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EDITOR'S NOTE:
The Saudi-US Relations Information Service is pleased to present this important work and thanks the author and the NYU Law Review for permission to reprint it. The complete article is available on-line.��
"From Exclusivism to Accommodation: Doctrinal and Legal Evolution of Wahhabism" originally appeared in the New York University Law Review ( 79 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 485 (2004)).
"From Exclusivism to Accommodation: Doctrinal and Legal Evolution of Wahhabism"
By Abdulaziz H. Al-Fahad
In the section titled "Origins of Wahhabism"
[see complete
text] Mr. Fahad discussed the conflicts with, among others, the Ottomans. It is recounted here as background to Part 4.
The early conflicts with outside powers came with the Wahhabi occupation of al-Ahsa (1208/1794) in eastern Arabia, which brought the Wahhabis into close contact with the Ottomans in Iraq. A complex web of local, tribal and regional politics underlay many of these early conflicts. Both the Wahhabis and the Ottomans launched military campaigns with the Wahhabis typically destroying venerated tombs during their raids into Iraq. With the 1805 occupation of the holy cities of Makkah and Madinah by the Wahhabi/Saud forces, however, the spread of the movement raise more immediate and profound concerns for outsiders, especially the Ottomans, who were the dominant Sunni power at the time. The systematic destruction of tombs and saint shrines in the holy cities drew sharp reactions from the wider Muslims communities. To be deprived of the honor of custodianship of the Holy Mosques in Arabia, however, was an insult to the Ottoman Sultan could not bear for long. Eventually he dispatched the forces of his Egyptian vassal, Muhammad Ali, to crush the Wahhabi challenge. Unfortunately for the Wahhabis, their exclusivist tendencies, coupled with their lack of experience in regional and international politics, allowed the Ottomans to make the case against them with relative ease. For example, convinced of the impermissibility under correct Islamic principles of the traditional "mahmal" -- the camel caravan bringing pilgrims from Syria and Egypt with music and other innovative practices -- the Wahhabis simply banned the caravans. The Ottomans presented the ban as an attempt by the Wahhabis to prevent Muslims from making the required pilgrimage, and an uproar ensued. The Egyptians launched their campaigns to destroy the Wahhabis in 1811; by 1818, the Wahhabi capital, Diriyyah, was in ruins and the Saud Imam was taken to Istanbul where he was executed.
From Exclusivism to Accommodation: Doctrinal and Legal Evolution of Wahhabism -- Part 4
Occupation, Disintegration, and the Radical Response �
By Abdulaziz H. Al-Fahad
Occupation, Disintegration, and the Radical Response
The invasion and crushing defeat presented the religious scholars with novel and problematic issues. The old conflict had been over the prevalence and legality of prohibited beliefs and practices. These issues became moot within the Wahhabi realm following the triumph of the Wahhabi campaigns and the successful suppression of objectionable beliefs and popular practices. During the Ottoman invasion, however, many local groups, both sedentary and nomadic, hastened to the aid of the invaders, thereby committing "treasonous" acts and perhaps betraying the shallowness of their convictions. After the invasion, the critical issue for the increasingly radical and conservative scholars was not the elimination of prohibited practices but instead the question of loyalty. The puritans among the scholars, especially those in al-Arid, took up the issue and pronounced those supporting the invading armies to be apostates, since the Ottomans and their vassals were regarded as polytheists.
The jurists' position was expounded by a brilliant grandson of the founder of Wahhabism, Sulayman ibn Abd Allah, who was executed by the invading army in 1818, at the young age of thirty-two. Apparently alarmed by the serious defections from the Wahhabi cause to the invading "unbelievers," he wrote an influential epistle adducing no fewer than twenty-one text-proofs that those who assisted the attackers were no longer Muslims. Strikingly, however, this jurist did not find it necessary to establish that the invaders were unbelievers. His verdict was swift and given within the first lines of the epistle:
Know, may God bless you, that when a person shows approval of the polytheists' religion, for fear of, or in appeasement or flattery to them to avoid their evil, that he is an unbeliever like them, even if he dislikes their religion and hates them and loves Islam and Muslims, if that were the only [error] committed. However, if he is in a protected realm, and he invites them, obeys them and shows approval of their false religion and assists them with help and money, becomes loyal to them and terminates loyalty between himself and the Muslims, and becomes a soldier of polytheism and tombs and their people�.. no Muslim should doubt he is an unbeliever.
The pages of this short epistle are replete with references to the apostates -- presumably those who invited the Egyptians, were not steadfast in their defense of the Wahhabi realm, or defected to the enemy. Shaykh Sulayman regarded polytheists -- the worshippers of tombs and the dead -- as enemies, and constantly pointed out the prevalence of prostitution, homosexuality, intoxication, and myriad other sins among them. For Shaykh Sulayman, there was an unequivocal rupture between Islam and those failing to resist the conquerors. His epistle set the tone for many of the subsequent legal, theological, and political positions taken by the conservative Wahhabi scholars in their responses to foreign and domestic challenges.
This "rejectionist" line, however, was not the only local reaction to the trauma of invasion, destruction, and occupation. Some in the population, especially in the al-Qasim area (about 200 miles northwest of Riyadh), which gradually achieved prominence in local politics, came to the conclusion that the radical Wahhabis actually had brought destruction upon themselves. They specifically held the descendants of the founder, the Al al-Shaykh, responsible for the calamity, for they were instrumental in formulating policy and following a zealous line that turned many people into enemies of the nascent state.
Thus, there emerged within Wahhabism two distinct and competing attitudes toward the outside world. The religious scholars of southern Najd and their allies still maintained some of their old exclusivist positions, which they now put in the service of recovering Wahhabi/Saudi control. Other religious scholars, especially in al-Qasim but also in al-Ahsa and Ha'il, advocated less exclusivist doctrines. This internal dispute preoccupied Wahhabi scholars for close to a century, from the destruction of the first Saudi state and the civil war during the second through the initial stages of the third Saudi state in the early decades of the twentieth century.
One of the earliest exchanges within the Wahhabi scholarly community came during the Egyptian occupation of much of Najd. The faithful were faced with the profound question of how to deal with the occupiers, whom many regarded as non-Muslims. Some in the southern areas, especially those distant from the influence of the occupiers, believed that the inhabitants of occupied towns had an obligation to make the hijrah�the flight from the land of unbelief to the land of Islam. For obvious reasons, the majority thought it an impractical idea, and one of the Wahhabi judges provided justification for people to stay where they were. His fatwa advising that it was not incumbent upon the inhabitants of towns under Egyptian occupation to leave their homes and lands was simple:
The matter in question is�.. what many ignoramuses and the riffraff�.. say that anyone staying in a town occupied by the asakir [foreign army] is an unbeliever�.. How could it be said that a person whose belief is strengthened and religion maintained by God is an unbeliever just because the askar are controlling his town by force, but did not order him to renounce his religion and did not compel or entice him to commit any act that would harm it? God has put man's sanctity before the sanctity of His own [commands], so He absolved him of the prohibition against eating carrion if he feared harm because of hunger and allowed him to renounce belief if he is coerced.�
There is nothing in this jurist's biography to suggest any undue influences or hostility to Wahhabism. Indeed, his long (and artistically mediocre) poem mourning the demise of the Wahhabi state and the capture of its leaders is strong testimony to his loyalty to the Wahhabi cause. Yet when he issued his fatwa he was subjected to contemptuous attacks by the southern Wahhabis. �
Another important problem facing the faithful was the loss of political leadership -- the ruler -- under the occupation. This raised many questions for the community. It was unclear, for example, whether resistance --
jihad -- against the occupying army was legitimate without a properly constituted political authority. Those who were willing to accommodate the foreign invaders latched onto this expediency and argued that there could not be a jihad without a ruler. This merited a long and detailed response from the ranking shaykh, Abd al-Rahman ibn Hasan. He declared that it is jihad that makes a ruler and not the other way around, and concluded by offering textual proofs for this position, in effect sanctioning "freelance" jihad.
Civil War: The Ulama Divided
As was the case with the early Wahhabis, the legal and theological debate during what is called the second Saudi state (1824�1891) involved both Najdi and non-Najdi scholars. Cloaked in the now familiar theological idiom of Islam and unbelief, the Wahhabis of the south and their allies maintained their old rigorous attitudes. An emerging group in the north, however, in alliance with some Iraqi scholars, came to challenge the accepted dogmas and launched a series of attacks on their southern counterparts. For these moderate religious scholars, who were perhaps aware of their compatriots' acute need to conduct trade with the Levant and the rest of the Ottoman possessions, the sins of the Ottoman Muslims did not amount to total unbelief, and they challenged the interpretation offered by the conservative Wahhabis that pronounced as unbelievers those who practiced veneration of saints.
During the second Saudi state, the split among the Wahhabi political and scholarly groups over the conduct of the affairs of their state and its proper relation with its neighbors widened. When the powerful ruler Faysal passed away in 1865, his eldest son, Abd Allah, succeeded him, in accord with the then-applicable dynastic principle of primogeniture. Because of discord within the ruling house, his younger brother, Saud, challenged Abd Allah and eventually deposed him in 1871. Abd Allah sought to recover his position through other means, ultimately soliciting the help of the Ottoman Governor in Iraq, who complied and promptly occupied al-Ahsa. Sensing that the Ottomans had come to stay and that the designs of the Ottoman governor included jailing him, Abd Allah fled the territory, announcing his repentance and regrets, and relied again on domestic forces to continue the fight with his brother. In 1875, Saud passed away, allowing Abd Allah a brief recovery that was brought to an end by the overthrow of Saudi rule in 1887 by the House of Rashid in Ha'il (about 400 miles north of Riyadh), an emerging power from the north.
Abd Allah's dealings with the Ottomans were problematic from the perspective of Wahhabi doctrine, but he nonetheless succeeded in obtaining the necessary fatwas from one of the religious scholars, Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Ajlan. The conservative Wahhabis were quick to retaliate with their own fatwas, declaring the invitation to be unlawful, and expounding upon the deficiencies of the Ottomans� Islamic credentials.
The conservative Wahhabis were persuaded that the Ottomans were unbelievers. As such, the legality of Abd Allah's request for assistance was determined in accordance with the rules pertaining to the solicitation of military help by Muslims from unbelievers. The legal norms governing this issue were conflicting and usually addressed through the rules governing warfare. A plurality of jurists categorically prohibited the solicitation and use of non-Muslim military assistance, while others allowed it subject to some stringent conditions, the most important of which were that the non-Muslim providing the help must not have a part in decisionmaking, and that the party providing the assistance not be of such strength as to be dangerous to those receiving it.
Although ibn Ajlan's letter/ fatwa is no longer extant -- at least not publicly -- we are able to reconstruct the general outlines of his argument from a number of rebuttals. It appears that ibn Ajlan argued along the following lines: First, the solicitation of help from the Ottomans was no more sinful than the actions taken by ibn Taymiyyah when he requested the help of people from Egypt and Syria in the fight against the invading Mongols in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, since the inhabitants of those territories were then equally unbelievers. While stressing the piety of high-ranking officers of the Ottoman army -- and presumably conceding a lack thereof on the part of the rank-and-file -- he nonetheless argued that enlisting the help of unbelievers was permissible. As a last resort, he invoked the necessity doctrine as justification for the validity of the invitation.
The rebuttal was swift and harsh. Shaykh Abd al-Latif, dubbing the letter "the snare of the devil."
Shaykh Abd al-Latif�s most powerful critique, however, was that the "legal" point at issue was not whether it was permissible to enlist Ottoman help. In fact, the Ottomans intended to stay and rule, he wrote, which had no legal justification under any circumstances. Shaykh Abd al-Latif further stressed this point in another letter which, while critical of ibn Atiq for describing ibn Ajlan as an apostate, still contended that the main issue was that the Ottomans planned to stay and govern.
About the Author
Abdulaziz H. Al-Fahad received his B.A., 1979, Michigan State University; M.A., 1980, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies; J.D., 1984, Yale Law School. Mr. Al-Fahad is a practicing attorney in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Conference on Transnational Connections: The Arab Gulf and Beyond, at St. John's College, Oxford University, September 2002, and at the Yale Middle East Legal Studies Seminar in Granada, Spain, January 10-13, 2003.
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