- What is reported in Majmuʿ al-Fatāwā 5/264:
“An Account of the Debate on ‘Direction’ and ‘Corporeality’”
This is the document that was presented to Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyyah—may Allah have mercy on him and be pleased with him—when he was brought from Damascus by express courier and confined to the dungeon (al-Jubb) of the Citadel of the Mountain, after a formal council had been convened in the Dar al-Niʿābah. He arrived on Thursday, the twenty-sixth of the month of Ramadan; the council was held on Friday, the twenty-seventh, after the Friday prayer, and on that very day he—may Allah have mercy on him—was imprisoned.
In that document he was required to affirm the negation of any spatial direction for Allah Most High, and to deny corporeality; he was further ordered not to say that the Speech of Allah consists of letters and sound subsisting in Him, but rather that it is a meaning subsisting in His Essence. He was also obliged to state that the Almighty is not to be pointed to with a physical gesture, and he was instructed not to mention the hadiths and verses concerning the divine attributes before the common people, nor to write about them to other lands, nor to include them in fatwas dealing with such matters.
This passage confirms that the book was composed in Egypt, not in al-Shām, despite the date recorded in the base manuscript and in (Ṭ).
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The topics treated in this book are, in fact, a refutation of the objections that the judges and jurists had raised in that memorandum, criticizing the Shaykh’s creed.
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Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī and Ibn al-Qayyim—both students of the Shaykh—when listing his works on theology, spoke of “The Book of His Ordeal in Egypt….” Ibn al-Qayyim also said in Badaʾiʿ al-Fawāʾid—as mentioned earlier—referring to this very book:
“…ninety incontrovertible proofs that Shaykh al-Islam set forth in the Egyptian responses.”
Ibn Rajab al-Ḥanbalī likewise stated—also cited above—that among the major works the Shaykh authored in Egypt was “al-Miḥnah al-Miṣriyyah” (“The Egyptian Ordeal”).
It is well known that the Shaykh—may Allah have mercy on him—resided in Egypt from 705 AH to 712 AH; this supports the conclusion that he wrote the present book during that period, specifically in 706 AH, while in Egypt.
- The book itself ⦗1⦘ records that the presiding judge was Abū’l-Ḥasan