At the moment when they were least expected, the Wahabis would arrive to confront the tribe they wished to subject, and a messenger from Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud would appear bearing a Koran in one hand and a sword in the other. His message was stark and simple: ‘Abd el Aziz to the Arabs of the tribe of ——, hail! Your duty is to believe in the book I send you. Do not be like the idolatrous Turks, who give God a human intermediary [a reference to the Wahhabi belief in a unitary God]. If you are true believers, you shall be saved; otherwise, I shall wage war upon you until death.’
Faced by such a stark choice, few tribes resisted. In 1773 the Emir’s strongest opponent in Nejd was defeated and the Wahhabis won the town of Riyadh, which now became the military base for further conquests extending far beyond the Nejd plateau.
In that same year Al-Wahhab, by then aged seventy, resigned the office of imam. Whether this was a voluntary or involuntary surrender is unclear. But the title was then assumed not by his eldest son or by some other leading figure from the Wahhabi ulema, as might have been expected, but by the Emir, Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud. The word imam means ‘one who leads’ and is usually read in Sunni Islam as ‘one who leads the prayers’, but it is quite clear that Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud used the title to present himself as spiritual head of the Wahhabi ulema. Nor is it possible to ignore the word’s associations with the supreme religious authority and infallibility of the imams who guided the early Islamic community in the first decades after the death of Muhammad and are revered as the al-Salaf al-Salih or ‘the Righteous Forefathers’. When Emir and Imam Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud took the title for himself he may have done so in much the same spirit as that in which King Henry VIII assumed the title of Defender of the Faith after breaking away from the authority of Rome – but it was at this juncture that Wahhabism began to take on the characteristics of a cult built around the infallibility of its emir-cum-imam.
For the next two decades Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud alone directed the Wahhabi expansion in the dual role of temporal leader and spiritual head of the Wahhabi ulema, his genius as a military commander and popular ruler enabling him to enlarge his Wahhabi chiefdom to an extent his father and father-in-law could scarcely have dreamed of. His first mentor and father-in-law Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab died in 1792, leaving twenty widows and eighteen children, five of whom became renowned Wahhabi religious teachers in their turn. This dynasty became known as the Aal as-Sheikh, the Family of the Sheikhs, with its most senior male members assuming the title of Mufti or chief judge of the Wahhabi ulema, so helping to maintain the dynastic links between the Ibn Sauds and the Aal as-Sheikh which continues to this day.
By the start of the nineteenth century a common identity had begun to take shape among the disparate tribes of the Arabian peninsula, superseding all other local loyalties. It was an Arab identity but also a Wahhabi identity, both personified in Emir and Imam Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud. As Burckhardt put it:
All the Arabs, even his enemies, praise Saud for his wisdom in counsel and his skill in deciding litigations; he was very learned in the Muselman [Muslim] law; and the rigour of his justice, although it disgusted many of his chiefs, endeared him to the great mass of his Arabs… A country once conquered by the Wahaby enjoys under him the most perfect tranquillity. In Nejd and Hedjaz the roads are secure, and the people free from any kind of oppression. The Muselmans are forced to adopt his system; but the Jews and Christians are not molested in exercising the respective religions of their ancestors, on condition of paying tribute.
By all accounts Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud was handsome in demeanour and modest in disposition, his only extravagance a passion for fine horses and his only weakness, in Arab eyes, a morbid fear of assassination that caused him to direct his armies into battle from a secure position to the rear. Yet it remains an incontrovertible fact that under his aegis the Wahhabi ghazu brought terror to large parts of Arabia as far south as Oman and the Yemen, and to the lands to the north as far as Baghdad and Damascus.
In 1802 a Wahhabi raiding band led by the Emir’s eldest son Saud ibn Saud attacked Karbala in modern-day Iraq, the most sacred shrine of the Shias, containing the tomb of their chief saint, Husayn, grandson of the Prophet and son of Imam Ali. ‘They pillaged the whole of it and plundered the Tomb of Hossein,’ wrote Lieutenant Francis Warden, ‘slaying in the course of the day, with circumstances of peculiar cruelty, above five thousand of the inhabitants. This event, which made a deep impression on the minds of the Turks, Arabs and Persians, was attributed to the guilty negligence of the Turkish Government, in failing to keep the Tomb of Hossein in a proper state of defence.’ Huge amounts of booty were seized, the emir-cum-imam taking the usual one-fifth for himself and sharing out the rest among his Wahhabi soldiery, a single share to every foot-soldier and a double share to every horseman.
In 1803 Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud requested and obtained the permission of the Sharif of Mecca, guardian of Islam’s holiest shrine, to perform the Hajj to Mecca, whereupon his Wahhabis laid waste to Islam’s holiest shrine. According to T. E. Ravenshaw, author of A Memorandum on the Sect of Wahabees, ‘They killed many Sheikhs and other believers who refused to adopt Wahabeeism; they robbed the splendid tombs of the Mahomedan saints who were interred there; and their fanatical zeal did not even spare the famous Mosque, which they robbed of the immense treasures and costly furniture to which each Mahomedan Prince of Europe, Asia and Africa had contributed his share.’
In 1804 a Wahhabi army again crossed the great desert into the Hijaz and destroyed tombs in the ancient cemetery at Medina, despoiling the grave of the Prophet Muhammad. In the following year the Wahhabis entered Mecca for the second time and, having massacred those who refused to accept their creed, now claimed it for themselves.
The shock waves of the fall of Mecca to the Wahhabis were felt in the farthest corners of the Ottoman Empire. To most Muslims it was sacrilege of the grossest kind, made all the worse by the Wahhabis’ violation of the tomb of the Prophet. By shutting down the pilgrimage route, the Wahhabis also closed off the path to salvation for all Muslims except those of their own sect. There were those who could place only one interpretation on these events: they marked the descent to earth of the false prophet Ad-Dajjal, as foretold by the Prophet Muhammad, and the beginning of the end of the world. Others were more sanguine, but concerned that they might lead to an Islamic revival. ‘The Wahabis are now united under the banner of a single leader where their power was formerly scattered among a thousand small tribes,’ wrote de Corancez in 1810:
This union has moulded vagrant hordes weakened by internecine wars into a people; and through this union the might of this people will soon spread beyond the desert itself… These Arabs lament their past glory, and impatiently await the time to regain it. Everything therefore points to the Wahabis becoming in our time – at least in the East – what the Arabs once were, and such a revolution can surely no longer be remote.
The British Government in India and the Turkish rulers of the Ottoman Empire now became involved, though from very different motives. Today one need only tap in ‘Wahhabi+British’ on the search engine of a PC to bring up any number of websites claiming a British hand behind the rise of Al-Wahhab and the Wahhabis as part of the Crusader war against Islam. Many take as their source the purported memoirs of a British spymaster named Mr Humphrey, who in the mid-eighteenth century supposedly infiltrated the Ottoman caliphate in the guise of a Muslim and thereafter guided Al-Wahhab’s every move. One such site declares of the Wahhabis that ‘their false love of religion traces back to a dajjal [devil] who went by the name of Muhammad bin Abdul-Wahhab, who was a man sponsored, educated, paid, and helped by the British to eradicate the Uthmani [Ottoman] empire, as well as the rest of the Ummah from within.’ Mr Humphrey is in fact a fiction, part of a German-inspired effort to destabilise the Indian war effort in the Second World War. The author was most probably the anti-British ex-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad al-Husseini, also known as ‘Hitler’s Mufti’.