Paralysis of Thought

You come to learn or be taught a beneficial topic in thought, creed, jurisprudence, history, education, character-building... You hesitate...then freeze! Why? Because you say to yourself: The Muslims in Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Burma...are in what they are in, and I am preoccupied with this topic?! What good will it do them? How will it contribute to their salvation?! Don't you see that we hardly adhere to a religious course after we initially get excited about it? No teachers nor students?! And we don't complete reading a book... It is "Paralysis of Thought"! How much we need in such a situation to learn from the model of Ibn Taymiyyah and his student Ibn al-Qayyim, may Allah have mercy on them. Their era was very similar to ours in many aspects... The Tatars from the East (Russia today), the Crusaders from the West (the Western countries today), the Rafidah, the Qaramitah, and the Hashashin from within the Muslim lands (like the Rafidah sects today) all gathered against the Muslims, while the Muslims were at the peak of division and infighting. Look at what he wrote in Majmu' al-Fatawa, Vol. 28, p. (530-534). To the extent that he wrote in that place: (When the polytheists' king came to "Aleppo," there was killing there as there was). Glory be to Allah! Like our days today where killing occurs in Aleppo as it does. The Tatars tried to deceive the Muslims by enforcing the Yassa, which considers Islamic Sharia "one of the sources of legislation" as is the case today... In addition to that, intellectual and doctrinal deviations reached their peak in that era, intersecting with the "modernist" and "secular" calls today, and philosophers spread their doubts about Islam and confused the general people as in the skeptical and atheistic calls today. The situation was very difficult and extremely discouraging... even Ibn Taymiyyah himself was exiled in his youth with his family from Baghdad; fleeing from the Mongol invasion in Iraq... Did Ibn Taymiyyah suffer from "Paralysis of Thought"? No, he confronted all these fronts... and taught and wrote in everything that benefits the Muslims! Whoever reads his research in creed, jurisprudence, principles, or exegesis feels that he is in front of a person who is at ease, with all services available to him, and his only job is to write and delve into scientific issues, writing with a long breath and deep contemplation, knowing that he was between the imprisonment of sultans, their threats, the slander of his enemies, and inciting the common people against him, and he died imprisoned. Ibn Taymiyyah confronted all intellectual deviations in his time and refuted all types of innovators (by the way, he refuted the atheists in his time), and he did not say: (How can I write about this or that matter with the bad situation of the Muslims and the enemies' encirclement of them?).... He did not suffer from paralysis of thought, but left a vast, unique heritage from which Muslims have benefited and continue to benefit, and they cannot do without it for eight centuries until now, to the extent that he deserved to be called: Sheikh al-Islam. Of course, Ibn Taymiyyah did not neglect the aspect of jihad, but he himself fought and encouraged jihad... but before that, he did not sit frozen, neither in the rear nor in the front, belittling work in other aspects of Islam as is the case with most of us today. Similarly was his student Ibn al-Qayyim, who amazes you when you read his works on character-building when he mentions the tragic circumstances in which these beautiful, deep, and refined works were written! O Allah, free our minds, use us in defending Your religion, and end us with jihad and martyrdom in Your path.