Wahhabism

• 1. Introduction

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  Wahhabism, a Salafi revivalist movement within Sunni Islam, stopped being the official policy of Saudi Arabia in 2022. That same year the kingdom began marking a new annual Founding Day on the 22nd of February. The date commemorates the ascension of Muhammad ibn Saud in 1727. Its story gives far less weight to the religious partnership that earlier tellings put at the center.

  The movement carries the name of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an eighteenth-century Hanbali scholar from Najd, in central Arabia. Strangely, neither he nor his followers ever used the word. Historians have called the movement puritanical. Its adherents call it reform, a restoration of "pure monotheistic worship".

  This documentary asks who invented the label and why it stuck. It asks what the movement teaches about God, law and daily behavior. And it asks how a scholar's argument in Najd became the creed of three Saudi states, and then lost that standing. Underneath all of it sits a harder question: who gets to decide what the word even means?

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• 2. A Name From Opponents

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  Sulayman ibn Abd al-Wahhab was the founder's own brother, and he was among the movement's most ardent critics. He likely first used the word Wahhabi in a treatise attributed to him, Fasl al-Khitab fi al-Radd ala Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. His argument was that the movement amounted to one man's personal interpretation. Political opponents later spread the word widely as a way to denounce it.

  The founder and his early followers called themselves Muwahhidun, meaning the Monotheists. The name comes from tawhid, the central Islamic principle that God is one. Later, many followers preferred Salafi, which ties them to the salaf, the first three generations of Muslims. Another label, Najdi, simply points to the region where the movement began. Modern followers still reject the word Wahhabi for themselves.

  Robert Lacey observes that, like the Christian Quakers, the Wahhabis have "remained known by the name first assigned to them by their detractors". Their preferred alternatives carried a cost. Critics complained that calling yourself the Monotheists, or simply Muslims, implies that everyone else is neither.

  The word also travelled far beyond Najd. Colonial authorities in British India applied it to movements they saw as threats to imperial security. One example was the Indian jihad movement promoted by Syed Ahmad Barelvi and Siddiq Hasan Khan. Qeyamuddin Ahmed wrote that "In the eyes of the British Government, the word Wahabi was synonymous with 'traitor' and 'rebel'". Indian Muslims pushed back, and by 1889 the term was banned from official discourse.

  Inside Saudi Arabia, the rejection comes from the top. King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has called Wahhabism "a doctrine that doesn't exist here". In a 2018 interview with The Atlantic, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that "When people speak of Wahhabism, they don't know exactly what they are talking about." Professor Ingrid Mattson calls it a social movement rather than a sect. Abdallah al Obeid, a former dean of the Islamic University of Medina, went further. He described it as "a political trend" adopted for power-sharing purposes.

  A different Abd al-Wahhab muddied things further. In the eighth century, Abd al-Wahhab ibn Abd al-Rahman led an Ibadi movement whose followers were also called Wahhabis. It still gets mistaken for the Najdi movement in North and sub-Saharan Africa.

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• 3. Salafi Cousins

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  Christopher M. Blanchard offers one way to separate Wahhabism from Salafism. For him, Wahhabism is "a conservative Islamic creed centered in and emanating from Saudi Arabia". Salafism is "a more general puritanical Islamic movement that has developed independently at various times and in various places in the Islamic world". Ahmad Moussalli states it as a rule: "all Wahhabis are salafists, but not all salafists are Wahhabis."

  Joas Wagemakers of Utrecht University draws a similar line. Salafism covers broad movements of Muslims everywhere who want to live by the example of the early generations. Wahhabism is the specific reform campaign begun by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and carried on by his disciples in Najd. Other Salafis do not always welcome the connection. They object to what they see as harsh enforcement and intolerance toward fellow Muslims. They also doubt its commitment to opposing taqlid, the habit of following established legal authorities without question.

  Creed is another point of difference. The Muwahhidun worried chiefly about two kinds of divine oneness: of Lordship and of Worship. The Salafis added a third, concerning God's Names and Attributes, which they read literally. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab did not give that third topic prominence. A later scholar named Hammad Ibn Atiq was among the first Wahhabis to take it seriously. He wrote to Siddiq Hasan Khan, a scholar in the Indian principality of Bhopal, and asked him to accept his son as a student. From the middle of the twentieth century, Wahhabi scholars revived these debates. Opponents such as Al-Kawthari answered with charges of anthropomorphism, meaning describing God in human terms.

  Bhopal also gave its name to the Ahl-i-Hadith, a revivalist movement founded there in the mid-19th century. It stressed the study of hadith, the recorded sayings and actions of the Prophet. Wahhabi students who studied under Ahl-i-Hadith teachers later became prominent scholars in the Saudi religious establishment. After the Saudi state was founded, its sheikhs repaid that debt by financing the Indian movement. The Grand Mufti, Ibn Baz, strongly supported it.

  In Egypt, Muhammad Rashid Rida, regarded by admirers as the "leader of Salafis", worked to rehabilitate the Wahhabis in the wider Islamic world. He won the friendship of many Najdi scholars. By the 1920s, with the backing of the Third Saudi State, a global idea of Salafiyya had emerged. Some of Rida's disciples took posts in Saudi Arabia. They included the Syrian Muhammad Bahjat al-Bitar (1894-1976), the Egyptian Muhammad Hamid al-Fiqi (1892-1959) and the Moroccan Taqi al-Din al-Hilali (1894-1987). Others carried the preaching home.

  One of al-Bitar's students, the Syrian-Albanian scholar al-Albani, was a keen reader of Rida's journal Al-Manar. He would grow into one of the Saudi establishment's most uncomfortable critics.

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• 4. Preacher and Emir

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  Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was born in 1703. He rose as a young Hanbali cleric in Najd, where pilgrimages to the tombs and shrines of saints were widespread. He urged his disciples to denounce certain practices tied to Sufi orders as idolatrous impurities and innovations, known as bid'ah. His chief inspiration was the medieval Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyya, who called for a return to the purity of the first three generations.

  In 1744, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab formed a pact with a local leader, Muhammad bin Saud. The scholar offered political obedience. In return he promised that protecting and spreading the movement would mean "power and glory" and rule over "lands and men". That alliance lasted more than 250 years.

  The pact had a wider backdrop. Turkish, Persian and other foreign empires had dominated the Islamic world since the Mongol invasions and the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate in the 13th century. The movement represented the first major Arab-led revolt against them. It was one of several revivalist currents of its era. Others included the Mahdist movement in Sudan, the Senussi in Libya and Uthman Dan Fodio's movement in Nigeria. Haji Shariatullah (1784-1840) led the Faraizi in Bengal, and the Padri movement (1803-1837) arose in Indonesia. Historians treat these as precursors of the Arab Salafiyya of the late nineteenth century.

  The Kadizadeli movement offers a darker parallel from the seventeenth century. Its namesake, Kadizade Mehmed (1582-1635), preached against Sufism and popular religion inside the Ottoman Empire. Between 1630 and 1680, his followers became increasingly violent. They entered mosques, tekkes and coffeehouses to punish people who broke their version of orthodoxy.

  Ibn Abd al-Wahhab insisted that the military campaigns of the Emirate of Diriyah were defensive. In his words: "As for warfare, until today, we did not fight anyone, except in defense of our lives and honor." He advised Emir Muhammad ibn Saud toward a largely defensive strategy and forbade attacks on women, children and civilians. After his retirement in 1773, that restraint faded. Emir Abdulaziz, Muhammad ibn Saud's son and successor, pursued expansion. When Wahhabi forces took Mecca in 1803, Abdullah ibn Muhammad Aal Ash-Shaykh condemned the excesses. He said some Bedouin had destroyed books belonging to the people of Ta'if. He also declared, "we do not agree to killing of women and children."

  European observers reached for revolutionary comparisons. John Ludwig Burckhardt, whose Travels in Arabia appeared in 1829, described the Muwahhidun as Arab locals resisting Turkish hegemony and its "Napoleonic" tactics. Corancez, in his Histoire des Wahabis, saw an Asiatic revolution that aimed to cleanse Arabia of superstition. The Scottish historian Mark Napier credited the movement's successes to "frequent interpositions of Heaven".

  The twentieth century changed the scale. After the unification of Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabis consolidated their rule over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Then petroleum was discovered near the Persian Gulf in 1939. Export revenues eventually reached billions of dollars. The money went into books, media, schools, universities, mosques, scholarships, fellowships and well-paid jobs for journalists, academics and scholars. It gave Wahhabi ideals a "preeminent position of strength" in Islam around the world. What that money carried hinged on one heavily disputed word, tawhid.

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• 5. Oneness and Excommunication

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  David Commins calls the pivotal idea in Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's teaching a hard boundary. Muslims who rejected his definition of monotheism stood, in this reading, "outside the pale of Islam altogether". Many other Muslims held that the shahada, the declaration that there is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger, made someone a Muslim. Failings in conduct made that person a sinner, but not an unbeliever. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab disagreed. For him the test was correct worship.

  Any act or statement showing devotion to a being other than God was shirk, or idolatry. That included popular practices that made holy men into intercessors. In his major work, Kitab al-Tawhid, he denounced the veneration of trees and rocks. He accepted that Muhammad would intercede for believers, but only with God's permission. Commins stresses that the quarrel was never over whether tawhid matters. It was over what counts as tawhid.

  The sharpest edge of this teaching is takfir, the declaration that someone is an unbeliever. In his own words, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab said: "I only make takfir of whoever knows the religion of the Messenger and thereafter insults it, forbids people from it, and manifests enmity towards whoever practices it." One account of his teaching goes further. It holds that anyone who heard the call, understood it and rejected it had forfeited blood and treasure. Some non-Wahhabi Sunnis have compared the movement to the Kharijites on this point. Commins observes that the main points of the debate have stayed much the same since 1740.

  Did this make the movement an enemy of Sufism? Jeffry R. Halverson notes that Ibn Taymiyya, usually blamed for the hostility, belonged to the Qadiriyyah Sufi order himself. DeLong-Bas argues that Ibn Abd al-Wahhab attacked specific practices rather than Sufis as a group. Asked about the matter, he praised the pious Sufis who focus on worship and the quest for the hereafter. His son Abdullah Aal al-Shaykh wrote, "My father and I do not deny or criticise the science of Sufism." Esther Peskes points to cordial relations in early 19th-century Mecca between the movement and the Sufi Shaykh Ahmad Ibn Idris.

  On the Shia, the record is more tangled. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab wrote a treatise against the Rafidah, Risalah fi al-radd ala al-Rafidah, covering thirty-two topics of theology and law. DeLong-Bas holds that he meant an extremist sect, not Shia generally. He judged the doctrine of the imams' infallibility to be associationism, meaning joining others to God. Still, he and his son Abdullah regarded Shia sects as heretical but Muslim. Abdullah's son Sulayman articulated a new doctrine of takfir that placed Shia outside Islam.

  That doctrine was revived in 1871, when the Ottomans annexed Al-Hasa, a Shia-majority area. The invasion was assisted by the British. The scholar 'Abd al-Latif ibn 'Abd al-Rahman (1810-1876) wrote tracts condemning the Ottomans, Shia and British as polytheists. He urged Muslims to boycott them and forbade travel to their lands.

  A related doctrine, al-wala' wa al-bara', means loyalty and disassociation. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab taught that Muslims must not befriend, ally with or imitate non-Muslims or heretical Muslims. As late as 2003, entire pages of Saudi textbooks taught undergraduates that every form of Islam except Wahhabism was deviation. In a reply that year, the Saudi government strenuously denied claims that it exports religious or cultural extremism.

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• 6. Law Without Masters

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  In 1963, the Saudi clergy expelled al-Albani from the kingdom. The offense was a fatwa permitting women to uncover their faces, which ran against Hanbali jurisprudence and Saudi standards. Al-Albani had taught in Saudi Arabia in the 1960s with profound influence, and he was no outsider to the movement's ideas. His charge was that the Wahhabis professed loyalty only to the Quran, the hadith and the consensus of the early Muslims. In practice, he said, they relied almost entirely on Hanbali rulings. That made them undeclared partisans of one school of law.

  He called Ibn Abd al-Wahhab a "Salafi in creed, but not in Fiqh". He also faulted the founder's weakness in hadith sciences and censured later followers for harshness in takfir. Even so, his own hadith revivalism made him popular with Salafi students everywhere, including in Saudi Arabia. By the 1970s the idea of a distinct Salafi Manhaj, or method, had consolidated.

  His attack landed because the movement made rejecting blind imitation a founding principle. Sulayman ibn Abd-Allah al-Shaykh, born in 1785, wrote that a believer who understands the Quran and Sunnah on any matter must act on them "no matter who he may be disagreeing with". Abd al-Rahman ibn Hasan Aal al-Shaykh, born in 1782 and a judge, or qadi, of the Second Saudi State, went further. He called taqlid itself a form of shirk. This pitted the Wahhabis against the Ottoman Sufi scholars, who shunned independent legal reasoning, called ijtihad, and made taqlid obligatory.

  Wahhabi scholars built their own procedure. They searched the Quran and hadith first. If the answer was not there, they turned to consensus, restricted to the Companions of the Prophet, the early generations and the scholars of Ahl al-Sunnah. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab accepted analogical reasoning only in cases of extreme necessity. They also upheld a rule against reversing ijtihad: a scholar's fatwa could be overturned if it rested on personal reasoning rather than a clear text. In effect, this kept Wahhabi judges autonomous.

  Regional rivals mocked Ibn Abd al-Wahhab as a self-taught "ignorant", since in their view knowledge could come only from teachers. He answered that every Muslim layman had a duty to read the scriptures. The surprise is how little new law resulted. The legal expert Frank Vogel said that Ibn Abd al-Wahhab "produced no unprecedented opinions". Vogel added that the Wahhabis' bitter differences with other Muslims were over theology, not legal rules. Commins calls the belief that Wahhabism springs from Hanbali legal thought a "myth". To lower clerical resistance, the Wahhabis kept the Hanbali tradition of Najd.

  Hamad ibn Nasir ibn Mu'ammar, the founder's son-in-law and pupil, later supplied the systematic account of legal principles that the founder himself never wrote.

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• 7. Strict Rules, Slow Change

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  The Economist described the movement as the "strictest form of Sunni Islam". Religious critics reject that praise, calling it a distorted version that departs from traditional Shari'a. Lawrence Wright notes that prayer which is "punctual, ritually correct, and communally performed" is publicly required of men. Women are told to wear a black abaya covering all but the eyes and hands. Tobacco is banned along with all intoxicating drinks.

  An official committee, charged with commanding the good and forbidding the evil, enforced the rules. Its field officers closed shops at prayer time, kept the sexes apart and policed alcohol sales. Over the years, Wahhabi officials, preachers or religious police banned a long list of pastimes. These included music, dancing, fortune telling, amulets, chess, backgammon, cards and drawing human or animal figures. Acting in plays, writing fiction and dissecting cadavers, even for medical research, were also forbidden. Some bans were bizarre: recorded music on telephones on hold, or flowers sent to a sick relative.

  Foreign customs drew suspicion too. Valentine's Day, Mothers Day, birthdays and keeping dogs all attracted condemnation. Juhayman al Utaybi even declared football forbidden, partly for its foreign language and revealing uniforms. The Saudi Grand Mufti rebuked such fatwas and called on the religious police to prosecute their author.

  The rules were never as fixed as they sounded. Abdulaziz Ibn Saud imposed Wahhabi doctrine in a progressively gentler form as his early 20th-century conquests reached urban areas, especially the Hejaz. After vigorous debate, religious authorities allowed paper money in 1951 and abolished slavery in 1962. Education for girls followed in 1964, and television in 1965. Music, once grounds for summary execution, now fills Saudi radio. Flogging for missing prayers has ended.

  A legal body took charge of the new questions. King Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud appointed Muhammad ibn Ibrahim Aal Al-Shaykh as Grand Mufti in 1953 to head Dar al-Ifta. It was reorganized in 1971 to include more senior scholars. Its fatwas legalized corneal transplants, autopsies and organ donations. The internet reached Saudi citizens in 1997. In a 2000 fatwa, Grand Mufti Abd al-Aziz Aal al-Shaykh called it "both a blessing and a curse". A 1976 fatwa permitted birth control in cases of harm to the woman or agreement between spouses.

  Some rulings still strike outsiders as archaic. Clerics declared that the sun orbited the Earth and that bicycles were "the devil's horses" for women. Saleh Al-Fawzan, the most senior cleric in early 2022, once forbade all-you-can-eat buffets as akin to gambling. Fandy Mamoun summed up the contradictions this way: "In Saudi Arabia, different times and different places exist at once."

  Exceptions existed where the king's needs demanded them. Foreign non-Muslim troops were barred from Arabia until 1990, when they were needed against Saddam Hussein. At King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, men and women mixed freely. Women driving and movie theaters, banned nationwide until 2018, were already permitted inside the ARAMCO compound.

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• 8. After Wahhabism

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  In 2013, a report commissioned by the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism. Other voices tell a different story. Admirers credit the movement with inspiring revivalists, pan-Islamist thinkers and anti-colonial activists as far away as West Africa. They say it also gave a revolutionary push to pan-Arab trends in the 19th century.

  The label itself complicates every verdict. Authoritarian governments often use "Wahhabi extremists" for all opposition, legitimate and illegitimate, to justify heavy repression of dissidents. The word has also become a blanket term for any movement showing misogyny, militancy or strict literal readings of the Quran and hadith.

  Within Saudi Arabia, the ground shifted under the clergy. As of 2017, changes in religious policy under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman led to widespread crackdowns on Islamists in the kingdom and across the Arab world. By 2021, the clerics' power had waned. Social, economic and political change was one cause. The government's promotion of a nationalist narrative stressing non-Islamic components was another. The result has been described as the "post-Wahhabi era".

  Observers describe a multiyear "Conscious Uncoupling" meant to separate the history of the state from Wahhabism. In 2019, the Saudi academic Khalid Al-Dakhil spelled out the old version. Most Saudis, he said, had been told that Sheikh Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab came to fight polytheism, Muhammad bin Saud joined him, and together they fought polytheism. Al-Dakhil argued that what Saudis have been taught needs to change.

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