Page 228 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

‘Araby the Blest* 225

daughter of Ibn Abdul Wahhab, assumed, at the latter’s urging, the title of
xmam spiritual and temporal leader of the Muslim community.
The followers of Ibn Abdul Wahhab styled themselves muwahhidun,
‘believers in the oneness (of God)’, after the principal doctrine expounded by

the reformer. It has been well said that the essence of his teaching was that he
took the basic precept of Islam, ‘There is no God but God and Muhammad is
the Prophet of God’, and enhanced the force of the first proposition by
suppressing that of the second. As God is one and indivisible, as well as being
the sole possessor of divine power, it follows (so Ibn Abdul Wahhab argued)
that prayer to anyone other than God is tantamount to polytheism (shirk), the

ultimate sin. Even the Prophet himself could not be excluded from this blanket
admonition. To pray to him - as to any other prophet, saint or spirit - to
intercede for the suppliant with God was to merit condemnation as a mushrik, a
polytheist. A like abomination was the excessive veneration of past saints and
prophets, especially when it took the form of erecting costly and elaborate
tombs or mosques over their graves. To worship at such shrines — worse still, to

seek blessings from the shrines themselves - was nothing short of idolatry, as
heinous in its way as was the attribution of a spiritual or sacred quality to
stones, trees and springs. In place of these odious and degenerate practices Ibn
Abdul Wahhab preached a reversion to the pristine prescriptions of Islam,
with especial emphasis being placed upon the performance of the obligatory

acts of devotion, the so-called ‘five pillars’ of the faith - the shahada, or
profession of faith; thesa/a/z, or daily ritual prayers; thezakah, or alms giving;
thesownz, or fast during the month of Ramadan; and the hajj, or pilgrimage.
The Koranic prohibitions and penalties were also to be strictly enforced,
especially those applying to murder, theft, adultery, usury, gambling and the
drinking of wine. To these proscribed acts Ibn Abdul Wahhab added the
enjoyment of tobacco, music and fine apparel.

What, in sum, he was propounding was a fundamentalism of the narrowest
and harshest kind. All knowledge other than that contained in the Koran and
the hadith (traditions), construed at their face value, was, according to Ibn
Abdul Wahhab, to be rejected. All philosophical or legal innovations (bida)
introduced into Islam after the third century AH were to be discarded as

excrescences. Only the four Sunni law schools - Hanbali, Hanafi, Maliki and
Shafi - could be recognized as legitimate (the Shia were simply dismissed as
mushrikun), and of these the Hanbali rite, the severest of the four, was that most
worthy to be followed. It was the sacred duty of the muwahhidun, those who
had accepted the Najdi reformation, to induce other Muslims to follow suit. If
the latter failed to mend their ways, they were to be treated as kafirs, unbeliev­
ers, and the holy war (jihad) was to be waged against them as fiercely as against
all infidels and non-Muslims.

It was this last element in Ibn Abdul Wahhab’s dogma that accounted as
much as anything for its spread in central Arabia, and along with it the