The Most Dangerous Sort of Deviant

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

Imam Taqi’ ad-Din Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali ibn ‘Abd al-Kafi’ as-Subki (r.a.) wrote, in his introduction to the first epistle of his threefold refutation of Shaykh Taqi’ ad-Din Ahmad ibn ‘Abd al-Halim ibn Taymiyyah (r.a.), “When ibn Taymiyyah innovated whatever he innovated in the principles of doctrines and destroyed the pillars and seams of the foundations of Islam after camouflaging himself with the pretence of following the Book and the sunnah, feigning to summon people to the truth and guide them to Paradise, he exited conformity and entered novelty, strayed from the jama’ah of the Muslims by violating the ijma’, and attributed what necessitates corporeality and compound nature for the Transcendent Essence. 

He claimed that dependency on composite parts is not an impossibility; that Created entities subsist in the Essence of Allah (s.w.t.); that the Qur’an is originated, Allah Speaking it after its non-existence; that He speaks, falls silent, and originates in His Essence the volitions according to Created things, in the process arriving at the necessary pre-eternity of the world by stating that there is no beginning for Created entities.  So, he claimed the existence of originated entities without beginning, affirming the pre-eternal attribute to be originated and the created and originated to be without beginning.  And none ever held these two doctrines at one and the same time in any society nor in any religious community, so he is not part of any of the seventy-three sects into which the ummah split, nor can there be any ground for him to stand with any particular ummah.  And even if all this constitutes the foulest disbelief, yet it is little compared to what he innovated in the branches!”