The Other Islam by Stephen Schwartz

Author:Stephen Schwartz
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780385526654
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2008-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

FIVE CENTURIES PASSED BEFORE the appearance of a figure even more threatening to Sufism than Ibn Taymiyyah. By then the world of Islam was obviously weakened by Western advances. An obscure proponent of a fundamentalist purge in Islam read deeply in Ibn Taymiyyah, but with a more ambitious spirit. Ibn Taymiyyah attacked the Sufis and others he despised, but he did not argue that the whole community of Muslims had fallen into disbelief. That bizarre charge was introduced by a simpleton from the wilderness of Najd in east-central Arabia named Muhammad Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab (1703–1792). His creed, Wahhabism, is now known to the whole world, as the inspirer of Al-Qaida on September 11, 2001, as well as in Iraq and everywhere else the terrorist conspiracy sheds blood. Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab considered himself a reformer of Islam, and non-Muslims or Muslim dissidents who call for a “Muslim Reformation” today seldom understand that religious reform means very different things to liberal-minded protestors and literal-minded purifiers. Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab was of the latter kind. And it is mainly because of Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab that what was described after the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq as the “Iraqi resistance” against Americans became the “Sunni insurgency”—and then fell under Al-Qaida control, turning into the Wahhabi jihad, or Saudi second invasion of Iraq, financed from Riyadh, against Sufis and Shias.

Like Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab seems to have spent some time with Sufis, and this fact has also been used by slothful Western authors to argue that there is little difference between the violence of the Wahhabis and the metaphysics of the Sufis. The claim is absurd. Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab gained very little from his brief involvement with Sufism. His manifest intent was that of a radical “cleansing” through blood. He was convinced that Islam was threatened from within and fanatical about his belief that he alone had the prescription for its rescue. Islam must, he exhorted, expunge everything spiritual it had encompassed since the time of Muhammad and his successors, especially anything associated with Sufism. The Shias were unbelievers and must be exterminated. In the minds of his later admirers, the attitudes of Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab would justify not only mass murder in twenty-first-century Iraq but the entire global assault by Al-Qaida on Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists, in addition to Shia and Sunni Muslims who rejected Wahhabism.

Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab did not spend much time on Christians and Jews except to accuse Muslims of unacceptably imitating them and to defame Jews as corrupt. But they were very thin on the ground in the area of Arabia where he lived most of his life. He was more intent on wiping out the Sufis, Shias, and others who according to him were no longer Muslims. The father of Wahhabism was not much of a scholar, and his main “contribution” is a little book called Kitab al-Tawhid, or The Book of Monotheism. There he expressed the core of his doctrine: it was not enough for a Muslim to publicly declare belief in One God.

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