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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"
| 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.
|
Mecca, Saudi Arabia. (Photo by S.M. Amin/Aramco/PADIA)
|
He
declared that it is
jihad that
makes a ruler
and not the
other way
around .. in effect sanctioning
"freelance" jihad. |
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.
|
..
he nonetheless argued that enlisting
the help of unbelievers was
permissible.. |
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.
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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