THE IMPACT OF IBN TAYMIYYAH ON SOUTH ASIA pdf download

The Impact Of ibn Taymiyyah on South Asia

THE IMPACT OF IBN TAYMIYYAH ON SOUTH ASIA

Ibn Taimiyya (661-728/1263-1327) is one of the most dynamic and seminal personalities in the history of Islam.

 Born in an age which, to use Toynbee’s words, was characterized by ‘schism of the soul’ and ‘schism of the body politic’, he struggled hard to revive Muslim society through inward animation and reinterpretation of its values in the light of a new spirit of ijtihad (interpretation of law) based on direct recourse to the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet.

 He therefore reacted most forcefully to the political decadence and social chaos which followed the irruption of the Mongols.

He was born five years after Hulagu’s sack of Baghdad and was in his teens when the Mongol storm inundated the eastern world of Islam.

 He struggled hard to turn the tide. When he breathed his last in 1327, Muslim and Mongol principalities existed side by side in Central Asia, the Ilkhans had stabilized their position in Persia and the Mongol tribes were converting to Islam. Much of this had been due to the efforts of Ibn Taimiyya.

He came to be hailed as the mujaddid 1 of his age. 2 His thought influenced not only his contemporaries in the Muslim heartlands but reached far beyond: Muhammad bin Tughluq (1325—1351) the Sultan of Delhi, for example, became an ardent advocate of his ideology and sought to restructure political institutions in its light;

many Muslim reform movements in the 18th and 19th centuries drew some degree of inspiration from him;

in recent history his thought supplied elan to the movements for political liberation in South Asia.

Surprisingly, no attempt has so far been made to assess the impact of his ideology on South Asia.