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Ibn Abdul Wahhab's Militant Mission (Part 1)

2023/8/9
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CONFLICTED

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Eamon Dean: 我认为伊本·阿卜杜勒·瓦哈卜是一位使我的信仰变得简单的人。他的著作《Tawheed》对我的信仰形成有重要影响,即使在孩童时期,它也是沙特阿拉伯学校的教材。瓦哈比主义在许多人眼中是逊尼派穆斯林世界极端主义和恐怖主义的根源,圣战分子经常引用瓦哈比文本。伊本·阿卜杜勒·瓦哈卜的思想与伊本·泰米耶的思想一脉相承,但伊本·阿卜杜勒·瓦哈卜更进一步,他不仅谴责偶像崇拜的行为,还谴责那些从事这种行为的人,这在当时引起了极大的争议。他寻求政治支持是为了保护自己并完成他的使命,这与先知穆罕默德的经历相似。他对伊斯兰教的理解是基于对《古兰经》的字面解释,他认为穆斯林世界已经堕落为偶像崇拜,需要一场运动来重建真正的伊斯兰教。他与乌斯曼·本·穆阿玛尔一起摧毁了扎伊德·伊本·哈塔卜的陵墓,以及其他被认为是偶像崇拜的场所,这在当时引起了极大的震惊。他认为这些行为是偶像崇拜,违背了《古兰经》的教导。他采取了简洁明了的写作风格,使他的著作易于阅读和记忆,这使得他的思想能够更容易地传播到大众中。他所做的许多事情,例如处决通奸妇女,也引起了极大的争议,并最终导致了他被驱逐出乌伊纳。 Thomas Small: 我认为伊本·阿卜杜勒·瓦哈卜是一个复杂的人物,既有优点也有缺点。他的目标是推翻内志地区的宗教现状,并重建他所理解的真正的伊斯兰教,这是一种革命性的举动。他的著作《Tawheed》并非一本论证性著作,而是一份简洁的信仰声明。瓦哈比主义已成为圣战运动的意识形态支柱,圣战学者和领导人经常引用瓦哈比文本。伊本·阿卜杜勒·瓦哈卜的思想与伊本·泰米耶的思想一脉相承,但他更进一步,将温和的伊斯兰教等同于叛教。他最初寻求乌斯曼·本·穆阿玛尔的政治支持,并与他一起摧毁了扎伊德·伊本·哈塔卜的陵墓,这在当时引起了极大的震惊。巴士拉的学者们批评伊本·阿卜杜勒·瓦哈卜的信件,认为他谴责了规范的伊斯兰教实践。内志地区韩巴里学派占据主导地位并非出于设计,而是偶然形成的。伊本·阿卜杜勒·瓦哈卜出身于一个具有学术背景的贵族阿拉伯部落家庭,他为了深造,前往麦加、麦地那和巴士拉等地学习。在巴士拉,他接触了什叶派伊斯兰教,这对他日后的思想发展产生了影响。他认为什叶派伊斯兰教是另一种形式的偶像崇拜。他需要政治支持来传播他的教义,这与先知穆罕默德的经历相似。他所做的许多事情,例如处决通奸妇女,也引起了极大的争议,并最终导致了他被驱逐出乌伊纳。

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The episode introduces Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, a radical and controversial figure whose teachings laid the foundation for Wahhabism and the rise of the House of Saud. The hosts discuss their differing views on him.

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This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot, Shopify helps you do your thing, however you cha-ching. From the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the we just hit a million orders stage. No matter what stage you're in, Shopify's there to help you grow. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash special offer, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash special offer.

Welcome back, dear listeners. Thomas Small here with another episode of Conflicted alongside my old friend, Eamon Dean. Now, Eamon, I want you to cast your mind back, if you will, to the early 18th century, to a small village in the desolate, nudged mountains, desert of your home country, Saudi Arabia.

to find a man whose radical preaching alienated many but has stood the test of time. A man who laid the theological foundation for the rise of the all-powerful House of Saud.

A man whose vitriolic pronouncements against anyone who disagreed with his interpretation of Islam continue to influence fundamentalist Muslims to this day. Ayman, I'm talking, of course, about... Muhammad bin Abdul Wahab. Muhammad bin Abdul Wahab. A controversial figure, Ayman. I hope you and I don't come to blows in this conversation. We have different views on the man. In the spirit of Christian charity, I'll start with you.

In brief summary, what does the name Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab mean to you? For me, he is not controversial, Thomas. For me, he is someone who made my faith so simple.

Ah, a simplifier, a purifier, if you will, of Islam. Exactly. Well, we're going to tell the life story of this man, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahab. And yet the way that Ayman and I are going to tell the story is kind of diametrically opposed. For Ayman, who reveres the man, bin Abdul Wahab is a good guy. He's the hero of the story. The way I'm going to tell the story...

is a little bit less positive. I sort of think of bin Abdul Wahab as the bad guy. Our friendship will, Ayman, survive it, I'm sure, but it's going to be a corker of an episode. Absolutely. No question. Continuing our exploration into the people who have set the historical template for fundamentalist Muslims today, this is the first of another pair of episodes on Muhammad bin Abdul Wahab. Let's jump right in. ♪

You know what, Thomas, in 2009, I was addressing a counterterrorism conference where lots of those experts or pseudo experts, most of them, to be honest. But anyway, they were coming to listen to me talking about Al-Qaeda and terrorism at that time and the election of Barack Obama and all of these things.

So after the event and after I gave my speech, one of those ladies who work in this space in counterterrorism and counterviolent extremism came to me while I was having a Coke with some friends. And she told me, you know what, Mr. Dean, I really think that the greatest problem in the Sunni Muslim world are those wasabis. Yeah.

And for me, it's like, excuse me, what? Sort of samurai fundamentalist. Yeah. It's like, you know, for me, like, you know, it conjured into my mind the image of, you know, ninja celibates. So I said to her, excuse me, who? Wasabis. Those like who believe in wasabism.

And I like, okay, you mean Wahhabis, you know? She said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, Wahhabis, Wahhabis, sorry about that. But anyway, I think it brought, you know, to my attention at the time that really, I mean, in the minds of many people, even if they don't know what Wahhabism is or who the founder of the movement is or when was it or where was it, and yet the...

Narrative among the industry experts at that time is that Wahhabism is at the core, you know, of the problem with extremism in the Muslim world that was driving terrorism. To prepare for this episode, I read Cole Bunzel's excellent, recently released book called Wahhabism, The History of a Militant Islamic Movement.

And in it, he actually writes this. He says, "Wahhabism has become the jihadi movement's ideological backbone. Wahhabi texts abound on jihadi websites and are frequently quoted by jihadi scholars and leaders who see themselves as the proper heirs of the Wahhabi tradition.

There is, of course, more to jihadi ideology than the pre-modern Wahhabi tradition. The influence of certain Muslim brotherhood ideas remains key. However, Wahhabism forms a crucial part of the ideology of modern Sunni jihadism.

That is true, it must be admitted, right, Ayman? I mean, when you were a young jihadist, Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab was prevalent in the circles you were frequenting. Of course, no question. He was as prevalent as Ibn Taymiyyah, you know, the scholar who we discussed in the previous episodes. And this is why, for me, Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab, he was...

Ever so present, even in my childhood, my fellow friends from Saudi Arabia will remember that when you go into the middle school, the book of Tawheed was part of the curriculum, a book which was written by Muhammad bin Abdul Wahab as a statement of faith. And it is really a small text, but memorizing it was part of the curriculum in Saudi Arabia at that time. Yes, so...

Obviously, Ibn Abdul Wahab's ideas were formative for you. And you mentioned Ibn Taymiyyah, whom, as you said, yes, we've just covered in a couple of episodes. So, dear listener, if you've been following along, we started this series with Ibn Hanbal, Ahmed Ibn Hanbal. Then we moved on to Ahmed Ibn Taymiyyah. And today, Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahab.

a story really of kind of ever increasing radicalism and even militancy. This isn't to criticize or castigate, it's just sort of objectively the case. Each scholar built on the one before him and moved

moved the dial a little bit further in the direction of fundamentalism. And in addition to their ideas, it's a story of progressive jihad. You know, in Ibn Hanbal's time, the jihad was against the Byzantine Empire. In Ibn Taymiyyah's time, the jihad was against the Mongols, who at times were Sunni, at times were Shia. So fellow Muslims in a way, but very much the other.

And as we'll see in Ibn Abdul Wahab's time, the jihad took a further dimension and it became, to some extent, a jihad against fellow Muslims, which is part of that dialing up of fundamentalism. Indeed. And as we progress through the episode, I want to offer in advance an apology to all my fellow Salafists.

that I am going to use the term Wahhabi and Wahhabism not as a derogatory term, but as an academic term that has become more the mainstream way of referring to Salafists who follow Ad-Dawah al-Najdiya or the Najdi mission, as the followers of Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab would have called it at that time.

I'm glad you brought that up. It is important to point out that that term, Wahhabi, was leveled against Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab and his followers at the time by his enemies. So it began as a term, a derogatory term. In the eyes of Salafis today, it remains so. I will try as best I can to avoid the term, and I will use the term the mission if I can. So it's the mission. That's how they understood it.

So to begin his story, Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahab was born in 1703 in Al-Uyayna.

a very small town, really, at the time, in what's called the Nejd. We probably, Ayman, should tell the listeners or remind the listeners about the Nejd, this area in Central Arabia, part of the great Central Arabian plateau. I mean, we're talking about really a backwater in the early 18th century, no question. Indeed, it was a backwater. But you see, like, I mean, the Nejd is...

A large area, almost as big as Egypt, you know, as modern day Egypt. It is huge. It is a plateau. I think the average elevation there is about 400 meters above sea level. So it is dry. It is a desert with multiple oases appearing here and there. Now, Najd, you know, because of its harsh environment, is sparsely populated.

However, it used to be always at the beginning of Islam, let's say like in about the fourth, fifth and sixth and seventh century Arabia, used to be the home of some of the most notable tribes in Arabia. The tribes which give birth

to legends in the fields of poetry, in the fields of knighthood and chivalry. It was really the place of Banu Hanifa, Banu Tamim, Ghatafan, Qudaa, and many other of the tribes that we hear about. And this is why I would say that Najd,

Just like the Hejaz, we're always part of the Arabian legend and folklore and the lure where, you know, people always hear about these knights, you know, on, you know, their white horses and the beautiful Arabian horses, you know, straddling the desert. Yes, that is Najd.

That's right, and at the start of the 18th century when bin Abdul Wahab was born, the Nejd lay on the fringes of the Ottoman world. The Ottoman Empire was the great hegemonic power at the time, but the Nejd, and this is incredibly important to remember, the Nejd

was never conquered by the Ottomans, was never incorporated into the Ottoman state. And in fact, at the time bin Abdul Wahab was born, the Nejd hadn't been properly incorporated into any larger imperial state structure since the 11th century. So not for 700 years had the Nejd been part of a larger state structure.

This, I think, is key to understanding the political and social and cultural dynamics of the Nejd. It was very riven. It was very politically unstable. It was quite tribal. It just did not have the benefits of a state. Just imagine Frank Herbert's dune, Arrakis, you know, this desert planet. The dune planet, yeah. The dune planet, you know, where Arrakis is such a desolate place. But the reality is that Nejd was...

politically fractured and decentralized. And that's why they depended a lot on trading with the Ottoman Empire outposts, such as Basra, Mecca, Medina, these places. So what can we say about Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab himself? Let's talk about his ancestry. He was from the tribe, the Benitamim. Yes, yes.

He was from the clan of Al-Wahaba, from the tribe of Bani Tamim, so he was a Tamimi. He comes from a good line of noble Arab tribes. The Al-Musharraf was his family line, and it was a scholarly family. His father actually was a judge of Al-A'iyana, and his grandfather was a well-known Hanbali scholar in Najd.

Yes, like Ahmed bin Hanbal, like Ibn Taymiyyah, Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab came from a good, established religious family with an exalted role in society. And if you remember, dear listener, back to last season, early on in last season, Ayman and I discussed the difference

within Arabia between al-Hadara and al-Badawa. So if you remember this, we think quite popularly of Arabia as populated only by nomadic tribes living in the desert, moving around with camels and stuff, but that's not true. That's al-Badawa, that's one half of that society, Bedouin society. The other half, al-Hadara, were settled in towns like al-Ugaina and Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab and his family definitely come from that al-Hadara side of Arabia.

His mission, when it begins, was initially targeting the Hadara side of Arabia. So it's actually not a Bedouin phenomenon. It's a civilized, settled phenomenon. That's the world that bin Abdul Wahab grew up in. Indeed, he was an urbanist. He wasn't a nomad, for sure. As you said, Ayman, his father, Abdul Wahab, was the chief jurist of Al-Uyayna, and he was a Hanbali.

just like Ibn Taymiyyah, just like, to some extent, obviously, Ahmed bin Hanbal. So we're still in the same line of Hanbali scholarship of the world of Islamic Hanbalism. Tell us, Ayman, what Ibn Abdul Wahab's education would have been like as a child. Well, he was lucky in the sense that his father was a judge. Therefore, his father was a learned man who taught him how to read and write from a young age. And then,

A child like that in a town like Al-Uyayna, they will have the grand mosque of the town. And in the grand mosque, they will have a zawiyah, as they call it, like in a basically- A corner. A corner. And in that corner, young kids will come to study how to read and write, how to recite the Quran, to learn about Islamic history, theology, the hadith. So the education was-

completely religious. There is no concept at the time of any form of secular education. And this is in line not just with its education, but with its entire world. I mean, the Nejd and the Islamic world more generally was totally saturated with religion. It was a religious world. So when

they read the Quran, when they read the Hadith, when they heard about angels, when they heard about jinn, when they heard about destiny and prophecy, when they heard about the threat of hell, the promise of heaven, the reality of the divine judgment. These things are concrete. They're real. In addition to the commands of God, these aren't sort of like pieces of advice.

Indeed. That God says, if you'd like to follow this, you know, feel free. Not at all. You know, God's commands are absolute, total, and the failure to fulfill them is, you know, is pretty, you know, disastrous for people. So we're really in a religious world. Now, Eamon, why was the Hanbali school so dominant in the Nejd?

As we've said before, at that time, the Hanbali school was the minority school within Islam. The other schools of law, the other, the Hanafis, the Malikis, the Shafis, they were much more prevalent. The Hanbali school was a minority in Islam in general, but in the Nejd, it was by far the majority school. Why was that? The prevalence of one particular school of jurisprudence over others was always higher

subject to the prejudice of the leaders or the rulers of a specific territory. So, for example, if in the great Indian subcontinent, the Mughals were partial towards Hanafi, Hanafi would become the prevalent school of jurisprudence.

In North Africa, the murabids, you know, or the murabitin, Yusuf bin Tashafin and their founders, I mean, they became more partial towards Maliki school of jurisprudence. So the North Africa now is Maliki. If you look at Saudi Arabia right now, it's Hanbali. But next door, Bahrain, and next door, Abu Dhabi, you know, which is part of the Emirates, actually is Maliki.

Maliki. So that is why it is important to understand that it's according to the persuasion, the persuasion of the rulers of the day. Najd more or less became Hanbali because it was adopted by nearby schools in Basra and other centers of learning such as Al-Ahsa. And as a result, the Hanbali school of jurisprudence became the dominant in Najd, not by design, but by accident.

A salient point here is that there were no schools of higher education in the Nejd. Nejdi scholars, if they wanted really to get the highest, if they wanted their authority to be stamped with proper authority, they'd have to leave the Nejd and travel abroad. Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab did the same thing. Indeed. First of all, we have to understand that from young age, he showed promise. He was sharp.

Definitely. He had a clear mind. He had a photographic memory and was able to memorize the Quran by the age of 16 and lots of the books of Hadith. And also at the same time, he started to impress with his debating skills and his firebrand argumentative skills.

Yeah, I can imagine that, you know, as a teenager, he must have had some pretty, you know, formative debates and conversations with his brother, Suleiman. This is to foreshadow an episode in his life down the line. But Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab had a brother, Suleiman, who, like him, you know, became a jurist, received a first class education. So Muhammad and Suleiman together were growing up in these schools. And then Muhammad launched out

into the great unknown. What cities did he go visit to learn the higher sciences? One of the cities he did travel to was Mecca in order to perform the Hajj, and also to learn at the hands of great scholars, including Muhammad Hayat al-Sindi. Muhammad Hayat al-Sindi was a Hanafi.

And was a Sufi to some extent. And Muhammad bin Abdul Wahab would have studied alongside some other scholars like al-San'ani and al-Shami, who would later become Zaidis and would have been preaching, you know, and judging, according to Zaid, kind of mild Shia persuasion in Yemen.

So this is just to show basically the fact that he wasn't against the idea of learning from scholars who might have different persuasion from him. He just was someone who just wanted to learn. He had the thirst for learning and knowledge. And then he went to Medina, where in Medina, this is where the influence of Ibn Taymiyyah comes in handy. Ha ha, Ibn Taymiyyah.

Absolutely. So he studied with Sheikh Ali Effendi al-Daghestani al-Dimashqi. Al-Dimashqi, dear listener, that means this guy's from Damascus, where Ibn Taymiyyah lived and died. Absolutely. So al-Daghestani al-Dimashqi was...

pretty much influenced heavily by Ibn Taymiyyah's brand of Salafism. And he imparted that and imprinted that on his young, brand new student, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahab. Muhammad Abdul Wahab spent considerable time with Dagestan and Damascus in Medina. And then after that, he traveled to Basra. Yeah, in Basra. So this is, I want to ask you about Basra. So he spent...

most of his, let's say, study abroad period in Basra. And in addition to the Sunni Hanbali schools there, Basra was of course a great and important center of Shia Islam. And a lot of the sources suggest that it was there while he was living there that he first in a real way came face to face with the practice of Shia Islam, which to him,

as an ejdi growing up in a Hanbali environment would have seemed very foreign and in fact very troubling. Do you think, Ayman, that that exposure to Shia Islam, their practices, especially of praying for intercession at the grave of descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, and in general the Shia predilection for bestowing sainthood upon their imams and other such people and invoking them would have really influenced Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab as he developed as a thinker?

There is no question. It was in Basra where he absolutely started this thinking of, well, you know, this is not what I was taught that Islam was about. He encountered what he believed to be heresies. This is when he started to think that this is not Islam. This is shirk. Shirk, yeah.

sort of idolatry as the association of others apart from God with divinity. Exactly. Idolatry, let's call it idolatry. Idolatry, yeah. So he believed that, you know, Shia Islam is just, you know, another form of idolatry being, you know, given Islamic wrapping. You'll like this, Ayman. Banzal, in his book Wahhabism, he quotes Ibn Abdul Wahhab from his sort of memoirs. And he says this about his time in Basra. Ibn Abdul Wahhab said,

Some of the idolaters of Basra would come to me and relate their specious arguments to me. As they were seated before me, I would say, "Worship in its entirety is not valid but to God alone." All of them would be astonished and not a mouth would make a sound.

I like that anecdote because you have to ask yourself, why were they astonished? Were they astonished because of the power of his preaching or were they astonished because they thought, oh my God, we disagree, we don't know what to say. But certainly this preaching was provocative in Basra. His preaching was provocative. In fact, it became so provocative that...

that they complained to the governor of Basra about him. And they went to the governor of Basra and told him, you have to kick him out, you have to get rid of him.

The governor of Basra, as well as the judge of Basra, both of them were Sunnis and were appointed by the Ottomans. So Basra was in the Ottoman Empire. I mean, that's so it was it was part of the empire. Indeed. And they didn't give, you know, a damn really about, you know, what the Shia of Basra were thinking. He remained for a few years after that, after that incident with the Shia. But however, the governor and the judge were changed. There is a new governor and judge.

And at the same time, Najdi traders came to Basra, they recognized him, they said they warned the new governor, be careful, this guy will start to destroy your shrines and will call for the destruction of the holy shrines. So they kicked him out. In fact, he was warned by the people in Basra that if you don't leave today, you will be dead. He left with his own clothes and

And only by a kind shepherd, like, you know, basically who took him, you know, in a zubair and from there gave him enough, like, you know, food to go all the way to Al-Ahsa. It's not clear exactly from the sources when bin Abdul Wahab left Basra and returned home to the Nej. Probably when he was in his early 30s. Yeah. He returned to the Nej, specifically to the town of Huraymala. Yeah.

where his father, who was now chief qadi, so his father in the meantime had moved to Huraymullah, became the chief judge of the town, and his son Muhammad joined him there. At first, bin Abdul Wahab kept his head down.

it's likely that he didn't want to upset his father or provoke his father. Given what would happen down the line with his brother, Suleiman, it's possible that Muhammad's father would not have appreciated Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab's interpretation of Islam. Nonetheless, for some reason, he didn't preach openly again until his father died. And his father died in 1741.

when bin Abdul Wahab was 38 and at that point bin Abdul Wahab again began to preach openly and it is at this point that he wrote what would be his most influential text, the book you mentioned earlier, Ayman, the one that was part of your own education as a child in Saudi Arabia, Kitab al-Tawheed, the book of monotheism, the book of declaring God's unity, Tawheed.

Tell us a bit more about this book. I actually read it this morning, Eamon, to prepare for this chat. It's not a long book. You can read it in a single sitting. It's a weird book. It doesn't contain arguments. It doesn't argue its case. It just presents...

passages from the scripture and the hadith put in a certain order followed by bullet points really of pronouncements or of topics or of affirmations. These are things we must affirm. There is no rational argument involved, however. It just states it. Is that a fair way of characterizing the book, Ayman? Exactly, because at the end of the day, it is a statement. Kitab al-Tawheed, the book of divine unity, is

is in itself a statement. A statement doesn't have to be that rational, because from his point of view, this is the equivalent of stating the bleeding obvious, that there is only one God and that he is a supreme being and that this is what we need to know about him. So-

you know, I don't know if anyone's ever perused, you know, Twitter, Islamic or even Christian Twitter. You know, there are people who believe that the straightforward literal declaration of truth, the bleeding obvious, is the religious way. I think it's part of that fundamentalist mentality that we talked about. And reading the book of monotheism, it could tell,

Kitab al-Tawheed, bin Abdul Wahab's book, you get the sense that he definitely had that character trait. But you also feel that it's not really a book that's meant simply to be read. I mean, I feel, and a lot of modern scholars agree with this, that it's more like a textbook. It's sort of a book that someone is meant to carry with them to a kind of a lesson. And the topics in the lesson would be expanded upon by bin Abdul Wahab himself.

So it's almost like saying, we'll talk about this, we'll talk about this, we'll talk about this. So presumably in his actual teaching, bin Abdul Wahab did engage in argumentation and some sort of rational proof or whatever of his teachings. He can't simply have just stated things like that. Well, I tell you something. The reason why it was written this way, because he was dealing with Najdis.

At that time, the prevalent condition was illiteracy, not literacy. And therefore, he needed a book that was easily read to people in bullet points, in statements, littered with supporting texts from the Quran and the Hadith.

that is easy to memorize. Remember, I memorized it when I was young, you know, and, you know, all of my fellow classmates, like, memorized it. And it's easy to memorize, you know. And so the whole idea is that he wrote this book deliberately to be short, precise, concise statement of divine unity. That's it.

And to be easily remembered. From the very beginning, we see how Ibn Abdul-Wahhab was different from Ibn Taymiyyah. So Ibn Taymiyyah was an incredibly verbose writer. He never tried to write succinctly in this way to appeal to the average person, to kind of indoctrinate them or to convince them to join a cause in that way. Ibn Abdul-Wahhab was much more...

really much cleverer in launching a mission that would appeal to the masses by appealing to them directly in this simple, straightforward, easily memorizable way. Now, he didn't initially have a huge amount of success, not in Haremila at any rate. While he was there, he survived an assassination attempt.

It's not clear what exactly happened. Huraymullah was notoriously politically unstable. Ibn Abdul Wahab may have got enmeshed in that in some way. It definitely proved to him to be the wrong place to launch his mission. And what he needed, and I'm sure you'll agree with this, Ayman, what he really needed and knew he needed was political backing.

So having survived an assassination attempt in Haremila, he moved back home to his hometown of Al-Uyayna. And this is where we're going to take a quick break. Having survived an assassination attempt, Mohammed bin Abdul Wahab returns to his hometown of Al-Uyayna and is going to try to find a political backer to support his mission. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little...

Or a lot. Shopify helps you do your thing, however you cha-ching. From the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the we just hit a million orders stage. No matter what stage you're in, Shopify's there to help you grow. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash special offer, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash special offer.

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Right, we're back. We're telling the life story of Muhammad bin Abdul Wahab. At the time that we left him, he just survived an assassination attempt and therefore decided to up sticks and leave Al-Huraymala and move to Al-Uyayna where he grew up.

His reputation was already spreading. He'd written his book of monotheism. He'd written a number of letters, epistles, which were circulating around the Nejd. Some of them had made their way to Basra, where Hanbali scholars there were reading them. Most of them at this point with some alarm, and he began to attract attention.

a certain amount of criticism from his fellow scholars. In fact, the scholars in Basra, having read his letters, and this is important, not just the book of monotheism, which as we said before is brief and concise and possibly more or less uncontroversial, a straightforward statement of Islamic monotheism, but his letters in his essays that were also circulating were much more detailed and much more sort of, let's say, severe.

And the scholars in Basra called him Khalifat Iblis, Satan's deputy. This is because in their mind, at least, bin Abdul Wahab was denouncing in his letters really normative Islamic practices. The same things that bin Taymiyyah was complaining about in his day, things like praying to the dead, frequenting shrines in order to pray to the dead, invoking saints'

All of this was shirk. All of this was idolatry in bin Abdul Wahab's mind. But in the mind of his fellow scholars, including Hanbali scholars, this was not shirk or at least not shirk to the degree that bin Abdul Wahab believed it.

So, Ayman, why do you feel that bin Abdul Wahab felt so strongly as he did that the Muslim world had descended into shirk? Okay, I will argue from his point of view, and I will be the devil's advocate here. So I'm going to play the devil's advocate.

From his mind is that I am reading the Quran. I've learned the Quran by heart as a young Muslim growing up in Najd. And the Quran tells me, worship none but God. You don't read anything about saints. It says to you, pray only to God.

I don't see anything about graves or shrines. It tells you that the dead cannot help you. That's what the Quran says very clearly. And yet people go and seek help from the dead. So for him,

He sees a big contradiction between what he is reading in the text and what he is seeing outside. And then he realized that he is reading the story of the golden calf, you know, and the Israelites, you know, after they have been saved, you know, from Pharaoh and his army. And they are there in Sinai, you know, still seeking salvation.

to some extent, a manifestation, a worldly manifestation of the divine in the kaf. So, you know, he says,

Again, we are back to the days of Jahiliyyah, or what he calls it, the age of ignorance. Yeah, later on he would write in a letter, this is Ibn Abdul Wahab wrote this, what most people of the earth profess from east to west is idolatry, is shirk. That which is being performed in the Hejaz, in Basra, in Iraq, and in Yemen, this is shirk.

He became convinced that he was living in a time like the prophet's own time where everyone around him was an idolater and he needed to launch a mission inviting them to join

Islam. A very weird position for a Sunni Muslim to adopt in a world in which everyone around him was a Muslim. And the Sunni at the time, especially in Najd, while Ibn Taymiyyah would pronounce takfir on certain acts, not on people, he would describe an act as a shirk, but he wouldn't call the people idolaters. So he would basically call, oh, this is an act of idolatry.

But he wouldn't describe the people as pagans or idolaters. He would call them, you know, sinful Muslims. That's it. Like, you know, he wouldn't excommunicate them from the zone of Islam. However, for some reason, Ibn Abdul Wahab took this, you know, to a greater extent than

where he started to pronounce takfir not on the act, but on the general population that were practicing this act. I'm glad you brought up Ibn Taymiyyah because bin Abdul Wahab's detractors amongst the Sunni scholars who began to argue against him, they brought up Ibn Taymiyyah a lot. Even the Hanbali ones for whom Ibn Taymiyyah was concerned.

you know, not a hated figure. They accepted him as a revered thinker, though they were always slightly cautious about him because they knew the power of his preaching, the power of his rhetoric could incline people towards radicalism. But the scholars...

who encountered Ibn Abdul Wahab's teaching and were rather shocked by it, they kept saying, "This man is following in the footsteps of Ibn Taymiyyah. He is slavishly adopting the perverted doctrines of Ibn Taymiyyah." So, Ibn Taymiyyah in their minds had mostly good things to say, but some bad things to say, all about shirk, all about what constitutes shirk and how to respond to shirk, and Ibn Abdul Wahab took it even to the next level.

Now, when we left him, he'd just survived an assassination attempt. He'd moved to Al-Uyayna, and he was in pursuit of political backing. Explain in general, Ayman, why someone like bin Abdul Wahab would seek a political backer. Well, he would be following in the same footsteps of the Prophet Muhammad, because at the end of the day, when the Prophet Muhammad

found that he was prevented from fulfilling his mission by his tribe, Quraysh in Mecca, he started to seek the protection of other tribes. You know, he started with Taif, they rejected him, but then the people of Medina accepted him. And so the whole issue is that

I am on a mission, Muhammad al-Wahhab, just like his namesake, the Prophet Muhammad. Basically, he believed that he is on a mission and I can't fulfill my mission if I am to be hounded, persecuted, and possibly killed by assassins. I need someone to protect me. And only with that power, I could actually achieve the goals of my mission.

I'm so glad that you brought up the Prophet Muhammad and his life because in the next episode we're going to talk at length about the ways in which Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab felt that his life mirrored the Prophet's life and how important that was to ibn Abdul Wahab. And yes, you're totally right. Like the Prophet,

who was forced to flee from his hometown of Mecca to Medina to receive sanctuary, bin Abdul Wahab would find himself forced to flee to find sanctuary. Ironically, he first hoped he might find it in his hometown, al-Uyayna, and the man who he first hoped might offer him the political backing and protection he needed was a man called Uthman bin Muammar.

He was the ruler of al-Uyaynah, which was the chief town in the Nejd at the time. So he was the strongest ruler in the Nejd. So bin Abdul Wahab was like, great, this is exactly what I need. And even better, quite quickly, bin Muammar, the leader of al-Uyaynah, lent bin Abdul Wahab his support.

to the extent that bin Abdul Wahab even married Uthman bin Mu'min's aunt. So in the Nejd, that would have been a sign of a very close political alliance. So bin Abdul Wahab must have really thought, "Okay, I've got what I need here, a political backer who's supporting my mission." And indeed he did support his mission and he lent his mission sort of real support, which led to an initial quite notorious event in the minds and memories of Muslims and at the time a shocking event.

when Uthman bin Mu'mar and Ibn Abdul Wahab together, they destroyed a tomb. A tomb that at the time was considered to be very sacred. The tomb of Zayd bin al-Khattab

the brother of the second caliph of Islam, Umar. Now, Ayman, tell us this story and explain why this would have been shocking to Muslims at the time and remain so in the memories of the people who don't like Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab to this day. Zayd ibn Khattab is one of the Prophet's early disciples. His brother would later become the second caliph, Umar ibn Khattab.

And Zayd was killed during the wars of the apostasy in Najd, which happened just months after the Prophet Muhammad's death. Yes, these are known as the Ridda Wars, the wars of apostasy. Absolutely. And, you know, so therefore this is why his tomb is in Najd.

In later years, it became a place of reverence, of worship, and people were coming to seek blessings. Sick people were coming seeking healing, you know, women coming to seek divine help to get married and pregnant.

And of course, there were some, you know, shrine servants who would basically get the donations from the people and all of that. So for Muhammad bin Abdul Wahab, for him, this is idolatry. You know, this is not exactly a place of worship that was ordained by God. Therefore, it must go, not ordained.

Must go. That's it. This is the attitude that he adopted. When Uthman bin Muammar, the chief of Ayyina, when he showed up at the shrine of Zayd ibn al-Khattab with his men, and of course with them, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahab himself,

And they announced their intention to destroy the shrine. They were evacuating everyone from inside and they were telling them to stand back. So those caretakers, the priests, those who are serving the shrine, they were warning everyone there. Ibn al-Mammar and Ibn al-Wahhab, they were warning them. God will smite your hands. God will strike you down, will paralyze you if you dare to do anything. Ibn al-Wahhab noticed that Ibn al-Mammar's men were hesitant.

However, he took the shovel and started attacking the shrine and started with the dome. He climbed to the dome and started destroying it from the top. And of course, you know, the bin Muammar men, when they saw that nothing was happening to the guy, he was just looking and laughing at the priests of the shrine, they joined in.

And in no time, it was leveled to the ground. And they made sure that the original grave would be according to what Ibn Adl Wahab described as the sunnah, as the hadith. Just two hands, you know, if you look at your own palm, two palms above the ground, that's it. This is how a grave should be raised above the ground. That's it. This is the sunnah.

And of course, this sent a shockwave across all of Najd and beyond, all the way to Mecca and Medina and the Hijaz. The shrine of Zayd ibn al-Khattab was destroyed. And they didn't stop at that.

Yeah, that's true. There was also a grove of sacred trees in the area that they chopped down. Trees where women, just like to the grave that they destroyed, women would go hang little strips of paper or whatever, strips of things on the tree, pray to the tree, the spirit of the tree in order to get them pregnant and stuff. This is a very much more straightforward form of maybe pre-Islamic worship.

superstition that they were still practicing there. And Uthman bin Muammar bin Abdul Wahab chopped down the grove of trees and again, you know, there was no divine retribution from heaven. So they must have felt, you know, a

buoyed up by conviction that they were on the right path. It reminds me, this story reminds me of stories from the Protestant Reformation in Europe when men like John Knox in Scotland, for example, were going around, you know, invading against statues in cathedrals, invading against bishops, invading against the cult of saints.

and knocking down statues, knocking down whole cathedrals, digging up the relics of saints, burning them, destroying them. So it brings to mind that early modern movement in Europe. And, you know, I'm an Orthodox Christian, as you know, Eamon. That kind of stuff rather upsets me. I don't like the idea of it at all. As it would have upset a lot of the locals in the Negev in the early 18th century or more like the mid-18th.

18th century. Actually, it's beyond Najd, actually. It's beyond Najd. That news is

reached all the way to the ruler of Al-Aqsa, which is on the east coast of the current Saudi Arabia, along the Persian or Arabian Gulf. Yeah, indeed. The great region of Al-Aqsa, which at that time claimed some overlordship over Nejd, very, very loosely organized. But they claimed to have overlordship over the Nejd and to be able to dictate terms to the Umara, the emirs of the Nejd.

Indeed. So, yes, as you say, in Al-Asa, they were like, what the hell is going on? The tomb of the brother of the second caliph has been destroyed by these maniacs. Indeed, even Amir Al-Asa, the powerful leader of that huge oasis, emirate, sent a very strong worded letter to Uthman bin Muammar saying that if you don't kick Muhammad bin Abdul Wahab and get rid of him,

I'm going to cut your trade revenues from Al-Ahsa. At the beginning, Othman bin Muammar refused. He would stood his ground and said, no, I'm not going to kick Muhammad Abdul Wahab.

However, a delegation from Najd went again to Al-Ahsa and asked its powerful ruler to send another letter and another threat. And this time it worked. It did. This is all wrapped up in another story from that time in bin Abdul Wahab's life. When a confessed adulteress, so a woman who committed adultery, confessed to it, was stoned.

in al-Uyayna. This also sent shockwaves around the Nejd and beyond because, you know, obviously the execution method of stoning to this day is very controversial in Islam. You yourself, Ayman, have said on this podcast that stoning is not part of the Sharia. It's a misinterpretation of spurious hadith.

And yet in Uyena this happened. This woman who confessed to adultery and in a way must have known that she was going to be at the receiving end of some pretty harsh discipline was stoned. And as a result of this –

In addition to the previous destruction of the tomb and the trees and the basic tenor of bin Abdul Wahab's preaching, the leader of Al-Asa, the leader of the Bani Khalid tribe there, ordered bin Muammar to expel him from Al-Uyayna, and he did. One funny thing is that later on, Salafi historians in the Nejd, those who followed bin Abdul Wahab, the Wahabis, let us say,

They actually said that the leader of Al-Asa was offended by the story of the stoning of the adulteress because he himself was a notorious fornicator. And he just felt personally offended that such an extreme punishment was meted out to someone accused of fornication. However, there is actually another reason. Historians, later historians, actually realized that she was related to him. She was related to the leader of Al-Asa? Yes. Oh.

Oh, even worse. Oh, bin Abdul Wahab chose the wrong woman to stone. Indeed, indeed. Maybe he was stoned when he did it. But nonetheless... Oh, haram. How dare you cast such calumny across such a wonderful man? It's an innocent joke. But nonetheless, you know, I would reiterate here again my own personal belief that the Quran from cover to cover does not contain one single verse that says that...

there is a stoning for any crime whatsoever. It goes to show you that bin Abdul Wahab's mentality, his ideas were not informed strictly by a literal interpretation of the Quran. There was something else underlying it, the Hadith, but also a mentality. You know, he was making what we would think of as moderate Islam tantamount to apostasy. This wasn't entirely new. As we've said, bin Tamiya had argued something similar.

but Ibn Abdul Wahab was expanding its scope. As a result, he was kicked out of al-Uyyaynah.

The question is, where would he go? We're going to leave this episode there because there's a huge turning point around the corner in bin Abdul Wahab's life, and not just his life, but in the history of the world, which we will, of course, discuss in our next episode. But before we go, I do want to just discuss with you, Eamon, this question. So in Banzal's book, this great book, it's recently released. It's called Wahabism. You really should read it, everyone. It's a great book. He writes...

Ibn Abdul Wahab's ambition was revolutionary. He was seeking to demolish the religious status quo in Nejd and reestablish in its place a commitment to true Islam as he understood it. And Banzal calling Ibn Abdul Wahab a revolutionary made me think about this idea that we've been discussing, the radical mentality, the fundamentalist mentality. Because moving our view to the present day and actually away from the Muslim world and towards the West,

we see movements around animated by a similar spirit, looking around and seeing that everything about Western society is tainted by things like, you know, racism, colonialism, you know, a kind of resurgence of radical left-wing, certainly not religious, quite secular ideology, but animated by a revolutionary spirit that seeks to destroy the status quo and replace something pure in its place.

It's funny because it gets back to personality, to mentality. I feel that bin Abdul-Wahhab had this personality in spades. And if we return to the Lebowski principle of exegesis, you're not wrong, you're an asshole.

To me, Ibn Abdul-Wahhab inclines towards, you're not right. You're just an asshole. But I know, Amy, that you disagree with that. I disagree to the sense that I believe he was misunderstood and that he was the product of his time. He was brilliant. But unfortunately, just like a knife, he had two edges.

Well, we are going to hear all about the two edges of the knife called Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab in our next episode when, you know, out of the blue, a knight in shining armor comes to his rescue. And of course, I'm talking about the founder of the notorious and all-powerful dynasty, the House of Saud. Stay tuned.

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Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Harry Stott. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley and Tom Biddle.