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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 and excerpts will be presented as items of interest over the
next few weeks.
"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)).
Click below
to read part one of this article.
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Exclusivism to Accommodation: Doctrinal and Legal Evolution of Wahhabism --
Part 2
By Abdulaziz
H. Al-Fahad
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The
Saudi Restoration and the Defeat of Militancy
In
1902, the young Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd al-Rahman
(later King Abd al-Aziz) launched a new campaign to
restore the fortunes of the Saudi dynasty, starting with a heroic
reconquest of Riyadh, his ancestral capital.
The campaigns against local powers, the Rashidi dynasty, the Sharifs of
Hijaz, the Ottomans in the eastern parts, the  nomadic tribes, and a host of
other potentates took about three decades, concluding with the firm
establishment of the Saudi state. During
these campaigns the conservative religious scholars
were a mainstay of his support. They
were unwavering and generous in their assistance and were full participants in
the campaigns and the affairs of the realm.
With the rise in Saudi power, their fortunes improved
significantly and their triumph was slowly but firmly recognized.
But they soon were put on the defensive, this time by even more radical
scholars and proselytizers springing from their midst.
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"The pastoral nomads always had been problematic for any party that
wished to establish a central authority in Arabia.
The nomadic tribes had been living an autonomous existence from time
immemorial and jealously guarded their independence against the encroachment
of central authority, whatever its trappings.." |
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Part
of the Wahhabi drive to restore the state and consolidate its power was a new
strategy to deal with the age-old Bedouin "question."
The pastoral nomads always had been problematic for any party that
wished to establish a central authority in Arabia.
The nomadic tribes had been living an autonomous existence from time
immemorial and jealously guarded their independence against the encroachment
of central authority, whatever its trappings. While willing to strike
alliances of convenience with any and all, especially if there was the
prospect of booty, the nomadic tribes were always quick to reassert their
independence. The tribes
consistently refused to pay the religious tax (zakat),
rejected the shariah in favor of
their customary laws -- the bete noire of
the religious scholars, and maintained the
traditions of raiding (ghazw) among
the various Bedouin tribes and against the sedentary communities and
collecting tribute (khuwah) from the
weaker groups. The founder of
Wahhabism himself was even more severe in his condemnation of the Bedouins,
essentially accusing them of unbelief. He
viewed them as no better than pagans; for they did not believe in even the
simple, basic tenets of Islam, such as resurrection, let alone the shariah.
The
new Wahhabi strategy involved an innovative approach that would require the
tribes to renounce nomadism in favor of a settled lifestyle devoted to the
pursuit of learning and land cultivation.
To accomplish this task, the scholars relied upon the antinomadic
tendencies embedded in Islam. Wahhabism had already made major inroads within the nomadic
communities and Islamic rituals gradually came to be observed.
Therefore
the next step in delegitimating the nomadic lifestyle was less radical than it
might have appeared. The Wahhabi
jurists deployed their colleagues to press the nomads to settle.
They were provided with the little assistance the embryonic state could
spare and they settled in droves in villages called hijar, which numbered in the hundreds by the 1920s.
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"..
the campaign, successful as it was, spawned a fanatical new breed that put
even the conservative Wahhabi jurists on the defensive.." |
But
the campaign, successful as it was, spawned a fanatical new breed that put
even the conservative Wahhabi jurists on the defensive.
In addition to pronouncements on the laxity of other scholars or
communities, Wahhabi scholars in the 1910s and 1920s attempted to stem the
rise of a new extremism that threatened the very foundation of the new
Wahhabi/Saudi order. The
settled nomads, known as Ikhwan (the
Brethren), were advocating a state of "permanent revolution" and the right
to conduct warfare against "unbelievers" regardless of the wishes of the
political leadership. Their
definition of unbelief left even fewer Muslims in the world.
The
conservative Wahhabis were up to the task, and the preaching and fatwas
of that era betray an acute awareness of the need to protect the new state.
In a series of letters and fatwas
addressed to the recalcitrant Bedouins, the religious scholars
urged them to tone down their fanaticism.
But the most significant clash was over the prerogative of the state
vis-a-vis the citizen in matters of war and peace.
Once the battles for  unification were completed, the Ikhwan
were disturbed by their idleness and their inability to conduct raiding, or jihad,
in the name of Islam. Building on
the same logic that first induced them to settle and launch wars against
"unbelievers," they now contended that the ruler, Abd al-Aziz,
had an obligation to continue warfare until all unbelievers were subdued.
In practical terms, this meant to engage the British in Iraq and
Jordan, a prospect that both the Wahhabi scholars and the ruler
found unappealing given the lessons learned from the self-defeating
conflict with the Ottomans during the first Saudi state.
The
fatwas
issued during this period make for fascinating reading.
They indicate the jurists' early awareness of the danger posed to the
emerging polity by the notion of waging jihad
independently of the ruler. For
example, in a letter written in 1919-1920 by four of the ranking scholars
and addressed to Abd al-Aziz himself, the jurists
started by emphasizing the need for a unified community (jamaah) and stressed that there can be "no Islam
without [a unified] community, and no such community without obedience."
They admonished the ruler for failing to take
decisive action against a Bedouin chief who engaged in his own jihad
and implored him to protect the realm by ensuring that no nomads from the hijar
engaged in raiding without the ruler's
explicit permission and direction.
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"..
the
jurists .. explicitly acknowledged that the political leadership, the ruler,
enjoyed great latitude in decisions of war and peace.
He was to be the exclusive decision-maker in such matters, and all had
to defer to him, be they religious scholars
or laity.." |
While
the
jurists still were
uncompromising in their understanding of what constituted correct belief, they
now implicitly recognized a limit to what could be done about it and
explicitly acknowledged that the political leadership, the ruler,
enjoyed great latitude in decisions of war and peace.
He was to be the exclusive decision-maker in such matters, and all had
to defer to him, be they religious scholars
or laity. Their fatwas
were replete with references to avoiding sedition and discouraging
transgression against the prerogatives of the ruler.
Henceforth freelance jihad was
no longer permissible and the state's monopoly on such powers was affirmed.
When fatwas
and arguments failed to make an impression, a military showdown was sanctioned
by the religious scholars. The Ikhwan
were dealt a painful and decisive blow in the Battle of Sabalah in early
1929. That marked the end of the
extremist Bedouin challenge, and the state was slowly but firmly consolidated
in the midst of only episodic but ineffective challenges.
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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