Re: Was Ibn Taymiyyah a follower of Imam Hanbali path? Were Salafis before Ibn Taymiyyah?
Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyyah was a member of the Hanbali school and believed that he was returning Islam to it’s sources, The Quran and sunnah. He is the primary source of the Wahabi school. His grandfather and father were well-known scholars of the Hanbali school. He studied hadith from Zaynab bint Makki. He believed in a very literal interpretation of the Quran, and was imprisoned on multiple occasions for attributing human characteristics to Allah (SWT), forbidding people to visit saint’s tombs, and for issuing a ruling making it more difficult for a man to divorce his wife. He had a huge following, though he was considered outside of the establishment, but unlike Ibn Wahab, he was not considered to be an apostate. He was also famous for his amazing memory, and was compared to an encyclopedia.
His primary belief was that the sunnah of the first three generations (the salaf) with the Qur’an, constituted a infallible guide to life. Any deviation from their practice was bidah.
More general information (non-opinionated) about him is available through Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Taymiya