A Litany of Shaykh Taqi’ ad-Din Ahmad ibn ‘Abd al-Halim ibn Taymiyyah’s (r.a.) Kufr & Its Legacy

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

Among the things Shaykh Taqi’ ad-Din Ahmad ibn ‘Abd al-Halim ibn Taymiyyah (r.a.) said which are considered to grossly violate the scholarly consensus is that Allah (s.w.t.) is subject to Created events; that Allah (s.w.t.) is complex or made of parts, His Essence standing in need similarly to the way the whole stands in need of the parts; that the Qur’an is created in the Essence of Allah (s.w.t.); that the world is of a pre-eternal nature and exists with Allah (s.w.t.) since pre-eternity as an “ever-abiding created object”, thus making it necessarily existent in His Essence and not Allah (s.w.t.) Acting Deliberately; his suggestions of the corporeality, direction, and displacement of Allah (s.w.t.), and that He fits the size of the Throne, being neither bigger nor smaller; that prophets are not sinless; that the Prophet (s.a.w.) has no special status before Allah (s.w.t.) and must not be used as a wasilah: and that the undertaking of travel to the Prophet (s.a.w.) in order to perform his visitation is a sin, for which it is unlawful to shorten the prayers, and that it is forbidden to ask for his intercession in view of the Day of Need. 

Shaykh ibn Taymiyyah (r.a.) was also responsible for the innovated ‘aqidah of the Wahhabi sect.  He divided tawhid into two types: tawhid ar-rububiyyah and tawhid al-uluhiyyah, Oneness of Lordship and Oneness of Godhead respectively.  He said the first consisted in the acknowledgment of Allah (s.w.t.) as the Creator of all, a belief shared by believers and non-believers alike.  And he said the second was the affirmation of Allah (s.w.t.) as the one true deity and only object of worship, a belief exclusive to believers.  His natural conclusion was that “whoever does not know tawhid al-uluhiyyah, his knowledge of tawhid ar-rububiyyah is not taken into account because the idolaters also had such knowledge.”  He then compared the scholars of kalam to the Arab idol-worshippers who accepted tawhid al-rububiyyah but ignored tawhid al-uluhiyyah.  In effect, he used this to make takfir of Imam al-Ghazali (r.a.), and the entire Ash’ari school of creed.   This is the basis by which the Wahhabi sect uses to deny the shahadah of the Muslims until now and claim us all to be kafirun and mushrikin. 

In the final five months of his last two-year period in jail, Shaykh ibn Taymiyyah (r.a.) was prevented from writing, at which time he turned to prayer and the intensive recitation of the Qur’an and repented from having spent time writing doctrinal refutations instead of focusing on the commentary of the Qur’an.  At that time, he confided to his faithful student, Imam Shams ad-Din Abu ‘Abdullah Muhammad ibn Abu Bakr ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah (r.a.), “My Paradise and my Garden are in my breast and wherever I go they never depart from me.  My prison is seclusion, my execution is martyrdom, and my exile is an excursion.”  His “Paradise” and “Garden” here meaning his faith and knowledge.  He repented for all the heresy that he was charged with, listed above.  And he gave instructions that all these books with them were to be burnt. 

Shaykh ibn Taymiyyah’s (r.a.) janazah was attended by about 50,000 people, including many of the very scholars who had opposed him.  They had accepted him as one of them, and prayed for him as they would for any Muslim, and affirmed that despite his shortcomings, his famous temper and quick tongue, his previous arrogance and character faults, he was an ‘alim, and his piety was never in question.  His teachings were by and large forgotten, a distant nightmare of the ummah.  Forgotten that is, until the coming of the great shaythan, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab an-Najdi.  The founder of the Wahhabi sect brought them back from oblivion, and innovated them further.  Later, the “Salafi” movement revived them through a large-scale publication campaign backed up by political and financial activism from the 1930s to our day.