Ibn Taymiyya Quotes
Whatever is not done by the permission of Allah will not happen, and what is not done for the sake of Allah will not benefit or remain.
Ibn Taymiyyah, Taqi al-Din. Majmu' al-Fatawa. Vol. 8, King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Quran, 1995, p. 329.
This quotation is sometimes used as an illustration of a difficulty that many Western officials have in dealing with Islamic governments. Failure of their plans, policies, and strategies do not become a learning experience or an example to guide the future. The failure was the will of Allah and not the result of the policy. So repeating the strategy of staying with the policy is not per se destructive or useless. Allah may favor it the next time. So there are no consequences of bad policies. Only destiny which Allah has shaped for any of a thousand reasons which are not known to man.
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.
