48 - Sayyid Qutb, one of the religion reformers of this century, too, announced his admiration for Ibn Taymiyya and Muhammad 'Abduh in almost all his books. In The Future is Islam's, for example, he praised only the word 'Islam' but he did not explain what he understood from this word or in which madhhab he was. On its ninety-fourth page, he wrote:

"The spiritual leader struggling in the front row of those who protected Muslim countries against the Tatar invasions was Ibn Taymiyya."

If he meant the empire of Genghis by Tatars, Ibn Taymiyya had not been born yet when the Georgians (of Caucasus), the Persians and the Tatars in the army of Hulagu, the famous unbeliever, burned and ruined Baghdad and put hundreds of Muslims to the sword in 565 A.H. Ibn Taymiyya was born in Harran in 661 A.H. It is written in the Turkish Islam Ansiklopedisi (volume V) that he was assigned to preach for jihad against Mongols, and in 699, as a preacher, he was in the victory won against Mongols in Shaqhab in the vicinity of Damascus. It is written on the 137th page of the book Mirat al-ka'inat, "Sultan Mahmud Ghazan Khan, Hulagu's grandson, became the Mogul ruler in 694 A.H. That year, upon the advices of Amir Nawruz, his vizier, he embraced Islam with 400,000 Mongols including his commanders, viziers and soldiers. He read the Qur'an and fasted [in the Ramadan of] that year." And on the 930th page of Qisas-i Anbiya' is written, "Ghazan Mahmud Khan wrote to Egyptian Sultan Nasser to cooperate with him and work fraternally so that Islam might get stronger. Nasser, who was the ninth Turkoman sultan, did not listen to him. Nasser's soldiers plundered the neighborhood of Mardin. Upon this, Ghazan Khan came to Aleppo in 699 A.H. Nasser's army was routed in Homs. Ghazan Khan left a commander named Kapchak and a number of fighters to capture Damascus and he himself went back to his country. Nasser recruited soldiers in Egypt and sent them to Damascus. Upon hearing this, Kapchak gave up besieging Damascus and returned." It is seen that Ibn Taymiyya, who is praised falsely to be a spiritual leader in the front row, in fact, incited the war between the two Muslim rulers and caused the shedding of fraternal blood and the death of thousands of Muslims. As for Ghazan Khan, whom Sayyid Qutb slanders in order to represent Ibn Taymiyya as an Islamic struggler, he had an unequaled, artistically invaluable mosque built in Tebriz and established twelve big madrasas, innumerable tekkes, inns and charitable deeds. He sent many gifts to Mecca and Medina and devoted many villages. He belonged to the Ahl as-Sunnat. Shamsaddin Sami Beg wrote that he loved to make the right prevail and to do justice and possessed many virtues and superiorities and that he was reverent to sayyids and scholars. If Ibn Taymiyya had advised these two Muslim sultans and had told them that they were brothers by following the ayat, "Reconcile your brothers!" as the Ahl as-Sunnat scholars had done, Ghazan Khan and Sultan Nasser, who were goodwilled themselves, would have co-operated and, perhaps, he would have caused the establishment of a greater Islamic empire. Even the process of history and the world's face would have changed. He did not perform this benevolent deed but set men of knowledge and rulers at loggerheads.

Long before Ibn Taymiyya when the Tatarian unbelievers ruined and burned Muslim countries and martyred millions of Muslims, not the men of bidat like Ibn Taymiyya but the preaches and books of Burhan ad-din Shadid, Fakhr ad-din ar-Razi, 'Umar an-Nasafi, Sadr ad-din al-Qonawi, Shaikh Sadi ash-Shirazi and many other Ahl as-Sunnat scholars and thousands of awliya', who were educated by the spiritual masters such as Ahmad ar-Rifai, Imam al-Ghazali, Najm ad-din al-Kubra, Ahmad an-Namiqi Jami' and 'Abd al-Qadir al-Geilani , protected Muslims' religion and iman. These great 'ulama' and awliya' both guided the peoples of many countries to the right course and performed jihad in person against unbelievers as soldiers. Many of them became martyrs. The history is obvious.