the Chief Judge Kamāl al-Dīn al-Zamlakānī, al-Qazwīnī, al-Subkī, and Ibn Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī.

Yet despite the presence of these outstanding figures, the scholarly milieu as a whole was marked by simplicity, superficiality, and little depth in matters of jurisprudence and the sacred sciences. At that time, fiqh had become rigid and ossified, and nothing is more harmful to Islam and the Muslims than petrified thinking and stagnant minds—a condition that prevailed during the Mongol and Crusader wars of Ibn Taymiyyah’s age.

When wars grow fierce, people instinctively turn to religion; but few things have harmed the Muslims more than polemical disputations, speculative theology, and sophistic philosophy—discourses that show off eloquence and rhetoric while hiding a disgraceful ignorance of the faith’s truths and its pristine nature.

The family of the erudite jurist and ḥadith-master Ibn Taymiyyah was itself a household of knowledge and virtue, firmly attached to the school of Imām Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal. Indeed, it was the leading family of the Ḥanbalī madhhab in those lands, for his grandfather had been the foremost Ḥanbalī scholar of his time. Al-Dhahabī relates: “Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah himself told me that Shaykh Ibn Mālik used to say, ‘Allah made fiqh pliant for Majd al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyyah just as He made iron soft for David, peace be upon him.’”

Ibn Taymiyyah studied all the sciences current in his era, giving particular attention to Arabic—its grammar and morphology—while also taking up arithmetic, mathematics, and calligraphy. He devoted special care to jurisprudence, legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh), ḥadith, Qur’anic exegesis, and the science of inheritance. Exegesis was perhaps his dearest discipline; it is said that he would consult nearly one hundred commentaries on a single verse. He once said: “I might study about one hundred tafsīrs of a single verse, after which I beg Allah for understanding, saying, ‘O Teacher of Adam and Abraham, teach me!’ I would go to abandoned mosques and the like, rub my face in the dust, and beseech Allah, saying, ‘O Teacher of Abraham, grant me comprehension.’”