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May 28 - June 27, 2023
In recent decades, jihādī groups and actors have embraced the premodern Wahhābī tradition as their own, seeing it as the embodiment of sound Islamic creed with its emphasis on doctrinal exclusivism and militant activism. Wahhābism has become the jihādī movement’s ideological backbone.
The term Wahhābī is in origin a pejorative coined by the enemies of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb to stigmatize his movement as deviant and heretical. For most of Wahhābism’s history, its adherents have rejected the label as offensive, preferring to call themselves Muslims (Muslimūn) or monotheists (muwaḥḥidūn), their view being that the Wahhābī form of Islam is nothing but a revival of the pure and uncorrupted version.14 Even so, the Wahhābīs have long recognized that theirs is a distinct movement in Islam, one captured by the term “the Najdī mission” (al-daʿwa al-Najdiyya). The latter term, which goes
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The term Salafism comes from the name for the first three generations of Muslims, al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ (the pious ancestors), whom Salafīs purport to emulate in belief and practice. The Wahhābīs certainly fit the popular conception of Salafism today as a purist religious orientation in Sunnī Islam, one that combines a fundamentalist hermeneutics (that is, direct engagement with the source texts of revelation) with a commitment to the doctrinal tenets of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim.
This book is not about this later Wahhābism but, rather, about Wahhābism as it was before its taming and co-optation by the modern Saudi state. It aims to show that Wahhābism, from its emergence in 1153/1741 to approximately 1351/1932, was a distinctly militant form of Islam, one founded in a radical spirit of exclusion and confrontation that would persist for nearly two hundred years.
Nabil Mouline has described early Wahhābism in terms of a “counterreligion.” A counterreligion is an exclusivist and militant form of monotheism, one that approaches the outside world with an “antagonistic character” and “rejects and repudiates everything that went before and what is outside itself as ‘paganism.’ ”25 In Mouline’s view, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb was the founder of just such a counterreligion, one that “refus[es] all compromise” and in which “exclusion is the golden rule and interaction with other groups is possible only in the framework of conversion or confrontation.”
The dominance of Ḥanbalism in Najd goes some way in explaining the rise of Wahhābism in the eighteenth century, given that the Ḥanbalī tradition preserved the ideas and writings of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim. However, many of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s early opponents, as will be seen, were themselves devout Ḥanbalīs, and they contested his use of these fourteenth-century Ḥanbalī authorities.
An important feature of Ibn Ghannām’s history, in addition to its elaborate prose, is its stark portrayal of non-Wahhābī Muslims as polytheists and unbelievers. The Wahhābīs are made out to be the revivers of true Islam who are waging jihād against their heathen enemies, and their conquests are presented in terms of the early Islamic conquests.
The non-Wahhābī biographical tradition is also of value, especially the Ḥanbalī biographical dictionary al-Suḥub al-wābila by the anti-Wahhābī Muḥammad ibn Ḥumayd (d. 1295/1878), the ʿUnayza-born Ḥanbalī muftī of Mecca.79
The refutations are helpful in giving both a sense of what the debate over Wahhābism was all about and a sense of the tenor of that debate. Wahhābism’s opponents did not confront it politely; many people wanted Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb dead, even before his movement had adopted violence. Further, the refutations are helpful in allowing us to date some of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s letters and epistles, given that many of the refutations are dated and quote Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s writings.
The chapter shows how Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, for each of these components, borrowed from the ideas of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim while also modifying them substantially, generally taking their ideas in a more radical direction.
They should be ccalled Taymiyyans!
In the mid–eighteenth century, the emergence of the Wahhābī movement in central Arabia gave rise to a new subgenre of the refutation, that of Wahhābism and its founder. In the early 1150s/early 1740s, a number of heated anti-Wahhābī tracts appeared almost simultaneously in and around the Arabian Peninsula.
Ibn Bishr adds that he came out openly with his mission in Ḥuraymilāʾ (aʿlana biʾl-daʿwa) only after his father died, in Dhū ʾl-ḥijja 1153/February–March 1741.
As Ibn Bishr has it, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb and his father had a tense relationship in Ḥuraymilāʾ. When Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb criticized the religious innovations and polytheism (al-bidaʿ waʾl-shirk) in the area, there followed an exchange of words between the two men (waqaʿa baynahu wa-bayna abīhi kalām), meaning a serious confrontation.51 The story finds corroboration in the anti-Wahhābī refutation of Ibn Dāwūd al-Zubayrī, who states that Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s father and brother were the first to censure him for his doctrinal views (awwal man ankara ʿalayhi). Ibn Dāwūd further notes that Ibn ʿAbd
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The general portrayal of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb in the biographies is as a humble servant of God who rediscovered the original message of Islam, the true meaning of tawḥīd, through divine inspiration. As will be seen, the claim of divine inspiration was one that Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb would even make himself.
In a sign of his growing support, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb began to take action in his campaign against shirk by destroying certain objects of veneration. On one occasion, he set out with Ibn Muʿammar and a group of men to destroy the domes and mosques built above the graves of certain of the Prophet’s Companions in al-Jubayla, an area near Riyadh. One of these was the tomb of Zayd ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, the brother of the second caliph, ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb.
The earliest extant refutation of Wahhābism that is dated was written by a Shāfiʿī scholar in Basra named Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī al-Qabbānī
Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s message was thus intended to be divisive and disruptive. The idea was to emphasize the distinction between the community of belief (i.e., the Wahhābīs), on the one hand, and the community of unbelief or shirk (i.e., those seen as participating in the cult of saints or even just tolerating it), on the other, and then to enforce the distinction by means of condemning and confronting the latter group.
For al-Qabbānī, as for the other Shāfiʿī refuters, the practices of istighātha and tawassul were perfectly legitimate, being supported both by the ḥadīth and by reason.89 Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, by targeting those who engage in istighātha and tawassul, was effectively pronouncing takfīr on the global Muslim community
More often al-Qabbānī identified the source of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s heretical views as twofold: (1) his willingness to engage in ijtihād and (2) his imitation of Ibn Taymiyya.
As another anti-Wahhābī refuter, the Palestinian Ḥanbalī Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Saffārīnī (d. 1188/1774), later put it, “[W]hosoever seeks to exercise ijtihād in these times … has sought the impossible” (man rāma ʾl-ijtihād fī hādhihi ʾl-azmina … fa-qad rāma ʾl-muḥāl).94 He compared Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s purported claim of ijtihād to Musaylima’s claim of prophecy.95
Like a mujtahid, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb appealed directly to the foundational Islamic texts, but he did so as a revolutionary reformer concerned with reestablishing the foundations of the religion, not as a mujtahid devising legal judgments and operating within a system that he respected.
One of the biggest harms
Hoping to expose him as a fraud, Ibn ʿAfāliq proceeds to ask Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb a series of advanced questions about the different branches of religious knowledge, demanding that the Najdī respond in ten volumes (fī ʿasharat mujalladāt), as anyone capable of ijtihād could surely do, and calling on his supporters to force him to respond within one year.119 No such response, of course, was forthcoming.
Like some of the Ḥanbalī refuters, Ibn al-Amīr draws attention to the distinction between al-shirk al-akbar and al-shirk al-aṣghar, which he relates to two types of unbelief (kufr): unbelief in creed (kufr iʿtiqād) and unbelief in action (kufr ʿamal). Those who call on saints and make vows to them, among other such practices, have only committed kufr ʿamal, not kufr iʿtiqād. The proper response is therefore not takfīr but, rather, admonishment and instruction to dispel their ignorance (waʿẓuhum wa-taʿrīfuhum jahlahum).
“Min asbāb al-muʿāraḍa,” 43–45.
In fact, Ibn Taymiyya accused many of his scholarly opponents, who were Sunnī Muslims, of being Jahmiyya.
The differences between the Shāfiʿī and Ḥanbalī refuters were certainly great, but there was one thing that they agreed upon: Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim were central to what Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb was preaching, regardless of whether his use of them was legitimate. As the nineteenth-century Ḥanbalī muftī of Mecca Muḥammad ibn Ḥumayd (d. 1295/1878) remarked, in a statement that all the refuters would have agreed with, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb treated the words of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim as scripture: “He saw their words as a proof text not admitting of interpretation [naṣṣan lā yaqbalu
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As Michael Cook has observed, no one has been able to identify a more proximate intellectual influence on Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb than Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim.
When Salafis, who are readily identified by relying on the works of Ibn Abdul Wahhab, who in turn relied almost exclusively on Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibnul Qayyim, neither of whom are from the time of the Salaf, then how does their "ascription to the Salaf" actually connect them?
Wahhābism can hardly be understood without recourse to its Taymiyyan background.
While theology was not Ibn Taymiyya’s only concern, it was here that he expended the better part of his literary efforts and created the most trouble for himself.
Ibn Taymiyya saw the mainstream beliefs and practices of contemporary Sunnī Islam as having been corrupted—by the influence of the Ashʿarīs, the Ṣūfīs, the Shīʿa, the philosophers, the Christians and Jews, and the Mongols, among others. He therefore authored a seemingly endless series of theological treatises and polemics, “introduc[ing] a new current of theology unprecedented in the Ḥanbalī school and not found elsewhere in medieval Islam” and provoking an uproar thereby.
As noted above, the traditionalist Ḥanbalī approach to the anthropomorphic descriptions of God in the revealed texts involved affirming the attributes while avoiding inquiry into their modality (kayfiyya) or meaning (maʿnā). The traditionalists affirmed the attributes, but with the caveats of bi-lā kayf (lit. “without how,” or without inquiring into modality) and imrār (lit. “passing over,” in the sense of passing over the attributes without comment and without inquiry into their meanings).
The basic idea of Ibn Taymiyya’s approach was that it was wrong and unbefitting of God to affirm the attributes in complete ignorance of their meanings. Like his traditionalist predecessors, he adhered to the bi-lā kayf doctrine, agreeing that it was impossible to know the modality of the attributes. But he drew a distinction between modality and meaning, such that the meanings of the attributes were opened to linguistic inquiry.
Unlike most Ḥanbalī theologians before him, Ibn Taymiyya was thus not opposed to engaging in reason-based arguments when it came to theology or borrowing the very conceptual frameworks and terminology of the rationalist theologians. Much as he made room in Ḥanbalī theology for investigating the meanings of God’s attributes, he widened its scope to include rationalist argumentation, allowing him to clarify and translate the meanings of the revealed texts into another idiom and to engage his theological opponents on their own terms.
He explains his position as the golden mean (wasaṭ) between the exponents of free will (qadariyya) and the exponents of hard determinism (jabriyya). Human agency is real in that humans are freely choosing, but at the same time God is the creator of both their will and their acts.
Ibn Taymiyya was not an opponent of Ṣūfism, the mystical dispensation in Islam, as such. His writings do not betray a categorical hostility to Ṣūfism, and there is even some evidence, as George Makdisi has shown, that he was initiated into the Qādirī Ṣūfī order.
The Egyptian Shāfiʿī Nūr al-Dīn al-Bakrī (d. 724/1324),
another Egyptian scholar, a prominent Mālikī jurist named Taqī al-Dīn al-Ikhnāʾī (d. 750/1349).
As Yossef Rapoport has explained, Ibn Taymiyya, who had no qualms about using independent legal reasoning (ijtihād), played down the importance of law school affiliation, opposed the passive imitation (taqlīd) of any one scholar or school, and rejected as a source of law the consensus (ijmāʿ) of any group or generation of scholars after the Companions of the Prophet.
In addition to Ibn Taymiyya’s own works, Ibn al-Qayyim’s books, Ibn Kathīr’s Qurʾānic exegesis, and Ibn Abī ʾl-ʿIzz’s commentary on al-Ṭaḥāwī’s creed would be popular with the Wahhābīs.
They are known by their works
Here we will look at just two aspects of the Taymiyyan example to which Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb appealed: (1) his disregard for scholarly authority and (2) his disapproval of the cult of saints.
True authority for him was vested in the foundational Islamic texts, and he believed in drawing directly from these rather than emulating (taqlīd) living or dead scholars. His view was that in a given matter one should go directly to the proof texts rather than to the opinions of any person or school, so long as one was capable of doing so.
While Ibn Taymiyya was critical of those who deferred unthinkingly to living religious authorities, his criticism was not as extreme as Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s.101 Ibn Taymiyya never went so far as to condemn the entire scholarly establishment as the epitome of shirk.
While the degree of Ibn Taymiyya’s influence on the Ḥanbalī madhhab has been called into question,139 the fact is that he had come to be seen, in the centuries following his death, as the chief authority figure in Ḥanbalism, widely dubbed “the shaykh” in Ḥanbalī legal texts. Previously this term had been reserved for Ibn Qudāma al-Maqdisī (d. 620/1223), but by the time al-Ḥajjāwī was writing in the sixteenth century it was used to refer to Ibn Taymiyya exclusively.140 And yet, the Ḥanbalīs of Arabia did not adopt each and every one of Ibn Taymiyya’s views as orthodoxy.
Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb not only borrowed from Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim but also adapted and reformulated some of their ideas, taking their thought in a more radical direction.
A key point that Ibn Taymiyya repeatedly makes in developing his dichotomy of tawḥīd concerns the unbelievers in Arabia at the time of the Prophet Muḥammad. In Ibn Taymiyya’s view, these pagan Arabs were not in fact polytheists (mushrikūn) in the full sense of the word, even though they are described as such in the Qurʾān. Rather, they were monotheists, believers in one God, who failed to worship Him alone. In other words, they confessed tawḥīd al-rubūbiyya but not tawḥīd al-ulūhiyya.
From his perception that shirk had spread widely in the Muslim community, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb drew the opposite conclusion of the one drawn by Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim. For him, the diffusion of shirk was justification not for discretion but for urgent action in the all-important pursuit of eradicating shirk. Thus Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb generally did not display the same qualms about condemning everyday Muslims as unbelievers.
The presumption in early Wahhābism was very much so that the majority of the world’s professed Muslims were unbelieving polytheists who ought to be treated as such.
If a person did not agree with him that the ṭawāghīt of Najd were unbelievers, and that those perceived as worshipping them were unbelievers, then that person was to be regarded as an unbeliever in turn.
The most reasonable explanation for these kinds of comments is that Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb was simply not consistent in expounding his doctrine, his approach perhaps changing over time or according to context. It may be that at the beginning of his mission he was more restrained in takfīr or that he spoke about takfīr in different ways before different audiences.
Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb was fond of saying that he did not pronounce takfīr on Muslims. As he writes in his letter to Riyadh and Manfūḥa, “We have not pronounced takfīr on Muslims; rather, we have only pronounced takfīr on polytheists [mā kaffarnā illā ʾl-mushrikīn].”125 While these words are intended to signal restraint in takfīr, they in fact mean something different. What Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb is really saying is that all those we declare to be unbelievers are just that—unbelievers—and so we cannot possibly be accused of having excommunicated Muslims.
