Ibn Taymiyya

Ibn Taymiyya's positions are more specific than the label of a hardliner suggests, and several of them cut against the reputation.

On God he held that the attributes named in scripture are to be affirmed as they are given, without allegorical reinterpretation and without asking how, and he attacked the speculative theology of the Ashari school for reasoning about God from premises it had taken from philosophy. He wrote an extended refutation of Aristotelian logic, arguing that the syllogism cannot deliver certainty about the world and that the definition by essence does no work.

On practice, his best known rulings concern tombs. He held that travelling to a grave for intercession, seeking a need from a buried saint, and building over graves compromise the exclusive claim of God, and he applied this to shrines of great prestige, which is what made it intolerable to his contemporaries.

On the Mongols, who had professed Islam but governed by their own law, he issued rulings that a ruler in that position could be fought, which is the single text of his most quoted in the twentieth century.

He also held positions that sit awkwardly with his later admirers. He argued that the punishment of hell may not be everlasting, a view he was attacked for in his lifetime. And his opposition to Ibn Arabi's doctrine of the unity of being did not extend to Sufism as such: he was affiliated with the Qadiri tradition and wrote approvingly of disciplined mystical practice. He died in the citadel of Damascus in 1328, months after his writing materials were taken from him.

For most of the period between his death and the nineteenth century Ibn Taymiyya was a respected but peripheral figure, read within the Hanbali school and largely set aside elsewhere. The Ottoman religious establishment worked in the Hanafi school and in Ashari theology, both of which he had written against.

Two things changed that. The movement founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the Arabian interior in the eighteenth century took his rulings on tombs and on associating partners with God as its authority. And from the later nineteenth century the printing press put his works into wide circulation for the first time, with reformist editors in Cairo and elsewhere issuing them to readers who had never had access to the manuscripts.

Twentieth century movements then drew on him in incompatible directions. Reformists cited his insistence on returning to the earliest generations against what they regarded as inherited accretion. Militant groups cited his rulings on the Mongols to justify fighting governments that call themselves Muslim.

That last use has been challenged on textual grounds. At a conference held at Mardin in 2010, participants examined the manuscript of the ruling associated with the town and argued that the printed editions carry a reading that reverses its sense, turning an instruction about how a population should be treated into an instruction that it be fought. The argument is about a single word, and it has not settled the wider dispute, but it illustrates the position he now occupies: a thirteenth century jurist whose sentences are contested in the present tense, by people who agree on very little except that he matters.