permitted because banning them would cause them to be lost and their reward could not be regained once their time had passed, the same reasoning applies to praying in his Mosque, Allah bless him and grant him peace.
I subsequently found Ibn Taymiyyah stating this outright, for he says in his book al-Jawāb al-Bāhir fī Ziyār al-Maqābir (1) ⦗22/1-2⦘: