is truly astonishing: the Maliki judge kept trying to persuade the sultan to lay a heavy hand on him, but Ibn Taymiyyah would retort, “That is impossible; it has no basis in your own school of law. You Malikis yourselves have stated such-and-such, and on the principles of your madhhab the ruler cannot condemn me for what you have mentioned.” The judge was left speechless—how could this man know details of our doctrine that we ourselves do not know?

Moreover, may Allah have mercy on him, he had a broad command of every discipline. He was learned in grammar, pure Arabic, morphology, and rhetoric. His student Ibn al-Qayyim, may Allah have mercy on him, devoted an exceedingly meticulous discussion in Badāʾiʿ al-Fawāʾid to the difference between madḥ and ḥamd and to the way Arabic nuances meaning by placing a single letter before or after another. After presenting that remarkable analysis he added, “Whenever our shaykh—may Allah have mercy on him—spoke on such matters, he produced wonders upon wonders.” He was referring to questions of language and morphology, yet—as the poet said:

Lightning flashed from Najd, and I said to it:
“Turn aside, for I am busy with other concerns.”

That is, Shaykh al-Islam was occupied with issues far weightier than points of grammar, rhetoric, or morphology.

On one occasion he arrived in Egypt, where the famed linguist and Qur’an exegete Abū Ḥayyān resided. Abū Ḥayyān used to praise Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah and composed an incomparable ode in his honour, in which he said:

Ibn Taymiyyah has risen
to spread the religion and champion our Sacred Law,
assuming the station of the lord of Taym
when Muḍar defied the truth.

The “lord of Taym” is Abū Bakr, may Allah be pleased with him—meaning that Ibn Taymiyyah rose in