While the degree of Ibn Taymiyya’s influence on the Ḥanbalī madhhab has been called into question,139 the fact is that he had come to be seen, in the centuries following his death, as the chief authority figure in Ḥanbalism, widely dubbed “the shaykh” in Ḥanbalī legal texts. Previously this term had been reserved for Ibn Qudāma al-Maqdisī (d. 620/1223), but by the time al-Ḥajjāwī was writing in the sixteenth century it was used to refer to Ibn Taymiyya exclusively.140 And yet, the Ḥanbalīs of Arabia did not adopt each and every one of Ibn Taymiyya’s views as orthodoxy.
