by Tamim Ansary
Many reformers emerged and many movements bubbled up, but all of them can be sorted into three general sorts of responses to the troubling question.
One response was to say that what needed changing was not Islam but Muslims. Innovations, alterations, and accretions had corrupted the faith, so that no one was practicing true Islam anymore. What Muslims needed to do was to shut out Western influence and restore Islam to its pristine, original form.
Another response was to say that the West was right. Muslims had gotten mired in obsolete religious ideas; they had ceded control of Islam to ignorant clerics who were out of touch with changing times; they needed to modernize their faith along Western lines by clearing out superstition, renouncing magical thinking, and rethinking Islam as an ethical system compatible with science and secular activities.
A third response was to declare Islam the true religion but concede that Muslims had certain things to learn from the West. In this view, Muslims needed to rediscover and strengthen the essence of their own faith, history, and traditions, but absorb Western learning in the fields of science and technology. According to this river of reform, Muslims needed to modernize but could do so in a distinctively Muslim way: science was compatible with the Muslim faith and modernization did not have to mean Westernization.
These three answers to the challenge of modernity were well-embodied in three seminal reformers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Abdul Wahhab of the Arabian peninsula, Sayyid Ahmad of Aligarh, India, and Sayyid Jamaluddin-i-Afghan, whose birthplace is disputed and whose presence was felt everywhere. By no means were they the only reformers. Their ideas were not always mutually exclusive. They sometimes straddled two different currents of reformism. Their contemporaries and students often borrowed from each other. But still, these three men represent three distinctively different approaches to reforming and reviving Islam.
WAHHABISM
Abdul Wahhab was born around 1703 in the Nejd, that desert of yellow sand dunes that many of us picture reflexively when we think of Arabia. He grew up in a small oasis town, the son of a judge. When he showed promise as a Qur’anic student, he was sent to Medina for further schooling. There, one of his teachers introduced him to the works of Ibn Taymiyah, the austere Syrian theologian who, in the wake of the Mongol holocaust taught that God had abandoned Muslims and that Muslims must return to the exact ways of the First Community if they were ever to regain His favor. These teachings resonated for the young Wahhab.
From Medina the youngster made his way to the cosmopolitan city of Basra on the Persian Gulf, and what this ultimate country boy saw in Basra—the clamorous diversity of opinion, the many schools of thought, the numerous interpretations of the Holy Word, the crowds, the lights, the noise—appalled him. This, he decided, was the sort of excrescence that was making Islam weak.
He returned, then, to the stark simplicity of his hometown in the desert and began to preach religious revival through restoration of Islam to its original form. There was only one God, he thundered, and everyone must worship the one God exactly as instructed in the Holy Book. Everyone must obey the laws laid down by the revelations. Everyone must live exactly as the Pure Originals of Medina in Mohammed’s time, and anyone who blocked the restoration of the original and holy community must be eliminated.
The Ottomans considered all of Arabia their possession, but they had no real authority among the small Bedouin tribes who inhabited this arid landscape, living in scattered oases and eking out a thin survival as traders and herders. Wahhab attracted some followers among his fellow Bedouins, and he led his group around the countryside destroying shrines because they were objects of improper reverence, and Abdul Wahhab preached that reverence for anything or anyone except God was idolatry. Eventually, Wahhab achieved the position of judge and began to apply Hanbali law as he saw it with uncompromising zeal. One day, he had a well-known woman of the town stoned to death as an adulteress. The locals had seen enough. A mob gathered to demand that Abdul Wahhab be ousted from his post; there was even talk of lynching. Wahhab fled that town and made his way to another oasis called Dariyah.
There, the local ruler Mohammed ibn Saud welcomed him warmly. Ibn Saud was a minor tribal chieftain with very big ambitions: to “unite” the Arabian Peninsula. By “unite,” of course, he meant “conquer.” In the single-minded preacher Abdul Wahhab he saw just the ally he needed; Wahhab saw the same when he looked at Ibn Saud. The two men made a pact. The chieftain agreed to recognize Wahhab as the top religious authority of the Muslim community and do all he could to implement his vision; the preacher, for his part, agreed to recognize Ibn Saud as the political head of the Muslim community, its amir, and to instruct his followers to fight for him.
The pact produced fruit. Over the next few decades, these two men “united” all the bedouin tribes of the Arabian Peninsula under Saudi-Wahhabi rule. Each time they confronted another recalcitrant tribe, they began by called on them to convert. “Convert! Convert! Convert!” they yelled three times. If the warning was ignored three times (as it generally was) Wahhab told the soldiers they could go ahead and kill the people they were confronting; Allah permitted it, because these were infidels.
The call to convert confused the tribes they were attacking at this point because all of these tribes considered themselves devout Muslims already. But when Abdul Wahhab said “Convert!” he meant to the vision of Islam he was preaching. He did not call it Wahhabism because, like Ibn Taymiyah before him, he maintained that he was simply calling Muslims back to pristine, original Islam, stripped of all accretions and washed of all corruptions. He was not an innovator; in fact, he was the anti-innovator.
People unconvinced of his views, however, saw his vision as a particular interpretation of Islam, not Islam itself; and they had no trouble labeling his ideology Wahhabism, a term that came into use even among some who endorsed his views.
In 1766, Ibn Saud was assassinated but his son Abdul Aziz took over and continued his father’s campaign to unite Arabia under the banner of Abdul Wahhab’s theology. Then in 1792, Wahhab himself died, leaving behind twenty widows and countless children. His life had spanned virtually the entire eighteenth century. While he was imposing his vision of pristine Islam in Arabia, England and Scotland melded into Great Britain, the United States of America was born, the French Revolution issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Mozart wrote his entire corpus of music, and James Watt invented the steam engine.
Upon Wahhab’s death, Aziz ibn Saud declared himself his successor. Already the amir, the new Ibn Saud now anointed himself the chief religious authority as well. In 1802, Aziz ibn Saud attacked the city of Karbala, where the Prophet’s grandson Hussein had been martyred. This city was central to Shi’i devotions, and many of them had gathered just then to commemorate Hussein’s martyrdom. But Shi’is ranked high on Wahhab’s list of those who had altered and corrupted pristine original Islam, and so, upon conquering the city, Aziz ibn Saud had some two thousand of its Shi’i inhabitants put to death.
In 1804, Aziz ibn Saud conquered Medina, where he had his army promptly destroy the tombs of Mohammed’s companions. From Medina, the Saudi-Wahhabi armies went on to Mecca, where they wrecked a shrine that supposedly marked Prophet Mohammed’s birthplace (so that no one would fall into idolatrous worship of Mohammed). As long as he was in the city, Ibn Saud took advantage of the opportunity to humbly perform the rites of pilgrimage in the Ka’ba.
Then in 1811, the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance began to organize a new campaign, this time to Asia Minor, the heart of the Ottoman Empire. Now at last the sultan took notice of the Wahhabi movement. To grapple with these surging Bedouins, he called on Mohammed Ali, khedive of Egypt, to help him out. Mohammed Ali took his disciplined modern army into Arabia, and in 1815—the same year that Napoleon’s career was ending at Waterloo—he crushed Ibn Saud, restored Ottoman control over Mecca and Medina, and opened the Holy City up again to Muslim pilgrims of every stripe. Then he sent Aziz ibn Saud’s son and
successor to Istanbul to be paraded before derisive crowds and then beheaded.
Little more was heard of the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance for about a century, but the alliance did not die. The executed chieftain had a son who took over the collapsed remnants of the Saudi confederacy. Now he was just a minor tribal chieftain again, but he was still a chieftain, and he was still a Wahhabi, and wherever he could still impose his authority, Wahhabi ulama presided and prospered. Wahhab was dead, but Wahhabism lived on.
What were its tenets?
You can look long and hard through the actual writings of Abdul Wahhab and not find Wahhabism as it is defined today. That’s largely because Abdul Wahhab didn’t write political tracts; he wrote Qur’anic commentary and wrote it strictly in the vocabulary of his doctrine. His single-minded focus on details of Muslim doctrine, law, and practice might strike outsiders as obsessive. His major work, Kitab-al-Tawhid (The Book of Unity) has sixty-six chapters, each of which presents one or more quotes from the Qur’an, unpacks each quote, lists lessons to be learned from the quote, and then explains how this quote relates to Wahhab’s core creed. There is no talk here of East or West, nothing about Western influence or Muslim weakness, nothing recognizably political at all. To read Wahhab’s words is to realize that he looked at the world through purely religious spectacles. In his own view, his entire theology boiled down to two tenets: first, the importance of tawhid, or “unity,” that is, the singleness and unity of God; and second, the fallacy of shirk, the idea that anyone or anything shared in God’s divinity to even the smallest degree.
Marx once said “I am not a Marxist,” and if Abdul Wahhab were alive today, he might well say, “I am not a Wahhabi,” but nonetheless, Wahhabism exists, and it now includes many further tenets that derive from Wahhab’s preachings by implication or that developed historically from its application by Saudi chieftains. This expanded Wahhabism told Muslims that the Law was Islam and Islam was the Law: getting it right, knowing it fully, and following it exactly was the whole of the faith.
The Law was all right there in the Qur’an, according to Wahhab and his followers. The sunna—the life of the Prophet as revealed through hadith—amounted to a commentary on the Law. The Qur’an did not prescribe principles to guide human behavior but actual acts Muslims were to perform. It revealed not just the form but the content of human life. In the life of Prophet Mohammed, it gave a stencil for every Muslim to follow.
Medina in the time of Mohammed and the first three khalifas was the ideal community, the one time and place when everybody knew the law, got the law and followed it fully. That was why the First Community was able to flourish and expand so miraculously. That Medina was the stencil for every Muslim community to recreate.
The purpose of life was to follow the Law. The purpose of social and political life was to build the community in which the Law could be reified. All who hindered the great task of building that ideal community were enemies of Islam. The obligations of a Muslim included participation in jihad, the struggle to defeat the enemies of Islam. Jihad was right up there with prayer, fasting, alms, pilgrimage, and attesting to the unity of God as a religious obligation.
And who were the enemies of Islam?
According to Wahhab’s doctrines, those who did not believe in Islam were, of course, potential enemies but not the most crucial offenders. If they agreed to live peacefully under Muslim rule, they could be tolerated. The enemies of real concern were slackards, apostates, hypocrites, and innovators.
Slackards were Muslims who talked the talk but didn’t really walk the walk. They espoused the creed, but when it was time to pray, you found them playing cards or taking naps. They had to be punished so they would not corrupt other Muslims. Apostates were those who were born into or had converted to Islam but had then renounced it. They were to be killed. Hypocrites were those who said they were Muslims but weren’t really. They mouthed the words but in their hearts their allegiance went to some other faith. They were inherently a fifth column working against the community and could commit disastrous betrayal in a crisis. Hypocrites were to be killed as soon as they were unmasked. And finally, perhaps the worst offenders of all were the innovators: Muslims who were corrupting Islam by adding to or altering any aspects of the pristine original Law. People who performed the rituals differently than the Pious Originals, or who performed rituals the Prophet and his companions never practiced, or who advocated ideas not found in the Qur’an were innovators. Both the Shi’i and the Sufis belonged to this group. Jihad against them was not only legitimate but obligatory, according to Wahhabism as it developed in historical practice.
Wahhabi attitudes and enthusiasms spread far beyond Arabia. Wahhabism found particularly fertile ground at the other end of the Muslim world, in the subcontinent of India. In practice, various people who called themselves Wahhabis emphasized various aspects of the creed the Saudi tribe preached. In India, for example, some so-called Wahhabis rejected jihad as an obligation. Others said apostates should be engaged in debate not battle. Some thought slackards should be reeducated rather than punished or that hypocrites should be chastened rather than killed, or some other variation. But all who called themselves Wahhabis looked at the Law as the core of Islam, even the whole of Islam. All tended to look back to a golden era that provided a stencil for Muslim life and tended to believe that restoring the First Community of Mohammed’s Medina would restore Muslims to favor in Allah’s eyes, thereby restoring the vigor and power the Umma enjoyed under the first four khalifas.
Outside the Islamic world, the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance may have seemed like some brief anomaly that flared and vanished; but in fact it went on smoldering in the deserts of Arabia, and the world was to hear a great deal more about the alliance in the twentieth century, after the British agent remembered as Lawrence of Arabia found his way to that desert.
THE ALIGARH MOVEMENT: SECULAR MODERNISM
Sayyid Ahmad, or Sir Sayyid Ahmad of Aligarh, as he liked to be called later in life, represents an attitude of thought that sprang up independently in many parts of the Muslim world in the nineteenth century. He and others began exploring ways to rethink Islam as an ethical system that would stay true to its own traditions and spirit but make it compatible with a secular world dominated by Europeans.
Sayyid Ahmad was born in 1817 to a prominent Muslim family in Delhi. His forebears had been important officials under the Moghuls, back when the Moghuls ruled this part of the world. Now, the British grip on the subcontinent had been deepening for many generations and Sayyid Ahmed’s family had adapted to the new order. His grandfather served the East India Company in positions of responsibility, once running a school for them and another time traveling to Iran as a British envoy. Twice he had worked for the Moghul emperor as his prime minister, but the “emperor” at this point was just another British pensioner and his prime minister’s chief duties were to fill out the appropriate forms to keep his pension flowing. Sayyid Ahmad’s father worked for the company too, and his brother started one of India’s first Urdu newspapers. In short, Sayyid Ahmad hailed from a high-status, modernist, Western-oriented family, and he knew something about British life.
His mother, however, was a devout Muslim of legendary piety, respected for her scholarship. She made the boy go to madrassa, and she equaled his grandfather as an influence on this life, so Sayyid Ahmad grew to manhood with these two dueling currents in his personality: a heartfelt allegiance to his own Muslim community and a high regard for British culture and a longing for the respect of those colonials.
Unfortunately, his family sank into financial trouble after his father’s untimely death. Sayyid Ahmad had to quit school and go to work. He hired on with the East India Company as a clerk and eventually earned promotion to subjudge, handling small claims, but this was a minor post in the company’s judicial system: really not much more than a glorified clerk. He couldn’t rise higher because he had never completed his formal education; he was largely self-taught.
Stil
l he read avidly, all the science and English-language literature he could get his hands on. He formed reading groups and discussion clubs with his Indian Muslim friends and organized lecture series on scientific topics. During the Indian Mutiny of 1857, he sided with the British; but afterwards he wrote a pamphlet called The Causes of the Indian Revolt in which he reproached the British administrators for their errors and oversights, a pamphlet he sent to government officials in Calcutta and London. He followed up with An Account of the Loyal Mohammedans of India, which was translated into English by a British colonel. In this little book, he tried to resurrect his coreligionists in British eyes by depicting Indian Muslims as the Queen’s most loyal subjects. He also argued that Muslims could have no jihadist sentiments toward the British and ought not to have, quoting scholarly religious sources to prove that jihad against the British was not permissible since the British did not restrict or interfere with Muslim devotions.
Finally, in 1874, he decided to see England for himself. It was the first time Sayyid Ahmad had traveled beyond the confines of India. In London, where his writings had earned him some affection, he lived beyond his means, attending fashionable parties and hobnobbing with intellectuals, artists, and aristocrats. He cut a striking figure in this milieu, resolutely clad in Muslim robes, sporting a large beard, and wearing a small pillboxshaped religious cap, looking every inch the old-school Muslim gentleman of Moghul high society. The queen herself awarded him a ribbon, making him a “Companion of the Star of India,” which led him ever afterward to call himself Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan.
Then one day, there in London, he ran across a derogatory biography of Prophet Mohammed written by some Englishman. He was devastated. He dropped all his other concerns and began writing his own biography of the Prophet to refute the one by the Englishman. He wrote in Urdu, because it was his mother tongue, but he was aiming his book at a European public, so he paid to have it translated, chapter by chapter, as he was writing it, into English, French, German, and Latin. The job proved too immense; he had to scale down his ambitions, in the end going for a collection of essays about Mohammed. He ran out of money before he could finish even that, and seventeen months after leaving India he dragged himself home again, penniless and exhausted.