It is in the context of this last subject, jihad, that Ibn Taymiyya is best remembered – and both admired and execrated. And not without reason, since his reinterpretation of jihad lies at the heart of modern Islamist revivalism.
In the first centuries of Islamic expansion, jihad had been recognised as an obligation on the part of all Muslims to strive for the faith until the entire world had converted or submitted to Islamic authority. That uncompromising view had inevitably set Islam on a collision course with Byzantine Christendom. But as Islam was transformed from an Arab faith into a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic world religion in which learning and diversity of interpretation was celebrated, so the literalist view of jihad gave way to a more pragmatic reading. Included in the Hadith is a famous pronouncement made by the Prophet Muhammad on his return from the battle of Badr, which marked the end of his military campaign against the polytheists: ‘We are finished with the lesser jihad (jihad kabeer); now we are starting the greater jihad (jihad akbar).’ This division of jihad now came to be interpreted in Islam as meaning that the outer and less important physical struggle for Islam was over and had given way to the more important inner, moral struggle. Even Ahmad bin Hanbal, the ninth-century jurist who gave his name to the most restrictive of the four Sunni schools of law, took this view. The dramatic spread of Sufi mysticism and the Sufi brotherhoods throughout the Islamic world community in the twelfth century helped to develop further this concept of jihad as a spiritual, inner struggle.
Ibn Taymiyya, however, declared the Prophet’s division of jihad to be inauthentic, on the grounds that it contradicted the words of God as set down in the Quran. Taking two verses (chapter 2, verse 193; and chapter 8, verse 39) from the Quran as his authority, Ibn Taymiyya defined jihad in strictly literal terms: as unrelenting struggle against all who stood in the way of Islam’s destiny.
This uncompromising interpretation has to be seen in the context of the threat to Islam posed by the Mongols and by the unorthodox, Shia beliefs they supported. Ibn Taymiyya declared the Mongol khans to be unbelievers, and called on all true Muslims to unite against them in battle as a matter of religious duty. In 1300 he actively participated in an important military victory over the Mongols outside Damascus, encouraging the troops on the battlefield by preaching jihad from the sidelines and even involving himself in their military training. But jihad, in his view, was much more than a matter of military defence: it was active belligerence against all who refused to heed the call of Islam or who disobeyed the strictures of Islam. It was, in his own words, ‘the punishment of recalcitrant groups, such as those that can only be brought under the sway of the Imam by a decisive fight… For whoever has heard the summons of the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him, and has not responded to it, must be fought.’
Ibn Taymiyya further declared jihad to be the finest act that man could perform: ‘Jihad against the disbelievers is the most noble of actions and moreover it is the most important action for the sake of mankind… Jihad implies all kinds of worship, both in its inner and outer forms. More than any other act jihad implies love and devotion for God… Since its aim is that the religion is Allah’s entirely and Allah’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.’
Ibn Taymiyya classified the enemies of Islam into four distinct groups: infidels such as Christians, with whom it was permissible to make peace agreements and share meals, whose women Muslims might marry and whose lives might be spared after they had been made prisoners; those Muslims who had reverted to infidel habits, with whom no peace could be made and who must be fought if they refused to return to the fold; those who declared themselves Muslims but were not carrying out Islam’s rituals properly, and were therefore to be killed without mercy; lastly, those who rejected Islam while still claiming to belong to it, and were thus deserving of no mercy under any circumstances.
It should always be remembered that Ibn Taymiyya’s literalist, dogmatic, intolerant ideology was widely condemned in his own lifetime. He was frequently in trouble with the religious authorities, imprisoned on several occasions and branded a heretic. His theology has never found a place in the Sunni mainstream. But it was never forgotten and it continued to attract adherents, of whom the most famous – until recent times – was the Arab named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, born in Nejd soon after the beginning of the eighteenth century.
At that time Nejd was no more than a barren stretch of scrubland surrounded on all sides by desert wastes, sparsely inhabited by tribes of Bedouin camel-herders and graziers engaged in endless internecine struggles for the possession of grasslands and oases. Indeed, for many Arabs Nejd had only negative associations. There was a popular saying that ‘Nothing good ever came out of Nejd’, and it was related in the Hadith that the Prophet had three times been called upon to ask God to bless Nejd and had three times refused, answering on the third occasion, ‘Earthquakes and dissension are there, and there shall arise the horns of Satan.’ In the years following the ministry of Al-Wahhab there were many who argued that this prophecy had been confirmed.
Al-Wahhab was of the impoverished tribe of Beni Temin, known only for the quality of their horseflesh. According to his many critics, he was a provincial bumpkin with little access to Islamic scholarship. This view was given some substance by his Wahhabi biographers, who wished to emphasise the learning he received from his father, a judge descended from a long line of respected jurists who followed the Hanbali school of law, holding that the interpretation of sharia had to be based exclusively on the Quran and the Hadith. But from the first Al-Wahhab was a devoted student of religion, and by the age of ten could recite the Quran from memory. As an adolescent talib he visited Medina and Basra, as well as flirting briefly with Sufism at Qum. A decade later he returned to Medina to sit at the feet of a number of renowned teachers drawn from all over the Muslim world. Whatever gloss his biographers later put on it, it was here that he acquired the extreme views associated with his name.
At Medina Al-Wahhab studied initially under a fellow Nejdi, Abd Allah ibn Ibrahim ibn Sayf, a known admirer of the theology of Ibn Taymiyya, who then introduced him to an Indian immigrant named MUHAMMAD HAYAT of Sind, a prominent teacher of Hadith. Although a follower of the Shafi school of jurisprudence and not a Hanbali, Muhammad Hayat was a Naqshbandi Sufi of the line of the sixteenth-century hardline revivalist Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi – and he too was an admirer of the heretical Sheikh Ibn Taymiyya. Muhammad Hayat and his father are known to have taught a great many students in Medina. Besides Al-Wahhab from Nejd these talibs included a young man from Delhi: Shah Waliullah.
Few historians seem to have realised that Shah Waliullah of Delhi, born in 1703, and Al-Wahhab of Nejd were not only contemporaries but studied in Medina over the same period and with at least one teacher in common. Shah Waliullah went to Mecca on hajj in 1730 at the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight and subsequently spent fourteen months studying in Medina. Al-Wahhab (born 1702/1703) is known to have returned to Medina to continue his studies in his late twenties. How long he spent there is not recorded, but the odds are that his time overlapped with Shah Waliullah’s period of stay. Shah Waliullah’s principal instructor of Hadith in Medina was the venerable Kurd Shaikh Abu Tahir Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Kurani al-Madani – who had earlier taught Muhammad Hayat of Sind, Al-Wahhab’s main teacher. Thus the intriguing possibility presents itself that these two young revolutionaries-to-be may have sat in the same classes and even exchanged ideas. Muhammad Hayat and his father, both followers of Ibn Taymiyya, encouraged their students to reject the rigid imitation of precedent, to make their own interpretations of religious law, and to view militant jihad as a religious duty. The consequences of their studies in Medina were that both Al-Wahhab and Shah Waliullah went home to become the two great Sunni revivalists of their time, each to implement the radical teachings learned in Medina in his own way.