Ibn Taymiyya saw the mainstream beliefs and practices of contemporary Sunnī Islam as having been corrupted—by the influence of the Ashʿarīs, the Ṣūfīs, the Shīʿa, the philosophers, the Christians and Jews, and the Mongols, among others. He therefore authored a seemingly endless series of theological treatises and polemics, “introduc[ing] a new current of theology unprecedented in the Ḥanbalī school and not found elsewhere in medieval Islam” and provoking an uproar thereby.
