Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: was ibn taymiyyah popular before the 1800s — December 20, 2024 | Ali Shukri Amin

Ibn Taymiyyah was considered probably the fourth or fifth most influential Hanbali jurist within a century after his death. But as Jonathan Brown notes in "Misquoting Muhammad", the Hanbalites were always a cloistered exclusive madh'hab - either full of intellectuals or fanatics depending on the era.

He was not influential with respect to Quranic interpretation, hadith studies, Sira, theology, or mysticism.

According to biographies of ibn Taymiyyah, estimated tens of thousands of people came out for his funeral when he died. Ibn Battuta makes a point of hearing him speak (in an anthropomorphic way) during his travels (doubtful as ibn Taymiyyah was in prison at the time), but this shows that he had considerable renown during his life.

Ibn Taymiyyah was a prolific author and a towering intellectual who exercised his free thinking in all of the fields of Islamic study. So, he quite often deviated from the Hanbali school in law. Furthermore, his theological constructions were totally new. Hanbalis had not deal with Aqidah the way he did, in fact no one did before him.

As a result, he wasn't highly celebrated in the Hanbali school outside of his fiqh (which was also unconventional). It was popular for people to claim that he repented before his death from the views they believe he had that were heretical (ibn Hajr mentions this).

Ibn Taymiyyah's project of using the entirety of philosophical literature available to him to reach Athari conclusions (and some of his own idiosyncratic ones), complete ijtihad in fiqh, railing against Sufi saint-veneration, and his theory on Arabic and Quranic interpretation were not paid much attention to until ibn Abd al-Wah'hab.

He did spawn some seminal students who were prolific in their own right and who carried on some of his legacy for at least one generation (Dhahabi, Ibn al-Qayyim, ibn Kathir, al-Mizzi, etc.)

In ibn Taymiyyah, ibn Abd al-Wah'hab most importantly found a political model for his project and a mechanism by which to excommunicate (takfir) his most vehement opponents. While ibn Taymiyyah himself did not attempt to start his own political movement and refrained from actually takfiring his opponents (while accusing them of heresy), ibn Abd al-Wah'hab was far less interested in being a theoretician.

It's not clear that ibn Abd al-Wah'hab was anywhere near as sophisticated as ibn Taymiyyah with respect to theology, philosophy, exegesis, jurisprudence, or mysticism. However, ibn Abd al-Wah'hab was incredibly adept at distilling the core ideas, popularizing them, organizing, and statecraft. He wanted to create an ibn Taymiyyan state, free of the esoteric or syncretic religious practices he accused the Arabs of falling into.

As a result of successfully doing so with the Saudo-Wahhabi state, ibn Taymiyyah became the de facto grandfather of modern Wahhabism. Since Hanbalism had fallen into near total irrelevance outside of Najd, all future Hanbalis found their intellectual tradition irrevocably linked to ibn Taymiyyah.

Now, even the surviving non-Taymiyyan Hanbalis are forced to engage very closely with his thoughts and works. That's because all otber strains of Hanbalis and even non-Hanbalis have to deal with his mass popularization.

Ibn Abd al-Wahhab is responsible for the popularization of not just ibn Taymiyyah but of Hanbalism writ large. The wider madh'hab could have been considered to have become intellectually irrelevant by the 17th century, including ibn Taymiyyah. In ibn Abd al-Wah'hab's refurbishment of Hanbaliam, ibn Taymiyyah was the most important figure.