#muhammed ibn abd-al wahhab

[thephilosopheroftheboudoir]

Grim History

The Rise of Wahhabi Islam and the Conquest of the Arabian Peninsula

    In the early years of the 18th century, the impoverished region of the central Arabian peninsula called the Najd was a veritable backwater. Dominated by the northern Arabian Rashid tribe with support from the Ottoman Empire, the Najdi people were suffering from poverty due to agricultural difficulties. The practice of Islam had faded away and given rise to superstitious rites and the worship of saints in its place. Violence, lawlessness, and constant raiding by Bedouin tribes were seemingly never-ending problems. Out of the chaos came a young student of Islamic law named Muhammed ibn Abd-al Wahhab who promised to alleviate their distress if they returned to the way of life set out by the first adherents to the Muslim religion.  His  teachings transformed the Arabian lands and set the course of the region on the path to fundamentalist militant Islam.

    Born sometime in the first decade of the 1700’s, Abd al-Wahhab came from a family of judges. Raised in the Sunni Hanbali school of Muslim jurisprudence, he chose his devotion to the practice of law at an early age. After going on pilgrimage in Mecca and Medina, Adb-al Wahhab returned to his native village of Uyayna, convinced after what he saw there that Muslims had abandoned the true and pure form of Islam as it was originally planned out by the prophet Mohammad. He began preaching about the purification of Islamic teachings and soon began attracting adherents to his revivalist style of militancy and literalism. Male followers were made to wear a plain white thobe and turban on their heads rather than the traditional Bedouin iqal, the black rope used to hold their headscarves in place. Female disciples were commanded to dress with extreme modesty in the full black burqa covering all parts of their bodies except for their eyes.

    Aside from the memorization of the Qur’an, the early Wahhabis believed that every aspect of their lives had to be done in strict obedience to Allah without any influence from anything else. Thus, praying to saints, a practice that had gained in popularity in those times, was strictly forbidden. Even the intervention of doctors in illnesses or injuries was banned because the patient in such situations did not seek out guidance from Allah instead. Women were to be highly regarded just as long as they married and did their wifely duties. Social interaction between members of the opposite sex was outlawed to prevent extra-marital affairs; this social taboo, if broken, was punishable by public whippings and beatings. Followers of Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion were regarded as sorcerers and agents of evil and Muslims who practiced or believed anything other than the Wahhabi cult’s doctrine were thought of as heretics and enemies of the true faith of Islam.

    Muhammad ibn Abd-al Wahhab starting gaining notoriety when he and his followers set out on a campaign to clean up their society. They began their rampage by destroying a coffin containing the remains of a revered saint, said to have healing powers. The people of the Najd also had taken to worshiping sacred trees which they believed to have supernatural powers; Abd-al Wahhab and his followers cut these down. They also found a woman who had been known for speaking publicly about cheating on her husband; when they commanded that she repent, she reacted with defiance and claimed to be proud of her infidelity. Her punishment was that they buried her up to the neck in sand and threw rocks at her head until she died. Public beheadings were another common punishment for other transgressions. To top it all off, the Bani Khalid tribal chief Sulaiman ibn Muhammad ibn Ghurayr forced the Wahhabis to leave the eastern Najdi region because they declared taxation to be against the teachings of Islam, something that did not impress a chief whose main source of income was tax revenues.

    Abd-al Wahhab moved on. Upon arriving at the town of Dhiriya, he was welcomed in and soon struck up a friendship with Muhammad ibn Saud, the grandfather of Abdul-aziz ibn Saud, the first king of the modern nation of Saudi Arabia. Muhammad ibn Saud was impressed by the strictly disciplined followers of Abd-al Wahhab and the two agreed that by combining the Wahhabi teachings with militant tribal politics, they could conquer the Arabian peninsula. After forming this alliance, they built up an army and seized the town of Riyadh. Whipped up into a frenzy of religious zeal, the Wahhab-Saud alliance’s army began raiding nearby tribes, forcing them to convert as they conquered each one. They marched on the eastern towns of Hasa and Qatif, down to the peninsula of Qatar, south to Oman and Yemen, then north to the Rashid fortress in Ha’il and the Shi’ite-dominated  city of Karbala. All along the way they gave the conquered people the choice of peacefully converting to the Wahhabi creed or being slaughtered. They all chose to convert and the first Saudi emirate of Dhiriya was born.

    Next they turned their attentions to the Hejaz, the western strip of the Arabian peninsula where the holy cities of Mecca and Medina were under the control of the Ottoman Empire. They seized these cities too and ruled them for years, refusing to allow any Muslims other than Sunni Wahhabis to perform the Hajj pilgrimage. But as time went on, the insular Wahhab-Saud alliance had no contact with the outside world. The Industrial Revolution produced new technologies for killing and new strategies for warfare and the Wahhabis, smug in their fanatical conceit, knew nothing of them. The Ottoman Empire built up a proxy army of Egyptian soldiers who marched on the Hejaz, decimating the Wahhabis and taking control, once again, of the cities of Mecca and Medina. Meanwhile, the Ottomans also supplied the Rashids with war materiel and assisted them when they attacked Riyadh, forcing the House of Saud to flee to Kuwait where they lived in exile until their return in the 20th century.

    To this day, the Sauds have maintained their alliance with the Wahhabis who act as the official governing body of religious clerics in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Wahhabi doctrine not only acts as the founding principle of national and religious identity for Saudis but it also provides the belief system for fundamentalist terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS. Their goal of dominating the world through a radical, draconian interpretation of Islam is the modern ancestor of the fanatical teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd-al Wahhab.

Darlow, Michael and Bray, Barbara. Ibn Saud: The Desert Warrior Who Created the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Skyhorse Publishing, 2012

[tamamita]

I've hear the term Salafism a few time, and I have no idea what exactly it is and why it's used to describe Gendo Ikari (if there's a serious ground behind this joke).

Salafism is a conservative or traditionalist movement within Sunnism that coincided with the rise of western imperialism. Salafism focuses on the idea that Muslims should follow the religion without adhering to the four Sunni schools of thought and to subscribe to a more literal interpretation of the Qur'an and the Sunnah as was interpreted by the "noble ancestors" (=Salaf). They mostly basee their work on scholars such as Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Qayyim.

Methodologically, they are literalist and puritanical in their approaches to Islamic theology and law. Adherents of Salafism are known to have a very strict view on Monotheism and are against the idea of shrine veneration, intercession, religious innovations and etc. This has often been the cause of Salafism being at odds with Shi'as and Sufi-inclined Sunnis. Salafists are also sectarian in nature and rejects any non-Sunni Islamic denomination, considering them to be heretical.Due to their traditionalist views, they reject metaphorical interpretations of the Qur’an.

Wahhabism is a movement within Salafism that follows the teachings of Muhammed Abd al-Wahhab and exists predominately in the gulf states and are far more concerning with establishing a caliphate. DAESH is an example of a terrorist group that adherred to this branch of Salafism.

[tamamita]

hi! i was wondering, does the islamic religion really teach that you should hurt or kill people that arent muslims in order to glorify Allah? im interested in the religion but everyone keeps telling me that and it worries me a bit. thank u! sorry if this is a repetitive question!

To sum it up.

Western nations keep funding states that promote the oppression of minorities. These minorities include Shias, Christians and etc. These states are controlled by a government that seeks to establish a puritan version of Sunni Islam called Wahhabism established by Muhammed ibn Abd-l Wahab (la) whose teachings are based on the classical scholar Ibn Taymiyyah who established an aggressive fatwa/policy against Non-Sunni minorities, this doctrine was particularly popular in the Arabian Peninsula, which led to the House of Saud getting power with the help of the Brits. The Brits took this as an opportunity because both the Brits and Wahabis saw the Othman empire as their enemy. When the western nations keep funding these states (consequently contributing to the oppression of minorities), the latter later funds them to militant/terrorist/activist groups who hold the same beliefs as them, which helps them gain a foothold in the MENA region and an influence among many Islamic communities around the world. Now, these terrorist groups hold the same fundamental view as these Gulf States; they’re both influenced by Wahabi doctrines. So why are these terrorists everywhere, well, that is because of western influence in the MENA region since the beginning of the 18th century, as a result of anger and corruption in that region due to western colonial and interventionist policies, so a lot of groups have been formed to combat these “crusaders” as they purport them to be. But that’s not all, there is a nation with a predominate group of people who adhere to a different type of Islam, Shia Islam. Because this group of Muslims are considered heretics by the Wahabis and have been considered as such for 1400 years by their ancestors, the gulf states, especially, do not like them and have a history of persecuting Shias in the Gulf states. This also goes hand in hand with the interest of the western states, because the aforementioned nation, that is predominately Shia, doesn’t really like the State of Israel, so because of that, the western nations, especially the U.S see it as a threat, it is for reason they keep throwing money at the Gulf states, for they all share a common enemy – Iran. Ultimately, we’ve seen the rise of groups such as Daesh, Al-Qaeda, Fatah al-Sham, Jayish-al Islam, Tahrir al-Sham, Al-jabaat al-Islamiyyah and etc who wants to wipe the “Crusaders” or “Rawafidhs” (a slur commonly used by some Sunnis to describe Shia Muslims as apostates/rejector/s.) off of the face of the Earth.

This is why you see the Battle against DAESH in Iraq being mainly fought against by predominately Shia militias, why? because they had enough of being continuously and systematically oppressed and seeing other minorities dying by their hands, and after 1700 Shias were murdered by DAESH militants at Camp Spechier and who later threw their bodies into the Tigris river, you can see that there is a political root to this problem, not theological roots, theology is just used as a tool to boost the moral of these terrorist groups.