God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  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.

  It is no coincidence that in Saudi Arabia today Ibn Taymiyya occup
ies a place of honour second only to that of Al-Wahhab. The latter’s debt to Ibn Taymiyya is huge. Inspired by Ibn Taymiyya’s example, and further encouraged by Muhammad Hayat, Al-Wahhab returned to Nejd to expound a new faith, later summarised by the Wahhabi apologist Sheikh HAFIZ WAHBA as ‘restoring Islam to what it was in the time of the holy Prophet and the great caliphs’. This was precisely what Shah Waliullah also set out to do in Delhi – yet the one became honoured as a great revivalist and the other hated as a schismatic.

  In Delhi, Shah Waliullah operated in a highly informed religious community wherein his every pronouncement was challenged and tempered through debate and argument. In provincial Nejd, however, there were few scholars with the legal expertise and debating skills to stand up to Al-Wahhab. In consequence, he was able to construct and apply almost unchallenged a brand of holier-than-thou, confrontational and heartless Islam the like of which had not been seen since the days of Mahmud of Ghazni, the butcher who led twelve loot-and-destroy raids through northern India in the eleventh century, justifying his actions in the name of Islam. Al-Wahhab’s fundamentalism went way beyond the return to Islamic first principles that Shah Waliullah called for. It was strictly literalist and uncompromising, applied with an aggressive intolerance not shared by his former fellow student.

  The name Al-Wahhab gave to this new theology was ad Dawa lil Tawhid, usually translated as The Call to Unity. Those who espoused it termed themselves al-Muwahhidun or Unitarians. Very quickly, however, both the teaching and its followers became known, after its founder, as Wahhabi – a term that soon came to be used in most of the Islamic world as an insult, an epithet to describe a schismatic, and a byword for religious intolerance.

  The tenets of Wahhabism were first set down in a treatise entitled Kitab al-Tawhid (The Book of Unity), originally little more than a series of notes but afterwards worked up by his successors into four thick volumes. It reduced Islam to absolute monotheism (tawhid), rejected all innovation (bidat) and declared there to be but one interpretation of the Quran and the Hadith – Al-Wahhab’s, by virtue of his competence to exercise independent reasoning. The rise of Islam had been accomplished only by jihad against idolaters and polytheists. It followed that there was only one course of action open to those who regarded themselves as true Muslims. They had, first, to swear absolute loyalty to their religious leader; secondly, to follow his teaching in every respect; thirdly, to join him in armed jihad against all apostates, blasphemers and unbelievers; and fourthly, to hate those same apostates, blasphemers and unbelievers. In return, they were promised the protection of God and the love and companionship of their fellow believers, and were assured of an immediate ascent to heaven should they die as martyrs while striving for Islam. There was no other path to salvation. ‘The only way’, wrote Al-Wahhab, ‘is by love to those who practise tawhid of Allah, by devotion to them, rendering them every kind of help, as well as by hate and hostility to infidels and polytheists.’

  This new vision was badly received in Nejd. It placed Al-Wahhab at odds with other contemporary religious teachers, including his father and uncle. ‘He claims’, declared the latter, Sulayman, ‘to follow the Holy Quran and al-Sunna [the example of the Prophet and his companions as accepted by Sunnis] and dares to deduce from their teachings, paying no heed to any opposition. Anyone who opposes him he calls a heretic, although he possesses none of the qualifications of the mujtahedeen [those who exercise independent reasoning].’ In his home village of Uyainah he was denounced as a schismatic and ordered to leave. He went to join his father, who had moved to the settlement of Huraymila, but there too his teachings so angered his new neighbours that he was ordered to keep his views to himself, which he did until his father’s death in about 1740. He then took over as judge and began to act and pronounce judgment in accordance with his new teachings. Increasingly outraged, the populace finally turned on him, and an attempt was made to kill him under cover of darkness. He fled Huraymila and sought refuge back in Uyainah.

  There Al-Wahhab gained the ear of the new governor, whose aunt he married. With his new patron’s backing he once more began to apply the doctrines of the Call to Unity, gaining particular notoriety through a number of violent acts that became the hallmark of his teaching. These included inciting and then leading a mob to tear down the tomb of a Companion of the Prophet, and sentencing to death a woman who refused to abandon a sexual liaison outside marriage – an action made all the more shocking by Al-Wahhab’s active participation in the stoning to death that followed. This last act seems to have been the final straw for the local ulema. He was charged with heresy in seeking to set up a new school of Islamic interpretation, and with acting violently against those who did not support his views. The tribal chieftain intervened and Al-Wahhab was again ordered to move on – now to the little hamlet of Dariya, where his teachings had won him a number of converts.

  This retreat to Dariya subsequently came to be represented among the Wahhabis as a re-enactment of the Prophet’s famous migration from the dar ul-harb of Mecca to the dar ul-Islam of Medina, from which he began his spiritual conquest of Arabia. Here in Dariya Al-Wahhab won the support of the local chief, MUHAMMAD IBN SAUD, leader of a sub-branch of the powerful Aneiza tribe and already admired for his abilities as a warrior. Muhammad ibn Saud became not only a convert to Wahhabism but, by marrying his eldest son ABD AL-AZIZ IBN SAUD to Al-Wahhab’s daughter, the founding father of the Saud–Wahhabi dynasty, the future rulers of Saudi Arabia (see chart in Appendix 1: the roots of the Al-Saud–Al-Wahhab family alliance).

  In about 1744 a remarkable partnership was forged between Muhammad ibn Saud and Al-Wahhab. This was formalised in an oath-swearing ceremony between the two by which the former took upon himself the role and title of emir, or secular leader, and the latter became the imam, soon afterwards assuming the rather grander title of Sheikh ul-Islam. This alliance allowed the one to become a powerful local ruler and the other to transform the province of Nejd by stages into a dar ul-Islam, that much sought-after domain of Faith wherein true sharia prevailed. In the words of a convert to the cause, Harry St John Philby, writing a century and a half later,

  The true faith was purged of the dross of ecclesiastical pedantry, and the salient facts of a moribund creed were made to shine forth again as beacons to every wanderer in the wilderness of doubt. The unity and jealousy of God, the vital necessity of belief and the certainty of reward to all believers – these were the cornerstones of the edifice, which prince and priest set to work to erect upon the shifting sands of nomad society; and the edifice that grew out of those foundations was an Arabian Empire.

  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 f
amily 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.