Shams ad-Dīn ʾabū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ʾAbī Bakr ibn ʾAyyūb az-Zurʿī ad-Dimashqī al-Ḥanbalī (29 Jan. 1292–15 Sep. 1350 CE / 691–751 AH), commonly known as Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah ("The son of the principal of [the school of] Jawziyyah") or Ibn al-Qayyim ("Son of the principal"; ابن القيّم) for short, or reverentially as al-Imam Ibn al-Qayyim in Sunni tradition, was an important medieval Islamic jurisconsult, theologian, and spiritual writer. Belonging to the Hanbali school of Fiqh (Islamic Jurisprudence), of which he is regarded as "one of the most important thinkers," Ibn al-Qayyim was also the foremost disciple and student of Ibn Taymiyyah, with whom he was imprisoned in 1326 for dissenting against established tradition during Ibn Taymiyyah's famous incarceration in the Citadel of Damascus.
Of humble origin, Ibn al-Qayyim's father was the principal (qayyim) of the School of Jawziyyah, which also served as a court of law for the Hanbali judge of Damascus during the period. Ibn al-Qayyim went on to become a prolific scholar, producing a rich corpus of "doctrinal and literary" works. As a result, numerous important Muslim scholars of the Mamluk period were among Ibn al-Qayyim's students or, at least, greatly influenced by him, including, amongst others, the Shafi historian Ibn Kathir (d. 774/1373), the Hanbali hadith scholar Ibn Rajab (d. 795/1397) and Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (d. 852/1449). In the present day, Ibn al-Qayyim's name has become a controversial one in certain quarters of the Islamic world due to his popularity amongst many adherents of Salafism, who see in his criticisms of such widespread Sufi practices of the medieval period associated with veneration of saints and the veneration of their graves and relics a classical precursor to their own perspective.
