His life was filled up with persecutions and misfortune. He was a popular idol, and inquiries for his judgment on theological and canonical questions kept pouring in upon him. If there was no inquiry, and he felt that a situation called for an expression of opinion from him, he did not hesitate to send it out with all formality. It is true that it is the duty of every Muslim, so far as he can, to do away or at least to denounce any illegality or unorthodox view or practice which he may observe. This duty evidently weighed heavily on Ibn Taymiya, and there was fear at one time at the Mamluk court lest he might go the way of Ibn Tumart. In one of these utterances he defined the doctrine of God’s qualities as Ibn Hazm had done, and joined thereto denunciations 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. [Sidenote: CONTROVERSY WITH SUFIS]