Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. Every week-day morning at 08:00, we set out as a small group of friends for a one-hour walk in our neighbourhood of Ottawa. The area includes open areas like Mooney’s Bay, Hog’s Back Falls, Rideau River, etc. The tranquility and fresh air promotes enquiring minds pondering all kinds of topics, including religion. This morning my offering for discussion was Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia: Living as Canadians in Jeddah for three years 1976-79, we understood the influence of Wahhabism on life in Saudi Arabia. Strict adherence to fundamentalist Islamic norm was imposed on all Saudis, such as praying five times daily, fasting during Ramadan, conservative dress code, prohibition against women driving, flogging those who misbehaved and beheading deviants, etc, etc… We also knew of the symbiotic relationship between Wahhabism and the Saudi royal family. One beneficial impact was that it made Saudi Arabia extremely safe for Canadians, an observation reinforced in the summer of 1991 when I was in Riyadh for a month during turbulent times, with ramifications of the Iraqi war being felt and oil well fires polluting the air. After leaving Saudi Arabia in 1979, new circumstances, like a four year posting to Paris, pushed the thought of Wahhabism to the background, where it lingered. By now, I could have easily obtained through the Internet a detailed history of Wahhabism, but never did because I was satisfied I had it pegged. A passage in the book I am currently reading “A History of the Arab Peoples” cements that. The chapter in the book describes the decline of the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth century, when various movements changed the balance of power. This is what it mentions about Wahhabism: “There was another movement which might have seemed of less importance at the time, but was to have wider significance later. It arose in central Arabia in the early eighteenth century, when a religious reformer, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al- Wahhab (1703-92), began to preach the need for Muslims to return to the teaching of Islam as understood by the followers of Ibn Hanbal: strict obedience to the Qur’an and Hadith as they were interpreted by responsible scholars in each generation, and rejection of all that could be regarded as illegitimate innovations. Among these innovations was the reverence given to dead saints as intercessors with God, and the special devotions of the Sufi orders. The reformer made an alliance with Muhammad ibn Sa’ud, ruler of a small market town, Dir’iyya, and this led to the formation of a state which claimed to live under the guidance of the shari’a and tried to bring the pastoral tribes all around it under its guidance too. In so doing it asserted the interests of the frail urban society of the oases against the pastoral hinterland, but at the same time it rejected the claims of the Ottomans to be the protectors of the authentic Islam. By the first years of the nineteenth century the armies of the new state had expanded; they had sacked the Shi’i shrines in south-western Iraq and occupied the holy cities of Hijaz”. --end of quote-- In 1991 I visited ruins of the old city Dir’iyya, just outside Riyadh. What a memorable day it was.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 15:36:42 +0000
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