Central Arabia

Of all the Islamic movements to rise to prominence in the past few centuries, none has had a greater or more lasting impact than that of the Wahhabiyya, an uncompromising assertion of Islamic orthodoxy and orthopraxy directed against all innovations in doctrine and practice deemed to have entered the faith since the third century.

The founder of the movement, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703—92) was a native of the central Arabian province of Nejd, a region nominally under the rule of the Ottoman Empire but in practice divided, like the rest of the peninsula, among competing clans and tribal groups. In 1744, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, expelled from his home town of Uyayna, joined forces with the ruler of Dariyya, Muhammad ibn Saud (d. 1765), in a religio-political alliance that was to transform Wahhabism from one man’s obsession into the ideology underpinning a small Arab empire.

Wahhabi doctrine was simple, uncluttered by specu­lation, and forcefully expressed. Terming themselves muwahhidun or ahi al-tawhid (exponents of the divine unity), the followers of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab eschewed anything and everything that seemed to them tainted with heresy. Wahhabism was not, in the strict sense, a new sect within Islam but a revival of orthodox Sunnism based on the teachings of the fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Taymiyya and the rulings of the Hanbali law-school, the strictest of the four recognised within the Sunni consensus. The particular targets of Wahhabi wrath were the Sufi brotherhoods (which had by that time reached unprecedented heights of influence throughout the world of Islam), Shi'ism, and the cult of saints common to both groups.

Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Wahhabi armies spread terror across the peninsula and beyond, reaching into Syria and Iraq. Medina was taken in 1804 and Mecca in 1806: Wahhabi arms ruled the most sacred sites of Islam, and Wahhabi intransi­gence began the process of remodelling society along the lines laid down by strict and unremitting orthodoxy. Shrines, even visible tombstones, were demolished (at one point even the tomb of the Prophet in Medina came near destruction), strict observance of the law was imposed, and zeal unleashed for the waging of an ongoing jihad against the ‘idolatrous’ practices of the Shi‘i and Sunni communities on their borders.

The inevitable riposte, when it came at last, was sudden and effective. Authorised by the Ottomans to intervene, the semi­independent ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, embarked on a series of campaigns led by himself and two ofhis sons, in the course of which Wahhabi rule was broken for a while. But however hard pressed it became in subse­quent decades, Wahhabism continued to exercise a profound influence throughout central Asia, above all in Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s native Nejd, where the Rashid dynasty of Hail was in control throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Its fortunes so closely linked to the military success of the Saudi family, Wahhabi Islam became retrenched and isolated, but it was far from spent as a force in the world.

In the opening years of the twentieth century, a new Saudi leader of immense ability, Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, recaptured the old dynastic capital of Riyadh and embarked on a campaign of conquest that was to lead in a matter of decades to the creation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

In 1916, Abd al-Aziz ordered those bedouin who owed allegiance to him to abandon herding and join forces with the burgeon­ing Ikhwan movement. Animated by a fundamentalist zeal that remained untempered by any external influence, the Ikhwan launched what was effec­tively a holy war throughout the peninsula, taking Mecca and Medina by force in 1924 and pushing the borders of the Saudi kingdom further and further afield. The curious parallel, not only with the original Wahhabi conquests but with the early days of Islam itself, was emphasised in the striking fashion whereby converts to the Ikwan would speak of themselves as having ‘become Muslims’, describing the period prior to their conversion as jahiliyya or ‘ignorance’—a term normally reserved for the days of irreligion before the coming of Muhammad. It was as iflslam itself was being reborn in its original homeland.

But as the power of the Ikhwan increased, so too did their intransigence. Wholly preoccupied with religion to the exclusion of everything else, they imposed a stark puritanical regime on all the territories they conquered. Under their rule, a man could as easily be put to death for his knowledge of Islam coupled with their version of it as for his ignorance of its tenets.

In 1928, bands of Ikhwan began to attack other Saudi subjects in Nejd, and in the following year Abd al-Aziz launched a military campaign against them, as a result of which he was able to put an end to their influence throughout the country. The defeat of the Ikhwan did not, how­ever, in any way spell the end of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, merely the curtailment of its most fanatical and least workable expression. The Saudi state remains firmly rooted in the Wahhabi creed down to the present day: ‘Just as the critical fact in the Saudi economy is petroleum, so the quintessence of its very being is Islam’ (Ralph Braibanti). Until the Iranian revolution of 1979, Saudi Arabia was the only state in the Islamic world to come close to the fundamentalist Islamic ideal. The country’s constitution remains the Qur’an, supplemented by the provisions of Islamic tradition and the rulings of the Hanbali law-school. The country’s legal system consists of two parts: the Shari'a or religious code and a body of state-issued ‘Regulations’. The latter do not, however, operate as an independent system as does customary law in some Muslim states, but are regarded as no more than decrees which enable the Shari'a to be properly implemented. In the ‘Fundamental Instructions for the Hejaz issued by Abd al-Aziz in 1926, it states that ‘His Majesty is bound by the provisions of the noble Shari'a.

Under the brief rule of Faisal (1964—75), Saudi Arabia took an increasingly influential role in the development of Islam at the international level, reviving earlier ideas of pan-Islamic unity that had been increasingly displaced by an ethos of national autonomy modelled on West­ern patterns. An extremely pious man, Faisal sought to combine political ambition with a variety of activities designed to enhance a sense of unity in the world of Islam at large. Even before he became king, Faisal sought to counteract the political radicalism promoted by Nasser throughout the Arab world by invoking Islam as an alternative, unifying ideology appropriate for all Muslims, both Arab and non-Arab. In 1962, the Saudi government sponsored an international Islamic conference in Mecca, at which delegates discussed ways in which Muslims could combat the twin threats of radical­ism and secularism. The conference resulted in the formation of the World Muslim League, an international body with headquarters in Mecca, the purpose of which was to further the interests of Islam and Muslims through­out the world. In 1969 and 1970, Faisal was again instrumental in calling the first Islamic summit (held in Rabat) and the first Islamic conference of foreign ministers (in Jedda).

As against its growing role as leader of the interna­tional Islamic community (a role much enhanced by custodianship of Mecca and Medina, the preservation of a respected puritan order and the financial power brought by petro-dollars), Saudi Arabia has had to face tensions at home which serve in many ways to symbolise the clash between Islamic and secular values in a singularly vivid manner. Although other oil-rich countries have experienced similar tensions in the course of modernisation, Saudi Arabia has felt the strain of rapid change more acutely than most precisely because of its perceived status as a nation somehow entrusted with the preservation of authentic Islamic faith and practice in a world fast receding from them.

In 1979, the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by a messianic sectarian group led by Juhayman ibn Sayf al-Utaybi showed that the vigour of Islamic fundamentalism has been weakened but far from extinguished in the kingdom. The Ikhwan are unlikely to become a serious threat again, but in a state where piety and puritan values are officially encouraged on the one hand and vast wealth creates unprecedented opportunities for dissipation and corruption on the other, it would not be surprising if Islamic extremism did not make headway among the younger generation. What happens in Saudi Arabia is bound to prove of immense significance for the entire Islamic world.