The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam From the Extremists (7 page)

Wahhabism exhibited extreme hostility to all forms of intel- lectualism, mysticism, and sectarianism within Islam, consid- ering all of these to be corrupt innovations that had crept into the religion due to un-Islamic influences. The Wahhabis tended to treat everything that did not come out of Arabia proper to be inherently suspect, and they believed that un-Islamic influ- ences came from nations such as Persia, Turkey, and Greece. For example, Wahhabis believed that Sufism was a Persian im- port; belief in the intercession of saints and the veneration of gravesites, a Turkish import; and rationalism and philosophy,

a Greek import.
2
These Wahhabi claims are overly simplistic and inaccurate, but there is no question that Wahhabis have always equated the austere cultural practices of Bedouin life with the one and only true Islam.
3

According to the Wahhabis, it was imperative to return to a presumed pristine, simple, and straightforward Islam, which was believed to be entirely reclaimable by a literal implemen- tation of the commands and precedents of the Prophet, and by a strict adherence to correct ritual practice. In effect, the Wah- habis treated religious texts—the Qur’an and the Sunna—as an instruction manual to a virtual utopia modeled after the Prophet’s city-state in Medina. If only Muslims would return to adopting the correct beliefs and practices mandated by God, the reasons for their backwardness and for their collec- tive sense of humiliation would disappear because Muslims would once again earn God’s favor and support. Wahhabism also rejected the long-established Islamic practice of consider- ing a variety of schools of thought to be equally orthodox, and attempted to narrow considerably the range of issues upon which Muslims could legitimately disagree. Orthodoxy was narrowly defined by the Wahhabis, according to whom the historical practice of accepting a plurality of opinions as equally legitimate and valid was one of the reasons for Mus- lim disunity and also one of the reasons for the backwardness and weakness of Muslims.

‘Abd al-Wahhab and his followers often engaged in rhetor- ical tirades against prominent medieval and contemporaneous jurists, whom they considered heretical, and even ordered the execution or assassination of a large number of jurists with whom they disagreed.
4
In his writings, ‘Abd al-Wahhab fre- quently referred to jurists as “devils” or “the spawn of Satan” (
shayatin
or
a‘wan al-shayatin
), and therefore removed any psychological barrier to violating the memories or lives of

distinguished scholars.
5
According to ‘Abd al-Wahhab and his followers, the juristic tradition—with the exception of a few jurists, such as Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), whom they held in high esteem—was largely corrupt, and deference to the well-established schools of jurisprudential thought or to con- temporaneous jurists was an act of heresy.
6
All jurists who were not strict literalists—or those who were suspected of using reason in legal interpretation or who had integrated ra- tionalist methods of analysis into their interpretive ap- proaches—were considered heretics. Among the medieval jurists that the Wahhabis explicitly condemned as
kuffar
(infi- dels) were prominent scholars such as Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 606/1210). This is akin to Jews accusing Maimonides or Catholic Christians accusing Thomas Aquinas of being infidels because they relied on rationalist criteria in thinking about God’s law. Furthermore, all Shi’is, without exception, and all jurists suspected of harboring Shi’i sympathies were also con- sidered heretics. The significance of calling a Muslim a heretic was enormous: a heretic was to be treated as an apostate, and thus killing or executing him was considered lawful.
7

‘Abd al-Wahhab himself was fond of creating long lists of beliefs and acts which he considered hypocritical and the adoption or commission of which would immediately render a Muslim an unbeliever. For instance, ‘Abd al-Wahhab con- tended that if a Muslim proclaimed that the consumption of bread or meat was unlawful, then such a Muslim had become an infidel, because it is clear that bread and meat are lawful in Islamic law. And as an infidel, such a Muslim could be killed.
8
In his teachings, ‘Abd al-Wahhab consistently emphasized that there was no middle of the road for a Muslim: either a Muslim was a true believer or not. And if a Muslim was not a true believer, according to his standards, ‘Abd al-Wahhab had no qualms about declaring that Muslim an infidel and then

treating him as such. If a Muslim explicitly or implicitly com- mitted an act that betrayed the impurity of his belief in God or implicitly or explicitly “associated partners with God”
9
—an Islamic expression meaning to fail to believe that there is one and only one God who is immutable and eternal. To associate partners with God is to ascribe to God partners or to believe that God has co-equal partners—then that Muslim must be considered an infidel and killed. For ‘Abd al-Wahhab, any in- dulgence in rationalism or frivolity—such as music, art, or nonreligious poetry—was indeed a form of associating part- ners with God serious enough to take a Muslim out of the fold of Islam.

‘Abd al-Wahhab was rabidly hostile toward non-Muslims as well, insisting that a Muslim should adopt none of the cus- toms of non-Muslims, and should not befriend such people ei- ther. It was entirely immaterial what a non-Muslim might think about Muslim practices, and it was equally immaterial whether non-Muslims were impressed by or approved of Mus- lim behavior. Importantly, ‘Abd al-Wahhab saw as unbelievers not only Christians and Jews but also Muslims who, due to their beliefs or actions, had (in his estimate) become apos- tates.
10
In the balance of things, according to ‘Abd al-Wahhab, apostate Muslims were
worse
than Christians and Jews be- cause their heretical beliefs or actions were more damaging to the faith.
11

Significantly, ‘Abd al-Wahhab also insisted that it was a sign of spiritual weakness for Muslims to care for or be interested in non-Muslim beliefs or practices. Pursuant to a doctrine known as
al-wala’ wa al-bara’
(literally, the doctrine of loyalty and disassociation), ‘Abd al-Wahhab argued that it was imperative for Muslims not to befriend, ally themselves with, or imitate non-Muslims or heretical Muslims. Furthermore, this enmity and hostility of Muslims toward non-Muslims and heretical

Muslims had to be visible and unequivocal.
12
For example, it was forbidden for a Muslim to be the first to greet a non-Muslim; and even if a Muslim returned a greeting, a Muslim should never wish a non-Muslim peace. Likewise, Muslims could convey their condolences to non-Muslims, but they should never pray that God have mercy upon them or ask God to for- give their sins. Muslims were only allowed to say, “May God guide you to the right path” or “May God compensate you for your loss.” If a Muslim violated any of these rules, he or she was to be treated as an apostate. The same dire conse- quences would follow if a Muslim referred to a non-Muslim as “brother” or “sister.”

Moreover, Wahhabis prohibited the use of labels of respect intended to honor human beings, such as “master,” “doctor,” “mister,” or “sir.” ‘Abd al-Wahhab argued that such prefixes were a form of associating partners with God; therefore, using them was enough to make a Muslim an infidel. More impor- tantly, ‘Abd al-Wahhab argued, the prefixes and labels consti- tuted an imitation of Western unbelievers and were thus condemnable, because those who imitated unbelievers were themselves unbelievers. Similarly, partaking in celebrations, vacations, festivities, or any other social event originally in- vented by non-Muslims was sufficient to make a Muslim an infidel.
13

‘Abd al-Wahhab espoused a self-sufficient and closed sys- tem of belief that had no reason to engage or interact with any other, except from a position of dominance. This is especially important because ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s orientation did not ma- terially differ from the approach adopted by later Muslim pu- ritan groups concerning the irrelevance of universal moral values to the Islamic mission. This insularism and moral isola- tionism, clearly manifested in the writings of ‘Abd al-Wahhab, was powerfully reproduced by ideologues of subsequent puri-

tan movements. For instance, Sayyid Qutb, one of the most in- fluential puritan ideologues, argued in the mid-twentieth cen- tury that the world, including the Muslim world, was living in
jahiliyya
(the darkness and ignorance associated with the pre- Islamic era). Like ‘Abd al-Wahhab, Qutb espoused a closed system of intellectual isolationism and argued that Muslims ought not interact with non-Muslims except from a position of supremacy.
14

The real irony is that at the heart of ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s zeal for Islamic purity was a pro-Arab ethnocentrism that was completely at odds with Islam’s universal message. As in later puritan movements, there was a strong political and national- istic cause to ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s thought—a cause that was promoted and concealed behind a veneer of religious lan- guage. ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s sworn enemies were not Christians or Jews but the Ottoman Turks. ‘Abd al-Wahhab accused the Ottoman Turks of corrupting Islam, and he described them as the moral equivalent of the Mongols, who earlier had invaded Muslim territories and then converted to Islam. But like the Mongols, the Turks had converted to Islam in name only, as ‘Abd al-Wahhab saw it. Indeed, according to him, the Ot- toman Turks were the primary enemies of Islam because they were corrupting the religion from the inside while pretending to be sincere and true Muslims. ‘Abd al-Wahhab described the Ottoman caliphate as
al-dawlah al-kufriyya
(a heretical na- tion) and claimed that supporting or allying oneself with the Ottomans was as grievous a sin as supporting or allying one- self with Christians or Jews.
15

‘Abd al-Wahhab was wrong about the Ottoman Turks: they were nothing like the Mongols that ravished the Muslim world in the twelfth century, massacring hundreds of thou- sands of people and destroying an untold number of Muslim manuscripts. The Ottomans had established one of the

strongest caliphates and had been long-time defenders of the Islamic faith. Even before the Ottoman caliphate, the Turks had become an important ethnicity in the pluralist ethnic mo- saic forming the Islamic Empire. It is true that in the late Ot- toman period, the Ottomans had adopted an extremely inefficient and corrupt system of taxation based on special concessions and patronage, and at times they were very re- pressive and exploitative. But in their writings, ‘Abd al-Wahhab and his followers do not protest these policies, and so their hostility to the Ottomans does not seem to have been moti- vated by a principled stand against Ottoman injustice. Rather, ‘Abd al-Wahhab was, in part, reacting to the old ethnocentric belief that only Arabs can represent the one true and authentic Islam.
16

But the other factor that explains ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s ani- mosity toward the Ottomans was that he was responding to British efforts in the eighteenth century to destroy the Ot- toman caliphate by igniting the fires of local ethnicities, in- cluding that of Arab nationalism.
17
Interestingly, unlike other nonsecular Arab nationalists, ‘Abd al-Wahhab did not advo- cate the creation of an Arab caliphate instead of the Ottoman caliphate. But ‘Abd al-Wahhab was not interested in political theory or political practice as much as he was interested in pure Arab culture, which in ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s mind was indis- tinguishable from true Islam. ‘Abd al-Wahhab, however, did not realize or did not acknowledge that he was confusing the Arab culture—more precisely, the Bedouin culture of Arabia—and the universal precepts of Islam. Effectively, ‘Abd al-Wahhab was declaring the particulars of Bedouin culture to be the one and only true Islam and then universalizing these particulars by making them obligatory upon all Muslims.

This all points to a fact that has been overlooked by many contemporary observers: Wahhabism in the eighteenth century

was plagued by ideological inconsistencies that to this day have not been reconciled or resolved.
18
So, for instance, while condemning all cultural practices and insisting on strict sub- mission to Islam, in reality Wahhabism was thoroughly a con- struct of its own culture—that is, the Bedouin culture of the Najd region of Arabia (part of modern-day Saudi Arabia).
19
While insisting that there was only one true Islam, in reality Wahhabism universalized its own culture and declared
it
to be the one true Islam. While consistently condemning non-Muslim influences and rejecting any form of cooperation with the West, in reality Wahhabis were incited and supported by English colonialists to rebel against the Ottomans, which ef- fectively meant that Wahhabis sided with non-Muslim En- glishmen against their Muslim Ottoman enemies. Moreover, while condemning all forms of nationalism as an evil Western invention, in reality Wahhabism was a pro-Arab nationalistic movement that rejected Turkish dominance over Arabs under the guise of defending the one true Islam. Fundamentally, while the Wahhabis of the eighteenth century took the culture of the Bedouins of Najd and universalized it into
the
Islam, the Wahhabis of today take the culture of Saudi Arabia and uni- versalize it into the singularly true Islam.

Wahhabism’s cultural dependency belies its claims to tex- tual literalism. The fact that Wahhabism gives expression to a specific and narrow cultural context and understanding is not consistent with its claim that its convictions and laws are based on literal readings of Islamic texts. In fact, ‘Abd al- Wahhab and his followers interpreted texts in a selective mat- ter in order to bolster their preconceived notions on a variety of issues. This selective reading of the textual evidence was greatly facilitated by the fact that the Wahhabis had liberated themselves from a considerable part of the Islamic juristic heritage. Not having to contend with the interpretations of the

past made it much easier to read Islamic sources in such a way as to support Wahhabi cultural understandings and biases. Legal precedents that did not support Wahhabi positions were simply ignored, and past generations of jurists who did not share ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s understandings of Islam were treated as heretics.