An 18th-century Najdi preacher whose alliance with the Saud family still shapes Arabia
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was chased out of Basra for preaching against shrine veneration. Back in central Arabia he struck a pact with Muhammad bin Saud, and the power-sharing deal between their two families, begun in the Emirate of Diriyah, still underpins the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia today.
He was born in 1703 into a poor settled clan of the Banu Tamim at 'Uyayna in Najd, a region with little formal learning but a tradition of Hanbali jurists. His father was the Hanbali legal authority of Najd and his grandfather a judge, and his first lessons were Quran memorisation and basic Hanbali law drawn from Ibn Qudamah. Historian David Commins judged his scholarship thin, yet noted it looked impressive against the ignorance around him.
Around twenty he left for Mecca and then Medina, where the Naqshbandi Sufi scholar Muhammad Hayat al-Sindi became his mentor. Al-Sindi urged him to reject pleas to dead saints and rigid imitation of medieval legal commentaries in favour of reading scripture directly. Four years in Basra followed, then Baghdad from 1739, where he married a wealthy woman, and journeys through Kurdistan, Isfahan, Damascus and Cairo before he returned to Huraymila and composed Kitab al-Tawhid.
His programme rested on tawhid, the oneness of God, and drew heavily on Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim. He wanted every Muslim, women included, to read the Quran personally, and he condemned tomb cults, sacred trees and sacrifices made before a blind sage as idolatry. Notably, he attacked specific practices rather than Sufism as a whole, and he wrote for ordinary people, splitting ideas into numbered principles and borrowing local dialect, folk sayings and vernacular poetry.
Opposition came even from fellow Hanbalis, and his followers reject the name Wahhabi that outsiders gave the movement. Political backing solved his isolation. His descendants, the Al ash-Sheikh, became Saudi Arabia's foremost religious family and have long dominated its clerical institutions. He died in 1792.
Source: Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab
