The Imam, Taqī al-Dīn Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm Ibn Taymiyyah al-Ḥarrānī al-Dimashqī, d. 728 AH

The eminent scholar Ibn Taymiyyah (1) was born in 661 AH, during the reign of al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Baybars, who at the time ruled Egypt and Syria and was considered one of the most powerful Muslim sovereigns after Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī.

Ibn Taymiyyah entered the world five years after the sack of Baghdad. Three years before his birth the Tatars had already stormed Aleppo and Damascus. When he grew older his contemporaries recounted to him those savage, relentless campaigns; even his birthplace, Ḥarrān, did not escape the brutality of those criminals who spared neither God’s law nor basic human decency in those once-secure lands.

As a child of about seven, Ibn Taymiyyah both heard and saw rivers of blood flowing around him in his hometown of Ḥarrān, where his family had long resided.

Amid this atmosphere, heavy with grief and resentment, a constellation of great scholars and jurists arose—figures such as Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ, al-Nawawī, al-ʿIzz ibn ʿAbd al-Salām, al-Mizzī, and al-Dhahabī. In Ibn Taymiyyah’s own day there also shone the Chief Judge Kamāl al-Dīn