Ibn Taymiyyah was reared in a family of prominent religious scholars. Both his father and his grandfather belonged to the Hanbali School of Law, the most conservative of the four schools in Sunni Islam (the other three are the Hanafi, the Maliki, and the Shafi’i). A diligent student who had memorized the Qur’an before he was nine years old, ibn Taymiyyah joined his father and grandfather as a Hanbali cleric at the astonishingly young age of nineteen—though, significantly, only after he had spent a number of years under the tutelage of major scholars from the other three schools of law, an
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