Wahhābism: The History of a Militant Islamic Movement

by Cole M. Bunzel

The phrase al-walāʾ waʾl-barāʾ, meaning “association and dissociation” or “loyalty and disavowal,” is the term used by modern Salafīs and Wahhābīs to capture the duties in question. It is only in the last century or so that this phrase came to be widely adopted in Sunnī Islam. The exact phrase al-walāʾ waʾl-barāʾ is not common in Ibn Taymiyya’s and Ibn al-Qayyim’s writings, but the concept was always there, even if it fell under a different designation.

Telling the people of Najd that their local saints were in fact ṭawāghīt and that those who venerated them were mushrikūn was provocative enough; urging his followers to show hatred and enmity to them was even more incendiary. Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s ambition was revolutionary: he was seeking to demolish the religious status quo in Najd and reestablish in its place a commitment to true Islam as he understood it.

As one can see, all of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s departures from Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim were in a more radical direction. The most significant of these was his more expansive approach to takfīr, which had implications for ʿadāwa and jihād as well. The unhindered practice of takfīr meant that Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, unlike Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim, judged vast swaths of professed Muslims to be unbelievers, and this allowed him to brandish ʿadāwa and jihād at a much wider set of targets than Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim ever did.

Wahhābism, according to Dallal, was in a category all its own, having nothing in common with the other movements. “Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb,” he claimed, “shared none of the concerns of other eighteenth-century thinkers.”228 Moreover, “Wahhābism lacks intellectual complexity and thus does not lend itself to much intellectual analysis.

Within just a few years, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb seems to have been able to convince most of the people of al-ʿĀriḍ that the Islam they had been practicing was shirk, and the movement continued to grow. Then, by a stroke of luck, he managed to form an alliance with the leader of al-Dirʿiyya, Muḥammad ibn Suʿūd, who offered him protection and agreed to promote his doctrine as the basis of his emirate’s expansion. Gradually, the minor emirate developed into the first Saudi state.

One major difference between Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s career and the Prophet’s is that Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb was never a head of state. He was not a politician, only a preacher and scholar.

He had no right or authority!

Dāwūd ibn Sulaymān ibn Jirjīs (d. 1299/1881) was a Shāfiʿī scholar from Iraq and a leader of the Khālidī branch of the Naqshabandī order there.

at times Ibn Manṣūr uses the term Khārijites as code for the Wahhābīs, as when he complains that the Khārijites excommunicate and fight Muslims on the grounds that the latter have not satisfied the confession of faith. The historical Khārijites were known for practicing takfīr on the basis of major sins (kabāʾir), the Wahhābīs being the ones who excommunicated and fought professed Muslims on the grounds of not satisfying the confession of faith.

The anti-Wahhābī books hitting the market, in addition to Daḥlān’s al-Durar al-saniyya (1299/1882), included Ibn Jirjīs’s Ṣulḥ al-ikhwān (1306/1888f), Sulaymān ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s al-Ṣawāʿiq al-ilāhiyya (1306/1888f), and ʿAlawī al-Ḥaddād’s Miṣbāḥ al-anām (1325/1907f), as well as refutations by the Syrians Muḥammad ʿAṭāʾ Allāh ibn Ibrāhīm al-Kasm (1901) and Mukhtār ibn Aḥmad al-ʿAẓamī (1330/1912) and the Iraqi Jamīl Ṣiqdī al-Zahāwī (1323/1905).

The Saudi expansion in Arabia was not as Islamically pure as the scholars may have believed, however, for in fact the emergent Saudi state enjoyed the financial and military support of the British Empire. While much attention has been paid by historians to the British role in promoting the “Arab revolt” of the Sharīf Ḥusayn in the Ḥijāz, the British support for ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz was of more lasting consequence.

In Ṣafar 1334/December 1915, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and the British political resident in the Persian Gulf, Percy Cox, signed an accord known as the Anglo-Saudi Treaty. In exchange for Saudi agreement not to attack Bahrain or Kuwait, and a Saudi pledge not to have dealings with other foreign powers, the British agreed to recognize ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz as the legitimate ruler of Najd and al-Aḥsāʾ

Riḍā’s embrace of Wahhābism was a highly controversial development at the time, as most of the Islamic world still perceived the Wahhābī movement as heretical.

The rest of the Islamic world that Wahhabis considered as disbelievers!

Riḍā regarded some of the Wahhābīs, including the Ikhwān, as extremists.80 But he denied that they represented the true spirit of Wahhābism, a term that he used neutrally and that he described as a movement of reform and renewal (al-iṣlāḥ waʾl-tajdīd). Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, he wrote, was a mujaddid, a renewer of Islam, who taught the people of Najd the proper understanding of tawḥīd as expounded by Ibn Taymiyya.

Never connected to the Salaf

Born in 1282/1865 in Tripoli, in modern-day Lebanon, Riḍā began his intellectual career as a disciple of one of the pioneers of Islamic modernism, the Egyptian Muḥammad ʿAbduh (d. 1323/1905).82 ʿAbduh and his followers believed that Islam needed to be reformed in accordance with the requirements of the modern, European-led world. Immersed in European philosophy and culture, they departed drastically in some ways from the accumulated theological and legal tradition of Sunnī Islam.

ʿAbduh, for instance, wished to do away with the Sunnī legal schools and was skeptical of much of the ḥadīth corpus. Shortly after moving to Cairo in 1315/1898, Riḍā sought and obtained ʿAbduh’s assistance in establishing his journal, al-Manār. He saw himself as a steward of ʿAbduh’s intellectual project. Yet Riḍā was always more conservative in his approach to the Islamic textual tradition than his mentor and, unlike him, was deeply sympathetic to the teachings of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb.

Clearly, Riḍā did not agree with the idea—foundational to Wahhābism—that showing hatred and enmity to unbelievers is a condition of faith.

a certain tension between ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and the Wahhābī scholars. While their relationship was generally one of “harmony,” there were times when “the zealotry of the Ulema” seemed to put the relationship in jeopardy.105 As with the Ikhwān, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz found himself having “to keep them in check.”106 While he had used the scholars “to consolidate his State and maintain his control over his subjects,” he also had taken care “to keep them in their place … to show the people, even if he has to be despotic, that they, the Ulema, are not the supreme power in the State.”

While in one sense ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz was merely reiterating a Wahhābī dictum, this being that Wahhābism is nothing but true Islam, he was also pushing back against the idea of Wahhābī separatism. It was important to him that the Wahhābīs shed their self-conception as a sect apart from and hostile to the majority of the Islamic world. Such a change required rejecting the very idea that there was a particular Wahhābī doctrine or creed, and it also required ceasing to self-identify as “Wahhābīs,” as Ibn Siḥmān and some of the other scholars had begun to do.

a mildly critical assessment of the founder of Wahhābism, at once praised for preaching the correct understanding of tawḥīd and criticized for the manner (uslūb) in which he did so. The problem with his uslūb, in al-Ṭanṭāwī’s view, was that it involved pronouncing takfīr on Muslims and fighting them as unbelievers. Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, he wrote, “observed the manifestations of shirk being committed by certain people at graves, and so he considered them to be polytheists. He then extended this judgment generally [ʿammama ʾl-ḥukm] to every land where these domes and tombs were found. This is to say, he judged Muslims to be apostates en masse [ḥakama bi-riddat al-Muslimīn jamīʿan] and deemed their blood and property licit.”4 While this might seem like an unflattering portrayal of the Najdī reformer, al-Ṭanṭāwī was far more concerned with being perceived as an apologist for the Wahhābī movement than he was the reverse.5 His hope was to be as balanced as possible, but he understood that for many this would look like an apology for Wahhābism.

a group known as al-Jamāʿa al-Salafiyya al-Muḥtasiba (The Salafī Group that Commands Right and Forbids Wrong) grew to prominence with a similar message, arguing that the Āl Suʿūd and their supporters had betrayed the Wahhābī heritage.

In the 1400s/1980s, jihādī ideologues began to appeal to the Wahhābī heritage as the principal source of their revolutionary ideology, seeing themselves as the heirs of the movement begun by Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb. Gradually, the jihādī movement acquired a distinctly Wahhābī character, as Wahhābī texts and concepts became a focal point of jihādī ideology.

As al-Maqdisī tells it, his first encounter with the Wahhābī tradition was textual. While pursuing religious studies in Saudi Arabia in the early 1400s/early 1980s, he chanced upon a set of old books in the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina titled al-Durar al-saniyya fī ʾl-ajwiba al-Najdiyya. This was the main compendium of the writings of the Wahhābī scholars from the time of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb to the early twentieth century. The encounter with these texts, he would say, “was my first contact with the books of the imāms of the Najdī mission.”

The recruits in Islamic State training camps were made to study textbooks about Wahhābī creed.36 In the summer of 1436/2015, the Islamic State’s official publishing house began the printing of classic Wahhābī texts, from Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s Arbaʿ qawāʿid fī ʾl-dīn and Kashf al-shubuhāt to Sulaymān ibn ʿAbdallāh’s al-Dalāʾil fī ḥukm muwālāt ahl al-ishrāk and Ḥamad ibn ʿAtīq’s Sabīl al-najāt waʾl-fikāk. The purpose of printing these texts was to inculcate in the new generation of jihādīs a proper understanding of Islamic belief, one that was exclusivist and militant.