The Political Thought of Ibn Taymiyyah

Ibn Taymiyyah remains one of the most consequential and most misread political thinkers in Islamic history. In this study, Qamaruddin Khan sets aside both hagiography and polemic to reconstruct, with careful attention to primary Arabic sources, how a fourteenth-century Hanbalite jurist arrived at a theory of the state that continues to shape reformist thought across the Muslim world today. Khan works chiefly from Ibn Taymiyyah's Minhaj al-Sunnah al-Nabawiyah, written against Shi'i claims to the Imamate, and from Al-Siyasah al-Shar'iyah, his treatise on governance under the Shari'ah. Read together, these works reveal a thinker who rejected both the Sunni myth of a universal caliphate and the Shi'i doctrine of the infallible Imam, proposing instead a pragmatic theory of cooperation between the scholarly class and holders of power — a state legitimized not by lineage or election but by its fidelity to revealed law. The book opens with Ibn Taymiyyah's formation in Mamluk Damascus, a city absorbing refugees from Mongol-devastated Baghdad and a Muslim Spain in its final collapse, and traces how persecution, imprisonment, and near-constant polemical combat with rival schools shaped his political vocabulary. From there, Khan moves systematically through the classical debate over whether the Imamate is a matter of revealed obligation or rational necessity, situating Ibn Taymiyyah against al-Ash'ari, the Mu'tazilah, the Shi'ah, and the Khawarij before turning to his most original contribution: a theory of the state built on cooperation rather than compulsion, in which the 'Ulama' and the Umara' share responsibility for upholding the Shari'ah. Subsequent chapters examine the Prophetic community at Madinah, the disputed question of Prophetic succession, and the qualifications, appointment, and duties of the Imam and his subjects — closing with an extended argument for regional cooperation among Muslim polities in place of the fiction of a single universal caliphate. A descriptive bibliography of Ibn Taymiyyah's complete works, compiled from manuscript and print sources, closes the volume and remains a standing reference for researchers working on his corpus. Serious, exactingly sourced, and unusually free of the apologetic tone common to studies of this period, this remains one of the only systematic English-language treatments of Ibn Taymiyyah's political philosophy — essential reading for students of Islamic political theory, Islamic intellectual history, and the classical roots of contemporary Islamic political movements.