In the early years of the 18th century, the impoverished region of the central Arabian peninsula called the Najd was a veritable backwater. Dominated by the northern Arabian Rashid tribe with support from the Ottoman Empire, the Najdi people were suffering from poverty due to agricultural difficulties. The practice of Islam had faded away and given rise to superstitious rites and the worship of saints in its place. Violence, lawlessness, and constant raiding by Bedouin tribes were seemingly never-ending problems. Out of the chaos came a young student of Islamic law named Muhammed ibn Abd-al Wahhab who promised to alleviate their distress if they returned to the way of life set out by the first adherents to the Muslim religion. His teachings transformed the Arabian lands and set the course of the region on the path to fundamentalist militant Islam.
Born sometime in the first decade of the 1700’s, Abd al-Wahhab came from a family of judges. Raised in the Sunni Hanbali school of Muslim jurisprudence, he chose his devotion to the practice of law at an early age. After going on pilgrimage in Mecca and Medina, Adb-al Wahhab returned to his native village of Uyayna, convinced after what he saw there that Muslims had abandoned the true and pure form of Islam as it was originally planned out by the prophet Mohammad. He began preaching about the purification of Islamic teachings and soon began attracting adherents to his revivalist style of militancy and literalism. Male followers were made to wear a plain white thobe and turban on their heads rather than the traditional Bedouin iqal, the black rope used to hold their headscarves in place. Female disciples were commanded to dress with extreme modesty in the full black burqa covering all parts of their bodies except for their eyes.
Aside from the memorization of the Qur’an, the early Wahhabis believed that every aspect of their lives had to be done in strict obedience to Allah without any influence from anything else. Thus, praying to saints, a practice that had gained in popularity in those times, was strictly forbidden. Even the intervention of doctors in illnesses or injuries was banned because the patient in such situations did not seek out guidance from Allah instead. Women were to be highly regarded just as long as they married and did their wifely duties. Social interaction between members of the opposite sex was outlawed to prevent extra-marital affairs; this social taboo, if broken, was punishable by public whippings and beatings. Followers of Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion were regarded as sorcerers and agents of evil and Muslims who practiced or believed anything other than the Wahhabi cult’s doctrine were thought of as heretics and enemies of the true faith of Islam.
Muhammad ibn Abd-al Wahhab starting gaining notoriety when he and his followers set out on a campaign to clean up their society. They began their rampage by destroying a coffin containing the remains of a revered saint, said to have healing powers. The people of the Najd also had taken to worshiping sacred trees which they believed to have supernatural powers; Abd-al Wahhab and his followers cut these down. They also found a woman who had been known for speaking publicly about cheating on her husband; when they commanded that she repent, she reacted with defiance and claimed to be proud of her infidelity. Her punishment was that they buried her up to the neck in sand and threw rocks at her head until she died. Public beheadings were another common punishment for other transgressions. To top it all off, the Bani Khalid tribal chief Sulaiman ibn Muhammad ibn Ghurayr forced the Wahhabis to leave the eastern Najdi region because they declared taxation to be against the teachings of Islam, something that did not impress a chief whose main source of income was tax revenues.
Abd-al Wahhab moved on. Upon arriving at the town of Dhiriya, he was welcomed in and soon struck up a friendship with Muhammad ibn Saud, the grandfather of Abdul-aziz ibn Saud, the first king of the modern nation of Saudi Arabia. Muhammad ibn Saud was impressed by the strictly disciplined followers of Abd-al Wahhab and the two agreed that by combining the Wahhabi teachings with militant tribal politics, they could conquer the Arabian peninsula. After forming this alliance, they built up an army and seized the town of Riyadh. Whipped up into a frenzy of religious zeal, the Wahhab-Saud alliance’s army began raiding nearby tribes, forcing them to convert as they conquered each one. They marched on the eastern towns of Hasa and Qatif, down to the peninsula of Qatar, south to Oman and Yemen, then north to the Rashid fortress in Ha’il and the Shi’ite-dominated city of Karbala. All along the way they gave the conquered people the choice of peacefully converting to the Wahhabi creed or being slaughtered. They all chose to convert and the first Saudi emirate of Dhiriya was born.
Next they turned their attentions to the Hejaz, the western strip of the Arabian peninsula where the holy cities of Mecca and Medina were under the control of the Ottoman Empire. They seized these cities too and ruled them for years, refusing to allow any Muslims other than Sunni Wahhabis to perform the Hajj pilgrimage. But as time went on, the insular Wahhab-Saud alliance had no contact with the outside world. The Industrial Revolution produced new technologies for killing and new strategies for warfare and the Wahhabis, smug in their fanatical conceit, knew nothing of them. The Ottoman Empire built up a proxy army of Egyptian soldiers who marched on the Hejaz, decimating the Wahhabis and taking control, once again, of the cities of Mecca and Medina. Meanwhile, the Ottomans also supplied the Rashids with war materiel and assisted them when they attacked Riyadh, forcing the House of Saud to flee to Kuwait where they lived in exile until their return in the 20thcentury.
To this day, the Sauds have maintained their alliance with the Wahhabis who act as the official governing body of religious clerics in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Wahhabi doctrine not only acts as the founding principle of national and religious identity for Saudis but it also provides the belief system for fundamentalist terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS. Their goal of dominating the world through a radical, draconian interpretation of Islam is the modern ancestor of the fanatical teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd-al Wahhab.
Darlow, Michael and Bray, Barbara. Ibn Saud: The Desert Warrior Who Created the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Skyhorse Publishing, 2012
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