Ibn Taymiya

God — praises to Him — is not His own creature, and not a part of His creation or an attribute of it. He is the Praised and Exalted, set apart in His holy Existence, aloof in His glorious Selfhood from all things He has created, and that is what the Books (of the Prophets) have brought…and thus God has created His servants, and thus reason attests. Often have I thought that the appearance of such as these [pantheist Sufis] is the chief cause for the appearance of the Mongol Tartars and the disappearance of the Law of Islam and that they are the vanguard of Antichrist the One-eyed, the Great Liar who shall assert that he is God.

• Ibn Taymiya (1263–1328) also known in Islam as Taqī ad-Dīn Abu ‘l-‘Abbās Ahmad ibn ‘Abd al-Halīm ibn ‘Abd as-Salām Ibn Taymiya al-Harrānī, was a Muslim theologian and logician who lived in the 13th Century during the time of the Mongol invasions. An early and important proponent of the conservative Hanbalism movement which in reaction to the sweeping reforms made by the more liberal theologian Al Ghazali (c. 1058–1111) sought to return Islam to what he saw as an earlier interpretation of the Quran.