Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

H i s to r i cal Introduction and Overv i e w 2 5to political power in the Arabian peninsula. It originated with Muhammadibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792), who grew up at Nejd in the Arabian peninsula.His writings on reforming Islam drew considerably on the works of medievalHanbali scholars such as Ibn Taymiyya; however, he claimed to be an independentreformer who derived his arguments directly from the Qur’an andhadith. He called for a radical reform of society to free Islam from what heviewed as the accretion of “ignorant” and “pagan” traditions, including thetraditional Muslim jurisprudence of the four established schools of law, aswell as such local customs as the veneration of shrines dedicated to Sufi “masters”(awliya Allah).These agendas were significantly advanced in Arabia after the Wa h h a b imovement for religious reform came together with the political and militaryenergies of the local Sa’ud clan. For much of the second half of the eighteenthc e n t u ry, campaigns both of words and of blunter weapons were waged by theWahhabi-Saudi forces until the establishment of the first Saudi state and theSaudi and Wahhabi conquest of Mecca in 1806. Through their control of thecities of Mecca and Medina, the influence of Wahhabi doctrine spread beyondthe Arabian peninsula to all parts of the Muslim world, following pilgrims onthe h a j j as well as itinerant Muslim scholars and students who came from allover Asia and Africa to study in Islam’s holiest city. The Wahhabis were known,then as now, for their sharp criticism of Muslim ideas and practices that theydeemed to be un-Islamic. This criticism often extended to many teachings andpractices associated with Sufism as well as to the institutions and ideas that haddynamically managed the differing Muslim scholarly opinions that had animatedreligious developments in earlier centuries of Islamic history.H o w e v e r, Wahhabism was not unopposed. In this period, one of the mostimportant early critics of Wahhabism was a North African scholar named Ahmadibn Idris, who wrote a treatise defending the rich traditions of Muslimlearning and religious experience established in Islamic history against theWahhabi reformism that sought to discard these legacies:As for you [the Wahhabis]—God bless you—you are familiar with texts entitledThe Rudiments a n d Basic Principles, and you imagine that knowledge of the Book(i.e., Qur’an) and the Sunna (as related through h a d i t h) consists of what is containedin such summaries. This is compound ignorance! . . . If you were cognizantof the accommodating religious learning which others possess, the realitieswould be apparent to you and you would proceed along the clearest path.But you have imposed restrictions on yourselves and the roads have become narrowfor you. You have reduced Islam to what you are aware of and you claim thatyou are the saved ones, whereas all others shall perish. This amounts to narrowmindednessand the hardening of accommodation. But God guides us andguides you! (Quoted in Radtke et al. 2000, 197–198)