Burning of the Books of Abd al-Salam ibn Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani and His Condemnation as a Fasiq in 603

إحراق كتب عبد السلام بن عبد القادر الجيلي وتفسيقه سنة 603

c. 1206 CE · 603 AH

Baghdad

In 603 the caliph arrested al-Rukn Abd al-Salam, son of Shaykh Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani; his books were burned and he was ruled a fasiq — the same man who had informed on Ibn al-Jawzi until the latter was ruined ¹. His obituary under 611 gives the mechanism: the wazir Ibn Yunus sealed his house and extracted volumes of the philosophers, the Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa, books of sorcery, narang and star-worship; read aloud was an address to Saturn — 'O luminous planet, you direct the spheres, give life and death, you are our god' — and when Abd al-Salam owned the hand, a great fire was lit beneath the mosque, Abu Bakr Ibn al-Maristaniyya read the volumes out one by one with curses on their writer and believers, and the crowd's cursing ran on to Abd al-Qadir and even Imam Ahmad; the qadi then ruled him fasiq, cast off his taylasan, and his grandfather's madrasa was taken from his father Abd al-Wahhab and entrusted to Ibn al-Jawzi ².