Ibn Taymiyyah’’s Letters from Prison

Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah, known as Ibn Taymiyyah for short, was a controversial medieval Sunni Muslim theologian, jurisconsult, logician, and reformer. A member of the Hanbali school of jurisprudence founded by Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Ibn Taymiyyah was also a member of the Qadiriyya Sufi order founded by the twelfth-century mystic and saint Abdul-Qadir Gilani. A polarizing figure in his own lifetime, Ibn Taymiyyah’s contentious and iconoclastic views on such widely accepted Sunni doctrines of the medieval period such as the intercession of saints and the veneration of saint’s tombs made him very unpopular with the vast majority of the orthodox religious scholars of the time, under whose orders he was imprisoned several times during his life. Often viewed as a minority figure in his own times and in the centuries that followed, Ibn Taymiyyah has become one of the most influential medieval writers in contemporary Islam, where his particular interpretations of the Qur’an and the Sunnah and his rejection of some aspects of classical Islamic tradition are believed by some scholars to have had considerable influence on contemporary Wahhabism, Salafism, and Jihadism. Indeed, particular aspects of his teachings had a profound influence on Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of the Hanbali reform movement practiced in Saudi Arabia known as Wahhabism, and on other later Wahabi scholars. Moreover, Ibn Taymiyyah’s controversial fatwa allowing jihad against other Muslims, is referenced to by Al-Qaeda and other jihadi groups. Ibn Taymiyyah did not marry. Living during the troubled times of the Mongol invasions, Ibn Taymiyyah was forced to leave his native Harran at the age of six, in order to seek refuge with his father and three brothers in Damascus.