104. Karen Armstrongtine Islam of the Quran and sunnah, the reformers were often
iconoclastic in sweeping away later medieval developments
that had come to be considered sacred. They were also suspi-
cious of foreign influence, and alien accretions, which had
corrupted what they saw as the purity of the faith. This type
of reformer would become a feature of Muslim society. Many
of the people who are called "Muslim fundamentalists " in our
own day correspond exactly to the old pattern set by the muj-
dadids.
In the post-Mongol world, the great reformer of the day
was Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328), an alim of Damas-
cus, which had suffered so terribly at the hands of the Mon-
gols. Ibn Taymiyyah came from an old family of ulama who
belonged to the Hanbali madhhab, and wanted to reinforce the
values of the Shariah. He declared that even though the
Mongols had converted to Islam, they were in fact infidels
and apostates, because they had promulgated the Yasa instead
of the Shariah. Like a true reformer, he attacked Islamic de-
velopments that had occurred after the Prophet and the
rashidun as inauthentic: Shiism, Sufism and Falsafah. But he
also had a positive programme. In these changed times, the
Shariah had to be brought up to date to fit the actual circum-
stances of Muslims, even if this meant getting rid of much of
the fiqh that had developed over the centuries. It was essential,
therefore, that jurists use ijtihad to find a legal solution that
was true to the spirit of the Shariah, even if it infringed the
letter of the law as this had been understood in recent times.
Ibn Taymiyyah was a worrying figure to the establishment.
His return to the fundamentals of the Quran and sunnah and
his denial of much of the rich spirituality and philosophy of
Islam may have been reactionary, but it was also revolution-
ary. He outraged the conservative ulama, who clung to the
textbook answers, and criticized the Mamluk government of
Syria for practices which contravened Islamic law as he un-