Ibn al-Qayyim
شمس الدين محمد بن أبي بكر ابن قيم الجوزية
Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Abī Bakr ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah
- Birthplace
- Damascus, Syria
- Madhhab
- Ḥanbalī
- Reference
- Wikipedia ↗
Madārij al-Sālikīn — the classical map of the spiritual journey — and a vast body of work on the soul, love, the traps of the ego, and the nature of the heart.
Ibn al-Qayyim was the lifelong student of Ibn Taymiyyah. He was imprisoned alongside his teacher, studied under him, and after Ibn Taymiyyah's death, carried the Ḥanbalī reformist tradition into a softer and more interior register. His prose is unlike most classical scholars — fiery, personal, poetic, plain-spoken.
Madārij al-Sālikīn is his magnum opus: a commentary on al-Anṣārī's short Sufi treatise, expanded into a sixty-seven-station map of the spiritual life. Each station — yaqaẓah, tawbah, muḥāsabah, maʿrifah — is given its own chapter and filled with Qurʾan, hadith, poetry, and Ibn al-Qayyim's own hard-won experience.
- Madārij al-Sālikīn (Ranks of the Divine Seekers)
- Zād al-Maʿād (Provisions for the Hereafter)
- Al-Dāʾ wa al-Dawāʾ (The Disease and the Cure)
- Iʿlām al-Muwaqqiʿīn (fiqh + uṣūl)
- Rawḍat al-Muḥibbīn (The Garden of the Lovers)
Ibn al-Qayyim is the classical author most often read in private by Muslims seeking words for what they already feel. Madārij al-Sālikīn is the standard against which Arabic devotional prose is measured.