Wahhabi

“ In 1691, however, Mohammed Ibn Abd-el-Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabi sect, was born at Eiyanah in Aared, his father being of the Ibn Temim tribe, the same which till lately held power in Jebel Shammar. In his youth he went to Bussorah, and perhaps to Damascus, to study religious law, and after making the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina returned to his native country, and soon after married in the village of Horeylama near Deriyeh. There and at Eyaneh he began his preaching, and about the year 1742 succeeded in converting Mohammed Ibn Saoud, Emir of Deriyeh, the principal town of Aared. ”

“ In 1798 a Turkish force was sent from Bagdad into El Hasa, but was compelled to retreat without accomplishing anything, and its discomfiture added much to the renown of the Wahhābi power. In 1801 Saūd, son of the amir Abdul Aziz, led an expedition to the Euphrates, and on the festival of Bairam, the 20th of April, stormed Kerbela, put the defenders to the sword, destroyed the sacred tomb, scattered the sacred relics and returned laden with the treasures, accumulated during centuries in the sanctuary of the Shiā faith. Mecca itself was taken ”

“ The only strong advocate of such views at the present day among true Arabs in Arabia is the aged Sherif, Abd el Mutalleb, the Sultan's nominee, who indeed has spared no pains, since he was installed at Mecca, to fan the zeal of the North Africans. A Wahhabi in his youth, he is still a fierce Puritan; and it is possible that, should he live long enough (he is said to be ninety years old) , he may be able to produce a corresponding zeal in Arabia. But at present the mass of the Arabs in Hejaz, no less than in Nejd and Yemen, are occupied with more humane ideas. ”

“ Along its course lie the villages of Ayana, and Deraiya the former Wahhābi capital, destroyed by Ibrahim Pasha in 1817; and a few miles farther E. the new capital Riād, built by the emir Fēsal after his restoration and visited by Palgrave in 1863, and by Pelly two years later. ”

“ But the history of the Muhammadan propaganda in Africa during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is very slight and wholly insignificant when compared with the remarkable revival of missionary activity during the present century. Some powerful influence was needed to arouse the dormant energies of the African Muslims, whose condition during the eighteenth century seems to have been almost one of religious indifference. Their spiritual awakening owed itself to the influence of the Wahhābī reformation at the close of the eighteenth century ”

“ Thus, physically, they yield to few races, if any, of mankind; mentally, they surpass most, and are only kept back in the march of progress by the remarkable defect of organizing power and incapacity for combined action. Character. Lax and imperfect as are their forms of government, it is with impatience that even these are borne; of the four caliphs who alone reigned—if reign theirs could be called—in Arabia proper, three died a violent death; and of the Wahhabi princes, the most genuine representatives in later times of pure Arab rule, almost all have met the same fate. ”

“ WAHABIS, wä-hä'bḗz, WAHHABIS, or WAHABITES. A reforming sect in Islam, named after its founder, Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1691-1787) . He was born in Aarad, a district west of Nejd, the central province of Arabia. He traveled as a student of law as far as Basra, and perhaps Damascus, and brought back home with him from his observations the conviction of the necessity of reformation in his faith. ”

“ They again took another start at a later period, but neither was this permanent; a purely Arab State, and that, too, founded upon religion, can be kept together for any length of time only by rulers of uncommon efficiency. At present the Wahhabite kingdom, properly so called, is powerless; it is subject to that of the Shammar, which lies to the north of it, and the prince of which, Ibn Rashíd, a ruler of extensive tracts, is also a professor of Wahhabitism, though with none of the fiery zeal of earlier times. ”

“ The persons who attend such a congress will certainly be unaccompanied by forces which would enable them to resist legislation of which they disapprove, and it is unlikely that those whom they represent would be in a position to back them up. It is asserted that the Wahhabis, on their entry into the Sacred City, proceeded to perform a series of acts which would certainly move the indignation of the bulk of the Moslem world ”

“ There, a native Arab dynasty has sprung up which is free from Turkish control in every respect, and has its seat in Ha’il. But the zeal of the Wahhabites gave an impulse to [61] reform in the general body of Muslims which is not yet, by any means, extinct. Especially in India, their views have been widely spread by missionaries, and at one time there was grave fear of a Wahhabite insurrection. But dead parties in Islam seldom rise again, and the life of Wahhabism has passed into the Muslim Church as a whole. ”

“ In Ali Bey's time Yambu' belonged to the Sharif of Meccah, and was garrisoned by him. [FN#4] This, as far as I could learn, is the only tax which the Sultan's government derives from the northern Hijaz; the people declare it to be, as one might expect at this distance from the capital, liable to gross peculation. When the Wahhabis held Yambu', they assessed it, like all other places; for which reason their name is held in the liveliest abhorrence. [FN#5] Civilians usually stick one pistol in the belt ”

“ The Hijaz and some sea-ports, such as Jedda and others, are at present absolutely under the Turkish Government; while Bahrein, Oman and its capital Muscat, and Yaman are more or less independent. Between Nejd and Syria a new and promising kingdom has sprung up under Telal.
The time perhaps may come, and perhaps not far distant, when the Turks will disappear altogether from Arabia, and Wahhabism and independent tribes will alone remain. Another Muhammad or another Abdul Wahhab may some day again appear, and bring together the tribes under one rule for a time. ”

“ In Al-Hijaz, as in England, any allusion to poverty is highly offensive. [FN#7] The Koran expressly forbids a Moslem to discredit the word of any man who professes his belief in the Saving Faith. The greatest offence of the Wahhabis is their habit of designating all Moslems that belong to any but their own sect by the opprobrious name of Kafirs or infidels. ”

“ They look to the good old days of early Islam and try to restore them.
The first is that of the Wahhabites, so called from Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (Slave of the Bountiful) , its founder, a native of Najd in central Arabia, who died in 1787. His aim was to bring Islam back to its primitive purity and to do away with all the usages and beliefs which had arisen to cloud its absolute monotheism. But attempts at reformation in Islam have never led to anything but the founding of new dynasties. ”

“ The only Moslim authorities which have to some extent fulfilled their duty in this respect belong to comparatively small sects, regarded by most of their co-religionists as heretical, as for example the Wahhabites who arose in the interior of Arabia towards the end of the eighteenth century, and in later times the Mahdists in the Sudan. ”

“ Central and Western Arabia formed the battlefield on which these zealots, called Wahhâbites after their leader, were defeated by Mohammed Ali, the first Khedive, and his Egyptian army. Since they have given up their efforts at violent reconstitution of what they consider to be the original Islâm, they are left alone, and their ideas have found adherents far outside Arabia, e.g., in British India and in Northern and Central Africa. ”

“ Only the puritanical Wahhabis, whose present leader is King Ibn Saoud of Mecca, prohibit this, and at one time they carried their fanatical opposition to such an extent that after the World War was over they attacked Medina and even damaged the tomb of the Prophet to remove from it evidences of reverence for Mohammed which they considered to be worship of him. ”

“ In 1807, according to Ali Bey, the Wahhabis took the same precaution, says Mr. Bankes. The fact is, some such precautions must always be taken. The pilgrims are forbidden to quarrel, to fight, or to destroy life, except under circumstances duly provided for. Moreover, as I shall explain in another part of this work, it was of old, and still is, the custom of the fiercer kind of Badawin to flock to Arafat�where the victim is sure to be found�for the purpose of revenging their blood-losses. ”

“ It is probably a mere consideration of interest that prevents the people rising en masse,
[p.360] and re-asserting the liberties of their country. And I have heard from authentic sources that the Wahhabis look forward to the day when a fresh crusade will enable them to purge the land of its abominations in the shape of silver and gold.
The Masjid al-Nabi, or Prophet's Mosque, is the second in Al-Islam in point of seniority, and the second, or, according to others, the first in dignity, ranking with the Ka'abah itself. ”

“ The two men travelled extensively for many years and visited Mecca. In the Wahhabite movement they found much that was akin to their own views, and on returning to India preached the new doctrine of a pure Islam, and gathered many adherents. ”

“ India the mass of the Mussulman population is Shafite, especially in Hyderabad and the Bombay Presidency, where the Arab element is strongest, while Hanefism is the school of the great people who derive their origin from the Mogul conquests, and of many of the Ulema who are in the habit of making their religious education complete in the Hanefite schools of Bokhara. Wahhabism, too, in the present century has taken great hold of the poorer classes, and within the last few years a Turkish propaganda has been at work among them with some success. ”

“ They may begin with a saintly reformer, but in the first or the second generation there is sure to come the conquering disciple; religion and rule go together, and he who meddles with the one must next grasp at the other. The third stage is the extinction of the new dynasty and the vanishing of its party into a more or less secret sect, the vitality of which is again directed into religious channels. The Wahhabites were no exception. Their rule extended from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, touched al-Yaman and Hadramawt and included some districts of the Pashalik of Baghdad. ”

“ Wahhábíism was reform after a fashion, in one direction; in the history of Islám there have been attempts at reform in other directions; there will yet be such attempts, but so long as the Qurán and the Sunnat (or, in the case of the Shía'h, its equivalent) are to form, as they have hitherto [113] done for every sect, the sole law to regulate all conditions and states of life, enlightened and continued progress is impossible. The deadening influence of Islám is the greatest obstacle the Church of God has to overcome in her onward march; its immobility is the bane of many lands ”

“ And the Wahhabis, during the first year of their conquest, covered the Ka�abah with a red Kiswah of the same stuff as the fine Arabian Aba or cloak, and made at Al-Hasa.
The Kiswah is now worked at a cotton manufactory called Al-Khurunfish, of the Tumn Bab al-Sha�ariyah, Cairo. It is made by a hereditary family, called the Bayt al-Sadi, and, as the specimen in my possession proves, it is a coarse tissue of silk and cotton mixed. The Kiswah is composed of eight pieces�two for each face of the Ka�abah�the seams being concealed by the Hizam, a broad band, which at a distance looks like gold ”

“ At the end of the first year of his caliphate Abu Bekr saw Arabia united under Islam. The new national feeling demanded that all Arabs should be free men, so the caliph ordained that all Arab slaves should be freed on easy terms. The solidarity of Arabia survived the first foreign conquests. It was not intended that Arabs should settle in the conquered lands except as armies of occupation. Thus it was at first forbidden that Arabs should buy or possess land in these countries. Kūfa was to be only a military camp, as was Fostat in Egypt. ”

“ The Wahabi state founded by Abd-el-Wahab in the Nejd was modelled on the theocratic democracy of the Meccan caliphs, and when Abd-el-Wahab's princely disciple, Saud, loosed his fanatic hosts upon the holy cities, he dreamed that this was but the first step in a puritan conquest and consolidation of the whole Moslem world. Foiled in this grandiose design, Wahabism, nevertheless, soon produced profound political disturbances in distant regions like northern India and Afghanistan, as I have already narrated. ”

“ The Wahabi would wage, if they dared, perpetual war not only against the infidel, but against such perverted individuals as those who go to worship at Mecca and other sacred shrines. The founder of this revival is reported to have beaten his sons to death for drinking wine, and to have made his daughters support themselves by spinning, but at the same time he felt himself entitled to give to a fanatical follower, who courted death for his sake, an order for an emerald palace and a large number of female slaves in the world to come. ”

“ The inhabitants of Yemen are settled, and for the most part occupied in agriculture and trade, the conditions which favour the pastoral or Bedouin type found in Hejaz and Nejd hardly existing. As in the adjoining province of Hadramut, with which Yemen has always been closely related, the people are divided into four classes:— (1) The Seyyids or Ashrāf, descendants of the prophet, forming a religious aristocracy; (2) the Kabail, or tribesmen, belonging to the Kahtanic or original S. Arabian stock, who form the bulk of the population, and are the only class habitually carrying arms ”