“Saʿud to Salīm.—I entered Makkah on the fourth day of Muḥarram in the 1218th year of the Hijrah. I kept peace towards the inhabitants, I destroyed all things that were idolatrously worshipped. I abolished all taxes except those required by the law. I confirmed the Qāẓī whom you had appointed agreeably to the commands of the Prophet of God. I desire that you will give orders to the rulers of Damascus and Cairo not to come up to the sacred city with the Maḥmal and with trumpets and drums. Religion is not profited by these things. May the peace and blessing of God be with you.” [[MAHMAL].]
Before the close of the year, al-Madīnah was added to the Wahhābī conquests, and so thoroughly did Saʿud carry out the work of reform, that even the Ḥujrah, containing the tomb of the Prophet, did not escape. Its richly ornamented dome was destroyed, and the curtain which covered the Prophet’s grave would have been removed, had not the Leader of the Faithful been warned in his dreams not to commit so monstrous a sacrilege. [[HUJRAH].]
For nine years did the Wahhābī rule exist at Makkah, and so strong was the position occupied by the Wahhābī army, and so rapidly did Wahhābī opinions spread amongst the people, that the Sultan of Turkey began to entertain the worst fears for the safety of his empire. ʿAlī Pasha was therefore ordered by the Sultan of Turkey to collect a strong army to suppress the Wahhābī movement; and eventually, Makkah and al-Madīnah were taken from the fanatics.
Upon the death of Saʿud (A.D. 1814), his son, ʿAbdu ʾllāh, became the Leader of the Faithful. He was even more distinguished than his father for personal bravery, but he lacked that knowledge of men which was so necessary for one called upon to lead the undisciplined nomadic tribes of the Arabian deserts. ʿAbdu ʾllāh and his army met with a series of reverses, and he was at last taken prisoner by Ibrāhīm Pasha and sent to Constantinople. He was executed in the public square of St. Sophia, December 19th, 1818. Turkī, the son of ʿAbdu ʾllāh, abandoned all hope of regaining the position, and fled to Riyāẓ, where he was afterwards assassinated. Faizul succeeded his father A.D. 1830, and established the Wahhābī rule in Eastern Arabia, making Riyāẓ the capital of his kingdom. It was this chief who entertained the traveller Palgrave in 1863, and received Lieutenant-Colonel (now Sir) Lewis Pelly, as Her Majesty’s representative, in 1865. Faizul died in 1866, soon after Sir Lewis Pelly’s visit, and was succeeded by his son ʿAbdu ʾllāh.
But although the great political and military power of the Wahhābīs had been well nigh crushed, and the rule of the dynasty of Saʿud circumscribed within the limits of the province of Najd, the principles laid down by Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdu ʾl-Wahhāb were still zealously maintained by certain religious teachers within the sacred mosque itself. And so it came to pass that when a restless spirit from India was endeavouring to redeem a lawless life by performing the pilgrimage to Makkah, he fell in with teachers who had imbibed Wahhābī doctrines and were secretly disseminating them amongst the pilgrims. Saiyid Aḥmad, the freebooter and bandit of Rai Bareli, having performed the sacred rites of the Pilgrimage, returned from Makkah (A.D. 1822), resolved to reclaim the whole of North India to the Faith of Islām. Being a direct descendant from the Prophet, he possessed (unlike the Wahhābī of Najd) the necessary qualification for a Leader of the Faithful, and the Muslims of India at once hailed him as the true K͟halīfah or al-Mahdī. Unheeded by the British Government, he traversed our provinces with a numerous retinue of devoted disciples, and converted the populace to his reformed doctrines by thousands. He appointed deputies at Patna, and then proceeded to Delhi, where he met with a ready listener in Muḥammad Ismāʾīl, who became his most devoted disciple, and recorded the sayings of the new K͟halīfah in the well-known Wahhābī book, entitled the Ṣirāt̤u ʾl-Mustaqīm.
On the 21st December 1826, Saiyid Aḥmad, the Leader of the Faithful, declared a religious war, or Jihād, against the Sikhs, and, hoping to unite the hosts of Islām in Central Asia under his banner, he commenced an insurrection on the Peshawar frontier. A fanatical war of varied successes followed, and lasted for four years; but the Wahhābī army was soon reduced in strength, and its disasters culminated in the death of its chief, who was slain by Sher Singh in an engagement at Balakot in Hazarah, May 1831. The remnant of the Saiyid’s army fled across the border and settled at Sattāna, where in 1857, their numbers were augmented by mutineers, who joined their camp. They were eventually displaced by the British Government in the Umbeyla War of 1863, but there are still some three hundred of them residing at Palosi on the banks of the Indus, where they are ruled by Shaik͟h ʿAbdu ʾllāh, an old mutineer of 1857, who has recently married his daughter to a former Imām of the Peshawar, Sadar Bāzār, in order to combine the Wahhābī influences of Peshawar with those of the Palosi settlement.
But as in the case of the Wahhābīs of Najd, so with the Wahhābīs of India. The religious tenets of the reformers did not die with their political leader. What Saʿud of Najd and Aḥmad of Bareli failed to accomplish with the sword, the cheapness of lithographic printing has enabled less daring leaders to accomplish with the pen. The reformed doctrines, as embodied in the Ṣirāt̤u ʿl-Mustaqīm and the Taqwiyatu ʾl-Īmān, still exercise a powerful influence upon Muḥammadan thought in India.
Wahhābīism has sometimes been designated the Protestantism of Islām, and so it really is, although with this remarkable difference, that whilst Christian Protestantism is the assertion of the paramount authority of sacred scripture to the rejection of traditional teachings, Wahhābīism is the assertion of the paramount authority of the Qurʾān with the Traditions. But both systems contend for first principles, and if there appears to be any incongruity in applying the term Protestant to a sect which receives, instead of rejects, tradition, it arises from the very important fact that what is called “tradition” in Islām occupies a totally different place in the Muḥammadan system from that which it does in the Christian, Tradition in Islām being nothing less than the supposed inspired sayings of the Prophet, recorded and handed down by uninspired writers, and being absolutely necessary to complete the structure of the faith. The daily prayer, the customs of the pilgrimage, and numerous other duties and dogmas held to be of Divine institution, being found not in the Qurʾān but in the Aḥādīs̤, or Traditions. Hence it is that the Wahhābīs of Najd and India call themselves Ahl-i-Ḥadīs̤, or the people of Tradition, and promote in every way they can the study of those records. [[TRADITION].]
The Wahhābīs speak of themselves as Muwaḥḥid, or “Unitarians,” and call all others Mushrik, or those who associate another with God; and the following are some of their distinctive religious tenets:—
1. They do not receive the decisions of the four orthodox sects, but say that any man who can read and understand the Qurʾān and the sacred Ḥadīs̤ can judge for himself in matters of doctrine. They, therefore, reject Ijmāʿ after the death of the Companions of the Prophet.