title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: Chun formed Hanahoe as a secret military club shortly after his promotion to general officer. It was predominantly composed of his fellow graduates from the 11th class of the Korea Military Academy, as well as other friends and supporters. The membership to this secret club was predominately restricted to officers from the Gyeongsang Province with just a token membership reserved for a Cholla Province officer. This secret organization's existence within a highly regimented and rigid hierarchical organization of the army was only possible because it was under the patronage of then President Park Chung-hee.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: On 26 October 1979, South Korean President Park Chung-hee was assassinated by Kim Jae-kyu, Director of the KCIA, while at a dinner party. Secretly, Kim had invited General Jeong Seung-hwa, Army Chief of Staff, and Kim Jeong-seop, Vice-Deputy Director of the KCIA, to dinner in another room that night as well. Although Jeong Seung-hwa was neither present during nor involved in the shooting of the President, his involvement later proved crucial. In the chaos that followed, Kim Jae-kyu was not arrested for many hours, as details of the incident were initially unclear.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: After some confusion over the constitutional procedures for presidential succession, Prime Minister Choi Kyu-ha finally ascended to the position of Acting President. Soon after, Jeong named Chun's Security Command to head up the investigation into the mysterious assassination. Chun immediately ordered his subordinates to draw up plans for the creation of an all-powerful "Joint Investigation Headquarters".


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: On 27 October, Chun called for a meeting in his commander's office. Invited were four key individuals now responsible for all intelligence collection nationwide: KCIA Deputy Chief of Foreign Affairs, KCIA Deputy Chief of Domestic Affairs, Attorney General, and Chief of the National Police. Chun had each person searched at the door on his way in, before having them seated and informing them of the President's death. Chun declared the KCIA held full responsibility for the President's assassination, and its organization was therefore under investigation for the crime. Chun stated that the KCIA would no longer be allowed to exercise its own budget:


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: Chun subsequently ordered all intelligence reports to now be sent to his office at 8:00 am and 5:00 pm every day, so he could decide what information to give higher command. In one move, Chun had taken control of the entire nation's intelligence organizations. Chun then put the KCIA Deputy Chief of Foreign Affairs in charge of running the day-to-day business of the KCIA.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: During the investigation and concerned for the welfare of President Park's family, Chun personally gave money (US$500,000) from Park's slush fund to Park Geun-hye, who was 27 at the time. He was reprimanded for this by General Jeong.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: In the following month Chun, along with Roh Tae-woo, Yu Hak-seong, Heo Sam-su, and others from the 11th graduating class of the KMA, continued taking advantage of the fragile political situation to grow Hanahoe's strength, courting key commanders and subverting the nation's intelligence gathering organizations.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: On 12 December 1979, Chun ordered the arrest of Army Chief of Staff Jeong Seung-hwa on charges of conspiring with Kim Jae-kyu to assassinate the President. This order was made without authorization from President Choi. On the night of Jeong's capture, 29th Regiment, 9th Division, along with the 1st and 3rd Airborne Brigades, invaded downtown Seoul to support the 30th and 33rd Security Group loyal to Chun, then a series of conflicts broke out in the capital. Jang Tae-wan, commander of the Capital Garrison Command, and Jeong Byeong Ju, commander of the special forces, were also arrested by the rebel troops. Major Kim Oh-rang, aide-de-camp of General Jeong Byeong-ju, was killed during the gunfight. By the next morning, the Ministry of Defense and Army HQ were all occupied, and Chun was in firm control of the military. For all intents and purposes, he was now the "de facto" leader of the country.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: In early 1980, Chun was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general, and he took up the position of acting director of the KCIA. On 14 April, Chun was officially installed as director of the KCIA.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: On 17 May 1980, Chun expanded martial law to the entire country, due to rumors of North Korean infiltration into South Korea. To enforce the martial law, troops were dispatched to various parts of the nation. The KCIA manipulated these rumors under the command of Chun. General John A. Wickham (US Armed Forces in Korea) reported that Chun's pessimistic assessment of the domestic situation and his stress on the North Korean threat only seemed to be a pretext for a move into the Blue House (the Korean presidential residence). The expanded martial law closed universities, banned political activities, and further curtailed the press. The event of 17 May meant the beginning of another military dictatorship.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: Many townsfolk were growing unhappy with the military presence in their cities, and on 18 May, the citizens of Gwangju organized into what became known as the Gwangju Democratization Movement. Chun ordered it to be immediately suppressed, sending in crack military troops with tanks and helicopter gunships to retake City Hall and ordered the troops to exercise full force. This led to a bloody massacre over the next two days, ultimately leading to the collapse of the Gwangju Democratization Movement and the deaths of at least 200 Gwangju activists. For this, he was called "The Butcher of Gwangju" by many people, especially among the students.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: In June 1980, Chun ordered the National Assembly to be dissolved. He subsequently created the (SCNSM), a junta-like organization, and installed himself as a member. On 17 July, he resigned his position as KCIA Director, and then held only the position of committee member.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: On 5 August, with full control of the military he effectively promoted himself to four star General and on 22 August he was discharged from active duty to the Army reserves.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: Beginning in August 1980, citizens were subjected to organized violence under the name of social cleansing, which aimed at the elimination of social ills, such as violence, smuggling, illegal drugs, and deceptions. They were arrested without proper warrants and given "ex parte" rankings. Some 42,000 victims were enrolled in the Samchung re-education camp for "purificatory education". More than 60,000 people were arrested in six months between August 1980 and January 1981, including many innocent citizens. They faced violence and hard labour in the re-education camp.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: In August 1980, Choi Kyu-hah, who had long since become little more than a figurehead, announced that he would be resigning the presidency. On 27 August, the National Conference for Unification, the nation's electoral college, gathered in Jangchung Arena. Chun was the sole candidate. Out of 2525 members, 2524 voted for Chun with 1 vote counted as invalid, thus with a tally of 99.96% in favor (it was widely speculated at that time that 1 invalid vote was purposely rigged as to differentiate Chun from North Korea's Kim Il-sung, who regularly claimed 100% support in North Korea's elections). He was officially inaugurated into office on 1 September 1980.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: On 17 October, he abolished all political parties —including Park's Democratic Republican Party, which had essentially ruled the country as a one-party state since the imposition of the Yushin Constitution. In November, he implemented the Policy for Merger and Abolition of the Press. In January 1981, Chun formed his own party, the Democratic Justice Party; however, for all intents and purposes, it was Park Chung-hee's Democratic Republican Party under a new name. Soon afterward, a new constitution was enacted. It was far less authoritarian than Park's Yusin Constitution; for instance, it enshrined the secrecy of correspondence, banned torture, and invalidated confessions obtained by force. It still vested fairly broad powers in the president, albeit far less sweeping than those Park had held.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: He was then re-elected president by the National Conference that February, taking 90 percent of the delegates' vote against three minor candidates. However, Chun's election was a foregone conclusion after the DJP's decisive victory at elections for the National Conference two weeks earlier. The DJP won a supermajority of 69.5 percent of the seats, three times as many as the independents and nine times as seats as the opposition Democratic Korea Party.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: In 1980, in the face of increased tension with the U.S. over his military takeover, President Chun issued a memorandum stating that his country would not develop missiles with a range longer than 180 km or capable of carrying greater than a 453 kg warhead. After receiving this promise, the Reagan administration decided to fully recognize Chun's military government.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: In the late 1990s, South Korea and the U.S. held talks on the issue and, rather than scrap the memorandum completely, they came to an agreement allowing missiles up to 300 km in range and capability to carry up to a 500 kg warhead. This compromise came into effect in 2001 under the name Missile Technology Control Regime.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: After his election in 1981, Chun completely rejected the presidency of Park, even going so far as to strike all references to Park's 1961 military coup from the constitution. Chun announced that he would be restoring justice to the government to remove the fraud and corruption of Park's tenure.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: Chun's government did not have the considerable political influence enjoyed by Park Chung-hee's administration. His government could not ignore American influence, and he ended South Korea's nuclear weapons program. During this time, Chun was worried about the state of South Korean-U.S. relations, which had greatly deteriorated towards the end of Park Chung-hee's long authoritarian presidency. Chun needed to be recognized by the United States to legitimize his government.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: After his inauguration, Chun clamped down on out-of-school tutoring and banned individual teaching or tutoring. In September 1980, Chun repealed "guilt by association" laws. In 1981, Chun enacted "Care and Custody" legislation; Chun believed that criminals who finish their prison time for a repeat offense should not be immediately returned to society. During the winter of 1984, before declaring a moratorium on the Korean economy, Chun visited Japan, where he requested a loan for $6 billion. With the military coup taking power and crushing the democratization movements country-wide, the citizens' political demands were being ignored, and in this way the 3S Policy (Sex, Screen, Sports) was passed. Based on right-wing Japanese activist Sejima Ryuzo's proposal, Chun tried to appeal to the citizens in order to ensure the success of the 1988 Seoul Olympics preparations. Chun rapidly enacted various measures to this end, forming professional baseball and soccer leagues, starting the broadcast of color TV throughout the nation as a whole, lessening censorship on sexually suggestive dramas and movies, making school uniforms voluntary, and so forth. In 1981, Chun held a large-scale festival called "Korean Breeze '81 ["Kukpung"81]", but it was largely ignored by the population.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: In 1983, Chun was the target of a failed assassination attempt by North Korean agents during a visit to Rangoon, Burma. The North Korean bombing killed 17 of Chun's entourage, including cabinet ministers. Four Burmese government officials were also killed in the attack.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: Chun's presidency occurred during the Cold War, and his foreign policies were based around combating communism not only from North Korea and Soviet Union.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: The United States put pressure on the South Korean government to abandon its plans to develop nuclear weapons.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: Japanese newspapers widely reported that Chun was the "de facto" leader of the country months before he made any move to become President.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: In 1982, Chun announced the "", but due to repeated rejections from North Korea the program was unable to get off the ground.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: Also from 1986 to 1988, he and President Corazon Aquino of the Philippines established talks between the two countries for strengthening Philippine-South Korean economic, social and cultural friendship.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: From the start of his presidency, Chun began grooming Noh Shin-yeong as his eventual successor. In 1980, while working as ambassador to the Geneva Representation Bureau, Noh Shin-yeong was recalled and made Minister of Foreign Affairs. In 1982, he was installed as the Director of the Security Planning Bureau, and in 1985, he was named Prime Minister.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: When that became widely known, those supporting Chun's regime were highly critical of his choice of successor. His supporters, mostly those with heavy military backgrounds, believed that the proper way to groom a successor was by military duties, not political positions. Chun was eventually persuaded to reverse his position and ceased pushing for Noh Shin-yeong to succeed him.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: The 1981 constitution restricted the president to a single seven-year term. Unlike his predecessors, Chun was unable to amend the document in order to run again in 1987; the constitution explicitly stated that any amendments extending a president's term would not apply to the incumbent. However, he consistently resisted pleas to open up the regime.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: On 13 April 1987, Chun made a "" speech. He declared that the DJP candidate for president would be one of his military supporters, and his successor would be chosen in an indirect election similar to the one that elected Chun seven years earlier. That announcement enraged the democratization community and, in concert with several scandals from the Chun government that year, demonstrators began their movement again, starting with a speech at the Anglican Cathedral of Seoul.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: Two months later, he declared Roh Tae-woo as the Democratic Justice Party's candidate for president, which, by all accounts, effectively handed Roh the presidency. The announcement triggered the June Democracy Movement, a series of large pro-democracy rallies across the country. In hopes of gaining control over a situation that was rapidly getting out of hand, Roh made a speech promising a much more democratic constitution and the first direct presidential elections in 16 years. On 10 July 1987, Chun resigned as head of the Democratic Justice Party, remaining its Honorary Chairman but handing official leadership of the upcoming campaign to Roh.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: In the 16 December 1987 Presidential Election, Roh won the election with a plurality, the first free and fair national elections of any sort held in the country in two decades, after opposition candidates Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung split the popular vote. Chun finished out his term and handed over the presidency to Roh on 25 February 1988, the first peaceful transition of power in the history of South Korea.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: In February 1988, having stepped down from the presidency at the conclusion of his term, Chun was named chair of the National Statesman Committee and so wielded considerable influence in South Korean politics. In that year, the Democratic Justice Party lost its majority in the National Assembly elections to opposition parties, paving the way for the so-called "Fifth Republic Hearings." The National Assembly explored the events of the Gwangju Democratization Movement and where responsibility should lay for the resulting massacre. On 11 November 1988, Chun apologized to the nation in a public address, pledging to give his money and belongings back to the country. Chun resigned from both the National Statesman Committee and the Democratic Justice Party.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: At this time, Chun decided to live for several years in Baekdamsa, a Buddhist temple in the Gangwon-do province, in order to pay penance for his actions. On 30 December 1990, Chun left Baekdamsa and returned home.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: After Kim Young-sam's inauguration as President in 1993, Kim declared that Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo had stolen 400 billion "won" (nearly $370 million) from the South Korean people, and he would conduct internal investigations to prove this.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: On 16 November 1995, the citizens’ cries were growing louder about the 12 December 1979 military coup and the bloody 5–18 Gwangju Democratization Movement incident, so Kim Young-sam announced the beginning of a movement to enact retroactive legislation, naming the bill Special Act on 5–18 Democratization Movement. As soon as the Constitutional Court declared Chun's actions unconstitutional, the prosecutors began a reinvestigation. On 3 December 1995, Chun and 16 others were arrested on charges of conspiracy and insurrection. At the same time, an investigation into the corruption of their presidencies was begun.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: In March 1996, their public trial began. On 26 August, the Seoul District Court issued a death sentence. On 16 December 1996, the Seoul High Court issued a sentence of life imprisonment and a fine in the amount of . On 17 April 1997, the judgment was finalized in the Supreme Court. Chun was officially convicted of leading an insurrection, conspiracy to commit insurrection, taking part in an insurrection, illegal troop movement orders, dereliction of duty during martial law, murder of superior officers, attempted murder of superior officers, murder of subordinate troops, leading a rebellion, conspiracy to commit rebellion, taking part in a rebellion, and murder for the purpose of rebellion, as well as assorted crimes relating to bribery.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: After his sentence was finalized, Chun began serving his prison sentence. On 22 December 1997, Chun's life imprisonment sentence was commuted by President Kim Young-sam, on the advice of incoming President Kim Dae-jung. Chun was still required to pay his massive fine, but at that point, he had only paid , not quite a fourth of the total fine amount. Chun made a relatively famous quote, saying, "I have only to my name." The remaining was never collected.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: According to the "May 18th Special Legislation", all medals awarded for the military intervention during the Gwangju Democratization Movement were revoked and ordered to be returned to the government. There are still nine medals that have not been returned to the government.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: Because of Chun's unpaid fines amounting to , a team of 90 prosecutors, tax collectors, and other investigators raided multiple locations simultaneously in July 2013, including Chun's residence and his family members' homes and offices. Television footage showed them hauling away paintings, porcelain, and expensive artifacts. Among the properties searched were two warehouses owned by publisher Chun Jae-guk, Chun's eldest son, which contained more than 350 pieces of art by famous Korean artists, some estimated to be worth .


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: The National Assembly passed a bill called the Chun Doo-hwan Act, extending the statute of limitations on confiscating assets from public officials who have failed to pay fines. Under the old law, prosecutors had only until October 2013, but the new law extends the statute of limitations on Chun's case until 2020 and allows prosecutors to collect from his family members as well if it is proven that any of their properties originated from Chun's illegal funds.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: Chun tried to publish three memoirs. On 4 August 2017, a court granted a petition from a group of organizations dedicated to the 18 May movement, to prohibit the publishing, sale, and distribution of the works unless 33 sections containing false statements about the 18 May Movement were removed. The court ruled that Chun and his son, Chun Jae-guk, who runs a publishing company, should take steps to prevent the books being sold—a violation of the order would incur a 5 million won fine, to be paid to the 5.18 Memorial Foundation. In October 2017, Chun reissued his memoirs prompting a second lawsuit to be filed against him. On 15 May 2018, the Gwangju District Court granted a further injunction request; in addition to the 33 sections containing false statements about the 18 May Movement found at the time of the first lawsuit, a further 36 sections were found to make false statements about the Movement.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: In March 2019, Chun appeared in a libel trial in Gwangju over his controversial memoirs, in which he allegedly defamed victims of his 1980 crackdown. Chun had refuted a testimony by the late activist priest, Cho Chul-hyun, and called him "Satan wearing a mask" in his memoirs. The priest allegedly witnessed the military firing at citizens from helicopters during the crackdown. On 30 November 2020, Chun was found guilty of defaming Cho Chul-hyun and was sentenced to eight months in prison, suspended for two years.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: Chun proceeded to appeal the sentence but failed to show up to the first and second appellate trials held on 10 May and 14 June 2021. He made his first appearance in the Gwangju District appellate court on 9 August 2021 accompanied by his wife, but looking gaunt and frail. Chun left the courtroom only 25 minutes into the hearing, due to breathing difficulties. He answered some of the judge's questions with the help of his wife and was seen dozing off. A Yonhap news report on 21 August revealed Chun was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: Chun died at his home in Yeonhui-dong, Seoul, on 23 November 2021 from complications of blood cancer. Chun died less than one month after his successor Roh Tae-woo.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: Since Chun never apologized for his role in the Gwangju Massacre and his past crimes, the Blue House only expressed private condolences to his family via a spokesperson, and announced that there was no plan to send wreaths. Following his death, the South Korean ruling and opposition parties refrained from sending official condolences.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: The South Korean government also decided not to hold a state funeral for Chun, and his funeral was conducted by his family with the government providing no assistance.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: His body was taken to Seoul's Severance Hospital, where it was to be cremated before burial. By law, Chun is not eligible for burial at a national cemetery because of his past criminal record and conviction. According to his widow Lee Soon-ja, Chun had requested his family to minimize the funeral process, never make any tomb for him, and spread his ashes in areas overlooking the North Korean territory.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: On 23 November 2021, during a press conference, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China spokesperson Zhao Lijian offered brief condolences to Chun's family, stating the 'brief exchanges with relevant sides' that he had following the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and South Korea.


title: Chun Doo-hwan

text: On 27 November 2021, during his funeral procession, Lee Soon-ja issued a brief apology over the "pains and scars" caused by Chun's brutal rule. Her apology did not mention Chun's responsibility of the suppression of May 18 Democratic Uprising in Gwangju. As a result, civic groups related to the movement, including those of bereaved families, criticized her apology for being vague and incomplete, and said that they would not accept the apology.


title: Ritu Varma

text: Ritu Varma (born 10 March 1990) is an Indian actress who works in Telugu and Tamil films. After appearing in short films and supporting roles, Varma played the lead in the Telugu film "Pelli Choopulu" (2016) for which she received Nandi Award for Best Actress and Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actress – South.


title: Ritu Varma

text: Ritu Taran Varma was born and brought up in Hyderabad in a North Indian family. Her father is from Madhya Pradesh and she speaks Hindi at home. She is fluent in Telugu and does her own dubbing for her Telugu films.


title: Ritu Varma

text: She did her intermediate from Villa Marie College for Women, Hyderabad and holds a bachelor's degree in engineering from Malla Reddy Engineering College. After completing her graduation, she took part in the Miss Hyderabad Beauty pageant and was declared the first runner-up.


title: Ritu Varma

text: Varma rose to fame with her performance in the Telugu short film "Anukokunda". The short film won the Best Film award at the 48HR Film Project competition in 2012 and also fetched Varma the Best Actor (Female) award. The short film was later screened at the Cannes Short Film Corner in 2013.


title: Ritu Varma

text: Her first film was "Baadshah" where she played a supporting role named Pinky. She signed her next film as a lead "Prema Ishq Kaadhal" in which she played the role of a costume designer opposite Sree Vishnu. Sebsequently, she appeared in "Naa Rakumarudu" (2014), which was followed by "Yevade Subramanyam", for which she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Female) award at IIFA Utsavam. Her next release, "Pelli Choopulu", was a romantic-comedy Telugu film starring Vijay Deverakonda. The film went on to be commercially successful and won the Best Feature Film in Telugu at the 64th National Film Awards as well as the Filmfare Award for Best Film - Telugu. She received critical praise for her performance and eventually won the Nandi Award for Best Actress and Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actress - Telugu for her performance.


title: Ritu Varma

text: Her next release was "Keshava" along with Nikhil Siddharth. She did an advertisement for Amazon Pongal 2017 alongside Aari. Impressed with her performance in "Pelli Choopulu", director Gautham Vasudev Menon chose her as the lead in his upcoming Tamil film with Vikram, "Dhruva Natchathiram". She later played the leading role in Desingh Periyasamy's Tamil-language romantic film "Kannum Kannum Kollaiyadithaal" alongside Dulquer Salmaan (2020) which went on to be commercially successful and critically acclaimed. In 2019, she was signed to star opposite Nani in "Tuck Jagadish", marking the second collaboration between the two actors since 2015's Yevade Subramanyam.


title: Computer memory

text: In computing, memory is a device or system that is used to store information for immediate use in a computer or related computer hardware and digital electronic devices. The term "memory" is often synonymous with the term "primary storage" or "main memory". An archaic synonym for memory is store.


title: Computer memory

text: Computer memory operates at a high speed compared to storage that is slower but less expensive and higher in capacity. Besides storing opened programs, computer memory serves as disk cache and write buffer to improve both reading and writing performance. Operating systems borrow RAM capacity for caching so long as not needed by running software. If needed, contents of the computer memory can be transferred to storage; a common way of doing this is through a memory management technique called "virtual memory".


title: Computer memory

text: Modern memory is implemented as semiconductor memory, where data is stored within memory cells built from MOS transistors and other components on an integrated circuit. There are two main kinds of semiconductor memory, volatile and non-volatile. Examples of non-volatile memory are flash memory and ROM, PROM, EPROM and EEPROM memory. Examples of volatile memory are dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) used for primary storage, and static random-access memory (SRAM) used for CPU cache.


title: Computer memory

text: Most semiconductor memory is organized into memory cells each storing one bit (0 or 1). Flash memory organization includes both one bit per memory cell and multi-level cell capable of storing multiple bits per cell. The memory cells are grouped into words of fixed word length, for example, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 or 128 bits. Each word can be accessed by a binary address of "N" bits, making it possible to store 2 words in the memory.


title: Computer memory

text: In the early 1940s, memory technology often permitted a capacity of a few bytes. The first electronic programmable digital computer, the ENIAC, using thousands of vacuum tubes, could perform simple calculations involving 20 numbers of ten decimal digits stored in the vacuum tubes.


title: Computer memory

text: The next significant advance in computer memory came with acoustic delay-line memory, developed by J. Presper Eckert in the early 1940s. Through the construction of a glass tube filled with mercury and plugged at each end with a quartz crystal, delay lines could store bits of information in the form of sound waves propagating through the mercury, with the quartz crystals acting as transducers to read and write bits. Delay-line memory was limited to a capacity of up to a few thousand bits.


title: Computer memory

text: Two alternatives to the delay line, the Williams tube and Selectron tube, originated in 1946, both using electron beams in glass tubes as means of storage. Using cathode ray tubes, Fred Williams invented the Williams tube, which was the first random-access computer memory. The Williams tube was able to store more information than the Selectron tube (the Selectron was limited to 256 bits, while the Williams tube could store thousands) and less expensive. The Williams tube was nevertheless frustratingly sensitive to environmental disturbances.


title: Computer memory

text: Efforts began in the late 1940s to find non-volatile memory. Magnetic-core memory allowed for recall of memory after power loss. It was developed by Frederick W. Viehe and An Wang in the late 1940s, and improved by Jay Forrester and Jan A. Rajchman in the early 1950s, before being commercialised with the Whirlwind computer in 1953. Magnetic-core memory was the dominant form of memory until the development of MOS semiconductor memory in the 1960s.


title: Computer memory

text: The first semiconductor memory was implemented as a flip-flop circuit in the early 1960s using bipolar transistors. Semiconductor memory made from discrete devices was first shipped by Texas Instruments to the United States Air Force in 1961. The same year, the concept of solid-state memory on an integrated circuit (IC) chip was proposed by applications engineer Bob Norman at Fairchild Semiconductor. The first bipolar semiconductor memory IC chip was the SP95 introduced by IBM in 1965. While semiconductor memory offered improved performance over magnetic-core memory, it remain larger and more expensive and did not displace magnetic-core memory until the late 1960s.


title: Computer memory

text: The invention of the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) enabled the practical use of metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) transistors as memory cell storage elements. MOS memory was developed by John Schmidt at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1964. In addition to higher performance, MOS semiconductor memory was cheaper and consumed less power than magnetic core memory. In 1965, J. Wood and R. Ball of the Royal Radar Establishment proposed digital storage systems that use CMOS (complementary MOS) memory cells, in addition to MOSFET power devices for the power supply, switched cross-coupling, switches and delay-line storage. The development of silicon-gate MOS integrated circuit (MOS IC) technology by Federico Faggin at Fairchild in 1968 enabled the production of MOS memory chips. NMOS memory was commercialized by IBM in the early 1970s. MOS memory overtook magnetic core memory as the dominant memory technology in the early 1970s.


title: Computer memory

text: The two main types of volatile random-access memory (RAM) are static random-access memory (SRAM) and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). Bipolar SRAM was invented by Robert Norman at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1963, followed by the development of MOS SRAM by John Schmidt at Fairchild in 1964. SRAM became an alternative to magnetic-core memory, but requires six transistors for each bit of data. Commercial use of SRAM began in 1965, when IBM introduced their SP95 SRAM chip for the System/360 Model 95.


title: Computer memory

text: Toshiba introduced bipolar DRAM memory cells for its Toscal BC-1411 electronic calculator in 1965. While it offered improved performance, bipolar DRAM could not compete with the lower price of the then dominant magnetic-core memory. MOS technology is the basis for modern DRAM. In 1966, Robert H. Dennard at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center was working on MOS memory. While examining the characteristics of MOS technology, he found it was possible to build capacitors, and that storing a charge or no charge on the MOS capacitor could represent the 1 and 0 of a bit, while the MOS transistor could control writing the charge to the capacitor. This led to his development of a single-transistor DRAM memory cell. In 1967, Dennard filed a patent for a single-transistor DRAM memory cell based on MOS technology. This led to the first commercial DRAM IC chip, the Intel 1103 in October 1970. Synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) later debuted with the Samsung KM48SL2000 chip in 1992.


title: Computer memory

text: The term "memory" is also often used to refer to non-volatile memory including read-only memory (ROM) through modern flash memory. Programmable read-only memory (PROM) was invented by Wen Tsing Chow in 1956, while working for the Arma Division of the American Bosch Arma Corporation. In 1967, Dawon Kahng and Simon Sze of Bell Labs proposed that the floating gate of a MOS semiconductor device could be used for the cell of a reprogrammable ROM, which led to Dov Frohman of Intel inventing EPROM (erasable PROM) in 1971. EEPROM (electrically erasable PROM) was developed by Yasuo Tarui, Yutaka Hayashi and Kiyoko Naga at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in 1972. Flash memory was invented by Fujio Masuoka at Toshiba in the early 1980s. Masuoka and colleagues presented the invention of NOR flash in 1984, and then NAND flash in 1987. Toshiba commercialized NAND flash memory in 1987.


title: Computer memory

text: Volatile memory is computer memory that requires power to maintain the stored information. Most modern semiconductor volatile memory is either static RAM (SRAM) or dynamic RAM (DRAM). DRAM dominates for desktop system memory. SRAM is used for CPU cache. SRAM is also found in small embedded systems requiring little memory.


title: Computer memory

text: SRAM retains its contents as long as the power is connected and may use a simpler interface, but requires six transistors per bit. Dynamic RAM is more complicated for interfacing and control, needing regular refresh cycles to prevent losing its contents, but uses only one transistor and one capacitor per bit, allowing it to reach much higher densities and much cheaper per-bit costs.


title: Computer memory

text: Non-volatile memory can retain the stored information even when not powered. Examples of non-volatile memory include read-only memory, flash memory, most types of magnetic computer storage devices (e.g. hard disk drives, floppy disks and magnetic tape), optical discs, and early computer storage methods such as paper tape and punched cards.


title: Computer memory

text: Non-volatile memory technologies under development include ferroelectric RAM, programmable metallization cell, Spin-transfer torque magnetic RAM, SONOS, resistive random-access memory, racetrack memory, Nano-RAM, 3D XPoint, and millipede memory.


title: Computer memory

text: A third category of memory is "semi-volatile". The term is used to describe a memory that has some limited non-volatile duration after power is removed, but then data is ultimately lost. A typical goal when using a semi-volatile memory is to provide the high performance and durability associated with volatile memories while providing some benefits of non-volatile memory.


title: Computer memory

text: For example, some non-volatile memory types experience wear when written. A "worn" cell has increased volatility but otherwise continues to work. Data locations which are written frequently can thus be directed to use worn circuits. As long as the location is updated within some known retention time, the data stays valid. After a period of time without update, the value is copied to a less-worn circuit with longer retention. Writing first to the worn area allows a high write rate while avoiding wear on the not-worn circuits.


title: Computer memory

text: As a second example, an STT-RAM can be made non-volatile by building large cells, but doing so raises the cost per bit and power requirements and reduces the write speed. Using small cells improves cost, power, and speed, but leads to semi-volatile behavior. In some applications, the increased volatility can be managed to provide many benefits of a non-volatile memory, for example by removing power but forcing a wake-up before data is lost; or by caching read-only data and discarding the cached data if the power-off time exceeds the non-volatile threshold.


title: Computer memory

text: The term semi-volatile is also used to describe semi-volatile behavior constructed from other memory types. For example, a volatile and a non-volatile memory may be combined, where an external signal copies data from the volatile memory to the non-volatile memory, but if power is removed before the copy occurs, the data is lost. Or, a battery-backed volatile memory, and if external power is lost there is some known period where the battery can continue to power the volatile memory, but if power is off for an extended time, the battery runs down and data is lost.


title: Computer memory

text: Proper management of memory is vital for a computer system to operate properly. Modern operating systems have complex systems to properly manage memory. Failure to do so can lead to bugs, slow performance, or takeover by viruses and malicious software.


title: Computer memory

text: In early computer systems, programs typically specified the location to write memory and what data to put there. This location was a physical location on the actual memory hardware. Early computers did not have the complex memory management systems used today.


title: Computer memory

text: This approach has its pitfalls. If the location specified is incorrect, this will cause the computer to write the data to some other part of the program. The results of an error like this are unpredictable. In some cases, the error might overwrite memory used by the operating system. Hackers can take advantage of this lack of protection to create viruses and malware.


title: Computer memory

text: Virtual memory is a system where physical memory is managed by the operating system typically with assistance from a memory management unit. It allows multiple types of memory to be used. For example, some data can be stored in RAM while other data is stored on a hard drive (e.g. in a swapfile), functioning as an extension of the cache hierarchy. This offers several advantages. Computer programmers no longer need to worry about where their data is physically stored or whether the user's computer will have enough memory. The operating system will place actively used data in RAM, which is much faster than hard disks. When the amount of RAM is not sufficient to run all the current programs, it can result in a situation where the computer spends more time moving data from RAM to disk and back than it does accomplishing tasks; this is known as thrashing.


title: Computer memory

text: Protected memory is a system where each program is given an area of memory to use and is prevented from going outside that range. If the operating system detects that a program has tried to alter memory that does not belong to it, the program is terminated (or otherwise restricted or redirected). This way, only the offending program crashes, and other programs are not affected by the misbehavior (whether accidental or intentional). Use of protected memory greatly enhances both the reliability and security of a computer system.


title: Computer memory

text: Without protected memory, it is possible that a bug in one program will alter the memory used by another program. This will cause that other program to run off of corrupted memory with unpredictable results. If the operating system's memory is corrupted, the entire computer system may crash and need to be rebooted. At times programs intentionally alter the memory used by other programs. This is done by viruses and malware to take over computers. It may also be used benignly by desirable programs which are intended to modify other programs, debuggers, for example, to insert breakpoints or hooks.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah (January 22, 1263 – September 26, 1328; ), birth name Taqī ad-Dīn ʾAḥmad ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm ibn ʿAbd al-Salām al-Numayrī al-Ḥarrānī (), was a Sunni Muslim ʿĀlim, muhaddith, judge, proto-Salafist theologian, and sometimes controversial thinker and political figure. He is known for his diplomatic involvement with the Ilkhanid ruler Ghazan Khan and for his involvement at the Battle of Marj al-Saffar which ended the Mongol invasions of the Levant. A member of the Hanbali school, Ibn Taymiyyah's iconoclastic views that condemned numerous folk practices associated with saint veneration and the visitation of tomb-shrines; made him unpopular with many scholars and rulers of the time, and he was imprisoned several times.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: A polarising figure in his own times and in the centuries that followed, Ibn Taymiyyah has emerged as one of the most influential medieval writers in contemporary Sunni Islam. He was also noteworthy for engaging in intense religious polemics that defended Athari school against the followers of rival schools of "Kalam" (speculative theology); namely Ash'arism and Maturidism. This would prompt numerous clerics and state authorities to accuse Ibn Taymiyyah and his disciples of being guilty of ""tashbīh"" (anthropomorphism); which eventually led to the censoring of his works and subsequent incarceration. Nevertheless, Ibn Taymiyya's numerous treatises that advocated "creedal Salafism" ("al-salafiyya al-iʿtiqādīyya"), based on his particular interpretations of the Qur'an and the Sunnah, constitute the most popular classical reference for later Salafi movements.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyya's rejection of some aspects of classical Islamic tradition are believed to have had considerable influence on contemporary militant Islamist movements such as Salafi-Jihadism. Major aspects of his teachings such as upholding the pristine monotheism of the early Muslim generations and campaigns to uproot what he regarded as "shirk" (idolatry); had a profound influence on Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of the Hanbali reform movement practiced in Saudi Arabia, and on other later Sunni scholars. Syrian Salafi theologian Muhammad Rashid Rida (d. 1935 C.E/ 1354 A.H), one of the major modern proponents of his works, designated Ibn Taymiyya as the "Mujaddid" (renewer) of the Islamic 7th century of Hijri year. Ibn Taymiyyah's doctrinal positions on the necessity of an Islamic political entity and his controversial "fatwas", such as his "Takfir" (declaration of unbelief) of the Mongol Ilkhanates, allowing jihad against other self-professed Muslims, are referenced by al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups to justify militant overthrowal of contemporary governments of the Muslim world.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah's full name is "'Taqiy al-Din 'Abu al-Abbas 'Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm ibn ʿAbd as-Salām" "ibn ʿAbdullāh ibn al-Khiḍr ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Khiḍr ibn ʾIbrāhīm ibn ʿAli ibn ʿAbdullāh an-Numayrī al-Ḥarrānī" ().


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah's () name is unusual in that it is derived from a female member of his family as opposed to a male member, which was the normal custom at the time and still is now. The title ""Taymiyyah"" comes from the mother of his forefathers who was called "Taymiyahh." She was an admonisher and he was ascribed to her and became known through the name, ""Ibn Taymiyahh"". Taymiyyah was a prominent woman, famous for her scholarship and piety and the name Ibn Taymiyyah was taken up by many of her male descendants.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah had a simple life, most of which he dedicated to learning, writing, and teaching. He never married nor did he have a female companion throughout his years. Al-Matroudi says that this may be why he was able to engage fully with the political affairs of his time without holding any official position such as that of a judge. An offer of an official position was made to him but he never accepted. His life was that of a religious scholar and a political activist. In his efforts he was persecuted and imprisoned on six occasions with the total time spent inside prison coming to over six years. Other sources say that he spent over twelve years in prison. His detentions were due to certain elements of his creed and his views on some jurisprudential issues. However, according to Yahya Michot, "the real reasons were more trivial". Michot gives five reasons as to why Ibn Taymiyyah was imprisoned, they being: not complying with the "doctrines and practices prevalent among powerful religious and Sufi establishments, an overly outspoken personality, the jealousy of his peers, the risk to public order due to this popular appeal and political intrigues." Baber Johansen, a professor at the Harvard Divinity School, says that the reasons for Ibn Taymiyyah's incarcerations were, "as a result of his conflicts with Muslim mystics, jurists, and theologians, who were able to persuade the political authorities of the necessity to limit Ibn Taymiyyah's range of action through political censorship and incarceration."


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah's own relationship, as a religious scholar, with the ruling apparatus was not always amicable. It ranged from silence to open rebellion. On occasions when he shared the same views and aims as the ruling authorities his contributions were welcomed, but when Ibn Taymiyyah went against the status quo, he was seen as "uncooperative", and on occasions spent much time in prison. Ibn Taymiyyah's attitude towards his own rulers was based on the actions of Muhammad's companions when they made an oath of allegiance to him as follows; "to obey within obedience to God, even if the one giving the order is unjust; to abstain from disputing the authority of those who exert it; and to speak out the truth, or take up its cause without fear in respect of God, of blame from anyone."


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah's father had the Hanbali chair in Harran and later at the Umayyad Mosque. Harran was a city part of the Sultanate of Rum, now Harran is a small city on the border of Syria and Turkey, currently in Şanlıurfa Province. At the beginning of the Islamic period, Harran was located in the land of the Mudar tribe (Diyar Mudar). Before its destruction by the Mongols, Harran was also well known since the early days of Islam for its Hanbali school and tradition, to which Ibn Taymiyyah's family belonged. His grandfather, Abu al-Barkat Majd ad-Din ibn Taymiyyah al-Hanbali (d. 1255) and his uncle, Fakhr al-Din (d. 1225) were reputable scholars of the Hanbali school of law. Likewise, the scholarly achievements of his father, Shihab al-Din Abd al-Halim ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1284) were also well known.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: In 1269, aged seven, Ibn Taymiyyah, left Harran together with his father and three brothers. The city was completely destroyed by the ensuing Mongol invasion. Ibn Taymiyyah's family moved and settled in Damascus, Syria, which at the time was ruled by the Mamluk Sultanate.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: In Damascus, his father served as the director of the Sukkariyya Madrasa, a place where Ibn Taymiyyah also received his early education. Ibn Taymiyyah acquainted himself with the religious and secular sciences of his time. His religious studies began in his early teens, when he committed the entire Qur'an to memory and later on came to learn the Islamic disciplines of the Qur'an. From his father he learnt the religious science of "fiqh" (jurisprudence) and "usul al-fiqh" (principles of jurisprudence). Ibn Taymiyyah learnt the works of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, al-Khallal, Ibn Qudamah and also the works of his grandfather, Abu al-Barakat Majd ad-Din. His study of jurisprudence was not limited to the Hanbali tradition but he also learnt the other schools of jurisprudence.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: The number of scholars under which he studied hadith is said to number more than two hundred, four of whom were women. Those who are known by name amount to forty hadith teachers, as recorded by Ibn Taymiyyah in his book called "Arba`un Hadithan". Serajul Haque says, based on this, Ibn Taymiyyah started to hear hadith from the age of five. One of his teachers was the first Hanbali Chief Justice of Syria, Shams ud-Din Al-Maqdisi who held the newly created position instituted by Baibars as part of a reform of the judiciary. Al-Maqdisi later on, came to give Ibn Taymiyyah permission to issue Fatawa (legal verdicts) when he became a mufti at the age of 17.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah's secular studies led him to devote attention to Arabic language and Arabic literature by studying Arabic grammar and lexicography under Ali ibn `Abd al-Qawi al-Tufi. He went on to master the famous book of Arabic grammar, "Al-Kitab", by the Persian grammarian Sibawayhi. He also studied mathematics, algebra, calligraphy, theology ("kalam"), philosophy, history and heresiography. Based on the knowledge he gained from history and philosophy, he used to refute the prevalent philosophical discourses of his time, one of which was Aristotelian philosophy. Ibn Taymiyyah learnt about Sufism and stated that he had reflected on the works of; Sahl al-Tustari, Junayd of Baghdad, Abu Talib al-Makki, Abdul-Qadir Gilani, Abu Hafs Umar al-Suhrawardi and Ibn Arabi. At the age of 20 in the year 1282, Ibn Taymiyyah completed his education.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: After his father died in 1284, he took up the then vacant post as the head of the Sukkariyya madrasa and began giving lessons on Hadith. A year later he started giving lessons, as chair of the Hanbali Zawiya on Fridays at the Umayyad Mosque, on the subject of tafsir (exegesis of Qur'an). In November 1292, Ibn Taymiyyah performed the Hajj and after returning 4 months later, he wrote his first book aged twenty nine called "Manasik al-Hajj" (Rites of the Pilgrimage), in which he criticized and condemned the religious innovations he saw take place there. Ibn Taymiyyah represented the Hanbali school of thought during this time. The Hanbali school was seen as the most traditional school out of the four legal systems (Hanafi, Maliki and Shafii) because it was "suspicious of the Hellenist disciplines of philosophy and speculative theology." He remained faithful throughout his life to this school, whose doctrines he had mastered, but he nevertheless called for "ijtihad" (independent reasoning by one who is qualified) and discouraged "taqlid".


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah's emergence into the public and political sphere began in 1293 at the age of 30, when he was asked by the authorities to issue a fatwa (legal verdict) on Assaf al-Nasrani, a Christian cleric accused of insulting Muhammad. He accepted the invitation and delivered his fatwa, calling for the man to receive the death penalty. Despite the fact that public opinion was very much on Ibn Taymiyyah's side, the Governor of Syria attempted to resolve the situation by asking Assaf to accept Islam in return for his life, to which he agreed. This resolution was not acceptable to Ibn Taymiyyah who then, together with his followers, protested outside the governor's palace demanding Assaf be put to death, on the grounds that any person—Muslim or non-Muslim—who insults Muhammad must be killed. This unwillingness to compromise coupled with his attempt to protest against the governor's actions, resulted in him being punished with a prison sentence, the first of many such imprisonments to come. The French orientalist Henri Laoust says that during this incarceration Ibn Taymiyyah "wrote his first great work, "al-Ṣārim al-maslūl ʿalā shātim al-Rasūl (The Drawn Sword against those who insult the Messenger)."" Ibn Taymiyyah, together with the help of his disciples, continued with his efforts against what, "he perceived to be un-Islamic practices" and to implement what he saw as his religious duty of commanding good and forbidding wrong. Yahya Michot says that some of these incidences included: "shaving children's heads", leading "an anti-debauchery campaign in brothels and taverns", hitting an atheist before his public execution, destroying what was thought to be a sacred rock in a mosque, attacking astrologers and obliging "deviant Sufi Shaykhs to make public acts of contrition and to adhere to the Sunnah." Ibn Taymiyyah and his disciples used to condemn wine sellers and they would attack wine shops in Damascus by breaking wine bottles and pouring them onto the floor.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: A few years later in 1296, he took over the position of one of his teachers (Zayn al-Din Ibn al-Munadjdjaal), taking the post of professor of Hanbali jurisprudence at the Hanbaliyya madrasa, the oldest such institution of this tradition in Damascus. This is seen by some to be the peak of his scholarly career. The year he began his post at the Hanbaliyya madrasa, was a time of political turmoil. The Mamluk sultan Al-Adil Kitbugha was deposed by his vice-sultan Al-Malik al-Mansur Lajin who then ruled from 1297 to 1299. Lajin had a desire to commission an expedition against the Christians of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia who formed an alliance with the Mongol Empire and taking part of the military campaign which lead to the destruction of Baghdad the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate and Harran the birthplace of Ibn Taymiyyah, for that purpose he urged Ibn Taymiyyah to call the Muslims to Jihad.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: In 1298, Ibn Taymiyyah wrote an explanation of the ayat al-mutashabihat (the unclear verses of the Qur'an) called Al-`Aqidat al-Hamawiyat al-Kubra (The creed of the great people of Hama). The book is about divine attributes and it served as an answer to a question from the city of Hama, Syria. At that particular time Ash'arites held prominent positions within the Islamic scholarly community in both Syria and Egypt, and they held a certain position on the divine attributes of God. Ibn Taymiyyah in his book strongly disagreed with their views and this heavy opposition to the common Ash'ari position, caused considerable controversy.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah collaborated once more with the Mamluks in 1300, when he joined the punitive expedition against the Alawites and Shiites, in the Kasrawan region of the Lebanese mountains. Ibn Taymiyyah thought of the Alawites as "more heritical yet than Jews and Christians", and according to Carole Hillenbrand, the confrontation with the Alawites resulted because they "were accused of collaboration with Christians and Mongols." Ibn Taymiyya had further active involvements in campaigns against the Mongols and their alleged Alawite allies.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah took part in a second military offensive in 1305 against the Alawites and the Isma`ilis in the Kasrawan region of the Lebanese mountains where they were defeated. The majority of the Alawis and Ismailis eventually converted to Twelver Shiism and settled in south Lebanon and the Bekaa valley, with a few Shia pockets that survived in the Lebanese mountains.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: The first invasion took place between December 1299 and April 1300 due to the military campaign by the Mamluks against the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia who were allied with the Mongols. Due to the Mongol legal system that neglected "sharia" and implemented Yassa; Ibn Taymiyya had declared "Takfir" upon the Ilkhanid regime and its armies for ruling by man-made laws, despite these laws being rarely enforced in Muslim majority regions in an extensive manner. Openly rejecting Ghazan Khan's claim to ""pādishāh al-islām"" (King of Islam), a title which Ghazan took to legitimise his military campaigns, Ibn Taymiyya denounced him as an "infidel king" and issued numerous "fatwas" condemning the political order of the Tatars. The Ilkhanate army managed to managed to defeat the Mamluk Sultanate in The Third Battle of Homs and reach Damascus by the end of December 1299. Fearful of Mongol atrocities, many scholars, intellectuals and officers began to flee Damascus in panic. Ibn Taymiyya was one of those clerics who stood firm alongside the vulnerable Damascene citizens and called for an uncompromisng and heroic resistance to the Tatar invaders. Ibn Taymiyya drew parallels of their crisis with the Riddah wars (Apostate wars) fought by the first Muslim Caliph, Abubakr, against the renegade Arabian tribes that abandoned "sharia". Ibn Taymiyya severely rebuked those Muslims escaping in the face of Mongol onslaught and compared their state to the withdrawal of Muslims in the Battle of Uhud. In a passionate letter to the commander of the Damascene Citadel, Ibn Taymiyya appealed: "Until there stands even a single rock, do everything in your power to not surrender the castle. There is great benefit for the people of Syria. Allah declared it a sanctuary for the people of Shām—where it will remain a land of faith and "sunna" until the descent of the Prophet Jesus.”Despite political pressure, Ibn Taymiyya's directives were heeded by the Mamluk officer and Mongol negotiations to surrender the Citadel stalled. Shortly after, Ibn Taymiyya and a number of his acolytes and pupils took part in a counter-offensive targeting various Shia tribes allied to the Mongols in the peripheral regions of the city; thereby repelling the Mongol attack. Ibn Taymiyyah went with a delegation of Islamic scholars to talk to Ghazan Khan, who was the Khan of the Mongol Ilkhanate of Iran, to plead clemency and to stop his attack on the Muslims. It is reported that none of the scholars said anything to the Khan except Ibn Taymiyyah who said:


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: You claim that you are Muslim and you have with you Mu'adhdhins, Muftis, Imams and Shaykhs but you invaded us and reached our country for what? While your father and your grandfather, Hulagu were non-believers, they did not attack and they kept their promise. But you promised and broke your promise.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: By early January 1300, the Mongol allies, the Armenians and Georgians, had caused widespread damage to Damascus and they had taken Syrian prisoners. The Mongols effectively occupied Damascus for the first four months of 1303. Most of the military had fled the city, including most of the civilians. Ibn Taymiyyah however, stayed and was one of the leaders of the resistance inside Damascus and he went to speak directly to the Ilkhan, Mahmud Ghazan, and his vizier Rashid al-Din Tabib. He sought the release of Muslim and dhimmi prisoners which the Mongols had taken in Syria, and after negotiation, secured their release.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: The second invasion lasted between October 1300 and January 1301. Ibn Taymiyyah at this time began giving sermons on jihad at the Umayyad mosque. As the civilians began to flee in panic; Ibn Taymiyya pronounced "fatwas" declaring the religious duty upon Muslims to fight the Mongol armies to death, inflict a massive defeat and expel them from Syria in its entirety. Ibn Taymiyyah also spoke to and encouraged the Governor of Damascus, al-Afram, to achieve victory over the Mongols. He became involved with al-Afram once more, when he was sent to get reinforcements from Cairo. Narrating Ibn Taymiyya's fierce stance on fighting the Mongols, Ibn Kathir reports:


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: The year 1303 saw the third Mongol invasion of Syria by Ghazan Khan. What has been called Ibn Taymiyyah's "most famous" "fatwā" was his third "fatwa" issued against the Mongols in the Mamluk's war. Ibn Taymiyyah declared that jihad against the Mongol attack on the Malmuk sultanate was not only permissible, but obligatory. The reason being that the Mongols could not, in his opinion, be true Muslims despite the fact that they had converted to Sunni Islam because they ruled using what he considered 'man-made laws' (their traditional Yassa code) rather than Islamic law or "Sharia", whilst believing that the Yassa code was better than the Sharia law. Because of this, he reasoned they were living in a state of jahiliyyah, or pre-Islamic pagan ignorance. Not only were Ilkhanate political elites and its military disbelievers in the eyes of Ibn Taymiyya; but anybody who joined their ranks were as guilty of "riddah" (apostasy) as them:


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: The "fatwa" broke new Islamic legal ground because "no jurist had ever before issued a general authorization for the use of lethal force against Muslims in battle", and would later influence modern-day Jihadists in their use of violence against other Muslims whom they deemed as apostates. In his legal verdicts issued to inform the populace, Ibn Taymiyya classified the Tatars and their advocates into four types:


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah called on the Muslims to jihad once again and personally participated in the Battle of Marj al-Saffar against the Ilkhanid army; leading his disciples in the field with a sword. The battle began on April 20 of that year. On the same day, Ibn Taymiyyah declared a "fatwa" which exempted Mamluk soldiers from fasting during Ramadan so that they could preserve their strength. Within two days the Mongols were severely crushed and the battle was won; thus ending Mongol control of Syria. These incidents greatly increased the scholarly prestige and social stature of Ibn Taymiyya amongst the masses, despite opposition from the establishment clergy. He would soon be appointed as the chief professor of the elite scholarly institute ""Kāmiliyya Dār al-Haḍīth"."


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyya's three unprecedented "fatwas" (legal verdicts) that excommunicated the Ilkhanid authorities and their supporters as apostates over their neglect to govern by "Sharia" (Islamic law) and preference of the traditional Mongol imperial code of Yassa; would form the theological basis of 20th century Islamist and Jihadist scholars and ideologues. Reviving Ibn Taymiyya's fatwas during the late 20th-century, Jihadist ideologues like Sayyid Qutb, Abd al-Salam al-Faraj, Abdullah Azzam, Usama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, etc. made public "Takfir" (excommunication) of contemporary governments of the Muslim world and called for their revolutionary overthrowal through armed Jihad.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah was imprisoned several times for conflicting with the prevailing opinions of the jurists and theologians of his day. A judge from the city of Wasit, Iraq, requested that Ibn Taymiyyah write a book on creed. His subsequent creedal work, "Al-Aqidah Al-Waasitiyyah, "caused him trouble with the authorities. Ibn Taymiyyah adopted the view that God should be described as he was literally described in the Qur'an and in the hadith, and that all Muslims were required to believe this because according to him it was the view held by the early Muslim community ("salaf"). Within the space of two years (1305–1306) four separate religious council hearings were held to assess the correctness of his creed.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: The first hearing was held with Ash'ari scholars who accused Ibn Taymiyyah of anthropomorphism. At the time Ibn Taymiyyah was 42 years old. He was protected by the then Governor of Damascus, Aqqush al-Afram, during the proceedings. The scholars suggested that he accept that his creed was simply that of the Hanbalites and offered this as a way out of the charge. However, if Ibn Taymiyyah ascribed his creed to the Hanbali school of law then it would be just one view out of the four schools which one could follow rather than a creed everybody must adhere to. Uncompromising, Ibn Taymiyyah maintained that it was obligatory for all scholars to adhere to his creed.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Two separate councils were held a year later on January 22 and 28, 1306. The first council was in the house of the Governor of Damascus Aqqush al-Afram, who had protected him the year before when facing the Shafii scholars. A second hearing was held six days later where the Indian scholar Safi al-Din al-Hindi found him innocent of all charges and accepted that his creed was in line with the "Qur'an and the Sunnah". Regardless, in April 1306 the chief Islamic judges of the Mamluk state declared Ibn Taymiyyah guilty and he was incarcerated. He was released four months later in September.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: After his release in Damascus, the doubts regarding his creed seemed to have resolved but this was not the case. A Shafii scholar, Ibn al-Sarsari, was insistent on starting another hearing against Ibn Taymiyyah which was held once again at the house of the Governor of Damascus, Al-Afram. His book "Al-Aqidah Al-Waasitiyyah" was still not found at fault. At the conclusion of this hearing, Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn al-Sarsari were sent to Cairo to settle the problem.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: On arrival of Ibn Taymiyyah and the Shafi'ite scholar in Cairo in 1306, an open meeting was held. The Mamluk sultan at the time was Al-Nasir Muhammad and his deputy attended the open meeting. Ibn Taymiyyah was found innocent. Despite the open meeting, objections regarding his creed continued and he was summoned to the Citadel in Cairo for a "munazara" (legal debate), which took place on April 8, 1306. During the "munazara", his views on divine attributes, specifically whether a direction could be attributed to God, were debated by the Indian scholar Safi al-Din al-Hindi, in the presence of Islamic judges. Ibn Taymiyyah failed to convince the judges of his position and so was incarcerated for the charge of anthropomorphism on the recommendation of al-Hindi. Thereafter, he together with his two brothers were imprisoned in the Citadel of the Mountain ("Qal'at al-Jabal"), in Cairo until September 25, 1307. He was freed due to the help he received from two "amirs"; Salar and Muhanna ibn Isa, but he was not allowed to go back to Syria. He was then again summoned for a legal debate, but this time he convinced the judges of his views and was allowed to go free.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah continued to face troubles for his views which were found to be at odds with those of his contemporaries. His strong opposition to what he believed to be religious innovations, caused upset among the prominent Sufis of Egypt including Ibn Ata Allah and Karim al-Din al-Amuli, and the locals who started to protest against him. Their main contention was Ibn Taymiyyah's stance on tawassul (intercession). In his view, a person could not ask anyone other than God for help except on the Day of Judgement when intercession in his view would be possible. At the time, the people did not restrict intercession to just the Day of Judgement but rather they said it was allowed in other cases. Due to this, Ibn Taymiyyah, now aged 45, was ordered to appear before the Shafi'i judge Badr al-Din in March 1308 and was questioned on his stance regarding intercession. Thereafter, he was incarcerated in the prison of the judges in Cairo for some months. After his release, he was allowed to return to Syria, should he so wish. Ibn Taymiyyah however stayed in Egypt for a further five years.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: 1309, the year after his release, saw a new Mamluk sultan accede to the throne, Baibars al-Jashnakir. His reign, marked by economical and political unrest, only lasted a year. In August 1309, Ibn Taymiyyah was taken into custody and placed under house arrest for seven months in the new sultan's palace in Alexandria. He was freed when al-Nasir Muhammad retook the position of sultan on March 4, 1310. Having returned to Cairo a week later, he was received by al-Nasir. The sultan would sometimes consult Ibn Taymiyyah on religious affairs and policies during the rest of his three-year stay in Cairo. During this time he continued to teach and wrote his famous book Al-"Kitab al-Siyasa al-shar'iyya" "(Treatise on the Government of the Religious Law)", a book noted for its account of the role of religion in politics.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: He spent his last fifteen years in Damascus. Aged 50, Ibn Taymiyyah returned to Damascus via Jerusalem on February 28, 1313. Damascus was now under the governorship of Tankiz. There, Ibn Taymiyyah continued his teaching role as professor of Hanbali fiqh. This is when he taught his most famous student, Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya, who went on to become a noted scholar in Islamic history. Ibn Qayyim was to share in Ibn Taymiyyah's renewed persecution.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Three years after his arrival in the city, Ibn Taymiyyah became involved in efforts to deal with the increasing Shia influence amongst Sunni Muslims. An agreement had been made in 1316 between the "amir" of Mecca and the Ilkhanid ruler Öljaitü, brother of Ghazan Khan, to allow a favourable policy towards Shi'ism in the city. Around the same time the Shia theologian Al-Hilli, who had played a crucial role in the Mongol ruler's decision to make Shi'ism the state religion of Persia, wrote the book "Minhaj al-Karamah"" ("The Way of Charisma'), which dealt with the Shia doctrine of the Imamate and also served as a refutation of the Sunni doctrine of the caliphate. In response, Ibn Taymiyyah wrote his famous book, "Minhaj as-Sunnah an-Nabawiyyah", as a refutation of Al-Hilli's work.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: In 1318, Ibn Taymiyyah wrote a treatise that would curtail the ease with which a Muslim man could divorce his wife. Ibn Taymiyyah's fatwa on divorce was not accepted by the majority of scholars of the time and this continued into the Ottoman era. However, almost every modern Muslim nation-state has come to adopt Ibn Taymiyyah's position on this issue of divorce. At the time he issued the fatwa, Ibn Taymiyyah revived an edict by the sultan not to issue fatwas on this issue but he continued to do so, saying, "I cannot conceal my knowledge". As in previous instances, he stated that his fatwa was based on the Qur'an and hadith. His view on the issue was at odds with the Hanbali position. This proved controversial among the people in Damascus as well as the Islamic scholars who opposed him on the issue.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: According to the scholars of the time, an oath of divorce counted as a full divorce and they were also of the view that three oaths of divorce taken under one occasion counted as three separate divorces. The significance of this was, that a man who divorces the same partner three times is no longer allowed to remarry that person until and if that person marries and divorces another person. Only then could the man, who took the oath, remarry his previous wife. Ibn Taymiyyah accepted this but rejected the validity of three oaths taken under one sitting to count as three separate divorces as long as the intention was not to divorce. Moreover, Ibn Taymiyyah was of the view that a single oath of divorce uttered but not intended, also does not count as an actual divorce. He stated that since this is an oath much like an oath taken in the name of God, a person must expiate for an unintentional oath in a similar manner.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Due to his views and also by not abiding to the sultan's letter two years before forbidding him from issuing a fatwa on the issue, three council hearings were held, in as many years (1318, 1319 and 1320), to deal with this matter. The hearing were overseen by the Viceroy of Syria, Tankiz. This resulted in Ibn Taymiyyah being imprisoned on August 26, 1320, in the Citadel of Damascus. He was released about five months and 18 days later, on February 9, 1321, by order of the Sultan Al-Nasir. Ibn Taymiyyah was reinstated as teacher of Hanbali law and he resumed teaching.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: In 1310, Ibn Taymiyyah had written a "risāla" (treatise) called "Ziyārat al-Qubūr" or according to another source, "Shadd al-rihal". It dealt with the validity and permissibility of making a journey to visit the tombs of prophets and saints. It is reported that in the book "he condemned the cult of saints" and declared that traveling with the sole purpose of visiting Muhammad's grave was a blameworthy religious innovation. For this, Ibn Taymiyyah, was imprisoned in the Citadel of Damascus sixteen years later on July 18, 1326, aged 63, along with his student Ibn Qayyim. The sultan also prohibited him from issuing any further fatwas. Hanbali scholar Ahmad ibn Umar al-Maqdisi accused Ibn Taymiyah of apostasy over the treatise.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah referred to prison as "a divine blessing". During his incarceration he wrote that, "when a scholar forsakes what he knows of the Book of God and of the "sunnah" of His messenger and follows the ruling of a ruler which contravenes a ruling of God and his messenger, he is a renegade, an unbeliever who deserves to be punished in this world and in the hereafter."


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Whilst in prison he faced opposition from the Maliki and Shafii Chief Justices of Damascus, Taḳī al-Dīn al-Ikhnāʾī. He remained in prison for over two years and ignored the sultan's prohibition, by continuing to deliver fatwas. During his incarceration Ibn Taymiyyah wrote three works which are extant; "Kitāb Maʿārif al-wuṣūl, Rafʿ al-malām", and "Kitāb al-Radd ʿala 'l-Ikhnāʾī" (The response to al-Ikhnāʾī). The last book was an attack on Taḳī al-Dīn al-Ikhnāʾī and explained his views on saints (wali).


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: When the Mongols invaded Syria in 1300, he was among those calling for Jihad against them and ruled that even though they had recently converted to Islam, they should be considered unbelievers. He went to Egypt to win support to this cause and became embroiled in religio-political disputes there. Ibn Taymiyyah's enemies accused him of anthropomorphism, a view that was objectionable to the teachings of the Ash'ari school of Islamic theology, and he was imprisoned for more than a year in 1306. Upon release, he condemned popular Sufi practices and the influence of Ibn Arabi (d. 1240), earning him the enmity of leading Sufi shaykhs in Egypt and another prison sentence. He was released by the Egyptian Sultan in 1310.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: The Sultan allowed Ibn Taymiyyah to return to Damascus in 1313, where he worked as a teacher and jurist. He had supporters among the powerful, but his outspokenness and nonconformity to traditional Sunni doctrine and Sufi ideals and practices continued to draw the wrath of the religious and political authorities in Syria and Egypt. He was arrested and released several more times, although he was usually allowed to continue writing Fatwas (advisory opinions in matters of law) and defenses of his ideas while in prison. Despite the controversy that surrounded him, Ibn Taymiyyah's influence reached well beyond Hanbali circles to members of other Sunni legal schools and Sufi groups. Among his foremost students were Ibn Kathir (d. 1373), a leading medieval historian and Quran commentator, and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziya (d. 1350), a prominent Hanbali jurist and theologian who helped spread his teacher's influence after his death in 1328. Ibn Taymiyyah died a prisoner in the citadel of Damascus and was buried in the city's Sufi cemetery.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: He fell ill in early September 1328 and died at the age of 65, on September 26 of that year, whilst in prison at the Citadel of Damascus. Once this news reached the public, there was a strong show of support for him from the people. After the authorities had given permission, it is reported that thousands of people came to show their respects. They gathered in the Citadel and lined the streets up to the Umayyad Mosque. The funeral prayer was held in the citadel by scholar Muhammad Tammam, and a second was held in the mosque. A third and final funeral prayer was held by Ibn Taymiyyah's brother, Zain al-Din. He was buried in Damascus, in "Maqbara Sufiyya" ("the cemetery of the Sufis"). His brother Sharafuddin had been buried in that cemetery before him.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Oliver Leaman says that being deprived of the means of writing led to Ibn Taymiyyah's death. It is reported that two hundred thousand men and fifteen to sixteen thousand women attended his funeral prayer. Ibn Kathir says that in the history of Islam, only the funeral of Ahmad ibn Hanbal received a larger attendance. This is also mentioned by Ibn `Abd al-Hadi. Caterina Bori says that, "In the Islamic tradition, wider popular attendance at funerals was a mark of public reverence, a demonstration of the deceased's rectitude, and a sign of divine approbation."


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyya is said to have "spent a lifetime objecting to tomb veneration, only to cast a more powerful posthumous spell than any of his Sufi contemporaries." On his death, his personal effects were in such demand "that bidders for his lice-killing camphor necklace pushed its price up to 150 dirhams, and his skullcap fetched a full 500." A few mourners sought and succeeded in "drinking the water used for bathing his corpse." His tomb received "pilgrims and sightseers" for 600 years. Almost 600 years after his death, the large Sufi cemetery where he was buried in was razed for redevelopment by French colonial authorities. His grave alone was left untouched after the Arab demolition teams "insisted" that his grave "was too holy to touch." . His resting place is now "in the parking lot of a maternity ward", though as of 2009 its headstone was broken, according to author Sadakat Kadri.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Several of Ibn Taymiyyah's students became scholars in their own right. His students came from different backgrounds and belonged to various different schools (madhabs). His most famous students were Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya and Ibn Kathir. His other students include:


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: In the 21st century, Ibn Taymiyya is one of the most cited medieval authors and his treatises are regarded to be of central intellectual importance by several Islamic revivalist movements. Ibn Taymiyya's disciples, consisting of both Hanbalis and non-Hanbalis, were attracted to his advocacy of "ijtihad" outside the established boundaries of the "madhabs" and shared his taste for activism and religious reform. Some of his unorthodox legal views in the field of Fiqh were also regarded as a challenge by mainstream Fuqaha. Many scholars have argued that Ibn Taymiyyah did not enjoy popularity among the intelligentsia of his day. Yossef Rapoport and Shahab Ahmed assert that he was a minority figure in his own times and the centuries that followed. Caterina Bori goes further, arguing that despite popularity Ibn Taymiyya may have enjoyed among the masses, he appears to have been not merely unpopular among the scholars of his day, but somewhat of an embarrassment. Khalid El-Rouayheb notes similarly that Ibn Taymiyyah had "very little influence on mainstream Sunni Islam until the nineteenth century" and that he was "a little-read scholar with problematic and controversial views." He also comments "the idea that Ibn Taymiyyah had an immediate and significant impact on the course of Sunni Islamic religious history simply does not cohere with the evidence that we have from the five centuries that elapsed between his death and the rise of Sunni revivalism in the modern period." It was only since the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries that the scholarly influence of Ibn Taymiyya has come to acquire an unprecedented prominence in Muslim societies, due to the efforts of Islamic revivalists like Rashid Rida. On the other hand, Prof. Al-Matroudi of SOAS university says that Ibn Taymiyyah, "was perhaps the most eminent and influential Hanbali jurist of the Middle Ages and one of the most prolific among them. He was also a renowned scholar of Islam whose influence was felt not only during his lifetime but extended through the centuries until the present day." Ibn Taymiyyah's followers often deemed him as Sheikh ul-Islam, an honorific title with which he is sometimes still termed today.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: In the pre-modern era, Ibn Taymiyyah was considered a controversial figure within Sunni Islam and had a number of critics during his life and in the centuries thereafter. The Shafi'i scholar Ibn Hajar al-Haytami stated that,


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Taqi al-Din al-Hisni condemned Ibn Taymiyya in even stronger terms by referring to him as the "heretic from Harran" and similarly, Munawi considered Ibn Taymiyyah to be an innovator though not an unbeliever. Taqi al-Din al-Subki criticised Ibn Taymiyyah for "contradicting the consensus of the Muslims by his anthropomorphism, by his claims that accidents exist in God, by suggesting that God was speaking in time, and by his belief in the eternity of the world." Ibn Battūta (d. 770/1369) famously wrote a work questioning Ibn Taymiyyah's mental state. The possibility of psychological abnormalities not with-standing, Ibn Taymiyya's personality, by multiple accounts, was fiery and oftentimes unpredictable. The historian Al-Maqrizi said, regarding the rift between the Sunni Ash'ari's and Ibn Taymiyyah, "People are divided into two factions over the question of Ibn Taymiyyah; for until the present, the latter has retained admirers and disciples in Syria and Egypt." Both his supporters and rivals grew to respect Ibn Taymiyyah because he was uncompromising in his views. Dhahabi's views towards Ibn Taymiyya were ambivalent. His praise of Ibn Taymiyya is invariably qualified with criticism and misgivings and he considered him to be both a "brilliant Shaykh" and also "cocky" and "impetuous". The Hanafi-Maturidi scholar 'Ala' al-Din al-Bukhari said that anyone that gives Ibn Taymiyya the title Shaykh al-Islām is a disbeliever. As a reaction, his contemporary Nasir ad-Din ad-Dimashqi wrote a refutation in which he quoted the 85 greatest scholars, from Ibn Taymiyyah's till his time, who called Ibn Taymiyyah with the title Shaykh al-Islam.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Despite the prevalent condemnations of Ibn Taymiyya outside Hanbali school during the pre-modern period, many prominent non-Hanbali scholars such as Ibrahim al-Kurrani (d.1690), Shāh Walī Allāh al-Dihlawi (d. 1762), Mehmet Birgiwi (d. 1573), Ibn al-Amīr Al-San'ani (d. 1768), Muḥammad al-Shawkānī (d. 1834), etc. would come to the defense of Ibn Taymiyya and advocate his ideas during this era. In the 18th century, influential South Asian Islamic scholar and revivalist Shah Waliullah Dehlawi would become the most prominent advocate of the doctrines of Ibn Taymiyya, and profoundly transformed the religious thought in South Asia. His seminary, "Madrasah-i-Rahimya", became a hub of intellectual life in the country, and the ideas developed there quickly spread to wider academic circles. Making a powerful defense of Ibn Taymiyya and his doctrines, Shah Waliullah wrote:


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: The reputation and stature of Ibn Taymiyya amongst non-Ḥanbalī Sunni scholars would significantly improve between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. From a little-read scholar considered controversial by many, he would become one of the most popular scholarly figures in the Sunni religious tradition. The nineteenth-century Iraqi scholar Khayr al-Dīn al-Ālūsī (d. 1899) wrote an influential treatise titled "Jalā’ al-‘aynayn fi muḥākamat al-Aḥmadayn" in defense of Ibn Taymiyya. The treatise would make great impact on major scholars of the Salafiyya movement in Syria and Egypt, such as Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qāsimī (d. 1914) and Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935). Praising Ibn Taymiyya as a central and heroic Islamic figure of the classical era, Rashid Rida wrote:


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah's works served as an inspiration for later Muslim scholars and historical figures, who have been regarded as his admirers or disciples. In the contemporary world, he may be considered at the root of Wahhabism, the Senussi order and other later reformist movements. Ibn Taymiyyah has been noted to have influenced Rashid Rida, Abul A`la Maududi, Sayyid Qutb, Hassan al-Banna, Abdullah Azzam, and Osama bin Laden. The terrorist organization Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant used a fatwa of Ibn Taymiyyah to justify the burning alive of Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh. After the Iranian revolution, conservative Sunni "ulema" robustly championed Ibn Taymiyya's anti-Shia polemics across the Islamic World since the 1980s; and vast majority of Sunni intellectual circles adopted Ibn Taymiyya's rhetoric against Shi'ism.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah was taught by scholars who were renowned in their time. However, there is no evidence that any of the contemporary scholars influenced him.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: A strong influence on Ibn Taymiyyah was the founder of the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence, Ahmad ibn Hanbal. Ibn Taymiyyah was trained in this school and he had studied Ibn Hanbal's Musnad in great detail, having studied it over multiple times. Though he spent much of his life following this school, in the end he renounced taqlid (blind following).


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: His work was most influenced by the sayings and actions of the Salaf (first 3 generation of Muslims) and this showed in his work where he would give preference to the Salaf over his contemporaries. The modern Salafi movement derives its name from this school of thought.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: In what may justifiably be described as an unscrupulous attempt of magnifying the purported influence of Ibn Taymiyyah on Jewish theology, the claim of the late Pakistani Islamic scholar Mawdudi deserves to be mentioned; if only for the purpose of correcting the published record. In his treatise "Tajdīd-o-Ahyā-e-Dīn" (Lahore: Islamic Publications, 31st Printing: 1999, p. 76; English edition translated by Al-Ash`ari titled: "A Short History of the Revivalist Movement in Islam," Lahore: Islamic Publications, 9th edition: 2004, p. 43), Mawdudi advances the following claim about the influence of Ibn Taymiyyah by appealing to the authority of the great scholar Goldziher:


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: ... he had acquired such an insight into the Jewish and Christian literatures and the differences between their religious sects that, according to Goldziher, no scholar who wanted to deal with the characters of the Bible could lose sight of and set aside the researches of Ibn-i-Taimiyyah.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: As a matter of fact Goldziher expressed his views and analyses about Ibn Taymiyyah's influence in his "The Zāhirīs" (Engl. tr. 2008, pp. 173–177) as well as in his article on Ibn Taymiyyah in the "Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics" (Vol. 7, p. 72). In neither of the mentioned writings does Goldziher say anything amounting to what Mawdudi attributed to him in his above-cited claim. What Goldziher did write was the following:


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: In his writings he [i.e. Ibn Taymiyyah] is a zealous adversary of Greek philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity. By way of inciting the Muslims against them, he pointed to the Mongol invasion which had just swept over Syria, asserting that the visitation was in part due to the laxity of his co-religionists. He issued a fatwa demanding


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: that the Jewish synagogues in Cairo should be destroyed, and urging his people not to allow the chapels of other faiths to exist in their midst...


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah said that God should be described as he has described himself in the Qur'an and the way Muhammad has described God in the Hadith. He rejected the Ta'tili's who denied these attributes, those who compare God with the creation (Tashbih) and those who engage in esoteric interpretations (ta'wil) of the Qur'an or use symbolic exegesis. Ibn Taymiyyah said that those attributes which we know about from the two above mentioned sources, should be ascribed to God. Anything regarding God's attributes which people have no knowledge of, should be approached in a manner, according to Ibn Taymiyyah, where the mystery of the unknown is left to God (called tafwid) and the Muslims submit themselves to the word of God and the prophet (called taslim). Henri Laoust says that through this framework, this doctrine, "provides authority for the widest possible scope in personal internationalization of religion."


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: In 1299, Ibn Taymiyyah wrote the book "Al-Aqida al-hamawiyya al-kubra", which dealt with, among other topics, theology and creed. When he was accused of anthropomorphism, a private meeting was held between scholars in the house of Al-Din `Umar al-Kazwini who was a Shafii judge. After careful study of this book, he was cleared of those charges. Ibn Taymiyyah also wrote another book dealing with the attributes of God called, "Al-Aqidah Al-Waasitiyyah". He faced considerable hostility towards these views from the Ash'ari's of whom the most notable were, Taqi al-Din al-Subki and his son Taj al-Din al-Subki who were influential Islamic jurists and also chief judge of Damascus in their respective times.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah's highly intellectual discourse at explaining "The Wise Purpose of God, Human Agency, and the Problems of Evil & Justice" using God's Attributes as a means has been illustrated by Dr. Jon Hoover in his work "Ibn Taymiyyah's Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism". Ibn Taymiyya regarded "Tawhid al-Asma wa Sifat" (‘monotheism of God's Names and Attributes’) as the third aspect of "Tawhid" and as part of "Tawhid al-Uluhiyya" (monotheism of Worship). According to Ibn Taymiyya, God must be worshipped by His Own Names and Attributes – by which He described himself in the "Qur’ān" and "Hadith" – and to do otherwise would be to commit "shirk" (polytheism) by associating God with improper ideas.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah held the belief that Hell was not eternal even for unbelievers. According to Ibn Taymiyyah, Hell is therapeutic and reformative, and God's wise purpose in chastising unbelievers is to make them fit to leave the Fire. This view contradicted the mainstream Sunni doctrine of eternal hell-fire for unbelievers. Ibn Taymiyyah was criticised for holding this view by the chief Shafi scholar Taqi al-Din al-Subki who presented a large body of Qur'anic evidence to argue that unbelievers will abide in hell-fire eternally.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: —Ibn Taymiyyah opposed the use of consensus of jurists, replacing it with the consensus of the "companions" ("sahaba").


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Like all Islamic jurists Ibn Taymiyyah believed in a hierarchy sources for the Sharia. Most important was the Quran, and the sunnah or any other source could not abrogate a verse of the Qur'an. (For him, an abrogation of a verse, known in Arabic as "Naskh", was only possible through another verse in the Qur'an.) Next was sunnah which other sources (besides the Quran) must not contradict.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Concerning Consensus ("ijma"), he believed that consensus of any Muslims other than that of the companions of Muhammad could not be "realistically verifiable" and so was speculative, and thus not a legitimate source of Islamic law (except in certain circumstances). The consensus (ijma) used must be that of the companions found in their reported sayings or actions. According one supporter, Serajul Haque, his rejection of the consensus of other scholars was justified, on the basis of the instructions given to the jurist Shuraih ibn al-Hârith from the Caliph Umar, one of the companions of Muhammad; to make decisions by first referring to the Qur'an, and if that is not possible, then to the sayings of Muhammad and finally to refer to the agreement of the companions like himself.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: An example of Ibn Taymiyyah use of his interpretation was in defense of the (temporary) closing of all Christian churches in 1299 in the Mamluk Sultanate during hostility against crusader states. The closing was in violation of a 600-year-old covenant with Christian "dhimmis" known as the Pact of Umar. But as Ibn Taymiyyah pointed out, while venerable, the pact was written 60 years or so after the time of the companions and so had no legal effect.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyyah considered the use of analogy ("qiyas") based on literal meaning of scripture as a valid source for deriving legal rulings. Analogy is the primary instrument of legal rationalism in Islam. He acknowledged its use as one of the four fundamental principles of Islamic jurisprudence. Ibn Taymiyyah argued against the certainty of syllogistic arguments and in favour of analogy. He argues that concepts founded on induction are themselves not certain but only probable, and thus a syllogism based on such concepts is no more certain than an argument based on analogy. He further claimed that induction itself depends on a process of analogy. His model of analogical reasoning was based on that of juridical arguments. Works by American computer scientists like John F. Sowa have, for example, have used Ibn Taymiyyah's model of analogy. He attached caveats however to the use of analogy because he considered the use of reason to be secondary to the use of revelation. Ibn Taymiyyah's view was that analogy should be used under the framework of revelation, as a supporting source.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: There were some jurists who thought rulings derived through analogy could contradict a ruling derived from the Qur'an and the authentic hadith. However, Ibn Taymiyyah disagreed because he thought a contradiction between the definitive canonical texts of Islam, and definitive reason was impossible and that this was also the understanding of the salaf. Racha el-Omari says that on an epistemological level, Ibn Taymiyyah considered the Salaf to be better than any other later scholars in understanding the agreement between revelation and reason. One example for this is the use of analogy in the Islamic legal principle of maslaha (public good) about which Ibn Taymiyya believed, if there were to be any contradiction to revelation then it is due to a misunderstanding or misapplication of the concept of utility. He said that to assess the utility of something, the criteria for benefit and harm should come from the Qur'an and sunnah, a criterion which he also applied to the establishment of a correct analogy.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: An example of Ibn Taymiyyah's use of analogy was in a fatwa forbidding the use of hashish on the grounds that it was analogous to wine, and users should be given 80 lashes in punishment. "Anyone who disagreed was an apostate, he added, whose corpse ought not to be washed or given a decent burial."


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: It is permissible to make du’aa’ in Arabic and in languages other than Arabic. Allaah knows the intention of the supplicant and what he wants, no matter what language he speaks, because He hears all the voices in all different languages, asking for all kinds of needs.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyya held the view that the lender of a loan is allowed to recover the original, inflation adjusted value. Ahmad ibn Hanbal, the eponym of the Hanbali madh'hab believed that only the practice of 'pay or increase' – which extended delay to debtors in exchange for rise in the principal – as the only form of "riba" (i.e., "Riba al-Jahiliyya") that was definitively and conclusively prohibited in "Shari'ah" (Islamic law). Ibn Qudama, another notable Hanbali jurist that preceded Ibn Taymiyya; opined that debtors who took loans involving unweighable, immeasurable objects should give back the original value to the creditors. This provided a basis for the argument that a creditor is allowed to "recover a sum equivalent to the amount by which the original principal lent has depreciated in real terms during the period of the loan". Building on Ibn Qudama's specific argument on unweighable objects, Ibn Taymiyya would argue for a more general view. He stipulated that the lender should be able to recover the original, inflation-adjusted value; reasoning that lenders unable to recover for losses from inflation would be far less inclined to grant future loans. In Ibn Taymiyya's view, such a lender was not involved in "riba", since he has not made any actual profit out of the transaction.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Ibn Taymiyya held that the term "riba" also included all types of interest resulting from late payment ("riba al-nasi'ah") or due to unequal exchange of the same commodity ("riba al-fadl"). "Riba" thus covers some cases of barter which involve exchanges unequal by way of quantity or time of delivery.


title: Ibn Taymiyyah

text: Issues surrounding the use of reason ('Aql) and rational came about in relation to the attributes of God for which he faced much resistance. At the time, Ashari and Maturidi theologians thought the literal attributes of God as stated in the Qur'an were contradictory to reason so sought to interpret them metaphorically. Ibn Taymiyyah believed that reason itself validated the entire Qur'an as being reliable and in light of that he argued, if some part of the scripture was to be rejected then this would render the use of reason as an unacceptable avenue through which to seek knowledge. He thought that the most perfect rational method and use of reason was contained within the Qur'an and sunnah and that the theologians of his time had used rational and reason in a flawed manner.