“I believe it is hardly now recognized by Mohammedans how near Abd el Wahhab was to complete success. Before the close of the eighteenth century, the chiefs of the Ibn Saouds, champions of Unitarian Islam, had established their authority over all Northern Arabia as far as the Euphrates, and in 1808 they took Mecca and Medina. In the meanwhile, the Wahhabite doctrines were gaining ground still further afield. India was at one time very near conversion, and in Egypt, and North Africa, and even in Turkey, many secretly subscribed to the new doctrines. Two things, however, marred the plan of general reform and prevented its full accomplishment. In the first place, the reform was too completely reactive. It took no account whatever of the progress of modern thought, and directly it attempted to leave Arabia it found itself face to face with difficulties which only political as well as religious success could overcome. It was impossible, except by force of arms, to Arabianise the world again, and nothing less than this was in contemplation. Its second mistake, and that was one that a little of the Prophet’s prudence which always went hand in hand with his zeal might have avoided, was a too rigid insistence upon trifles. Abd el Wahhab condemned minarets and tombstones because neither were in use during the first years of Islam. The minarets, therefore, were everywhere thrown down, and when the holy places of Hejaz fell into the hands of his followers, the tombs of saints which had for centuries been revered as objects of pilgrimage were levelled to the ground. Even the Prophet’s tomb at Medina was laid waste and the treasures it contained distributed among the soldiers of Ibn Saoud. This roused the indignation of all Islam, and turned the tide of the Wahhabite fortunes. Respectable feeling which had hitherto been on their side now declared itself against them, and they never after regained their position as moral and social reformers. Politically, too, it was the cause of their ruin. The outside Musalman world, looking upon them as sacrilegious barbarians, was afraid to visit Mecca, and the pilgrimage declined so rapidly that the Hejazi became alarmed. The source of their revenue they found cut off, and it seemed on the point of ceasing altogether. Then they appealed to Constantinople, urging the Sultan to vindicate his claim to be protector of the holy places. What followed is well known. After the peace of Paris, Sultan Mahmud commissioned Mehemet Ali to deliver Mecca and Medina from the Wahhabite heretics, and this he in time effected. The war was carried into Nejd; Deriyeh, their capital, was sacked, and Ibn Saoud himself taken prisoner and decapitated in front of St. Sophia at Constantinople. The movement of reform in Islam was thus put back for, perhaps, another hundred years.
“Still, the seed cast by Abd el Wahhab has not been entirely without fruit. Wahhabism, as a political regeneration of the world, has failed, but the spirit of reform has remained. Indeed, the present unquiet attitude of expectation in Islam has been its indirect result. Just as the Lutheran reformation in Europe, though it failed to convert the Christian Church, caused its real reform, so Wahhabism has produced a real desire for reform if not yet reform itself in Mussulmans. Islam is no longer asleep, and were another and a wiser Abd el Wahhab to appear, not as a heretic, but in the body of the orthodox sect, he might play the part of Loyola or Borromeo with success.
“The present condition of the Wahhabites as a sect is one of decline. In India, and I believe in other parts of Southern Asia, their missionaries still make converts and their preachers are held in high esteem. But at home in Arabia, their zeal has waxed cold, giving place to liberal ideas which in truth are far more congenial to the Arabian mind. The Ibn Saoud dynasty no longer holds the first position in Nejd, and Ibn Rashid who has taken their place, though nominally a Wahhabite, has little of the Wahhabite fanaticism. He is in fact a popular and national rather than a religious leader, and though still designated at Constantinople as a pestilent heretic, is counted as their ally by the more liberal Sunites. It is probable that he would not withhold his allegiance from a Caliph of the legitimate house of Koreysh.”
(The following English works may be consulted on the subject of Wahhābīism: Burckhardt’s Bedouins and Wahhabys; Brydge’s Brief History of the Wahhabis; Sir Lewis Pelly’s Political Mission to Najd; Hunter’s Musalmāns of India; Palgrave’s Central and Eastern Arabia; Lady Ann Blunt’s Pilgrimage to Najd; Dr. Badger’s Imāms and Seyyids of ʾOmān; Blunt’s Future of Islam.)
AL-WĀḤID (الواحد). “The One.” One of the ninety-nine special attributes of the Almighty. It occurs frequently in the Qurʾān, e.g. [Sūrah ii. 158]: “Your God is One God.”
WAḤY (وحى). [[INSPIRATION].]
WĀʿIZ̤ (واعظ). “A preacher.” The word k͟hat̤īb is generally applied to the Maulawī who recites the k͟hut̤bah on Fridays; wāʿiz̤ is of more general application. In the Qāmūs dictionary, the wāʿiz̤ is defined as one who reminds mankind of those punishments and rewards which soften the heart. The usual time for preaching is on Fridays, and in the months of Muḥarram and Ramaẓān. [[KHUTBAH].]
WAJD (وجد). “Ecstasy.” A Ṣūfī term for the fifth stage of the mystic journey, when the spiritual traveller attains to a state of mental excitement which is supposed to indicate a high state of divine illumination. [[SUFI].]
WAJH (وجه). Lit. “Presence; face.” The word occurs in the Qurʾān for the presence of God. [Sūrah ii. 109]: “Wherever ye turn there is the face of God (Wajhu ʾllāh).”
WĀJIB (واجب). Lit. “That which is obligatory.” A term used in Muḥammadan law for those injunctions, the non-observance of which constitutes sin, but the denial of which does not attain to downright infidelity. For example, that Muslim who does not offer the sacrifice on the day of the Great Festival [[IDU ʾL-AZHA]] commits a sin, and if he says the sacrifice is not a divine institution, he is a sinner, but not an infidel; and he who does not observe the fast [[RAMAZAN]] is a sinner, but if he deny that the fast is a divine institution, he is an infidel. The sacrifice being wājib, whilst the fast is farẓ. [[LAW].]