Ibn Taymiyya dies in the Citadel of Damascus

Ibn Taymiyya made his name during the Mongol invasions of Syria in 1299–1303. He preached jihad in the Umayyad Mosque, declared that the Ilkhan’s armies, though converts to Islam, had to be fought because they ruled by the Mongol law (yasa) rather than the sharia, and took part in the battle of Marj al-Saffar in April 1303. His attacks on speculative theology, philosophy, Sufi practices and the cult of saints set much of the religious establishment of Cairo and Damascus against him, and he was imprisoned several times. In July 1326 a treatise he had written in 1310, condemning travel undertaken solely to visit the tombs of prophets and saints — the grave of the Prophet included — led to his final arrest, and the sultan forbade him to issue fatwas. He went on writing in prison until his writing materials were taken away, and he died on 20 Dhu al-Qa’da 728 AH.

The funeral became a demonstration of popular reverence: the chronicler al-Birzali, quoted by Ibn Kathir, put the men at 60,000 to 200,000 and the women at some 15,000, and Ibn Kathir wrote that in the history of Islam only the funeral of Ahmad ibn Hanbal had drawn more people. Ibn Battuta, who reached Damascus on 9 August 1326, describes hearing him preach and come down one step of the pulpit to show how God descends to the sky of this world; but by then Ibn Taymiyya was already in the citadel, and the historian Donald Little (1975) suspected that the traveller was repeating what he had been told. Historians such as Khalid El-Rouayheb stress that for some five centuries his influence on mainstream Sunni Islam was slight. His ideas shaped Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the 18th century and the Salafi reformers of the 19th and 20th, and his rulings against the Mongols have been invoked by modern jihadist movements.