REBIRTH 161cess proved its revelations true. Well, if victory meant the revelations were
true, what did defeat mean?
Muslims had never before experienced such sweeping defeats, not any-
where in the world, not even in their nightmares. The historian Ibn al-
Athir called the Mongol onslaught "a tremendous disaster" the likes of
which the world might never experience again "from now until its end."
Another major Muslim historian speculated that the coming of the Mon-
gols portended the end of the world. According to yet another, the Mon-
gol victories showed that God had abandoned Muslims.^1
The Crusaders had at least been Christians, but the Mongols? They
weren't even "people of the book." Their victories posed an agonizing puz-
zle for theologians and tested the faith of the masses in some pervasive way
that many people probably felt but didn't intellectualize. Especially in
post-Crusader Mesopotamia, after the sack of Baghdad, where the Muslim
community had suffered its most devastating setback, any thinking person
who subscribed to the premise that universalizing the Muslim community
was the purpose of history might well have asked, "What went wrong?"
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 inva-
sion. They fled the wrath ofHulagu 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 fotwas, 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 catastro-
phe, 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.
Ibn Taymiyah propounded three main points. First, he said there was
nothing wrong with Islam, nothing false about the revelations, and noth-
ing bogus about seeing Muslim victories as proof of them. The problem,