Aḥmad ibn Taymiyyah died in the citadel of Damascus on the night of 20 Dhū al-Qaʿdah 728, in the imprisonment — his fifth or sixth, the biographers lose count — imposed over his fatwā on grave visitation. When his ink and paper were confiscated months earlier, the sources say, the writing that had produced hundreds of volumes stopped and the strength went out of him.
In life he had stood in the breach repeatedly: rallying Damascus before the Mongol invasions, riding to Ghāzān's camp to demand terms, arguing jurists, philosophers and antinomian Sufis to a standstill. The funeral emptied the city — the chroniclers' crowd figures rival Ibn Ḥanbal's — and his students, above all Ibn al-Qayyim, carried the corpus that modern movements of every stripe still fight over.
The night and date are precisely carried by al-Birzālī and the Damascene chroniclers.