Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (13 page)

Given the dismissive attitude of the Wahhabis towards Islamic history and law, the movement came under severe criticism from a considerable number of contemporaneous scholars, most notably ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s own brother, Sulayman, and reportedly his father as well.
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The main criticism leveled against ‘Abd al-Wahhab and his followers was that they exhibited very little regard for Islamic history, historical monuments, the Islamic intellectual tradition, or the sanctity of Muslim life.
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‘Abd al-Wahhab’s brother, as well as other critics, claimed that ‘Abd al-Wahhab, himself, was an ill-educated, intolerant man, who was ignorantly and arrogantly dismissive of any thoughts or individuals that disagreed with him.
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Sulayman complained that, except among the most extreme and fringe fanatical elements, his brother’s views were without

precedent in Islamic history.
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Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Wahhab, according to his brother, did not concern himself with reading or understanding the works of the juristic predecessors, but at the same time he treated the words of some, such as Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), as if they were Divinely revealed, not to be questioned or debated. But, even then, Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Wahhab was very selective with the works of Ibn Taymiyya, citing only what he liked and ignoring the rest.
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Sulayman, and other scholars, noted the irony in fact that Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Wahhab and his followers, while prohibiting
taqlid
(imitation or following the precedents of jurists), ended up affirming and even mandating it, but in a different form. They prohibited the practice of
taqlid
as far as it related to jurists whom they did not like, but demanded that Muslims imitate them blindly and unthinkingly. Sulayman complained that the Wahhabi methodology was based on a profound sense of despotism, where the whole of the Islamic intellectual tradition was dismissed off hand, and Muslims were given the choice of either accepting the idiosyncratic Wahhabi interpretations of Islam or being declared
kafirs
(infidels) and killed. Effectively, Sulayman argued, the Wahhabis behaved as if they alone, after several hundred years of history, had discovered the truth about Islam, and they considered themselves as if infallible.
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Therefore, in the Wahhabi paradigm, the only actual measure of commitment to Islam is to follow and obey them. If a Muslim disagrees with them then, by definition, that Muslim is a heretic.
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According to Sulayman, declaring Muslims infidels is considered a grave sin in Islam, and even Ibn Taymiyya prohibited the practice of
takfir
(branding Muslims as infidels).
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In order to prove his point, Sulayman concluded his treatise by quoting fifty-two traditions, attributed to the Prophet and some of the Companions, on the sin of accusing a Muslim of being an unbeliever or heretic.
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The simplicity, decisiveness, and incorruptibility of the religious thought of ‘Abd al-Wahhab made it attractive to the desert tribes, especially in the area of Najd. Ultimately, however, his ideas were too radical and extreme to have widespread influence on the Arab world, let alone the Muslim world. It is quite likely that ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s ideas would not have spread even in Arabia had it not been for the fact that in the late eighteenth century the Al Saud family united itself with the Wahhabi movement, and rebelled against Ottoman rule in Arabia.
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Armed with religious zeal and a strong sense of Arab nationalism, the rebellion was considerable, at one point reaching as far as Damascus in the north and Oman in the south. Egyptian forces under the leadership of Muhammad Ali in 1818, however, after several failed expeditions, quashed the rebellion, and Wahhabism, like other extremist movements in Islamic history, seemed to be on its way to extinction.
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Nevertheless, Wahhabi ideology was resuscitated once again in the early twentieth century under the leadership of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz b. Al Sa‘ud (r. 1319–73/1902–53), who adopted the puritanical theology of the Wahhabis and allied himself with the tribes of Najd, thereby establishing the nascent beginnings of what would become Saudi Arabia. The various Wahhabi

rebellions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were very bloody as the Wahhabis indiscriminately slaughtered Muslims, especially those belonging to the Sufi orders and the Shi‘i sect. In 1802, for example, the Wahhabi forces massacred the Shi‘i inhabitants of Karbala, and in 1803, 1804, and 1806 the Wahhabis executed a large number of Sunnis in Mecca and Medina whom they considered heretical.
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This led several mainstream jurists writing during this time period, such as the Hanafi jurist Ibn ‘Abidin (d. 1253/1837) and the Maliki jurist al-Sawi (d. 1241/1825), to condemn Wahhabis as a fanatic fringe group, and label them the “modern day Khawarij of Islam.”
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In the areas that fell under their control, the Wahhabis introduced practices that considerably expanded the intrusive powers of the state by making the state into the enforcer of a narrowly defined code of behavior, which, in their view, was the only correct Islam. For instance, the Wahhabis regularly flogged the residents of their territories for listening to music, shaving their beards, wearing silk or gold,
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smoking, playing backgammon, chess, or cards, or for failing to observe strict rules of sex segregation, and they destroyed all the shrines and most of the Muslim historical monuments found in Arabia.
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They also introduced the first reported precedent of taking rollcall at prayers. The Wahhabis prepared lists of the inhabitants of a city, and called off the names during the five daily prayers in the mosque, and anyone absent without a sufficient excuse was flogged. Being the caretakers of Mecca and Medina, the Wahhabis were uniquely positioned to enforce their version of orthodoxy upon Muslim pilgrims from around the world. As an indication of the limited popularity of the Wahhabi creed, at that stage of their development, the uncompromisingly austere practices of the Wahhabis during pilgrimage led to several clashes with pilgrims coming from Africa and Southeast Asia.
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In 1926, for example, the Wahhabi hostility to all forms of musical instruments led to a crisis between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, when Egyptian soldiers carrying the ceremonial palanquin to the sound of bugles during pilgrimage were attacked and beaten, and had their musical instruments destroyed. The Wahhabis also criminalized all forms of Sufi chants and dances in Mecca and Medina, and eventually in all of Saudi Arabia.
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There were four main factors that contributed to the survival and, in fact, the thriving of Wahhabism in contemporary Islam. (1) by rebelling against the Ottomans, Wahhabism appealed to the emerging ideologies of Arab nationalism in the eighteenth century. By treating Muslim Ottoman rule as a foreign occupying power, Wahhabism set a powerful precedent for notions of Arab self- determination and autonomy. (2) as noted above, Wahhabism advocated the return to the pristine and pure origins of Islam. Accordingly, Wahhabism rejected the cumulative weight of historical baggage, and insisted upon a return to the precedents of the “rightly guided” early generations (
al-salaf al-salih
). This idea was intuitively liberating for Muslim reformers, since it meant the re-birth of
ijtihad
, or the return to
de novo
examination and determination of legal issues unencumbered by the accretions of precedents and inherited

doctrines. (3) by controlling Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia became naturally positioned to exercise a considerable influence on Muslim culture and thinking. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina are the symbolic heart of Islam, and are the sites where millions of Muslims perform pilgrimage each year. Therefore, by regulating what might be considered orthodox belief and practice while at pilgrimage, Saudi Arabia became uniquely positioned to influence greatly the belief systems of Islam itself. For instance, for purely symbolic purposes, the King of Saudi Arabia adopted the lowly title of the custodian and servant of the two Holy Sites. (4) and most importantly, the discovery and exploitation of oil provided Saudi Arabia with high liquidity. Especially post-1975, with the sharp rise in oil prices, Saudi Arabia aggressively promoted Wahhabi thought around the Muslim world. Even a cursory examination of the predominant ideas and practices would reveal the widespread influence of Wahhabi thought on the Muslim world today. Part of the reason for Saudi Arabia aggressively promulgating its creed is related to the third element mentioned above. It would have been politically awkward for Saudi Arabia to be the custodian of the two Holy Sites, but at the same time adopt a system of belief that is at odds with the rest of the Muslim world. To say the least, custodianship of the Holy Sites is a sensitive position in the Muslim world, and the Saudi exclusive claim to sovereignty over these cities remained problematic from the 1920s through the 1960s, especially because of the Wahhabis’ intolerant attitude towards ritualistic practices that they deem unorthodox. In the 1950s and 1960s, Saudi Arabia was coming under considerable pressure from republican and Arab nationalist regimes who tended to consider the Saudi system archaic and reactionary. In the 1970s, Saudi Arabia finally possessed the financial means to address its legitimacy concerns. The Wahhabis either had to alter their own system of belief to make it more consistent with the convictions of other Muslims, or they had to aggressively spread their convictions to the rest of the Muslim world. The first would have required the Saudi regime to re-invent itself, but, in many ways, it was easier to attempt to re-invent the Muslim world, and that is the option they chose.

Wahhabism, however, did not spread in the modern Muslim world under its own banner. Given the marginal origins of the Wahhabi creed, this would have been quite difficult to accomplish. Wahhabism spread in the Muslim world under the banner of Salafism. It is important to note that even the term “Wahhabism” is considered derogatory to the followers of Ibn ‘Abd-al-Wahhab, since Wahhabis prefer to see themselves as the representatives of Islamic orthodoxy. According to its adherents, Wahhabism is not a school of thought within Islam, but is Islam itself, and it is the only possible Islam. The fact that Wahhabism rejected the use of a school label gave it a rather diffuse quality and made many of its doctrines and methodologies immanently transferable. Salafism, unlike Wahhabism, was a far more credible paradigm in Islam, and in many ways an ideal vehicle for Wahhabism. Therefore, in their literature,

Wahhabi clerics have consistently described themselves as Salafis (adherents of Salafism), and not Wahhabis.

Salafism is a creed founded in the late nineteenth century by Muslim reformers such as Muhammad ‘Abduh (d. 1323/1905), Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1314/1897), Muhammad Rashid Rida (d. 1354/1935), Muhammad al-Shawkani (d. 1250/1834), and al-Jalal al-San‘ani (d. 1225/1810). Salafism appealed to a very basic and fundamental concept in Islam – that Muslims ought to follow the precedent of the Prophet and his Rightly Guided Companions (
al-salaf al-salih
). Methodologically, Salafism was nearly identical to Wahhabism except that Wahhabism is far less tolerant of diversity and differences of opinions. In many ways, Salafism was intuitively undeniable, partly because of its epistemological promise. The founders of Salafism maintained that on all issues Muslims ought to return to the original textual sources of the Qur’an and the
Sunnah
(precedent) of the Prophet. In doing so, Muslims ought to re-interpret the original sources in light of modern needs and demands without being slavishly bound to the interpretive precedents of earlier Muslim generations. As originally conceived, Salafism was not necessarily anti-intellectual, but, like Wahhabism, it did tend to be uninterested in history. By emphasizing a presumed golden age in Islam, the adherents of Salafism idealized the time of the Prophet and his Companions, and ignored or demonized the balance of Islamic history. Furthermore, by rejecting juristic precedents and undervaluing tradition as a source of authoritativeness, Salafism adopted a form of egalitarianism that deconstructed traditional notions of established authority within Islam. According to Salafism, effectively, anyone was considered qualified to return to the original sources and speak for the Divine Will. By liberating Muslims from the burdens of the technocratic tradition of the jurists, Salafism contributed to a real vacuum of authority in contemporary Islam. However, unlike Wahhabism, Salafism was not hostile to the juristic tradition or the practice of various competing schools of thought. In addition, Salafism was not hostile to mysticism or Sufism. The proponents of Salafism were eager to throw off the shackles of tradition, and to engage in the rethinking of Islamic solutions in light of modern demands. As far as the juristic tradition was concerned, Salafi scholars were synchronizers; they tended to engage in a practice known as
talfiq
, in which they mixed and matched various opinions from the past in order to emerge with novel approaches to problems. Importantly, for the most part, Salafism was founded by Muslim nationalists who were eager to read the values of modernism into the original sources of Islam. Hence, Salafism was not necessarily anti- Western. In fact, its founders strove to project contemporary institutions such as democracy, constitutionalism, or socialism onto the foundational texts, and to justify the paradigm of the modern nation-state within Islam. In this sense, Salafism, as originally conceived, betrayed a degree of opportunism. Its proponents tended to be more interested in the end results than in maintaining the integrity or coherence of the juristic method. Salafism was marked by an

anxiety to reach results that would render Islam compatible with modernity, far more than by a desire to critically understand either modernity or the Islamic tradition itself. For instance, the Salafis of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries heavily emphasized the predominance of the concept of
maslaha
(public interest) in the formulation of Islamic law. Accordingly, it was consistently emphasized that whatever would fulfill the public interest ought to be deemed a part of Islamic law.
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