Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad

In autumn 2009, the Ladomir publishing house (Moscow) plans to publish the Russian translation of Natana J. DeLong-Bas, Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad (DeLong-Bas N.J. Wahhabi Islam. From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad. – Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. – 370 p.).

The book is devoted to the teaching of the founder of Wahhabism, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and to the development of his ideas in the modern era. Special emphasis is placed on the direct study of the writings of the Arabian preacher, whose views are contrasted with the ideology of contemporary Wahhabis. Of particular value is the author’s attempt to interpret Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s ideas within the broader Islamic tradition rather than to consider them in isolation. These aims determined the division of the book into six chapters.

Chapter I is devoted to an analysis of the general historical situation on the Arabian Peninsula in the eighteenth century and to the biography of the founder of Wahhabism.

Chapter II examines the preacher’s theological views in the context of the general direction of Islamic thought in this period. Central to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s teaching were ideas about the supremacy of intention over the literal fulfillment of religious prescriptions and the contextual interpretation of those prescriptions. The theoretical basis of these views was a new methodology for interpreting hadiths and the Qur’an, in which the emphasis was placed not on studying the reliability of the isnad but on assessing the ruling itself and its meaning. In essence, this was a restoration of the legal practice of ijtihad – the making of an independent judgment without relying on scholars of the past. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab skillfully used Islamic law to defend his ideas.

Therefore, DeLong-Bas devoted Chapter III to an overview of Islamic law and its use in the works of the founder of Wahhabism. After examining the basic principles in Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s teaching, the American researcher moves to a detailed analysis of two of the most controversial topics associated with the contemporary perception of Islam – the status of women (Chapter IV) and jihad (Chapter V).

The main leitmotif of the entire book is that Wahhabism in its original form was a very progressive teaching in which human rights were respected (an obvious modernization imposed by the author on the reader). Despite numerous claims about the importance of the women’s question in the works of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, it can be stated with confidence that the women’s question was NOT addressed at all by the founder of Wahhabism. He studied the legal mechanism of marriage as a union between a man and a woman, not as a means of protecting the weaker sex. The same applies to jihad. Apparently, however much the author tries to inflate this topic, it was of little concern to the Arabian preacher, who spent most of his life in the center of Najd, far from the significant political events of his era.

The final – sixth – chapter is devoted to the development of the theme of jihad in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to its concept in the ideology of Osama bin Laden.

Overall, despite a certain pro-Wahhabi bias, the book is of interest to everyone interested in the history of Islamic thought.

Review prepared by: The Political Sphere Institute