The Mission and the Kingdom

Wahhabi Power Behind the Saudi Throne

David Commins

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781838609511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

In the wake of September 11th instant theories have emerged that try to root Osama Bin Laden's attacks on Wahhabism. Muslim critics have dismissed this conservative interpretation of Islam that is the official creed of Saudi Arabia as an unorthodox innovation that manipulated a suggestible people to gain political influence. David Commins' book questions this assumption. He examines the debate on the nature of Wahhabism, and offers original findings on its ascendance in Saudi Arabia and spread throughout other parts of the Muslim world such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. He also assesses the challenge that radical militants within Saudi Arabia pose to the region, and draws conclusions which will concern all those who follow events in the Kingdom. The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia is essential reading for anyone interested in the Middle East and Islamic radicalism today.

Chapter One

Islam Began as a Stranger and Will Return as a Stranger

The Wahhabi religious reform movement arose in Najd, the vast, thinly populated heart of Central Arabia. Contrary to common belief, the movement did not bear the stamp of nomadic or tribal Arabia. Rather, it emerged from oasis settlements. To make sense of the movement’s origins, then, we must situate it in the context of Najdi society and that society’s place in the wider Muslim world.

Najd before the Wahhabi Mission

For centuries before the rise of Wahhabism, Najd was, to outsiders, a virtually forgotten land, an abode of disorderly, uncouth and irreligious nomads, a hole in the imagination of Islamic civilization’s great urban centres in Istanbul, Cairo and Damascus. It lay beyond the Muslim heartland’s cultural horizon even though it was adjacent to the Holy Cities, the spiritual core of Islam. Few Muslims traversed the Central Arabian desert to reach the pilgrimage centres at Mecca and Medina. Instead, pilgrims from North Africa, Egypt and Turkey would gather in Cairo and Damascus to journey in caravans that skirted the Red Sea coast. From the vast Indian Ocean basin, pilgrims sailed under monsoon winds to Yemen and Red Sea ports. The exceptions to this avoidance of Najd’s parched landscape were pilgrims and merchants from Iraq and Iran, for whom the land route was close at hand.

Najd’s isolation also obtained in the political sphere, as none of the great Muslim land empires had ruled it since the weakening of the Abbasid caliphate in the tenth century. The Ottoman Empire at its height in the sixteenth century surrounded the region on two sides, projecting its authority like two arms, one down the Red Sea coast to Yemen in order to secure the Holy Cities and another down the Persian Gulf to guard against Portuguese interlopers and to fend off Persian advances in Iraq and on the Gulf’s western Arabian shore. The Ottomans saw no reason to invade and subdue Najd - it lacked valuable economic resources, it posed no strategic threat and it offered the sultan no prestige. Istanbul regarded the peninsula as a primitive frontier zone whose primary importance was as the site of Islam’s Holy Cities. The sultan claimed to be their guardian on behalf of all Muslims, both inside and outside his domain. As long as the Ottoman-commanded pilgrim caravans made the journey safely, Istanbul was satisfied with arrangements managed by sharifs of Mecca with nomadic tribes. Interfering with or obstructing the pilgrimage, however, would pose a threat to the sultan’s prestige and provoke a strong reaction. Except for the rare successful nomadic raid on pilgrim trains, Ottoman sultans had little reason to worry about that quarter of their realm in the early 1700s. They were far more concerned with the empire’s weakening posture with respect to European powers.

Local Arabian powers west and east of Najd played a more active role in its political affairs. In Hijaz, the sharifs of Mecca, who acknowledged the Ottoman sultan as sovereign, had complex relations with the tribes and settlements of Najd. The sharifs tried to develop stable alliances with powerful tribes and extracted tribute from settlements; such arrangements, however, were rarely durable because of the tribes’ view of alliances as temporary opportunities. In al-Hasa, the Banu Khalid tribe was dominant and vied with Meccan sharifs for influence over Najd. In the early 1700s, the Banu Khalid enjoyed several decades of preponderance among the region’s tribes and oases.¹

Najd occupied a marginal position in the Muslim world. If we take a different perspective, that of Najd looking outward, the picture shifts. The central Islamic lands loomed large in its economic activities and a substantial section of the settled population regarded the major cities as vessels of religious and cultural ideals. Nomads and oasis dwellers derived part of their livelihood from trade with neighbouring regions (Iraq, al-Hasa, Hijaz, Syria) and from servicing trans-Arabian caravans with guides, escorts and camels. Nomads raided settled areas in adjacent lands for plunder. Nearby Muslim lands provided a model of civilized life that oasis dwellers regarded as exemplary and one dimension of that model was religious learning.²

Najdi society was divided between nomads and settled folk (hadar). The nomads belonged to several tribal groups organized by ties of kinship, both real and fictive. Each tribe grazed its sheep, goats, horses and camels in a more or less well-defined domain. They exchanged animal products for food crops and for goods made in settlements or imported there. They also sold transportation and security (against raids by other tribes) to merchant and pilgrim caravans. In contrast to the interdependence that characterized economic relations between nomads and settled folk, they were usually separate in the political sphere. Each tribe had its own leading clan, from which was selected a sheikh. Tribes made alliances with each other and oasis settlements, but again, such alliances were temporary. An important difference between the nomadic and settled realms lay in the degree to which kinship figured as a factor in social relations. It is only a slight overstatement to say that for residents of oasis settlements, tribal bonds seldom figured in their political or economic pursuits. One might consider them to be detribalized because of their immersion in an environment that fostered ties related to landed property and commercial wealth rather than common shares in livestock.³

The domain of the sown, the oasis settlements of Najd, depended on date palms and cultivated crops. Traders profited from long-distance caravans in the trans-Arabian trade. The political order bore a superficial resemblance to the nomadic one in that the settlements had chiefly lineages that commanded armed retinues to collect land rent from poorer townsmen. The Arabian chronicles record political events in the larger settlements as unending battles for pre-eminence between chiefly lineages or within rival branches of the same lineage. The scale of political power was small, both in terms of population and area under the sway of a chieftain. At the most, the chief of a large settlement might dominate smaller neighbours by levying tribute and designating an ally to act as his surrogate. More commonly, settlements were completely independent or even divided into two rival segments.

Since the fifteenth century at the latest, Najdi religious scholars (ulama) looked to learning centres in Hijaz, Egypt, Syria and Iraq to provide the most eminent teachers for itinerant Arabian pupils and to supply authoritative texts on Islamic sciences. The record on Najdi ulama prior to the mission is thin, but we can discern four significant patterns. First, just a handful of oasis settlements had any religious learning worth mention at all. Second, in those settlements, certain family lineages specialized in maintaining and transmitting the scholastic tradition. Third, the focus of learning and practice was applied Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). Fourth, the majority of ulama followed the Hanbali school of fiqh while a handful belonged to the Shafi’i and Maliki schools.⁴ These aspects of Najd’s scholastic tradition, singly or in combination, do not explain the rise of the Wahhabi mission, but the mission does bear a Hanbali stamp and it is firmly associated with the region’s most prominent scholastic lineage, known as Al Musharraf. While we know few details about the ulama, we know even less about the religious lives of ordinary Najdis apart from what Wahhabi critics wrote about their deviance from proper Islamic practice. The religious climate seems to have accommodated a variety of traditions: different Sunni schools of law, coexistence between local custom and norms of Islamic law (shari’a) in everyday life and indifference to the sectarian allegiance of Shiite pilgrims from Iran and al-Hasa passing through the region to perform the hajj.⁵ Wahhabi sources characterize Najd as a land of such lax observance and moral degradation that a revivalist mission was necessary, but the handful of chronicles that predate the mission take no note of such decadence.

To summarize conditions in Najd around 1700, society was divided between nomadic and settled populations, both organized in small scale, autonomous, ephemeral polities, as tribal groups or chieftaincies. The arid and semi-arid region provided sufficient vegetation and rainfall for raising livestock and growing date palms; a steady stream of merchant and pilgrim caravans traversed the peninsula, adding a locally significant surplus to the economy. A small number of settlements hosted scholars, mostly from a handful of lineages, who looked to cosmopolitan centres as repositories of Islamic sciences.

The Mission of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab

A prominent scholarly lineage named Al Musharraf provided religious leadership as teachers and judges in several oasis settlements.⁶ The modern Saudi historian Abd Allah al-Mutawa has identified ten ulama from Al Musharraf in the period before Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.⁷ Abd al-Wahhab ibn Sulayman Al Musharraf (d. 1740) was the chief jurist in al-Uyayna. He had two sons who pursued religious learning, Sulayman and Muhammad. Because the latter would launch the Wahhabi reform movement, historical sources provide much more, often contradictory, detail about his upbringing than his brother’s.⁸ Of course, he acquired the standard introduction to reading and writing through instruction about the Qur’an and then proceeded to the usual range of Islamic sciences, with emphasis on jurisprudence. The variants in his life story begin with descriptions of his travels to pursue learning.⁹ For at least two centuries, Najdi religious pupils journeyed to Cairo, Damascus and the Holy Cities to study under leading Hanbali authorities and then return home burnished with the prestige of their academic affiliation.¹⁰ That Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab travelled widely was not extraordinary. It is attested by all the sources, but the details vary not only on the sequence of his travels, they diverge as well on the extent of his journeys. Saudi sources confine his travels to Arabian towns – the Holy Cities and a town in al-Hasa (just east of Najd) – and the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Other accounts report lengthy tours in Baghdad, Mosul, Damascus and several Iranian towns. A close study of the various sources leads to the conclusion that somebody was misinformed.

Some historians suggest that Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s studies in Medina formed his outlook. In the early eighteenth century, ulama in Medina were part of an intellectual trend that was sweeping the Indian Ocean’s Muslim rim: the revival of Hadith (reports about the Prophet Muhammad) studies and a concomitant desire to bring the practices of Sufi orders into conformity with rules of Islamic law.¹¹ The list of Sheikh Muhammad’s teachers in Medina includes one of the Hadith-revivers and some sources report that this teacher urged him to dedicate himself to a campaign to purify religious practices at odds with the Sunna.¹² On the other hand, his doctrine bears little similarity to the teachings of other eighteenth-century religious revivalists and the very notion of a common revivalist impulse during that era is not firmly established.¹³ Another possibility is that he arrived at his ideas during his stay in Basra in the 1730s. The southern Iraqi city was passing through a turbulent period that included spells of Persian invasion and battles between Ottoman and Persian armies. Basra has a large Shiite population, something unknown in Najd and it is possible that Sheikh Muhammad reacted against Shiite veneration for the imams when he first encountered it.¹⁴ There he began public preaching against what he deemed illegitimate ritual innovations (singular, bid’a) and violations of man’s duty to devote all worship to God alone.¹⁵ According to Sheikh Muhammad’s grandson, it was during his study with Basra’s scholars that God revealed to him hidden aspects of God’s unity and His attributes. This special divine inspiration set him apart from other scholars of his time and moved him to compose the seminal treatise for Wahhabism, The Book of God’s Unity, on the basis of Hadith collections he found in Basra.¹⁶ The chronicler Ibn Ghannam placed the writing of that treatise in Huraymila, but Wahhabi sources concur that gifted inspiration is the wellspring for his monotheist manifesto.¹⁷

This brief essay is of tremendous significance for the Wahhabi mission and the subject of enduring controversy between supporters and detractors. It represents the core of Sheikh Muhammad’s teaching and the foundation of the Wahhabi canon. The essay deals with matters of theology, ritual and the impact of actions and speech on one’s standing as a true monotheist. It has nothing to say on Islamic law, which guides Muslims’ everyday lives. This is a crucial point. One of the myths about Wahhabism is that its distinctive character stems from its affiliation with the supposedly ‘conservative’ or ‘strict’ Hanbali legal school. If that were the case, how could we explain the fact that the earliest opposition to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab came from other Hanbali scho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface to the new edition
• Preface to the paperback edition
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Map of Arabia
• Introduction
• 1. Islam Began as a Stranger and Will Return as a Stranger
• 2. Holding Fast Against Idolatry
• 3. Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud and the Taming of Wahhabi Zeal
• 4. Wahhabism in a Modern State
• 5. The Wahhabi Mission and Islamic Revivalism
• 6. Challenges to Wahhabi Hegemony
• Conclusion
• Al al-Sheikh
• Chronology
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright