Conflicted S4 E5: The Firebrand from Damascus (Part 1)

Speakers: Thomas Small & Aimen Dean

Thomas: When it comes to the main historical antecedent for many modern jihadis, one man stands head and shoulders above the rest. One scholar writes, “Advocates of violent jihad from the late 1970s to the present quote him more than any other mediaeval scholar.”

Another one claims that Shiis and many Sunnis blame him for introducing excessive intolerance and theological error into their religion.

This is a man whose thrilling life foreshadows many of the issues with the radicalism that Islam is facing today. A man who baked in an uncompromising, even brutal zeal to the religion still felt 700 years later.

I'm talking of course about the 13th, 14th century scholar, theologian, warrior, Ibn Taymiyyah, the Sheikh of Islam, as he was called by his admirers. Now, Aimen Dean, Ibn Taymiyyah is a pretty controversial character. What does he mean to you?

Aimen: For me, he is the ultimate jurisprudent and pioneer, I would say, of political and militant Sunni Islam.

Thomas: Pioneer. I like that word. Ibn Taymiyyah was a pioneer. And part of our ongoing series looking at the historical thinkers who have influenced modern jihadism, this is the first of two episodes on Ibn Taymiyyah, exploring his life, his many contradictions, and his quest for jihad. I'm Thomas Small and welcome back to Conflicted.

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Aimen, why are we talking about Ibn Taymiyyah? In my view, going through his life, going through his works, going through his influence, he really is the prototype of a Salafi, meaning a Muslim who goes back to the original sources of the religion, the Quran, the Hadith, the extent to which they expressed the Sunnah of the prophet and his companions, the way of life of the Salaf, the original Muslims. That's why they're called Salafis.

And Ibn Taymiyyah, in my view, is a prototypical Salafi. In fact, he sort of foreshadows that movement.

Aimen: You know what, Thomas, when I was young, the most quoted theologian of old was always Ibn Taymiyyah. When I was learning the basics of Islamic sharia and theology, no one was mentioned more than Ibn Taymiyyah.

Why? Because he is not only the ultimate authority on all matters of creed and faith, he is also the ultimate authority on matters of politics and statecraft from the point of view of Sharia.

Thomas: What really interests me about Ibn Taymiyyah 's role amongst Salafis today is how a group which says we want to go back to the original generations of Muslims, actually bases so much of their thought on a Muslim from the seventh and eight centuries of Islam. So 7, 800 years after those early Muslims. It reminds me of some Protestants in Christianity who also bang on about being the original Christians, going back to the origins, the beginning.

But in fact, those that inspire them intellectually are based in the 16th and 17th century. So many, many hundreds of years after the religion was founded.

Aimen: Oh, Thomas, you and your anti-Protestant rants as usual, you pious orthodox priest. Anyway, so well, I agree. I mean, it is one of those rather strange. But why, because for Sunni Muslims, it is important that we mention this, is that they have the concept of a Mujaddid, that based on a Hadith, they believe in that every hundred years there is someone who will emerge, who would reform and revive the old ways of Islam.

Thomas: Yes.

Aimen: And cleanse it from the pollution and additions that were added to it. So, they believe that-

Thomas: Yes. The Mujaddid, meaning renewer in Arabic, someone who makes it new again. Yeah.

Aimen: Exactly. So, they believe that the first Mujaddid was the eighth Umayyad Caliph, Umar bin Abdul Aziz. And then after that they say the second Mujaddid was Ahmad bin Hanbal.

Thomas: Oh, Ahmad bin Hanbal-

Aimen: Who we talked about before.

Thomas: Our friend.

Aimen: Exactly. And so and so. And then they come to Ibn Taymiyyah and they say that he is also a Mujaddid.

Thomas: I’m glad you brought up Ahmad bin Hanbal. We did just finish a two-part series on him. And Ibn Taymiyyah stands in a direct line of dissent from him.

So, as we said at the end of that series, following Ahmad bin Hanbal's death in the ninth century, a school of Islamic jurisprudence, one of the four legal schools of Islam today, the Hanbali School was founded in his name. It remained always the minority school in Islam until recent centuries.

But in the Middle Ages, it was a minority school, and yet an influential school founded in the memory of Ahmad bin Hanbal and enshrining his fidelity to the original sources, his antipathy to philosophising, to analogical reasoning, to anything that goes against the literal interpretation of the text.

And Ibn Taymiyyah is born into a family of Hanbali scholars. He is directly related to that line of tradition within Islam.

Aimen: I agree. However, while Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah was born in a Hanbali house, his father and grandfather were definitely Hanbali jurisprudence themselves. But there is a huge difference between Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Hanbal.

While Ibn Hanbal was more of a stoic and magnanimous and austere, cleric and jurisprudent, and a scholar-

Thomas: A very spiritual person at the end of the day.

Aimen: Indeed. However, Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah was the product of his day, was confrontational, was a firebrand orator, and was far more prolific writer than Ahmad bin Hanbal. And his writings were more in defence of Islam, but in a very offensive way.

Thomas: We're going to get into all of this as we proceed. I think that what I'd like to stress here at the outset before we launch into the amazing story of Ibn Taymiyyah's life, is the familiarity of his world. The world in which he grew up in, even more than Ahmad bin Hanbal.

All the factions, the voices, the views that are rocking the Muslim world today are in evidence then, back then, when Ibn Taymiyyah was living, writing, and really becoming the firebrand that he is today remembered as.

Now, Ibn Taymiyyah was born on the 22nd of January, 1263 in the city of Harran, today that's in Southeastern Turkey. At that point, it was part of the Mamluk Empire.

Now, we can quickly Aimen explain what the Mamluk Empire is. It's a successor state to Saladin’s Ayyubid Sultanate, it's capital was in Cairo.

And at the time of Ibn Taymiyyah's birth, the empire was very young. It had been established only 13 years earlier in 1250, when Mamluk soldiers, and remember long-term listeners know this, Mamluk is literally the Arabic word for owned because these soldiers had originally been Turkic slave soldiers of the Ayyubid Sultans.

Well, in 1250, they overthrew the last Ayyubid and established their own Sultanate on top of the Ayyubid Sultanate. I mean, there's a certain amount of continuity there. But in 1250, the Mamluk Empire is born, and 13 years later, Ibn Taymiyyah is born within it.

Aimen: Indeed. I mean, the Mamluks were mostly central Asian Kazakhs, as well as some of them actually were Caucasians. I mean, some of them were Caucasians from the Caucasus, from Chechnya and Dagestan, it was a mix of the two. And these two will form the two pillars of the Mamluk Empire.

Thomas: The Mamluk Empire is known, I think by historians or maybe more generally in the public consciousness for the dramatic battle in 1260 of Ain Jalut against the Mongol hordes.

Often the Mamluks are praised, lauded, congratulated by historians for resisting the Mongol hordes, as if in 1260 at the Battle of Ain Jalut, finally the Mongol advance was arrested by the Mamluks.

As we will see, this is not exactly true. Ain Jalut is absolutely a vital battle. It did arrest the Mongol advance, but for several decades after that battle, and really throughout all of Ibn Taymiyyah 's life, the Mongol threat against the Mamluks would be real and ever present.

So, it's not that in 1260, the Mamluks just stopped the Mongols. In fact, it's not true. Really, from 1260 onward, there was like a Cold War that often waged hot between both sides along the border.

Aimen: Sometime I'm glad that Genghis Khan decided to adopt the name Genghis Khan, because it sounds threatening, unlike his birth name which sounds so cute, Temüjin. So, I mean, his birth name is Temüjin. I mean, it sounds like a Pokémon kind of character.

Temüjin Yesukhei Baghatur, that's his name. Unfortunately, this Temüjin turned out to be anything but cute. I mean, he did nothing but unleash the wrath of God on humanity. And he described himself actually as the wrath of God on humanity.

He began his conquest of Muslim Central Asia in the early 1200s. And what a conquest was that Thomas, millions, and this is not an exaggeration, millions of people were put to the slaughter from Narsapur, Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent, Otrar.

All of these cities that were the bastion of Islamic civilization and science were erased to the ground. It actually culminated in the destruction of the empire that gave us a lot of scientific advances, such as algorithms and optical science. This was the Khwarezmid Empire, and it was destroyed and torn asunder by none other than Genghis Khan.

Thomas: Yeah. And Ibn Taymiyyah's birth in 1263 was overshadowed absolutely by this advance because only five years earlier …

And honestly, we have to put ourselves in the kind of thought world, the imaginative thought world of a Sunni Muslim, especially at that time, five years before Ibn Taymiyyah was born, the most catastrophic event up to that point in Muslim history had happened when a Mongol general called Hulagu, conquered Baghdad itself, raised it to the ground and murdered the Abbasid Caliph, Musta'sim.

Aimen: Hulagu, who incidentally is Genghis Khan's grandson showed up with a massive army, hordes of Mongols at the gate of Baghdad. Baghdad at the time, the largest city humanity has seen by then, more than a million people congregated within that city.

It’s library, Dar Al-Hekma, contained 5 million titles of human knowledge from China all the way to North Africa. And Dar Al-Hekma means house of wisdom. What happened, the Caliph, along with a thousand people of his household ministers, generals, they thought they could treat with the Mongols.

They went to see Hulagu and how Hulagu treated the Caliph, he just took him and cuffed him and put him inside that carpet, rolled him inside that carpet, and ordered all of his soldiers to trample and kick the Caliph inside that carpet until actually he died.

Now, it sounded to the Arabs as the ultimate humiliation to be rolled in the carpet and kicked to death like this.

For the Mongols, they believe that if they spill the blood of a great leader, they will taste defeat. So, that's why he needed to be rolled in the carpet and kicked to death, so no blood will be spilled. He will be killed by internal bleeding.

Charming, absolutely charming. And the most charming thing that the Mongols did after that is that when they sacked Baghdad and put hundreds of thousands of people there to death, which coloured the Tigris  River red from the blood, they then coloured the Tigris River black from the ink of all the books that they found in the library of Dar Al-Hekma to build a bridge over which their horses could basically just cross the river.

Whether it is apocryphal or not, the fact of the matter is that after that Dar Al-Hekma was set on fire, and 500 years depository of knowledge, human knowledge was lost forever.

Thomas: Yes, and as I said, we can't imagine how catastrophic the sack of Baghdad, the destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate was. And there, five years later, Ibn Taymiyyah is born into this world, a broken world, a world of great uncertainty, a religiously smashed world.

The whole ideology of a Muslim at the time, an ideology of God's chosen empire that will continue to expand forever and will bring illumination and truth and piety to every corner of the world. That empire had been smashed to smithereens.

And I think it's interesting to compare that situation to the situation that Muslims, especially in the Middle East, have been living under in the last hundred years.

I think the colonial period in the Middle East, the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in the 1920s, everything that's followed on from that, all of the instability and the political wrangling and the rise of neo-Salafism invoking Ibn Taymiyyah's memory. It's so similar to that world, Ibn Taymiyyah’s world, wouldn't you say?

Aimen: Not only Salafists, Thomas, but even ordinary Muslims find that there are similarities between the time of Ibn Taymiyyah, the time of invasions, and hunger, and fear and collapse of the dynasties, the collapse of the law and order, and the nation states that existed.

They feel that it was so similar to the last 150 years in the Muslim world, where many Mongol empires were actually in invading the peripheries as well as the heart of the Muslim world.

Look at, for example, the Russian Empire, and then the Soviet Union after that, invading the Central Asian Republics, the Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan. These were the same areas which the Mongols invaded in the 1200s.

Then you have the French invading North Africa. You have Napoleon going into Egypt and invading it. You have, of course, above all the British Empire who actually removed the descendants of the Mongols, the Muslim Mughals from India, and they took over as the new emperors of India, and of course, removed Islam from the position of power that it was enjoying for hundreds of years there.

You see the feeling of being under siege, invaded, and at the same time, controlled and colonised, this is the same feeling that the people at the time of Ibn Taymiyyah were going through, possibly even more.

Thomas: You've just succinctly summarised season three of Conflicted, Aimen. Any new listeners who haven't enjoyed our massive sweeping history of the colonial period and the Cold War in the Middle East? Go back. Listen to season three. I promise you, you'll learn a lot.

You're absolutely right, Aimen. The time of Ibn Taymiyyah was very resonant with our own times, which is why so many Muslims today draw on his thought when conceiving of their own responses to their present predicaments.

So, back to Ibn Taymiyyah's life, as we said, he was born in Harran in modern Turkey, and in 1269, so this is what, he's six-years-old now, that city Harran is conquered by the Mongols and he is forced with his family to flee. The family flee to Damascus.

Aimen: As if the burning of the library of Dar al-Hekma, the house of wisdom in Baghdad was a reminder to Ibn Taymiyyah's family, the first thing they rescued from their house as they were fleeing Harran towards the Damascus, was their precious books.

It shows the mentality of that household. They knew that the Mongols are not going to treat the books very nicely. So, the first thing they rescued was the books. They put all of their precious books on the cart as they were dragging it all the way to Damascus. The most precious thing they had.

Thomas: Taymiyyah's father was a Hanbali scholar, and when they got to Damascus, he became the headmaster of the Sukariya Madrasa, a Hanbali Madrasa in Damascus, and the family lived there as well.

So, Ibn Taymiyyah actually grew up inside a Hanbali School, and I think that must have played a huge influence on his personality later, on his formation as a thinker and as a Muslim.

But what a tremendous trauma. You're six-years-old. Your city is conquered by the Mongols. You escape with your family to a new city. The whole world was smashed to smithereens.

And I think in this context, it's important to really emphasise that the religious system that had prevailed at the high water period of the Abbasid Caliphate, the religious system, was very much under pressure as a result of all of these stresses and shocks to it.

And that whole period is known as an age of drought when it comes to religious inspiration, especially when it comes to the legal structure that dominated Muslims lives.

And as Ibn Taymiyyah is growing up in that Hanbali School, I think it's fair to say that he became convinced of this, which is that the prevailing religious system of the day was not capable of responding forcefully to the challenges that the Muslim world was facing as a result of the Mongol conquests.

Aimen: Exactly. Because as far as he was concerned, Islam, more or less was to some extent, from a theological and jurisprudence point of view, became static and less dynamic in responding to ever evolving political and scientific and social developments in the Muslim world.

He felt that what we call Ijtihad, the exercise of one's initiative in matters of faith, this Ijtihad, its gate has been closed. So, he was always dreaming about the idea that this need to be reopened, and that there need to be new interpretation of Islam in order to deal with the challenges that has risen with the Mongol invasions.

Thomas: The closing of the gates of Ijtihad. This is a proverbial phase in the history of Islam. You'll hear a lot of times Western people, Western thinkers, accusing Islam very early on in its development of basically turning its back on reason.

And they used this idea that Ibn Taymiyyah himself evoked of the closing of the gates of Ijtihad to justify this idea that the Muslim world was anti-rational. And I just want to make it clear to the listener now that that is not true.

What the closing of the gates of Ijtihad means is that within Islamic law, the use of independent reason had been de-emphasized in favour of following strict precedents within the school of law that you were a part of. That's what the closing of the gates of Ijtihad means.

It does not mean that the Muslim world became suddenly anti rational. It does not mean that the Muslim world stopped engaging in science or philosophy.

Quite the contrary, there was a lot of great scholarship and great learning and philosophising and science going on, but within the law, a certain stultification had set in according to Ibn Taymiyyah and that's what he meant by the closing of the gates of Ijtihad.

Aimen: Well, in my opinion, I don't think there was any great harm done throughout this period. The period of when the Ijtihad was closed, according to Ibn Taymiyyah although I very much doubted there were so many great scholars appearing at the time, including Ibn al-Jawzi.

But from Ibn Taymiyyah's point of view, the need to reopen the gate of Ijtihad was a necessity in order to respond to these new catastrophic developments that happened, namely the Mongol invasions.

Thomas: So, Ibn Taymiyyah is growing up inside this madrasa in Damascus, a madrasa, which his father is the headmaster of.

But then in 1284, when he's 21-years-old, Ibn Taymiyyah's father dies, and he himself takes over the headmastership of the madrasa. So, he suddenly occupies this very prominent position. He's the head of the Hanbali Madrasa of Damascus.

And in that capacity, he begins lecturing on the Quran in the great Umayyad Mosque of Damascus. And his fame begins to spread.

Ibn Taymiyyah was clearly a great preacher, a very effective orator. And as we'll see, throughout his life, he used preaching as well as writing to further his interpretation of how Muslims are meant to engage with the sources of their revelation.

He created this sort of, what was at the time, a new way of explaining this, that Islam is founded on the law. The law is founded in the Quran and the Hadith and the practices of the Salaf.

Today, we take this for granted that this is what Islam is, because Salafi Islam today is so prevalent in the world, in the atmosphere of Islam.

But at the time, this succinct way of describing Islam was not so, let's say common and Ibn Taymiyyah’s power as an orator, and a preacher, and a writer laid the foundations for this way of understanding Islam. It is the practices of the Salaf.

Aimen: That's very interesting, Thomas, because this actually exposes one of the many contradictions that would characterise his life and personality. Ibn Taymiyyah never married, ever.

Thomas: It's amazing-

Aimen: All the way until he died. And many people speculated on why, but regardless of why, the reality is that the Prophet Muhammad himself stated that marriage is his Sunnah. And whoever decide to follow a monkish way and abstain from marriage, then he is abstaining from the Sunnah of the prophet. That's what the prophet himself said.

Thomas: I can't say that Ibn Taymiyyah's personality is very attractive to me, Aimen, I have to say, but this is one way in which he is quite attractive to me, his monkishness of spirit. A contradiction at the heart of Ibn Taymiyyah, and as you say, there's going to be many as we continue our story.

Now we’re going to go for a break here. But when we come back, Ibn Taymiyyah, who is preaching with great zeal in Damascus, is going to encounter the first major controversy of his life. And it’s all down to a pesky Christian, Aimen. One who allegedly insulted the Prophet Muhhamed. As we’ll see, Ibn Taymiyyah did not take it well. Stay tuned.

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We are back. We're talking about Ibn Taymiyyah, the great 13th, 14th century Muslim scholar that is the primary influence today on the global Salafi movement.

When we last left him, he was in Damascus preaching in the Umayyad Mosque, leading the Hanbali Madrasa there.

And then in 1294, he gets embroiled in really, let's say, the first controversy of his life, the first of many controversies in Ibn Taymiyyah's life, a story that really is quite resonant with modern day events as well.

So, in 1294, villagers near to Damascus came to the governor there and accused a Christian scribe from their village of insulting the prophet Muhammad. Already you might think, hmm, this sounds familiar.

Now, the governor in Damascus, ignored them. The Christian scribe worked for a local Emir. He didn't want to upset the Emir. He just tried to sort of, well, if I ignore these villagers, maybe they'll go away.

He didn't reckon on Ibn Taymiyyah, though. So, Ibn Taymiyyah hearing about this, he went into overdrive. He had one of his periodic freak-outs, I guess, and he whipped up a crowd at the Umayyad Mosque to do something about this great injustice, this great calumny against their prophet.

So, half of the crowd followed him to the governor's palace, where they demanded that the Christian be put to death. And the other half of the crowd tracked down the Emir, for whom this Christian scribe worked and attacked him, threw stones at him.

So, Ibn Taymiyyah is proving himself early on to be very good at whipping up the masses in this sort of radical way.

Well, the governor, first of all, he says to Ibn Taymiyyah, “You can't do this.” He throws him into prison. He beats him and his followers but he realises he can't just ignore this situation.

So, he finds the Christian, the accused Christian, and he prevails upon him to convert to Islam. So, the Christian becomes a Muslim to save his own skin. And the governor obviously hoped that this would placate Ibn Taymiyyah and the other radicals calling for his death.

Well, that's not what happened. Ibn Taymiyyah said, “No, no, no, no, no. Even conversion to Islam cannot help someone escape a penalty of death for insulting the prophet.”

Now, in the end, because conversion wasn't able to save this man, the governor arranged for him to escape Damascus under the cover of night, and he fled into safety.

But what does this tell us about Ibn Taymiyyah, Aimen? And actually, what does it tell us about this possibility within Islam that we see, even today, maybe most notoriously in 2005 in the episode of the Danish cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad, which resulted in mob violence in various places of the Muslim world.

Why does this happen? And what does it tell us about someone like Ibn Taymiyyah that he might wish to foment this kind of mob reaction?

Aimen: Well, it was the time of mob rule to some extent. And the reason for that is because just like the time of Ibn Taymiyyah, the time of Ibn Taymiyyah was a time where religious minorities were always viewed with suspicion. Why? We have to go back to the sack of Baghdad, which happened, of course, just five years before Ibn Taymiyyah's birth.

During the sack of Baghdad there is this story, whether it's true or not, as far as Sunni historians and scholars, they believe it is absolutely true. They believe that the grand minister of the Abbasid Caliph, when Baghdad was sacked, who was a Shia, by the way, arranged with the Mongol, general Hulagu, who was of course massing his troops just outside of the walls of Baghdad.

He arranged with him that he will be happy to assist the invasion of Baghdad by tricking the Caliph into visiting him, by dismissing the Abbasid armies into other parts of Iraq away from Baghdad.

And what is the price is that the Shia and the Christian minorities within Baghdad will be saved from the slaughter that will take place. All they have to do is to put either black crosses or black flags on their houses. And of course, basically the rest of the population will be put to the death who are Sunnis.

This story, whether it is true or not … of course, by the way, even Saddam Hussein himself used that on the 9th of April, 2003, when he said on a radio message to his people, he said, “Baghdad has been betrayed by another Ibn al-Alqami.” He referred to the minister who was known as Ibn al-Alqami.

So, even in the psyche of Sunnis and the psyche of Iraqis and Muslims, this name Ibn al-Alqami is synonymous to betrayal by a minority upstart. This has always been there.

And so, can you imagine if Saddam, after 800 years of that incident, was recalling it during the sack of Baghdad by another Mongol, President Bush and the Americans.

So, you can imagine that the suspicion that is surrounding the religious minorities, the Christians and the Shia in Damascus, they always viewed as the agents of the Crusaders.

You remember the Crusaders are still there, they are still in Ikar, they are still in Tripoli, they are still in Tyre, and they are an alliance with the Mongol. So, of course, the suspicion is always there is ever present, the Mongol Christian Crusader Alliance that they're always afraid of.

And the minorities are just waiting, biting their time to stab them in the back. That was always the ever present thinking at the back of every Sunni's mind at the time. Ibn Taymiyyah has no exception.

Thomas: I think that's really important to keep in mind. And there's another thing about the Mongol Empire that's quite interesting is that, I mean, no one would call them liberals, exactly, but the Mongols definitely had a different attitude towards religion from the attitude that the Abbasid Caliphate in Sunnis in general had.

So Hulagu, the Emperor Hulagu, like most Mongol generals, he practiced shamanism. But despite that, he, and the Mongols in general treated all religions as sort of equal, they didn't really have this sense of hierarchy of religions in the way that Muslims and Christians have.

He was just like, well, your religion is your business. Religion is not really what we're about. And it does seem to be true that at the sack of Baghdad, Christians were left unharmed.

And Hulagu's wife was a Christian, that might have had something to do with that. And the Mongol Empire, compared to the Muslim Empire that it conquered, adopted a much more egalitarian attitude towards religion.

And this would've offended as well, someone like Ibn Taymiyyah's understanding of the right ordering of the world where Muslims were meant to be on top, especially Sunni Muslims. They're meant to be on top with gradations of sort of religious rank below him. This would've made him mistrustful of religious minorities.

Aimen: Indeed. Just basically to comment on something here that I find interesting, is that the Mongols were so tolerant of religious minorities that they always either hated them equally, slaughtered them equally, and incorporated them equally.

Thomas: But to be fair to the Mongols, I mean, I never thought I'd say that, after the period of slaughter and state formation, they did end up having a state that functioned pretty well, and they had a legal system and everything.

And in that system, religion was not treated in the same way that it was treated under the Muslim systems. So yeah, Ibn Taymiyyah felt he had reason to distrust the religious minorities of the Mamluk Empire.

He certainly had reason to distrust the Mongol Empire and its alliances with Christians in order to pursue its own objectives. And that distrust was going to become frighteningly real to Ibn Taymiyyah just around the corner when the Mongols would be at the gates, the very gates of Damascus.

Very quick scene setting here in 1295, a man called Ghazan Khan ascends the throne of the Ilkhanid Empire, the original great world straddling empire of Genghis Khan, cracked into four during a period of civil war amongst Mongol generals.

One of the four successor states of Genghis Khan's great state is known as the Ilkhanid Sultanate. In 1295, when Ghazan Khan becomes the head of that Sultanate, which is with its capital in Iran, he converts to Sunni Islam.

So, from a shaman to a Sunni, and from that position of being a Sunni, Ghazan Khan demands that the Mamluks in Cairo submit to his over lordship, but the Mamluks refuse.

So, in 1299, Ghazan Khan and his Mongol army invades Syria, and that army importantly includes Christian allies, primarily Armenians and Georgians. And very quickly they conquer Aleppo, the great capital of Northern Syria, about 200 miles north of Damascus.

Panic broke out in Damascus. And already for the year before this Ibn Taymiyyah sensing the Mongol threat had been preaching jihad. And I think it's important at this stage that we explain Ibn Taymiyyah’s doctrine of jihad because in some ways it went further than the classical doctrine of jihad.

Aimen: Ah yes, Thomas, the Mardin Fatwa, in which Ibn Taymiyyah declares jihad in a way that really is unprecedented and foreshadow what is going to really happen in our modern time in the second half of 20th century and the first miserable quarter of the new 21st century.

The fact is that prior to this, jihad was always understood to be coming in two forms, and is always against the enemies of Islam. The first is the offensive jihad, the jihad of conquest that was practised by the Rashidun Caliphate and the Umayyads, and the Abbasid.

And then you have the defensive jihad in which any sultan or governor or a dynasty would declare jihad to repel an invader, a foreign non-Muslim invader who is invading your lands. This is where you can declare jihad.

However, in the case of the Sultan Mahmud Ghazan and his Mongol army, they were overall a Muslim army and a Sunni army for that matter.

However, even though the Mongol armies of Sultan Mahmud Ghazan were Sunnis and Muslims, however, Ibn Taymiyyah did not believe they were proper Muslims to begin with. Why? Because in his opinion and his mind, they did not rule purely by Sharia laws and principles. They just incorporated parts of Sharia into the Mongol codified law that is called the Yassa.

And in his mind, the Yassa is nothing short of Shirk or Kufur, as far as he was concerned, which means polytheism. And of course, heresy.

So, he viewed that army as heretical army that is worthy to wage jihad against. That was unprecedented that you call for jihad, not only against a Muslim army, but a fellow Muslim Sunni army, just because you disagree on the form of law that they practise.

Thomas: Yeah. And with the Mongols on the march, as you say, he releases the first of three anti-Mongol Fatwas. And in the first one he admits that these Mongols are Muslims, but because as you say, they don't follow all the laws of the Sharia, and they have Christian allies, this is important to him. Their religion is defective, they're not really proper Muslims, and they should be fought. And this is cool. This is interesting.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, and when King Fahd of Saudi Arabia invited an international coalition of armies to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, a certain Osama bin Laden wrote a strongly worded letter condemning this action, inviting Christian armies onto the Arabian Peninsula to expel a Muslim invader.

And he quotes Ibn Taymiyyah's first anti-Mongol Fatwa, Osama bin Laden, when he's attacking King Fahd's decision to ally with Christians, he quotes Ibn Taymiyyah's first anti-Mongol Fatwa. It's an example of how Ibn Taymiyyah in his life resonates to the present day.

Aimen: Indeed, because at the end of the day Ibn Taymiyyah paved the way for this defective form of the practice of state craft, at the end of the day, the decision of war and peace and how it is conducted is up to the head of the state, the head of the dynasty, the king of the day, the Emir of the day.

And that's why I think that with Ibn Taymiyyah usurping the role of the state in terms of determining how it defend itself and in what manner it does, it really did open the door for other young upstart clerics to practise this sort of militant Islam outside of the jurisdiction of the state.

And this unfortunately became the dangerous President, which many, many, many other clerics later would follow in his footsteps.

Thomas: Well, with the Mongol armies advancing south from Aleppo towards Damascus, the Mamluk armies emerge from Egypt to confront them, but the Mongols defeat them. And before long the Mongols are at the gates of Damascus.

If there was panic before, there's even more panic now. Some residents flee to Egypt, the governor barricades himself and all of his troops inside Damascus's vast citadel.

And for 10 days, the Mongols lay siege to the city, which on the 2nd of January, 1300 falls to Ghazan Khan and his hordes. The second time that Ibn Taymiyyah home has been conquered by a Mongol army.

Aimen: And exactly what Ibn Taymiyyah feared happened. I mean the Christian allies of the Mongols, those Georgians and Armenians, I mean, they were running a mock in the countryside of Damascus. They were capturing men and women and children, selling them as slaves to the crusaders, whether it is in the Crusader kingdoms nearby or to Cyprus.

And at the same time, they were opening taverns not far away from the Umayyad Mosque. I mean, not exactly a pretty picture that Ibn Taymiyyah was happy with. And of course, that enforced his hatred towards Christians and minorities.

Thomas: Absolutely, it was Ibn Taymiyyah's worst nightmare. But unlike when he was six-years-old, this time, he does not flee. He stands his ground. And in fact, he's a part of a number of notables who are sent to Ghazan Khan to negotiate the terms of peace.

And according to the historical sources that are very favourable to Ibn Taymiyyah’s memory, he confronted Ghazan Khan openly and said this, “You claim to be a Muslim. You have a judge, a prayer leader, a teacher, and a prayer caller with you, yet you have invaded us. Your father and your grandfather, Hulagu were unbelievers. And yet they did not do what you have done.”

So, there you have, there's that echo of you call yourself a Muslim, but you're not really a Muslim. Even unbelievers behaved better than you.

Now, I, as I say, this story is popular with Ibn Taymiyyah’s admirers today. I mean, it's hard for me to believe that that could have actually happened. I mean, surely Ghazan Khan would've responded, rather violently.

Aimen: Most likely. Yeah. I mean, a Mongol leader like Ghazan, he would have basically made Ibn Taymiyyah a head shorter and six feet under, no question about it. I mean, this is why just like a lot of the stories around many great Muslim scholars of the past, most of the stories after their death were really apocryphal.

Thomas: Well, either way, Ghazan Khan does not kill Ibn Taymiyyah. But what he does do is he returns home. Suddenly, he goes back to the centre of his empire in Iran with his army to repel an invader, a fellow Mongol invader from the East, leaving behind him, his Christian allies and their armies.

And for a few months there, they managed to maintain some kind of chaotic control of the city and its environments. They continue to misbehave as Ibn Taymiyyah considers it.

But in April of that year, the Mamluks are able to retake Damascus and Aleppo. There was a brief six months of tremendous panic, but in the end, things returned to normal, at least for a time.

In response, Ibn Taymiyyah goes on a sort of crusade, if you can put it that way, to purify Damascus and purify Syria of all of this Mongol, all of this Christian pollution. He closes the taverns; he prosecutes Christian allies of the Mongols. He accompanied the new Mamluk governor of Damascus on reprisal raids against Christians and Shia in Lebanon, who they accused of aiding the Mongols.

So, as I say, this sudden paroxysm of purification to purify a land that had been sullied by heresy, by pseudo Sunni invasion, by Christian heretical collaboration. But now we're coming to the close of this first half of our exploration of Ibn Taymiyyah’s life.

And after all of this, when I think of Ibn Taymiyyah, you know Aimen, what comes to mind more than anything else?

Aimen: What?

Thomas: What comes to mind is the great exegetical principle that I call the Lebowski Principle. That's The Big Lebowski, the Coen Brothers movie with Jeff Bridges playing The Dude. John Goodman's in it, Steve Buscemi. Go see it. If you haven't.

Well, in that movie, you get the line, which The Dude says to his friend, Walter, “You're not wrong, you are just an asshole.”

So, I think for me, the Lebowski Principle helps explain a lot in the world, especially amongst those radically inclined, you're not wrong, you're just an asshole. Obviously Ibn Taymiyyah had a point in everything that he said, the Mongols were not really fully Sunni. The Mongols had allied with Christians, et cetera, et cetera.

Just like as we'll find in the next episode, all the sort of enemies of Sunni Islam that Ibn Taymiyyah was going to go on and persecute and prosecute for the rest of his life. He often had a point, but he was just an asshole.

And in this way, I feel, and I don't want to offend anyone, but I do feel that he is a sort of proto Salafi. And it returns back to that exploration we had earlier of the fundamentalist mentality, the radical mentality. Why are they all such assholes? Why Aimen, are you and I sometimes such assholes?

Aimen: I tell you why Thomas, because Ibn Taymiyyah was the product of his time. He and his fellow Sunnis felt under siege. They were attacked from everywhere. Their world was shattered to pieces by outside enemies as well as inside enemies, whether real or perceived.

And that is why they behave in the way they do. It is the world of kill or be killed. The survival of the fittest, unite or die, basically. This is the world that he was growing up in.

Now mix in the Absolutist Salafism and you have a powder keg about to explode and this is what's going to happen.

Thomas: Yeah, it sure is. Ibn Taymiyyah's enemies, Aimen, as you say, real or imagined are the same enemies that modern Salafi jihadists see all around them. Philosophical, theological Muslims, Ash’aris, Sufis, Shia, of course Christians, Jews and Sunni leaders who are fake Muslims in their eyes.

They were there all around Ibn Taymiyyah and modern day Salafi jihadists had to see them all around them themselves.

Aimen: Not only Salafi jihadists Thomas, even politically active Safalis, those who are present in Egypt and Kuwait and many parts of the Arabian Peninsula in Iraq. I mean, they are also seeing all of those who you listed as also their enemies.

[Music Playing]

Thomas: Well, we're going to come back and finish our survey of the dramatic life story of Ibn Taymiyyah. He might think he's sitting pretty. The Mongols have been dispatched by the Mamluks, but in fact, little did he know, just around the corner, the Mongols will be back. Stay tuned for part two of Ibn Taymiyyah.

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Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Harry Stott. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley and Tom Biddle.