Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

The hardest-hitting response was delivered by the Syrian jurist Ibn Taymiyah. His family originated in Harran, a town near the intersection of present-day Syria, Iraq, and Turkey, right in the path of the Mongol invasion. They fled the wrath of Hulagu with nothing but their books, ending up in Damascus, where Ibn Taymiyah grew up. He studied the standard Islamic disciplines with unusual brilliance and earned, at an early age, the standing to issue fatwas, religious rulings. Intense horrors tend to spawn extreme opinions, and Ibn Taymiyah was rooted in his times. No doubt the anxiety of his uprooted family gave him an emotional stake in puzzling out the meaning of the Mongol catastrophe, or perhaps his personality would have inclined him to the views he propounded no matter when or where he was born—who can tell? But in a Syria so recently crushed by the Mongols and still suffering the residue of the Crusades, Ibn Taymiyah at least found a ready audience for his thoughts. If he had never been born, the audience that embraced him might well have found someone else to express those same ideas.