Ibn Taymiyah was born in Harran in the year 661 AH, and his father and family relocated to Damascus in his youth. In Damascus he embarked upon his formal studies with a number of the major scholars of the city and excelled in hadith, fiqh, tafsir, and other sciences. He was known to be a major depository of knowledge until it was said of him that he had greater mastery of the various legal schools than even their exponents among his contemporaries.

He was reverentially referred to as “Shaykh al-Islam” by those who respected him. And, the great Shafi’i contemporary Ibn al-Zamlakani reportedly said of him, “The conditions of juristic independence (ijtihad) were brought together in their appropriate fashion with respect to him.” But, like so many others before him, Ibn Taymiyah was tested by both the limitations of his knowledge and the jealousy of some of his peers. Consequently, much of his life was spent imprisoned in the Damascus citadel due to being perceived as a threat to Islamic orthodoxy and public order. A number of scholars deemed him an ideological threat and succeeded in convincing the governors that his detention would best serve society. It would seem, judging by the massive numbers of those reported to have attended his funeral (an excess of between 65,000 to 200,000 persons), that the attempts to silence him and limit his influence failed.