Free The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam From the Extremists by Khaled M. Abou el Fadl Page B

all Muslims except themselves to be infidels; and like the Wah- habis, they also massacred untold numbers of Muslims in Arabia. The Khawarij even assassinated ‘Ali, who was the

    Prophet’s revered cousin and the fourth caliph. Eventually, be- cause of the unrelenting hostility and criticism of the classical jurists and the sustained campaigns by various Muslim states, the Khawarij was forced to reform or perish. Today, the only offshoot of the original Khawarij is a sect known as the Ibadiyya, which survives in Oman and parts of Algeria. The law and theology of the Ibadiyya is nothing like that of their fanatic ancestors; in fact, the Ibadiyya were pressured into moderating their views and becoming much closer to the Mus- lim mainstream. Unfortunately, however, the prediction of many jurists that the Wahhabis would inevitably end up shar- ing the fate of the Khawarij turned out to be flatly wrong.
    The simplicity, decisiveness, and absolutism of the religious thought of ‘Abd al-Wahhab made it attractive to the desert tribes, especially in the area of Najd. At the time, Najd was the most tribal and least developed and cosmopolitan area of the Saudi state. Ultimately, however, ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s ideas were too radical and extreme to have widespread influence on the Arab world, let alone the entire Muslim world. Contem- porary scholars have already established the relative marginal- ity of Wahhabi extremist thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and have shown that the thought of moderate revivalists such as Muhammad al-Shawkani (d. 1250/1834) and Ali Jalal al-San‘ani (d. 1225/1810) were quite dissimilar to Wahhabi thinking, and far more influential at that time. 39
    It is quite likely that ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s ideas would not have spread even in Arabia had it not been for the fact that in the late nineteenth century the Al Sa‘ud family united itself with the Wahhabi movement and rebelled against Ottoman rule in Arabia. Armed with religious zeal and a strong sense of Arab nationalism, the rebellion was considerable, at one point reaching as far as Damascus in the north and Oman in the

    south. Egyptian forces under the leadership of Muhammad Ali in 1818, after several failed expeditions, quashed the rebellion, and Wahhabism, like other extremist movements in Islamic history, seemed to be on its way to extinction. 40 But that was not to be.
    The Al Sa‘ud/Wahhabi alliance from 1745 to 1818 is known as the first Saudi state, which ended when the Egyptian and Turkish forces destroyed the city of Dhar‘iyya, the home- town of the first Saudi kingdom, and massacred its inhabi- tants. If anything, this massacre stayed in the Wahhabi memory and further ignited their zeal by becoming a symbol of their suffering and sacrifices.
    Wahhabi ideology was resuscitated once again in the early twentieth century under the leadership of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz bin Al Sa‘ud (r. 1319–73/1902–53), the founder of the modern Saudi state, who adopted the puritanical theology of the Wahhabis and allied himself with the tribes of Najd, thereby establishing the nascent beginnings of what would become Saudi Arabia. The first Wahhabi rebellions in Arabia in the eighteenth cen- tury aimed to overthrow Ottoman control and enforce ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s puritanical brand of Islam upon as much of the Arab-speaking world as possible. The Wahhabis also sought to control Mecca and Medina, and by doing so, gain a huge symbolic victory by controlling the spiritual center of the Muslim world. 41
    Although the rebellions of the eighteenth century were quashed, the rebellions of the late nineteenth and early twenti- eth centuries presented a very different situation. From the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, Arabia was a very tribal society with a large number of prominent families vying for dominance over all others. But particularly the Hijaz area of Arabia, as opposed to the Najd area, was very culturally di- verse, with all types