Aqeedah al-wasitiyyah ibn uthaymeen

Biography of Ibn Taimiyah

Taqi ud-Din Abu-l-'Abbas Ahmad Ibn 'Abd al-Halim Ibn 'Abd as-Salam Ibn Taimiyah al-Harrani al-Hanbali, was born on Monday the 10th of Rabi' al-Awwal 66l H./22nd of January 1263 C.E.

at Harran. His father fled with his family from Harran to Damascus in the year 667 H./1268 C.E. out of fear of the Tatars who invaded the land of Islam and were very close to Harran. In Damascus, the center of Islamic studies at that time, Ahmad Ibn Taimiyah followed in the footsteps of his father who was a scholar of Islamic studies by studying with the great scholars of his time, among them a woman scholar by the name Zainab bint Makki who taught him hadith.

He completed his studies when he was a teenager and at age 19 he became a professor of Islamic studies.

Well versed in Qur'anic studies, Hadith, fiqh, theology, Arabic grammar and scholastic theology, etc., he started giving fatwas on religious legal matters without following any of the traditional legal schools, the Ha