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Intel - Terrorism
ibn Taymiyya

"In God we trust.
All others we monitor."

• Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah (January 22, 1263 - 1328) was a highly influential Muslim 13th century jurist.
• Like his grandfather before him, Taymiyyah was a leading member of the Hanbali school of Islam.

• The last Caliph, Al-Musta'sim Billah, was killed by Hulagu Khan (grandson of Genghis Khan), just five years before Taymiyyah was born.

• born in Harran, located in what is now Turkey, close to the Syrian border.

• Taymiyyah studied Sharia and became a professor of Islamic studies at the age of nineteen.

• It is perhaps accurate to say Taymiyyah retreated into Islamic studies, for he is said to have not married and "abstained from even enjoying the beauty of nature".

• In promoting a revisionist "back to the basics" program, Taymiyyah insisted on a literalist reading of the Qur'an.

• For fundamentalists, government of the people by the people is heretical, inasmuch as it is an expression of ta'til. This term, which stems from the political thought of the orthodox Islamic jurist Ibn Taimiyya, involves human measures that serve to suspend the rule of God.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 120]

• Taymiyyah polemicized against the very notion of democracy, calling it the "supreme heresy".

• The classical Muslim jurist Taymiyya dismisses "human rule" as ta'il, the suspension of God's rule. This is a traditional legacy. After the abolition of the Islamic caliphate in 1924 Muslims adopted the idea of popular sovereignty underpinning the institution of the nation-state, but the idea never quite took root, and the current crisis of the nation-state has led to the politicization of the classical Islamic doctrine, within the new confines of Islamic fundamentalism.
  [source: Challenge of Fundamentalism, p. 38]

• For Taymiyyah, any form of government that placed man "in charge" amounted to the "suspension of God's rule".

• For Taymiyyah, it is not merely that democracy could not be tolerated. Instead, argued Taymiyyah, it must be directly confronted. The first step in this process, according to Taymiyyah, is to declare the rulers "takfir" (the formal act of declaring another a "kufr", which is an apostate). Designating someone as an apostate then makes them eligible to be killed, since they have interfered with the primacy of God's rule, taught Taymiyyah.

• Repentance appears to have played little role in the calculus of Taymiyyah, for he advanced the doctrine that "no peace was possible" with infidels.

• "A prison psyche began to develop and impose itself on their minds. Their deep motivation was their hatred of reality, a need to revenge what nationalism, Arabism, secularism, socialism, and all that Nasser and the Ba'th stood for. It was a desire to destroy everything and build anew, a rejection of the other, a refusal of dialogue, a denial of all compromises, etc. All this had culminated in Sayyid Qutb's Signs of the Road [Signposts along the Road]. While such experiences certainly must figure into an account of the radicalization of Islamists in Egypt, its explanatory power is somewhat mitigated, at least in Qutb's case, by the facts that, first, Mawudi was the first to advance many of the radical ideas Qutb adopted and had never been imprisoned, and second, Hasan Hudhaybi, the advocate of a gradualist approah to Islamic reform, had himself been Nasser's political prisoner in Egypt in the 1960s."
  [source: Enemy in the Mirror, p. 189]

• Ibn Taymiyya developed a theory of legitimate authority designed at once no challenge the Mongol invaders who had converted to Islam and to underwrite the established power of the Mamluks. Specifically, Taymiyya argued that rulers who neglect or transgress Islamic law or portions thereof can be deemed infidels and therefore are enemies who can be legitimately killed on the battlefield.
  [source: Enemy in the Mirror, p. 188]

• Should an "innocent" be killed in the process, this was perfectly fine with Taymiyyah, since a true Muslim was destined for paradise anyway.

• The conclusions reached by Taymiyyah, as controversial as they were, are by no means typical of the day. Two famous teachers, Mawlana Jalal-ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi (Rumi) and Hafez lived during the Mongol invasions as well, and established their theology on love, rather than violent jihad.