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"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 -- Part 1 By Abdulaziz H. Al-Fahad

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Introduction

On August 2, 1990, Iraq attacked Kuwait.  For several days thereafter, the Saudi Arabian media was not allowed to report the invasion and occupation of Kuwait.  When the Saudi government was satisfied with the U.S. commitment to defend the country, it lifted the gag on the Saudi press as American and other soldiers poured into Saudi Arabia.  In retrospect, it seems obvious that the Saudis, aware of their vulnerabilities and fearful of provoking the Iraqis, were reluctant to take any public position on the invasion until it was ascertained whether the United States was willing to commit its forces to the defense of the Kingdom and eventually the liberation of Kuwait.

For a state founded on the basis of an austere, puritanical interpretation of Islam -- Wahhabism, with all its historically exclusivist tendencies -- the decision to invite the United States to the defense of the country was perhaps the most momentous in modern Saudi Arabian history.  The invitation of non-Muslim soldiers to defend the cradle of Islam was a dramatic and desperate step that presumably would have flown in the face of everything the country stood for, at least as interpreted by its Wahhabi scholars, or ulama.  Yet, those very scholars gave their stamp of religious and legal approval to the invitation under God's Holy Law, the shari^cah.  Shortly after the arrival of the foreign forces, the scholars, represented by the Council of Senior religious scholars, issued a fatwa (a ruling on a point of Islamic law that is given by a recognized authority) succinctly and unequivocally supporting the decision.

Some one hundred and twenty years before the 1990 invasion, the Wahhabi realm had experienced another violent encounter with the Iraqis, then acting in the name of the Ottoman Empire.  A Saudi ruler, ^cAbd Allah ibn Faysal (d. 1889), had lost his throne to his brother Sa^cud (d. 1875).  In his quest to reclaim power, ^cAbd Allah appealed to the Ottomans for military assistance -- an appeal that the Ottomans, under the leadership of one of their more astute leaders, Midhat Pasha, the Governor, of Iraq, were only too pleased to honor.  As behooves a Wahhabi ruler, ^cAbd Allah took care to solicit an appropriate fatwa -- ruling from a Wahhabi scholar, who obliged by declaring the request for assistance legitimate under shari^cah principles.  The more conservative and authoritative religious scholars would have none of this; most scholars declared the fatwa to be in error, and at least one went so far as to pronounce the issuing mufti (a jurist who interprets Muslim law) an apostate, in effect rendering a death sentence.  After all, the Ottomans were, in the eyes of many of the religious scholars, not proper Muslims; they were unbelievers, or even polytheists.

The evolution from finding the military support of another Muslim state -- the Ottomans -- to be an infringement of God's law to the conclusion that the assistance of the non-Muslim U.S. forces was in conformity with that law can be explained by the radical transformations in the international, regional, domestic, and material conditions to which the religious/legal elite had to respond, and the suppleness of the Wahhabi doctrinal and legal tenets.  More critically, it is an often overlooked characteristic of the Wahhabi movement -- that it was born in a stateless society with the explicit purpose of forming a state -- that provides the explanation for its evolution from a revolutionary to a more quietist and accommodating ideology.  Starting from an essentially radical approach to the organization of society and its relations with neighboring powers, and through difficult experiences over two centuries, the theoreticians and guardians of the movement slowly came to understand the high cost of ideological purity and the value of realism in domestic and foreign affairs.

Origins of Wahhabism

The Wahhabi revivalist movement originated around the middle of the eighteenth century in al-^cArid, the southern part of central Arabia (Najd), the location of present-day Riyadh.  Arabian politics at the time were chaotic and bloody, and violence and conflict were endemic.  Among the sedentary populations, or Hadar, neither tribal organization nor central authority existed.  Almost every town and village was ruled independently by local chiefs, and even within such small locales independent and warring neighborhoods often could be found.  The countryside was the realm of pastoral nomads, the Bedouins, and no order existed beyond the tenuous authority of the tribe.  The founder of the movement, Shaykh Muhammad ibn ^cAbd al-Wahhab (d. 1792), was keenly aware of these conditions and sought to unify the population and impose an order under the shari^cah.

He thus started propagating an austere interpretation of Sunni Islam and sought the renewal of the faith.  In particular, ibn ^cAbd al-Wahhab espoused a strict monotheism that drew its inspiration mainly from the writings of the distinguished medieval Hanbali scholar ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328) and his disciples.  As reflected in the writings of its founder and his followers, early Wahhabism espoused some exclusivist tendencies, and sought to create sharp distinctions between its adherents and others who resisted its call for unity and purification of Islam.

Ibn ^cAbd al-Wahhab embarked on his reform by persuading the local chiefs vigorously to apply both the strict legal scope and the wider theological tenets of the shariah.  Armed with rigorous unitarian notions of God and the obligations incumbent upon His human servants to make Him the exclusive recipient of worship, ibn Abd al-Wahhab pronounced many of the prevalent beliefs and practices of his time to be little more than idolatry -- the only sin that God promised never to forgive.  His attack on what he regarded as polytheism led him to condemn the apparently widespread custom of saint veneration and worship, which included imputation of supernatural powers to the saints and exaggerated claims of their miracles, as well as animistic practices.  He attracted attention, not all of which was friendly, when he took it upon himself to destroy holy trees and the tombs over the supposed graves of the Prophet's companions, as well as to stone adulterers.  The local ruler feared the consequences of the Shaykh's campaign and asked him to leave, a trip that took him to Dir^-iyyah and to the founding of the famous pact with the Saudi ruling house in 1744-1745.

The Shaykh, who attracted an enthusiastic following, was unrelenting in his campaigns, as were his enemies, who had at their disposal sizable support both among the public and from the local potentates who sensed the threat of the new Wahhabi call.  The Wahhabis to this day maintain that their military campaigns were carried out in self-defense, but the history of the campaigns need not detain us here.  The theological, legal, and political exchanges and polemics, on the other hand, are revealing of how the movement perceived itself and the world surrounding it.

To ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the state of the Muslim community around him was nothing short of a reversion to the old polytheism, which the Qur'an and the Prophet condemned and sought to eliminate.  Much of the debate surrounding early Wahhabi doctrine addressed the questions of what monotheism entails and whether nominal belief without more is sufficient to make one a Muslim.  For opponents of Wahhabism, mere profession of the attestation of faith was sufficient for a person to be considered a Muslim and entitled to all privileges and immunities inhering in such status.  Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, in contrast, refused to accept as a true Muslim anyone who failed to hold the beliefs and perform the rituals, especially prayers, attendant to the profession of faith.  By failing to perform the daily prayers, for example, one was committing unbelief, notwithstanding any formal profession of faith.  It was also unbelief to "associate" any other being or thing in the worship of God.  Because belief in the cult of saints and the practice of requesting the help and mediation of the dead were widespread at the time, Wahhabi theology had radical implications for Muslim society. Once, God's conclusive argument to unbelievers was communicated to a person or community, refusal to correct their ways could open the door to being pronounced unbelievers and having adverse legal rules and consequences imposed on them and their property.

This dichotomy between true Muslims living under the guidance of Wahhabi precepts and others who followed entrenched practices of old marked much of the conflict between the Wahhabis and their local and foreign opponents.  By embarking on a campaign to unify central Arabia and impose centralized authority under Wahhabi doctrines, the Wahhabis inevitably had to face the enmity of powerful adversaries.  This conflict originally took the form of theological and legal exchanges and polemics among scholars.  Each side attempted to paint the other in the most unflattering terms.  The Wahhabis were tireless in denouncing their enemies, and through a slow process managed to extend their realm to most of Arabia and simultaneously to eradicate objectionable practices.

The early conflicts with outside powers came with the Wahhabi occupation of al-Ahsa (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/Saudi forces, however, the spread of the movement raised 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 Muslim communities.  To be deprived of the honor of custodianship of the Holy Mosques in Arabia, however, was an insult 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 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 Saudi ruler was taken to Istanbul where he was executed.

*   Copyright � 2004 by Abdulaziz H. Al-Fahad.  

�   NYU Law Review Editor's Note:  Many of the sources cited herein are available only in Arabic, and many of those are unavailable in the English-speaking world; we therefore have not been able to verify them in accordance with our normal cite-checking procedures.  Because we believe that this Article represents a unique and valuable contribution to Western legal scholarship, we instead have relied on the author to provide translations or to verify the substance of particular sources where possible and appropriate.  Our transliteration of Arabic words into the Roman alphabet does not follow a formal system, but has been carried out consistently throughout the piece.  All inquiries concerning sources or citations should be directed to 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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