#HistoryClass: What is Wahhabism and how has its spread affected Nigerians

by Cheta Nwanze

About fifteen years ago I used to live at 6/23 Nnobi Street, Kilo, Surulere. At the time, it was a nice place, with the landlord in the upstairs flat facing the road, me at the back upstairs, Idowu downstairs in the flat below me, and Franca Fashions, downstairs, facing the road. Franca Fashions was a business, and so paid a rent slightly higher than the N90,000 a year that myself and Idowu used to pay.
I moved to Abuja later, then from there to London. I returned to Nigeria in 2009, and moved back to Lagos. In 2013, I bumped into Idowu and we had a nice long chat. About a year after I moved out, our landlord, Alhaji, went to Mecca on pilgrimage, then returned.
After returning, he converted the gatehouse into a mosque, complete with a minaret, then called the tenants together, and made it clear that Franca Fashions had to leave, because making and selling clothes was unislamic. He then gave Idowu, and the chap who replaced me, a stark choice: convert to Islam, or leave his property. Both men left. What turned my formerly affable former landlord to a religious fanatic? The answer, Wahhabism.
Today’s #HistoryClass is about Wahhabism, and references the work of Gilles Kepel, David Commins, David Long and  Shaikh ibn Baaz.
During the 18th century, missionary movements sprang up in many parts of the Islamic world as the Ottoman Empire began to decline and started losing its grip. For Muslims the political fragmentation of their society was also a religious problem because the Quran had given them a sacred mission – to build a just society in which everybody was treated with equity and respect. In Islam, the political well-being of the umma is a sacred matter.
One of the most influential of these missionaries was Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-91), a learned scholar from Uyayna, in the Najd region of Central Arabia, whose teachings still inspire Muslim reformers and extremists today. Al-Wahhab was concerned that the popular cult of saints and the idolatrous rituals at their tombs attributed divinity to mere mortals. He opposed Sufism and Shiaism as heresy (bidah), and insisted that every single man and woman should concentrate instead on the study of the Quran and the Hadiths about the Sunnah of the Prophet and his companions.
Naturally, this annoyed the clergy and threatened local rulers, who believed that interfering with these popular devotions would cause social unrest. Eventually Al-Wahhab found a patron in Muhammad ibn Saud, a chieftain of Najd who adopted his ideas. But there was tension both men as Al-Wahhab refused to endorse Ibn Saud’s military campaigns for plunder and territory, insisting that jihad could not be waged for personal profit but was permissible only when the umma was attacked militarily.
Al-Wahhab also forbade the Arab custom of killing prisoners of war, the deliberate destruction of property and the slaughter of civilians, including women and children. Al-Wahhab never claimed that those who fell in battle were martyrs who would be rewarded with a high place in heaven, because according to him, a desire for such self-aggrandisement was incompatible with jihad.
Two forms of Wahhabism were emerging: where Ibn Saud was happy to enforce Wahhabi Islam with the sword to enhance his political position, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab insisted that education, study and debate were the only legitimate means of spreading the one true faith.
Despite his rejection of other forms of Islam, Al-Wahhab himself refrained from takfir, and argued that God alone can read the heart. After he died, his followers cast this inhibition aside and the generous pluralism of Sufism became increasingly suspect in the Muslim world. As a result, Wahhabism became more violent, and an instrument of state terror. As he sought to establish an independent kingdom, Ibn Saud’s son and successor, Abd al-Aziz Ibn Muhammad, used takfir to justify the wholesale slaughter of resistant populations. In 1801, his army sacked the holy Shia city of Karbala modern Iraq, plundered the tomb of Imam Husain, and slaughtered thousands of Shias, including women and children; in 1803, in fear and panic, the holy city of Mecca surrendered to Abd al-Aziz Ibn Muhammad.
Tired of the upstarts, the Ottomans in 1815, sent Muhammad Ali Pasha, the governor of Egypt, to crush the Wahhabi forces and destroy their capital.
A century later, Wahhabism became a political force again. This time it was during World War I when the new leader of the Saud clan, Abd al-Aziz al Saud, made a new push for statehood and began to carve out a large kingdom for himself in the Middle East with his army, the Ikhwan.
In 1915, Abd al-Aziz planned to conquer the Hijaz (an area in the west of present-day Saudi Arabia that includes Mecca and Medina), the Persian Gulf to the east of Najd, and the land that is now Syria and Jordan in the north, but during the 1920s he slowed down so he could acquire diplomatic standing with Britain and the US. The Ikhwan, who regarded all modernisation as bidah, continued to raid the British protectorates of Iraq, Transjordan and Kuwait, insisting that no limits could be placed on jihad. The Ikhwan also attacked Abd al-Aziz for permitting telephones, cars, the telegraph, music and smoking, anything unknown in the Prophet’s time until finally Abd al-Aziz crushed them in 1930.
After the defeat of the Ikhwan, the official Wahhabism of the Saudi kingdom abandoned militant jihad and became a religiously conservative movement, similar to the original movement in the time of Al-Wahhab, except that takfir was now an accepted practice. From then on there was tension between the ruling Saudi establishment and more radical Wahhabis.
The Ikhwan spirit and its dream of territorial expansion did not die, but gained new ground in the 1970s, when Saudi Arabia became central to western foreign policy in the Middle East. The US welcomed the Saudis’ opposition to Nasser, and to Soviet influence. After the Iranian Revolution, the US gave tacit support to the Saudis’ project of countering Shia radicalism by Wahhabising the entire Muslim world.
Rising oil prices caused in 1973 gave Saudi Arabia all the cash it needed to export its quirky form of Islam. The old military jihad to spread the faith has now been replaced by soft power, which has caught up people in Nigeria such as my former landlord, and has influenced movements like Boko Haram.
The Muslim World League, sponsored by Saudi Arabia, has offices in every region inhabited by Muslims, and distributes Wahhabi interpretations of Muslim texts to Muslim communities all over the world. In all these places, they fund the building of Saudi-style mosques with Wahhabi preachers and establish schools that provide free education for the poor, with, of course, a Wahhabi curriculum. The Saudis demand religious conformity in return, so Wahhabi rejection of all other forms of Islam is spreading, unknowingly backed by the West, and gravely undermining Islam’s traditional inclusiveness and diversity.

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