Speakers: Thomas Small & Aimen Dean
Thomas: Welcome back, dear listeners, Thomas Small here with another episode of Conflicted alongside my old friend, Aimen Dean.
Now, Aimen I want you to cast your mind back, if you will, to the early 18th century, to a small village in the desolate Najd Mountains desert of your home country, Saudi Arabia, to find a man whose radical preaching alienated many, but has stood the test of time.
A man who laid the theological foundation for the rise of the all-powerful House of Saud, a man whose vitriolic pronouncements against anyone who disagreed with his interpretation of Islam, continue to influence fundamentalist Muslims to this day. Aimen, I'm talking of course about?
Aimen: Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab.
Thomas: Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, a controversial figure, Aimen. I hope you and I don't come to blows in this conversation. We have different views on the man. In the spirit of Christian charity, I'll start with you. In brief summary, what does the name Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab mean to you?
Aimen: For me, he's not controversial, Thomas. For me, he is someone who made my faith so simple.
Thomas: A simplifier, a purifier, if you will, of Islam.
Aimen: Exactly.
Thomas: Well, we're going to tell the life story of this man, Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab. And yet, the way that Aimen and I are going to tell the story is kind of diametrically opposed.
For Aimen, who reveres the man, ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab is a good guy. He's the hero of the story.
The way I'm going to tell the story is a little bit less positive. I sort of think of ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab as the bad guy. Our friendship will, Aimen, survive it, I'm sure. But it's going to be-
Aimen: Absolutely. No question.
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Thomas: So, just continuing our exploration into the people who have set the historical template for fundamentalist Muslims today, this is the first of another pair of episodes on Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab. Let's jump right in.
Aimen: You know what, Thomas, in 2009, I was addressing a counter-terrorism conference where lots of those experts or pseudo experts, most of them, to be honest, but anyway, they were coming to listen to me talking about Al-Qaeda and terrorism at that time, and the election of Barack Obama and all of these things.
So, after the event, and after I gave my speech, one of those ladies who work in this space in counter-terrorism and counter violent extremism came to me while I was having Coke with some friends.
And she told me, “You know what, Mr. Dean, I really think that the greatest problem in the Sunni Muslim world are those wasabis.” And for me, it's like, excuse me, what?
Thomas: Sort of Samurai fundamentalists.
Aimen: Yeah. For me, it conjured into my mind the image of ninja Salafists. So, I said to her, “Excuse me, who?” “Wasabis, those who believe in Wasabism.” And I like, “Okay, you mean Wahhabis?” She said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, Wahhabis, sorry about that.”
But anyway, I think it brought to my attention at the time that really, I mean, in the minds of many people, even if they don't know what Wahhabism is or who the founder of the movement is, or when was it, or where was it? And yet the narrative among the industry experts at that time is that Wahhabism is at the core of the problem with extremism in the Muslim world that was driving terrorism.
Thomas: To prepare for this episode, I read Cole Bunzel’s excellent, recently released book called Wahhābism: The History of a Militant Islamic Movement.
And in it, he actually writes this. He says, “Wahhabism has become the Jihadi movement, ideological backbone, Wahhabi texts abound on Jihadi websites, and are frequently quoted by Jihadi scholars and leaders who see themselves as the proper heirs of the Wahhabi tradition.
There is, of course, more to Jihadi ideology than the pre-modern Wahhabi tradition. The influence of certain Muslim brotherhood ideas remains key. However, Wahhabism forms a crucial part of the ideology of modern Sunni Jihadism.”
That is true. It must be admitted, Aimen. I mean, when you were a young Jihadist, Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab was prevalent in the circles you were frequenting.
Aimen: Of course. No question. He was as prevalent as Ibn Taymiyyah, the scholar who we discussed in the previous episodes.
And this is why, for me, Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab was ever so present even in my childhood. My fellow friends from Saudi Arabia will remember that when you go into the middle school, The Book of Tawheed was part of the curriculum, a book, which was written by Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab as a statement of faith.
And it is really a small text, but memorising it was part of the curriculum in Saudi Arabia at that time.
Thomas: Yes. So, obviously ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab’s ideas were formative for you. And you mentioned Ibn Taymiyyah, whom as you said, yes, we've just covered in a couple of episodes.
So, dear listener, if you've been following along, we started this series with Ibn Hanbal, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, then we moved on to Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah, and today, Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, a story really of kind of ever increasing radicalism and even militancy.
This isn't to criticise or castigate, it's just sort of objectively the case. Each scholar built on the one before him and moved the dial a little bit further in the direction of fundamentalism.
And in addition to their ideas, it's a story of progressive Jihad. In Ibn Hanbal’s time, the Jihad was against the Byzantine Empire. In ibn Taymiyyah’s time, the Jihad was against the Mongols, who at times were Sunni at times were Shia, so fellow Muslims in a way, but very much the other.
And as we'll see in ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab's, time, the Jihad took a further dimension, and it became, to some extent a Jihad against fellow Muslims, which is part of that dialling up of fundamentalism.
Aimen: Indeed. And as we progress through the episode, I want to offer in advance an apology to all my fellow Salafists that I am going to use the term Wahhabi and Wahhabism, not as a derogatory term, but as an academic term that has become more the mainstream way of referring to Salafists who follow Da'wah Najdiyah or the Najd mission as the followers of Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab would have called it at that time.
Thomas: I’m glad you brought that up. It is important to point out that that term Wahhabi was levelled against Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab and his followers at the time, by his enemies.
So, it began as a term, a derogatory term. In the eyes of Salafis today, it remains so. I will try as best I can to avoid the term, and I will use the term, the mission if I can. So, it's the mission. That's how they understood it.
So, to begin his story, Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab was born in 1703 in Al-Uyaynah, a very small town really at the time in what's called the Najd. We probably Aimen, should tell the listeners or remind the listeners about the Najd, this area in Central Arabia, part of the great Central Arabian Plateau.
I mean, we're talking about really a backwater in the early 18th century. No question.
Aimen: Indeed, it was a backwater. But you see, the Najd is a large area, almost as big as Egypt, as modern-day Egypt. It's huge. It is a plateau. I think the average elevation there is about 400 metres above sea level. So, it is dry, it is a desert with multiple oases appearing here and there.
Now, Najd because of its harsh environment, is sparsely populated. However, it used to be always at the beginning of Islam, let's say, about the fourth, fifth and sixth and seventh century Arabia used to be the home of some of the most notable tribes in Arabia, the tribes which give birth to legends in the fields of poetry, in the fields of knighthood and chivalry.
It was really the place of Banu Hanifa, Banu Tamim, Ghatafan, and many other of the tribes that we hear about. And this is why I would say that Najd just like the Hejaz were always part of the Arabian legend and folklore, and the lure where people always hear about these knights on their white horses and the beautiful Arabian horses, straddling the desert. Yes. That is Najd.
Thomas: That’s right. And at the start of the 18th century, when ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab was born, the Najd lay on the fringes of the Ottoman world. The Ottoman Empire was the great hegemonic power at the time.
But the Najd, and this is incredibly important to remember, the Najd was never conquered by the Ottomans, was never incorporated into the Ottoman state. And in fact, at the time, ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab was born, the Najd hadn't been properly incorporated into any larger imperial state structure since the 11th century.
So, not for 700 years had the Najd been part of a larger state structure. This, I think, is key to understanding the political and social and cultural dynamics of the Najd. It was very riven; it was very politically unstable. It was quite tribal. It just did not have the benefits of a state.
Aimen: Just imagine Frank Herbert's dune, Arrakis, this desert planet.
Thomas: The dune planet, yeah.
Aimen: The dune planet where Arrakis is such a desolate place. But the reality is that Najd was politically fractured and decentralised, and that's why they depended a lot on trading with the Ottoman Empire outposts such as Basra, Mecca, Medina, these places.
Thomas: So, what can we say about Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab himself? Let's talk about his ancestry. He was from the tribe, the Banu Tamim.
Aimen: Yes. He was from the clan of al wahhaba, from the tribe of Banu Tamim. So, he was a Tamimi. He comes from a good line of noble Arab tribes.
Thomas: The Al-Musharaf was his family line. And it was a scholarly family. H
Aimen: His father actually was a judge of al-Uyaynah. And his grandfather was a well-known Hanbali scholar in Najd.
Thomas: Yes. Like Ahmad bin Hanbal, like ibn Taymiyyah, Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab came from a good, established religious family with an exalted role in society.
And if you remember dear listener, back to last season, early on in last season, amen. And I discussed the difference within Arabia, between Al Hadara and Al Badawi.
So, if you remember this … we think quite popularly of Arabia as populated only by nomadic tribes living in the desert, moving around with camels and stuff. But that's not true. That's Al Badawi. That's one half of that society, Bedouin society.
The other half Al Hadara were settled in towns like al-Uyaynah and Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab and his family definitely come from that Al Hadara side of Arabia.
His mission, when it begins, was initially targeting the Hadara side of Arabia. So, it's actually not a Bedouin phenomenon, it's a civilised, settled phenomenon. That's the world that ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab grew up in.
Aimen: Indeed. He was an urbanist. He wasn't a nomad for sure.
Thomas: As you said, Aimen, his father, Abd al-Wahhab, was the chief jurist of al-Uyaynah, and he was a Hanbali, just like ibn Taymiyyah, just like to some extent, obviously Ahmad bin Hanbal.
So, we're still in the same line of Hanbali scholarship of the world of Islamic Hanbalism. Tell us Aimen, what ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab's education would've been like as a child.
Aimen: Well, he was lucky in the sense that his father was a judge. Therefore, his father was a learned man who taught him how to read and write from a young age.
And then a child like that, in a town like al-Uyaynah, they will have the grand mosque of the town. And in the grand mosque, they will have a zawi as they call it, basically.
Thomas: A corner.
Aimen: A corner. And in that corner, young kids will come to study how to read or write, how to recite the Quran, to learn about Islamic history, theology, the Hadith. So, the education was completely religious. There is no concept at the time of any form of secular education.
Thomas: And this is in line, not just with its education, but with its entire world. I mean, the Najd and the Islamic world, more generally was totally saturated with religion. It was a religious world.
So, when they read the Quran, when they read the Hadith, when they heard about angels, when they heard about jinn, when they heard about destiny and prophecy, when they heard about the threat of hell, the promise of heaven, the reality of the divine judgement, these things are concrete. They're real, in addition to the commands of God.
These aren't sort of like pieces of advice, that God says, if you'd like to follow this, feel free. Not at all. God's commands are absolute, total, and the failure to fulfil them is pretty disastrous for people. So, we're really in a religious world.
Now, Aimen why was the Hanbali School so dominant in the Najd? As we've said before, at that time, the Hanbali School was the minority school within Islam, the other schools of law, the Hanafis, the Malikis, the Shafi’is, they were much more prevalent.
The Hanbali School was a minority in Islam in general, but in the Najd, it was by far the majority school. Why was that?
Aimen: The prevalence of one particular school of jurisprudence over others was always subject to the prejudice of the leaders or the rulers of a specific territory.
So, for example, if in the great Indian subcontinent, the Mughals were partial towards Hanafi would become the prevalent school of jurisprudence.
In North Africa, the Moravids, or the al-Murabitun, Yusuf bin Tashfin and their founders, I mean, they became more partial towards Maliki School of Jurisprudence. So, the North Africa now is Maliki.
If you look at Saudi Arabia right now is Hanbali, but next door, Bahrain and next door, Abu Dhabi, which is part of the Emirates actually is Maliki.
So, that is why it is important to understand that it's according to the persuasion, the persuasion of the rulers of the day.
Najd more or less became Hanbali because it was adopted by nearby schools IN Basra and other centres of learning such as Al-Ahsa. And as a result, the Hanbali School of Jurisprudence became the dominant in Najd, not by design, but by accident.
Thomas: A salient point here is that there were no schools of higher education in the Najd. Najdi scholars, if they wanted really to get the highest, if they wanted their authority to be stamped with proper authority, they'd have to leave the Najd and travel abroad. Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab did the same thing.
Aimen: Indeed. First of all, we have to understand that from young age, he showed promise. He was sharp, definitely. He had a clear mind. He had a photographic memory and was able to memorise the Quran by the age of 16, and lots of the books of Hadith.
And also, at the same time, he started to impress with his debating skills and his fire-brand argumentative skills.
Thomas: Yeah, I can imagine that as a teenager, he must have had some pretty formative debates and conversations with his brother, Sulayman. This is to foreshadow an episode in his life down the line.
But Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab had a brother Sulayman, who like him, became a jurist, received a first-class education.
So, Muhammad and Sulayman together were growing up in these schools, and then Muhammad launched out into the great unknown. What cities did he go visit to learn the higher sciences?
Aimen: One of the cities he did travel to was Mecca in order to perform the Hajj, and also to learn at the hands of great scholars, including Muhammad Hayyat Sindhi. Muhammad Hayyat Sindhi was a Hanafi and was a Sufi to some extent.
And Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab would have studied alongside some other scholars like San’ani and al-Shami, who would later become Zaydis and would have been preaching, and judging according to Zaydi, kind of mild Shia persuasion in Yemen.
So, this is just to show basically the fact that he wasn't against the idea of learning from scholars who might have different persuasion from him. He just was someone who just wanted to learn. He had the thirst for learning and knowledge.
And then he went to Medina, where in Medina, this is where the influence of ibn Taymiyyah comes in handy.
Thomas: Ibn Taymiyyah.
Aimen: Absolutely. So, he studied with Shaykh Ali Effendi ad-Daghistani Al-Dimashqi.
Thomas: Al-Dimashqi, now dear listener, that means this guy is from Damascus.
Aimen: Absolutely.
Thomas: Where ibn Taymiyyah lived and died.
Aimen: Absolutely. So, ad-Daghistani Al-Dimashqi was pretty much influenced heavily by ibn Taymiyyah’s brand of Salafism. And he imparted that and imprinted that on his young, brand-new student, Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab. Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab spent considerable time with ad-Daghistani Al-Dimashqi in Medina. And then after that he travelled to Basra.
Thomas: Yeah, in Basra. So, I want to ask you about Basra. So, he spent most of his, let's say study abroad period in Basra. And in addition to the Sunni Hanbali schools there, Basra was of course, a great and important centre of Shia Islam.
And a lot of the sources suggest that it was there while he was living there, that he first, in a real way, came face-to-face with the practice of Shia Islam, which to him as an Najdi growing up in a Hanbali environment, would've seemed very foreign and in fact, very troubling.
Do you think Aimen, that that exposure to Shia Islam, their practices, especially of praying for intercession at the grave of descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, and in general, the Shia predilection for the bestowing sainthood upon their Imams and other such people and invoking them, would have really influenced Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab as he developed as a thinker?
Aimen: There is no question. It was Basra where he absolutely started this thinking of, well, this is not what I was taught that Islam was about. He encountered what he believed to be heresies. This is when he started to think that this is not Islam. This is shirk.
Thomas: Shirk, yeah. Sort of idolatry as the association of others, apart from God with divinity.
Aimen: Exactly.
Thomas: Idolatry. Let's call it idolatry.
Aimen: Idolatry, yeah. So, he believed that Shia Islam is just another form of idolatry being given Islamic wrapping.
Thomas: You’ll like this, Aimen. Bunzel in his book, Wahhabism, he quotes ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab from his sort of memoirs. And he says this about his time in Basra, ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab said, “Some of the idolaters of Basra would come to me,” now, he means Shia, “And relate their specious arguments to me.
As they were seated before me, I would say worship in its entirety is not valid, but to God alone. All of them would be astonished, and not a mouth would make a sound.”
I like that anecdote, because you have to ask yourself, why were they astonished? Were they astonished because of the power of his preaching? Or were they astonished because they thought, “Oh my God, we disagree, we don’t know what to say.” But certainly this preaching was provocative in Basra.
Aimen: His preaching was provocative. In fact, it became so provocative that they complained to the governor of Basra about him. And they went to the governor of Basra and told him, “You have to kick him out. You have to get rid of him.”
The governor of Basra, as well as the judge of Basra, both of them were Sunnis and were appointed by the Ottomans. So, they were-
Thomas: Yeah, the Basra was in the Ottoman Empire. So, it was part of the empire.
Aimen: Indeed. And they didn't give a damn really about what the Shia of Basra were thinking. He remained for few years after that incident with the Shia.
But however, the governor and the judge were changed. There is a new governor and judge, and at the same time, Najdi traders came to Basra. They recognized him. They warned the new governor, “Be careful, this guy will start to destroy your shrines and will call for the destruction of the holy shrines.”
So, they kicked him out. In fact, he was warned by the people in Basra that if you don't leave today, you will be dead. He left with his own clothes, and only by a kind shepherd, basically who took him in al-Zubair. And from there gave him enough food to go all the way to al-Ahsa.
Thomas: It's not clear exactly from the sources when ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab left Basra and returned home to the Najd. Probably when he was in his early 30S, he returned to the Najd specifically to the town of Huraimila, where his father, was now Chief Kadhi. So, his father in the meantime, had moved to Huraimila, became the chief judge of the town, and his son Muhammad joined him there.
At first ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab kept his head down. It's likely that he didn't want to upset his father or provoke his father, given what would happen down the line with his brother Sulayman, it's possible that Muhammad's father would not have appreciated Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab’s interpretation of Islam.
Nonetheless, for some reason, he didn't preach openly again until his father died. And his father died in 1741, when ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab was 38. And at that point, ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab again, began to preach openly.
And it is at this point that he wrote what would be his most influential text? The book you mentioned earlier, Aimen. The one that was part of your own education as a child in Saudi Arabia, Kitab at-Tawheed, the book of monotheism, the book of declaring God's unity, Tawheed.
Tell us a bit more about this book. I actually read it this morning, Aimen to prepare for this chat. It's not a long book. You can read it in a single sitting. And it's a weird book.
It doesn't contain arguments. It doesn't argue its case. It just presents passages from the scripture and the Hadith, put in a certain order, followed by bullet points, really, of pronouncements, or of topics, or of affirmations.
These are things we must affirm. There is no rational argument involved however, it just states it. Is that a fair way of characterising the book, Aimen?
Aimen: Exactly. Because at the end of the day, it is a statement, Kitab at-Tawheed, the book of divine unity is in itself a statement. A statement doesn't have to be that rational, but because from his point of view, this is the equivalent of stating the bleeding obvious. That there is only one God, and that he is a supreme being, and that this is what we need to know about him, so-
Thomas: Well, I don't know if anyone's ever perused Twitter, Islamic or even Christian Twitter. There are people who believe that the straightforward literal declaration of truth, the bleeding obvious is the religious way. I think it's part of that fundamentalist mentality that we talked about.
And reading the book of monotheism, Kitab at-Tawheed, ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab’s book, you get the sense that he definitely had that character trait.
But you also feel that it's not really a book that's meant simply to be read. I mean, I feel, and a lot of modern scholars agree with this, that it's more like a textbook. It's sort of a book that someone is meant to carry with them to a kind of a lesson.
And the topics in the lesson would be expanded upon by ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab himself. So, it's almost like saying, well, we'll talk about this, we'll talk about this, we'll talk about this.
So, presumably in his actual teaching, ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab did engage in argumentation and some sort of rational proof or whatever of his teachings. He can't simply have just stated things like that.
Aimen: Well, I tell you something, the reason why it was written this way, because he was dealing with Najdis at the time, Najd, the prevalent condition was illiteracy, not literacy.
And therefore, he needed a book that was easily read to people in bullet points in statements, littered with supporting texts from the Quran and the Hadith, that is easy to memorise.
Remember, I memorised it when I was young, and all of my fellow classmates memorised it, and it's easy to memorise. And so, the whole idea is that he wrote this book deliberately to be short, precise, concise statement of divine unity. That's it. And to be easily remembered.
Thomas: From the very beginning, we see how ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab was different from ibn Taymiyyah. So, ibn Taymiyyah was an incredibly verbose writer. He never tried to write succinctly in this way to appeal to the average person, to kind of indoctrinate them or to convince them to join a cause in that way.
Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab was much more, really much cleverer in launching a mission that would appeal to the masses by appealing to them directly in this simple, straightforward, easily memorisable way.
Now, he didn't initially have a huge amount of success, not in Huraimila in any rate. While he was there, he survived an assassination attempt. It's not clear what exactly happened.
Huraimila was notoriously politically unstable, ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab may have got enmeshed in that in some way. It definitely proved to him to be the wrong place to launch his mission.
And what he needed, and I'm sure you'll agree with this, Aimen. What he really needed and knew he needed was political backing.
So, having survived an assassination attempt in Huraimila, he moved back home to his hometown of al-Uyaynah.
And this is where we're going to take a quick break, having survived as an assassination attempt, Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab returns to his hometown of al-Uyaynah and is going to try to find a political backer to support his mission. We'll be right back.
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We're back. We're telling the life story of Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, that the time that we left him, he just survived an assassination attempt and therefore decided to up stakes and leave Huraimila and move to al-Uyaynah, where he grew up.
His reputation was already spreading. He'd written his book of monotheism. He'd written a number of letters, epistles, which were circulating around the Najd. Some of them had made their way to Basra, where Hanbali scholars, there were reading them, most of them at this point, with some alarm.
And he began to attract a certain amount of criticism from his fellow scholars. In fact, the scholars in Basra, having read his letters now, and this is important, not just the book of monotheism, which as we said before, his was brief and concise, and possibly, more or less uncontroversial, a straightforward statement of Islamic monotheism.
But his letters, in his essays that were also circulating, were much more detailed and much more sort of, let's say, severe. And the scholars in Basra called him Caliphate Iblis, Satan's Deputy.
And this is because in their mind, at least, ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab was denouncing in his letters, really normative Islamic practices. The same things that ibn Taymiyyah was complaining about in his day. Things like praying to the dead, frequenting shrines in order to pray to the dead, invoking saints.
All of this was shirk. All of this was idolatry in ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab's mind. But in the mind of his fellow scholars, including Hanbali scholars, this was not shirk, or at least not shirk, to the degree that ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab believed it.
So, Aimen, why do you feel that ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab felt so strongly as he did, that the Muslim world had descended into shirk?
Aimen: Okay, I will argue from his point of view, and I will be the devil's advocates here. So, I'm going to play the devil's advocate.
From his mind, is that “I am reading the Quran. I've learned the Quran by heart as a young Muslim growing up in Najd. And the Quran tells me, worship none, but God. You don't read anything about saints. It says to you, pray only to God.
I don't see anything about graves or shrines. It tells you that the dead cannot help you. That's what the Quran says very clearly. And yet, people go and seek help from the dead.”
So, for him, he sees a big contradiction between what he's reading in the text and what he's seeing outside.
And then he realised that he's reading the story of the golden calf and the Israelites, after they have been saved from Pharaoh and his army, and they are there in Sinai still seeking to some extent a manifestation, a worldly manifestation of the divine in the calf.
So, he says, “Again, we are back to the days of jāhiliyya,” or what he calls it, the age of ignorance.
Thomas: Yeah. Later on, he would write in a letter. This is ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab wrote this “What most people of the earth profess from east to west is idolatry, is shirk. That which is being performed in the Hijaz, in Basra, in Iraq, and in Yemen. This is shirk.”
He became convinced that he was living in a time like the prophet's own time, where everyone around him was an idolater. And he needed to launch a mission, inviting them to join Islam. A very weird position for a Sunni Muslim to adopt in a world in which everyone around him was a Muslim.
Aimen: And a Sunni at the time, especially in Najd. While ibn Taymiyyah would pronounce takfir on certain acts, not on people. He would describe an act as a shirk, but he wouldn't call the people idolaters.
So, he would basically call, this is an act of idolatry. But he wouldn't describe the people as pagans or idolaters. He will call them sinful Muslims. That's it. He wouldn't excommunicate them from the zone of Islam.
However, for some reason, ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab took this to a greater extent where he started to pronounce takfir not on the act, but on the general population that were practising this act.
Thomas: I'm glad you brought up ibn Taymiyyah, because ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab’s detractors amongst the Sunni scholars who began to argue against him, they brought up ibn Taymiyyah a lot. Even the Hanbali ones for whom ibn Taymiyyah was not a hated figure, they accepted him as a revered thinker.
Though they were always slightly cautious about him because they knew the power of his preaching, the power of his rhetoric could incline people towards radicalism.
But the scholars who encountered ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab teaching and were rather shocked by it, they kept saying, “This man is following in the footsteps of IBN Taymiyyah. He is slavishly adopting the perverted doctrines of ibn Taymiyyah.”
So, ibn Taymiyyah in their minds had mostly good things to say, but some bad things to say all about shirk, all about what constitutes shirk and how to respond to shirk and ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab took it even to the next level.
Now, when we left him, he'd just survived an assassination attempt. He'd moved to al-Uyaynah, and he was in pursuit of political backing. Explain in general, Aimen, why someone like ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab would seek a political backer.
Aimen: Well, he would be following in the same footsteps of the Prophet Muhammad. Because at the end of the day, when the Prophet Muhammad found that he was prevented from fulfilling his mission by his tribe, Quraysh in Mecca, he started to seek the protection of other tribes.
He started with Taif, they rejected him, but then the people of Medina accepted him. And so, the whole issue is that I am on a mission, Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, just like his namesake, the Prophet Muhammad, basically he believed that he is on a mission.
And I can't fulfil my mission if I am to be hounded, persecuted, and possibly killed by assassins, I need someone to protect me. And only with that power, I could actually achieve the goals of my mission.
Thomas: I'm so glad that you brought up the Prophet Muhammad in his life, because in the next episode, we're going to talk at length about the ways in which Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab felt that his life mirrored the prophet's life, and how important that was to ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab.
And yes, you're totally right. Like the prophet who was forced to flee from his hometown of Mecca to Medina to receive sanctuary, ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, would find himself forced to flee to find sanctuary.
Ironically, he first hoped he might find it in his hometown, al-Uyaynah. And the man who he first hoped might offer him the political backing and protection he needed was a man called Uthmān ibn Muʿammar.
He was the ruler of al-Uyaynah, which was the chief town in the Najd at the time. So, he was the strongest ruler in the Najd. So, ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab was like, great, this is exactly what I need.
And even better, quite quickly, ibn Muʿammar, the leader of al-Uyaynah, lent ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab his support to the extent that ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, even married Uthmān ibn Muʿammar's aunt.
So, in the Najd, that would've been a sign of a very close political alliance. So, Uthmān ibn Muʿammar must have really thought, “Okay, I've got what I need here, a political backer who's supporting my mission.”
And indeed, he did support his mission, and he lent his mission, sort of real support, which led to an initial, quite notorious event in the minds and memories of Muslims. And at the time, a shocking event when Uthmān ibn Muʿammar and ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab together, they destroyed a tomb, a tomb that at the time was considered to be very sacred.
The tomb of Zayd ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, the brother of the second Caliph of Islam, Umar. Now, Aimen tell us this story and explain why this would've been shocking to Muslims at the time and remains so in the memories of the people who don't like Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab to this day.
Aimen: Zayd ibn al-Khaṭṭāb is one of the prophet's, early disciples. His brother would later become the second Caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab.
And Zayd was killed during the wars of the apostasy in Najd, which happened just months after the Prophet Muhammad's death.
Thomas: Yes, these are known as the Ridda Wars. The wars of apostasy.
Aimen: Absolutely. And so, therefore, this is why his tomb is in Najd. In later years, it became a place of reverence, of worship. And people were coming to seek blessings. Sick people were coming, seeking healing, women coming to seek divine help to get married and pregnant.
And of course, there were some shrine servants who would basically get the donations from the people and all of that. So, for Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, for him, this is idolatry. This is not exactly a place of worship that was ordained by God. Therefore, it must go. Not ordained, must go. That's it. This is the attitude that he adopted.
When Uthmān ibn Muʿammar, the chief of Uyaynah, when he showed up at the shrine of Zayd ibn al-Khaṭṭāb with his men, and of course with them, Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab himself, and they announced their intention to destroy the shrine. They were evacuating everyone from inside, and they were telling them to stand back.
So, those caretakers, the priests, those who are serving the shrine, they were warning everyone there, ibn Muʿammar and ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, they were warning them, “God will smite your hands. God will strike you down, will paralyse you if you dare to do anything.”
Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab noticed that ibn Muʿammar's men were hesitant. However, he took the shovel and started attacking the shrine, and started with the dome. He climbed to the dome and started destroying it from the top.
And of course, the ibn Muʿammar men, when they saw that nothing was happening to the guy, he was just looking and laughing at the priests of the shrine, they joined in and in no time, it was levelled to the ground.
And they made sure that the original grave would be according to what ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab described as the Sunnah, as the Hadith. Just two hands, if you look at your own palm, two palms above the ground, that's it. This is how a grave should be raised above the ground. That's it. This is the Sunnah.
And of course, this sent a shockwave across all of Najd and beyond, all the way to Mecca and Medina and the Hijaz, the shrine of Zayd ibn al-Khaṭṭāb was destroyed. And they didn't stop at that, the trees.
Thomas: Yeah, that's true. There was also a grove of sacred trees in the area that they chopped down, trees where women just like to the grave that they destroyed, women would go hang little strips of paper or whatever, strips of things on the tree, pray to the tree, the spirit of the tree in order to get them pregnant and stuff.
This is a very much more straightforward form of maybe pre-Islamic superstition, that they were still practising there. And Uthmān ibn Muʿammar and ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab chopped down the grove of trees.
And again, there was no divine retribution from heaven. So, they must have felt buoyed up by conviction that they were on the right path.
It reminds me, this story reminds me of stories from the Protestant Reformation in Europe when men like John Knox, in Scotland, for example, were going around inveighing against statues in cathedrals, inveighing against bishops, inveighing against the cult of saints, and knocking down statues, knocking down whole cathedrals, digging up the relics of saints, burning them, destroying them.
So, it brings to mind that early modern movement in Europe. And I'm an orthodox Christian, as you know, Aimen. That kind of stuff rather upsets me, I don't like the idea of it at all, as it would've upset a lot of the locals in the Najd in the early 18th century, or more the mid-18th century.
Aimen: Actually, it's beyond Najd, actually. That news reached all the way to the ruler of al-Ahsa.
Thomas: Which is on the east coast of the current Saudi Arabia, along the Persian or Arabian Gulf.
Aimen: Yeah, indeed.
Thomas: The great region of al-Ahsa, which at that time claimed some over lordship, over Najd, very, very loosely organised, but they claimed to have over lordship, over the nudged, and to be able to dictate terms to the Umara, the emirs of the Najd.
So yes, as you say in al-Ahsa, they were like, what the hell is going on? The tomb of the brother of the second caliph has been destroyed by these maniacs.
Aimen: Indeed, even Emir al-Ahsa, the powerful leader of that huge oasis, Emirate, sent a very strong worded letter to Uthmān ibn Muʿammar saying that, if you don't kick Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab and get rid of him, I'm going to cut your trade revenues from al-Ahsa.
At the beginning Uthmān ibn Muʿammar refused, he would stood his ground and said, no, I'm not going to kick Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab. However, a delegation from Najd went again to al-Ahsa and asked its powerful ruler to send another letter and another threat. And this time it worked.
Thomas: It did. This is all wrapped up in another story from that time in ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab's life when confessed adulterous, so a woman who committed adultery, confessed to it, was stoned in al-Uyaynah.
This also sent shockwaves around the Najd and beyond, because obviously, the execution method of stoning to this day is very controversial in Islam. You yourself, Aimen, have said on this podcast that stoning is not part of the Sharia. It's a misinterpretation of spurious Hadith.
And yet, in Uyaynah this happened, this woman who confessed to adultery and in a way must have known that she was going to be at the receiving end of some pretty harsh discipline, was stoned.
And as a result of this, in addition to the previous destruction of the tomb and the trees and the basic tenor of ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab’s preaching, the leader of al-Ahsa, the leader of the Béni Khalled tribe, there ordered ibn Muʿammar to expel him from al-Uyaynah. And he did.
One funny thing is that later on, Salafi historians in the Najd those who followed ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, the Wahhabis, let us say, they actually said that the leader of al-Ahsa was offended by the story of the stoning of the adulterers because he himself was a notorious fornicator.
And he felt personally offended that such an extreme punishment was meted out to someone accused of fornication.
Aimen: However, there is actually another reason. Historians, later historians actually realised that she was related to him.
Thomas: She was related to the leader of al-Ahsa.
Aimen: Yes.
Thomas: Oh, even worse. Oh, ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab chose the wrong woman to stone.
Aimen: Indeed, indeed. Maybe he was stoned when he did it, but nonetheless.
Thomas: Haram, how dare you cast such calumny across such a wonderful man.
Aimen: It's an innocent joke. But nonetheless, I would reiterate here again, my own personal belief that the Quran from cover to cover does not contain one single verse that says that there is a stoning for any crime whatsoever.
Thomas: It goes to show you that ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab’s mentality, his ideas were not informed strictly by a literal interpretation of the Quran. There was something else underlying it, the Hadith, but also a mentality.
He was making what we would think of as moderate Islam tantamount to apostasy. This wasn't entirely new, as we've said, ibn Taymiyyah had argued something similar, but ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab was expanding its scope.
As a result, he was kicked out of al-Uyaynah. The question is, where would he go? We're going to leave this episode there, because there's a huge turning point around the corner in ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab’s life, and not just his life, but in the history of the world, which we will of course discuss in our next episode.
But before we go, I do want to just discuss with you, Aimen, this question. So, in Bunzel's book, this great book, it's recently released. It's called Wahhabism. You really should read it, everyone. It's a great book.
He writes, “Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab’s ambition was revolutionary. He was seeking to demolish the religious status quo in Najd and re-establish in its place a commitment to true Islam as he understood it.”
And Bunzel calling ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, a revolutionary made me think about this idea that we've been discussing, the radical mentality, the fundamentalist mentality, because moving our view to the present day, and actually away from the Muslim world and towards the West, we see movements around animated by a similar spirit, looking around and seeing that everything about Western society is tainted by things like, racism, colonialism.
All of these, a kind of resurgence of radical left-wing, certainly not religious, quite secular ideology, but animated by a revolutionary spirit that seeks to destroy the status quo and replace something pure in its place.
It's funny because it gets back to personality, to mentality. I feel that ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab had this personality in spades. And if we return to the Lebowski principle of exegesis, you're not wrong, you're an asshole. To me, ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab inclines towards you're not right, you're just an asshole. But I know Aimen, that you disagree with that.
Aimen: I disagree to the sense that I believe he was misunderstood and that he was the product of his time. He was brilliant, but unfortunately, just like a knife, he had two edges.
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Thomas: Well, we are going out here all about the two edges of the knife called Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab in our next episode, when out of the blue, a knight in shining armour comes to his rescue. And of course, I'm talking about the founder of the notorious and all-powerful dynasty, the House of Saud. In our next episode, stay tuned.
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Harry Stott. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley and Tom Biddle.