Intellectual rigidity and backwardness were unmistakable and deeply rooted. Education revolved around memorizing condensed primers, and writing was confined to commentaries, abridgements, or the production of marginal notes and glosses. New students encountered no renewal or originality whatsoever. Shaykh Muḥammad Abū Zahrah noticed this state of scholarly life and its intellectual repercussions, remarking:

“If the three centuries—the sixth, seventh, and eighth—were distinguished by anything, it was by the sheer abundance of knowledge, not by depth of thought. Information was plentiful, its acquisition extensive, and people devoted themselves to it earnestly. Yet unfettered reflection on its sources and channels, and an impartial comparison between sound and unsound opinions—free of intellectual fanaticism and sectarian bias, scrutinizing matters with a detached eye that surveys every side—was far from commensurate with that bountiful legacy handed down through the generations.”

(1)

As we envision the intellectual life of the period, the following observations must be recorded:

First:
The existence of sectarian partisanship among the four legal schools, and at times even among adherents of the same school.

Second:
The dispute between Shaykh Ibn Taymiyyah and his students on one side and certain Sufis and jurists on the other, which led to Ibn Taymiyyah’s imprisonment three times—one of them in Egypt—and to the imprisonment of the ḥadīth scholar al-Mizzī and Ibn al-Qayyim in Damascus. All this arose over subsidiary juristic issues, revealing rigidity and narrowness of vision.

Third:
An interest in historiography unaccompanied by renewal or critical appraisal—save for Ibn Khaldūn and al-Maqrīzī—limited instead to addenda and abridgements. This crippled that great discipline, preventing it from invigorating the building of the ummah, uniting it, and urging it toward constructing civilization and restoring cohesion.

Fourth:
The influence of the creeds of various nations and races; immersion in speculative theology; reliance on formal logic; and a slide into the labyrinths of determinism and free will, figurative interpretation and consigning meaning to God, corporealism and negation—all while leaving these divergent views suspended, fragmenting the ranks, imperiling the future, and portending destruction.