His grandfather was a judge and so was his father, ‘Abd al-Wahhab. In 1715, he left his home for an enterprise of seeking religious knowledge. This was relatively normal at the time, considering his family background and the fact that Najd had limited resources both in terms of teachers and books, especially when compared with al-Hijaz, for example, the region where Mecca and Medina are. The exact sequence of his peregrinations is difficult to establish, due to lack of sources. However, it is agreed that he visited Mecca, Medina, al-Ahsa (a city in Eastern Arabia) and Basra, in southern Iraq. It is believed that he first performed a hajj in Mecca and that from there he went to Medina. There, he was taught notably by Muhammad Hayat al-Sindi (d.1750), an Indian preacher who introduced him to hadith tradition, and ‘Abdullah ibn Sayf al-Shammari, who commented on the writings of Ibn Taymiya (d.1328) and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d.1350) for him. They also inspired him to refer to the two main sources of Islamic law directly, that is, the Qur’an and the Sunnah, as opposed to relying heavily on commentaries made throughout the centuries.1 John Voll explains that ‘the Haramayn cosmopolitan scholarly tradition may not have been the cause of eighteenth-century Islamic revivalism, but it had connections with most such movements’.
During his travels, especially in Basra, a port city with a sizeable Shi’i community at the time, he was confronted by popular Islamic piety in the form of prayers and visits to the graves of locally renowned, pious men, practices which he disliked and condemned. He met an important Islamic studies teacher, named Muhammad al-Majmu’i, who extended his knowledge of the Hanbali tradition and who initially endorsed his calls to rectify what he perceived as wrong in that community. The local religious elite, however, put pressure on the authorities to have him leave Basra due to his activism. He then went to al-Ahsa, where he was disappointed by the teachings and by the lack of commitment of the local scholars. He took some time there to copy many of the books of Ibn Taymiya and of Ibn al-Qayyim, who became major sources of inspiration for him.
It was then, in around 1739, that he went back to the oasis of Huraymila, in his native region of Najd where his father was a judge. There, he wrote his most famous book, Kitab al-Tawhid, or the Book on the Oneness of God. By then, the main elements of his theology had already been shaped. His personal conviction was that the Muslims of the Arabian Peninsula had neglected the quintessence of Islam, which is the belief in the Oneness of God (in Arabic: tawhid). He understood some of the practices of his contemporaries to be in violation of what worshipping one God entails. His original writings describe three types of oneness: the oneness of Allah’s Lordship (tawhid al-rububiyyah), which consists of recognising and knowing that there is only one God; the oneness of Allah’s worship (tawhid al-uluhiyyah), which consists of dedicating all acts of worship to God; the oneness of Allah’s Attributes (tawhid al-sifat in his original writings, which then became tawhid al-Asma wa al-Sifat in later Wahhabi literature, i.e., the oneness of Allah’s names and attributes), which he defines as stemming from the other two types of oneness and consisting in confirming the attributes of God.
He found inspiration for this definition in what Ibn Taymiya had said before him.4 He considered that idol worshippers could be counted as honouring partially the requirements of the oneness of God, and that some of them even had more belief in the oneness of God than some of his Muslim contemporaries. For example, he would explain that all idol worshippers would agree that God had Lordship over everything, using the verse in the Qur’an, which means ‘And if you were to ask them: “Who has created the heavens and the earth,” they would surely answer “God”’ [Q 39:38]. For Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, this proves that idol worshippers fulfil the requirements of the oneness of God’s Lordship, but that by worshipping other than God they do not uphold the requirements of the oneness of Allah’s worship. He then proceeds to explain that Muslims who ask for the intercession of Prophets or pious people have a weaker belief in the oneness of God than the polytheists, as he said that polytheists, in their hours of need, would turn to God, whereas some Muslims would ask for the help of other than God. This has led him to say that their disbelief, as he saw it, was even worse than the disbelief of the idol worshippers.5 To consider that non-Muslims could have a stronger belief in the oneness of God than Muslims was revolutionary and caused him to face strong opposition to his teachings later on. At the origin of his understanding of the concept of oneness, is his definition of the Islamic testification of faith (shahadatayn). He explains that when the Prophet was asking the idol worshippers to say ‘There is no god except God’, he did not mean by ‘God’ the Creator, or the Sustainer, as he believes they knew that already, but that he meant Allah is the only one who can be sought for the sake of one’s affairs.
Usurpation of the Leadership of Islamic Society after the Death of Holy Prophet Muhammad
