Page 227 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

CHAPTER V

'Araby the Blest'

‘The winds of Paradise are blowing. Where are ye who hanker
after Paradise?’

War chant of the Saudi ikhwan

The kingdom of Saudi Arabia is, to all intents and purposes, a theocracy, ruled
on absolutist principles by the Al Saud dynasty. From its very beginning in the
second half of the eighteenth century the Saudi state, together with its ruling
house, has been identified with the puritanical movement of Islamic revival
known to the outside world as Wahhabism, after the Muslim reformer who
instituted it, Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab. A native of Ayaina in Najd, Ibn
Abdul Wahhab spent much of his life up to the age of forty in travel and study

abroad, returning to his birthplace in the early 1740s. What he had seen and
learned on his travels had convinced him that the practice of Islam everywhere
had fallen into a grievous state, which could only be remedied by a return to the
austere simplicity of early Islam and a thoroughgoing purge of the supersti­
tions, heresies and other pernicious accretions which over the centuries had

come to sully the purity of the faith. He formulated his arguments in a work
entitled Kitab al-Tawhid, ‘the Book of the Unity (of God)’, and set forth on a
self-imposed mission to win his fellow Najdis back to a proper observance of
their religious duties.
Initially, he made little headway with the townsmen of Najd, who were
rather attached to the habits and customs that Ibn Abdul Wahhab condemned

- among them adultery, hagiolatry and the worship of sacred trees, stones and
springs. The Bedouin were even greater religious backsliders, almost incorrig­
ible in their addiction to superstitions and animistic beliefs. At Dariya, some
miles to the south-eastwards of Ayaina and a little to the north of Riyad, the
reformer had better fortune, converting to his cause Muhammad ibn Saud, the
chief of the Al Saud clan of the Anaiza tribal confederation. With Muhammad

ibn Saud’s armed support, Ibn Abdul Wahhab was able to spread his teaching
more widely among the tribes; so that by the time of the Saudi chieftain’s death
in 1765 most of Najd had sworn dual allegiance to the Al Saud and to the
doctrines of Ibn Abdul Wahhab. The theocratic compact was ratified when
Muhammad ibn Saud’s son and successor, Abdul Aziz, who had married a