of the Ash'arite kalam and of the Qur'anic exegesis of the mutakallims as a whole. They were nothing but the heirs and scholars of philosophers, idolaters, Magians, etc.; and yet they dared to go beyond the Prophet and his heirs and Companions. The consequence of this fatwa or legal opinion was that he was silenced for a time as a teacher. On another occasion he gave out a fatwa on divorce, pronouncing tahlil illegal. Tahlil is a device by which an awkward section in the canon law is evaded. If a man divorces his wife three times, or pronounces a threefold divorce formula, he cannot remarry her until she has been married to another man, has cohabited with him and been divorced by him. Muslim ideas of sexual purity are essentially different from ours, and the custom has grown up, when a man has thus divorced his wife in hasty anger, of employing another to marry her on pledge of divorcing her again next day. Sometimes the man so employed refuses to carry out his contract; such refusal is a frequent motif in oriental tales. To avoid this, the husband not infrequently employs one of his slaves and then presents him to his former wife the next day. A slave can legally marry a free woman, but when he becomes her property the marriage is ipso facto annulled, because a slave cannot be the husband of his mistress or a slave woman the wife of her master. It is to Ibn Taymiya's credit that he was one of the few to lift up their voices against this abomination. His independence is shown at its best.

But it was with the Sufis that he had his worst conflicts, and at their hands he suffered most. In many

points his career is parallel to that of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, the Sufi movement taking the place that was played by Mu'tazilism in the life of the earlier saint. One great difference, it may be remarked, was that al-Ma'mum urged the persecution of Ibn Hanbal, while an-Nasir, the great Mamluk Sultan (reg. 693, 698-708, 709-741), supported Ibn Taymiya as far as he possibly could. The beginning of the Sufi controversy was characteristic. Ibn Taymiya heard that a certain an-Nasr al-Manbiji (d. 719?), a reputed follower of Ibn Arabi and of Ibn Sab'in, had reached a position of influence in Cairo. That was enough to make Ibn Taymiya address an epistle to him, intended to turn him from his heresies. It is needless to give in detail the position and content of the epistle. He wrote as a strong monotheist of the old-fashioned type and exposed and assailed unmercifully the doctrine of Unity (ittihad) of the mystics. Al-Manbiji retorted with countercharges of heresy, and, as he had behind him all the Sufis of Egypt—as great an army as the Christian monks and ascetics or earlier Egypt and much like to them—Ibn Taymiya had to pay for his eagerness for a fight with long and painful imprisonment at Cairo, Alexandria and Damascus. Here it is evident that he had lost touch with the drift of popular, and especially Egyptian, feeling.

But his fearlessness was like that of Ibn Hanbal himself, and in 726 he gave out a fatwa which ran still straighter in the teeth of the beliefs of the people and which sent him to a prison which he never left alive. It had long been a custom in Islam to make pious pilgrimage to the graves of saints and prophets