IBN TAYMIYYA
(Taqī ad-Dīn Aḥmad ibn Abd al-Halim ibn Abd al-Salam al-Numayri al-Ḥarrānī)
At the time the Mongols were the “infidels” who dominated the area and the various Islamic sects were at odds with each other. According to him, belief is the highest duty and fighting for the religion was next in importance.
In the golden intellectual and science eras of Arabian Islam from 900-1300 individualism and independence of thought were much cherished virtues. In the 1100s, there began a period of theological and intellectual closing where the individual’s views were expected to conform to that of the then “proper” interpretation of the Koran and Islamic Dominance over all things. By the 1300s there were few Arab Muslims who would speak out for individual freedom of thought and rugged intellectual independence from the doctrine of the times. He was one of the few who advocated being back to the “old days” when Islam was far ahead of the intellectual thinking of the world. Few paid heed and Arab Islam has for the last 800 years been a shadow of its former intellectual achievements and has become a backward, stultified set of societies where one rarely finds an intellectual who does not depend on the community consensus and the values of the mullahs and muftis of the time rather than their own.
Taqī ad-Dīn Aḥmad ibn Abd al-Halim ibn Abd al-Salam al-Numayri al-Ḥarrānī, known simply Ibn Taymiyyah (ابن تيمية), was a controversial Islamic jurist scholar, muhaddith, theologian, judge, philosopher, economist, and polymath. He is known for his diplomatic involvement with the Ilkhanid ruler Ghazan Khan and for his involvement at the Battle of Marj al-Saffar which ended the Mongol invasions of the Levant. A member of the Hanbali school, Ibn Taymiyyah's iconoclastic views on widely accepted Sunni doctrines of his time such as the veneration of saints and the visitation to their tomb-shrines made him unpopular with many scholars and rulers of the time, under whose orders he was imprisoned several times.
