The Bedouin tribes of Arabia were mainly pastoralists, seemingly united by shared customs but as inveterately hostile to each other as the Pathans, with whom they shared many qualities. ‘The Arab’, noted the Swiss scholar and traveller J. H. Burckhardt, after visiting Mecca and Medina in disguise in 1816, ‘displays his manly character when he defends his guest at the peril of his own life, and submits to the reverses of fortune, to disappointment and distress with the most patient resignation… the Bedouin learns at an early period of life, to abstain and to suffer, and to know from experience the healing power of pity and consolation.’ Like the Pathans, the Bedouin valued their independence above all else: ‘Their primary cause is that sentiment of liberty, which has driven and still keeps them in the Desert, and makes them look down with contempt upon the slaves that dwell around them… The Bedouin exults in the advantages he enjoys; and it may be said, without any exaggeration, that the poorest Bedouin of an independent tribe smiles at the pomp of a Turkish Pasha.’
A prohibition on inter-tribal marriage helped to reinforce this sense of independence. Writing about the Wahhabis a few years before Burckhardt, Louis Alexandre Olivier de Corancez, the French Consul at Aleppo, noted that this ban ‘circumscribes the number of members of each tribe within extremely narrow limits, preserving unity within them through blood ties. Each tribe may therefore be described as an extended family whose father is the sheikh chosen by the Arabs… Since time immemorial, some of the tribes have been at war, and others in alliance with one another.’
By marrying his son into Al-Wahhab’s tribe Muhammad ibn Saud broke with custom but initiated a process that led to the unification of a number of disparate tribes under one leader. ‘Thus’, added de Corancez in his Histoire des Wahabis, ‘was born among the Arabs, in the very heart of their country, a new people which fashioned greatness out of its own wretchedness.’
The unification of Bedouin society under one green banner had been achieved once before, but only after a great deal of military coercion. Now once again those who had no wish to share one man’s vision of God were made to do so. The religious ideology to which Al-Wahhab gave his name created a community united in its total submission to God in the person of his emir. Every man who joined Muhammad ibn Saud’s inter-tribal commonwealth was required to take an oath of allegiance, on pain of losing his place in Paradise, to observe the law according to the Wahhabi tenets, and to pay religious tax at the rate of one Spanish dollar for every five camels and one for every forty sheep, those owning land or property paying by providing a certain number of armed camel-riders. To enforce compliance Imam Al-Wahhab instituted a cadre of religious policemen known as the mutawihin, guardians of public morals. Burckhardt describes them as ‘Constables for the punctuality of prayers… with an enormous staff in their hand, [who] were ordered to shout, to scold and to drag people by the shoulders to force them to take part in public prayers, five times a day.’ But the mutawihin were much more than enforcers of religious laws, for as well as ensuring conformity in almost every aspect of life from dressing modestly to closing shops at prayer-times, they also served as the movement’s religious commissars, seeing to it that only the Call to Unity was preached in the Friday mosques and taught in the madrassahs.
In return for their allegiance Muhammad ibn Saud offered his followers the prospect of conquest. Raiding one’s neighbours had been part and parcel of Bedouin life since before the days of the Prophet, but in 1746 Imam Al-Wahhab issued a formal proclamation of jihad against all those who refused to share his vision of Unity. Taking the early struggles of the Prophet against non-believers as its model, the Emir’s ghazu or war-parties began raiding deep into what were now proclaimed infidel territories, attacking the weakest first while their Imam secured non-aggression pacts with their more powerful neighbours. ‘By attacking the weaker singly and compelling them to join his standard against their neighbours,’ observed Lieutenant Francis Warden, author of the first British report on the Wahhabi phenomenon, Historical Sketch of the Wahabee tribe of Arabs 1795 to 1818, ‘the Wahabee [i.e., Muhammad ibn Saud] gradually increased his power to a height which enabled him to overawe the greater States.’
Whatever spiritual gloss he cared to put on it in his writings, under Al-Wahhab’s tutelage the Bedouin of Nejd became not so much holy warriors as fanatics without scruples. They preyed on their neighbours, each man in the raiding party setting out to plunder, destroy and kill bolstered by the conviction that he did so as a jihadi. One-fifth of the proceeds from these raids went to their emir, the rest being divided among the participating tribes. As for the imam and his Wahhabi ulema, they received the normal zakat or religious tax as required by the Quran of all true believers. Thus there was something in it for everyone – provided they were Wahhabi.
When in July 1929 the Wahhabi envoy Hafiz Wahba set out to explain the Wahhabi philosophy to his British audience at the Central Asian Society in London, he was at pains to draw parallels with the Protestant reformers in Europe, likening Ibn Taymiyya to his contemporary Martin Luther. The first European observers of the Wahhabis also drew parallels with their own Church. ‘The religion of the Wahabys may be called the Protestantism or even Puritanism of the Mohammedans’, noted J. H. Burckhardt:
The Wahaby acknowledges the Koran as a divine revelation; his principle is, ‘The Koran, and nothing but the Koran’… He reproves the Muselmans of this age, for their impious vanity in dress, their luxury in eating and smoking. He asks them whether Mohammed dressed in pelisses, whether he ever smoked the argyle or the pipe? All his followers dress in the most simple garments, having neither about their own persons, nor their horses, any gold or silver; they abstain from smoking, which, they say, stupefies and intoxicates. They reject music, singing, dancing, and games of every kind, and live with each other (at least in the presence of their chief) on terms of most perfect equality.
Although Al-Wahhab’s main targets were the Sufis and the Shias, many of the most popular practices of Sunni Islam were also condemned as innovations or reversions to paganism. They included a host of expressions of religious devotion that had developed over the centuries, such as invoking the intercession of the Prophet, the saints or the angels; visiting or praying at the graves of holy men or erecting monuments over their graves; celebrating the Prophet’s birthday or the feasts of dead saints; and making votive offerings. At the same time, many everyday habits were also declared sinful, among them smoking tobacco or hashish, dancing, playing music, fortune-telling, dressing in silks, telling beads or wearing talismans. The shaving of beards, the wearing of robes that failed to show the ankle, the use of rosaries to count the ninety-nine names of God and much else besides was declared un-Islamic.
But the parallels with Puritanism went only so far. According to the Wahhabi code, the moment a Muslim deviated from Al-Wahhab’s interpretation of monotheism he became an unbeliever – and the moment he became an unbeliever his life and goods became forfeit. ‘Any doubt or hesitation’, states The Book of Unity, Kitab al-Tawhid, ‘deprives a man of immunity of his property and his life.’
When asked to name the chief qualities of their faith, Muslims almost invariably describe it as a religion of peace, using the adjectives ‘merciful’ and ‘compassionate’ to describe God, as set out in the famous invocation that makes up the first chapter of the Quran. The Arabic of the Quran is a richly symbolic language, full of nuances, ambiguities, and words that when pronounced with different inflections can convey wider meanings. It is also a source text full of seeming contradictions that demand scholarly guidance to be fully understood. By its exclusive interpretation of the Quran and the Hadith, Al-Wahhab’s theology threw overboard all the checks and balances that Islamic jurisprudence had developed over centuries of learning to shape a confusing and conflicting series of revelations delivered in hard times in a hard country in the seventh century into a model for civilised, theocratic living. And by its selective reading and its focus on those passages which gave licence to anathematise, persecute, and kill without mercy, Al-Wahhab’s Islam effectively sidelined the Quran’s central message of charity, tolerance, forgiveness and mercy.