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Wahhabi DBQ
US History/Napp
Name: _________________
Historical Context:
“The early modern era likewise witnessed the continuation of the ‘long march of Islam’
across the Afro-Asian world…Continued Islamization usually was not the product of
conquering armies and expanding empires. It depended instead on wandering Muslim
holy men, Islamic scholars, and itinerant traders, none of whom posed a threat to local
rulers. In fact, such people often were useful to those rulers and their village communities.
They offered literacy in Arabic, established informal schools, provided protective charms
containing passages from the Quran, served as advisers to local authorities and healers to
the sick, often intermarried with local people, and generally did not insist that new converts
give up their older practices. What they offered, in short, was connection to the wider,
prestigious, prosperous world of Islam…
To more orthodox Muslims, this religious syncretism, which accompanied Islamization
almost everywhere, became increasingly offensive, even heretical. Such sentiments played
an important role in movements of religious renewal and reform that emerged throughout
the vast Islamic world of the eighteenth century. Scholars and religious leaders frequently
called attention to the ways in which the practice of Islam had come to deviate from the
original teachings of Muhammad and the Quran…
The most well known and widely visible of these Islamic renewal movements took place
during the mid-eighteenth century in Arabia itself, where the religion had been born 1,000
years earlier. A young Muslim theologian, Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792), argued that the
declining fortunes of the Islamic world were the result of a gradual process of decay that
had crept in over the centuries, as Muslims allowed themselves to be drawn away from the
essentials of the faith. He was particularly upset by common religious practices in central
Arabia that seemed to him idolatry – the widespread veneration of Sufi saints and their
tombs, the adoration of natural sites, and even the respect paid to Muhammad’s tomb at
Mecca. All of this was a dilution of the absolute monotheism of authentic Islam.
Abd al-Wahhab began preaching among the tribes of the Arabian Desert, calling for a
return to a doctrinaire Islam with an austere and puritanical lifestyle, in strict accordance
with sharia (Islamic law). When in the 1740s he joined forces with Muhammad Ibn Saud,
a sympathetic local chieftain, the movement took on a political dimension and soon led to
the creation of a state. Within that state, women were expected to subject themselves
strictly to the traditional patronage of husband and male relatives. Offending tombs were
razed; ‘idols’ were eliminated; books on logic were destroyed; the use of tobacco, hashish,
and musical instruments were forbidden; and certain taxes not authorized by religious
teaching were abolished. By the early nineteenth century, this new reformist state
encompassed much of central Arabia, with Mecca itself coming under Wahhabi control in
1806. Although an Egyptian army broke the power of the Wahhabis in 1818, the
movement’s influence continued to spread across the Islamic world.”
~ Stayer, Ways of the World, pp. 473-474
Task: Using information from the documents (1-5) and your knowledge of history, write an
essay
 Identifying and explaining the factors which gave rise to and increased the appeal of
the Wahhabi movement
 Discuss the effects the Wahhabi movement on specific nations and/or regions
Document 1
Source: David Kirkpatrick, ISIS’ Harsh Brand of Islam Is Rooted in Austere Saudi Creed,
September 24, 2014
Caliph Ibrahim, the leader of the Islamic State, appeared to come out of nowhere when he
matter-of-factly proclaimed himself the ruler of all Muslims in the middle of an otherwise
typical Ramadan sermon. Muslim scholars from the most moderate to the most militant all
denounced him as a grandiose pretender, and the world gaped at his growing following and
its vicious killings.
His ruthless creed, though, has clear roots in the 18th-century Arabian Peninsula. It was
there that the Saud clan formed an alliance with the puritanical scholar Muhammed ibn
Abd al-Wahhab. And as they conquered the warring tribes of the desert, his austere
interpretation of Islam became the foundation of the Saudi state.
Much to Saudi Arabia’s embarrassment, the same thought has now been revived by the
caliph, better known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as the foundation of the Islamic State.
“It is a kind of untamed Wahhabism,” said Bernard Haykel, a scholar at Princeton.
“Wahhabism is the closest religious cognate.”
The Saudis and the rulers of other Persian Gulf states — all monarchies — are now united
against the Islamic State, fearful that it might attack them from the outside or win
followers within. Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have all
participated with Washington in its attacks on the Islamic State’s strongholds in Syria.
For their guiding principles, the leaders of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL,
are open and clear about their almost exclusive commitment to the Wahhabi movement of
Sunni Islam. The group circulates images of Wahhabi religious textbooks from Saudi
Arabia in the schools it controls. Videos from the group’s territory have shown Wahhabi
texts plastered on the sides of an official missionary van.
This approach is at odds with the more mainstream Islamist and jihadist thinking that
forms the genealogy of Al Qaeda, and it has led to a fundamentally different view of
violence. Al Qaeda grew out of a radical tradition that viewed Muslim states and societies
as having fallen into sinful unbelief, and embraced violence as a tool to redeem them. But
the Wahhabi tradition embraced the killing of those deemed unbelievers as essential to
purifying the community of the faithful.
Document 2
Source: Olivia Ward, Saudi Arabia’s Ominous Generation Gap, Toronto Star, October 26,
2009
In most countries, a generation gap means a struggle between aging conservatives and their
young and restless critics. But in Saudi Arabia, an opposite kind of battle is being waged;
and one that poses dangers for both the mega-rich kingdom and the West…“In Saudi
Arabia, the idea that you have to go to the young for progress is turned on its head,” says
Robert Lacey, author of Inside the Kingdom. “It’s the older generation of Saudis, including
the royals, who are more friendly to progress, and to the West. Fundamentalism is a belief
... embraced by the young.” Lacey says it’s also a product of the royal family's history as
the spear-carrier of Wahhabism, one of the most austere Islamic sects.
And, he says, the society that produced Osama bin Laden, 9/11 and global jihad, now
depends on an 85-year-old monarch, King Abdullah, to strike a balance among the
entrenched conservatives, extremists and modernists struggling to steer Saudi Arabia's
course to the future.
It was Abdullah’s House of Saud that fought its way to power in 1932, and hammered three
disconnected territories into one kingdom under the Wahhabi faith. But the extremism the
regime nurtured brought the country to a near standstill and opened the way for radicals
who mixed religion with violence…the Saudi rulers’ adherence to Wahhabism led to
decades of turmoil, starting with the oil boom of the 1970s, when wealth and contact with
the West prompted a softening of traditional norms – followed by a violent backlash and
the rise of militant Islam. “The result of the oil boom was a religion boom,” Lacey said in
an interview in Toronto.
Document 3
Source: Britannica, April 8, 2014
ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s teachings have been characterized as puritanical and traditional,
representing the early era of the Islamic religion. He made a clear stand against all
innovations (bidʿah) in Islamic faith because he believed them to be reprehensible, insisting
that the original grandeur of Islam could be regained if the Islamic community would
return to the principles enunciated by the Prophet Muhammad. Wahhābī doctrines,
therefore, do not allow for an intermediary between the faithful and Allah and condemn
any such practice as polytheism. The decoration of mosques, the cult of saints, and even the
smoking of tobacco were condemned.
When the preaching of these doctrines led to controversy, ʿAbd al-Wahhāb was expelled
from ʿUyaynah in 1744. He then settled in Ad-Dirʿīyah, capital of Ibn Saʿūd, a ruler of the
Najd (now in Saudi Arabia).
The spread of Wahhābīsm originated from the alliance that was formed between ʿAbd alWahhāb and Ibn Saʿūd, who, by initiating a campaign of conquest that was continued by
his heirs, made Wahhābīsm the dominant force in Arabia since 1800.
Document 4
Source: pbs.org
For more than two centuries, Wahhabism has been Saudi Arabia’s dominant faith. It is an
austere form of Islam that insists on a literal interpretation of the Koran. Strict Wahhabis
believe that all those who don’t practice their form of Islam are heathens and enemies.
Critics say that Wahhabism’s rigidity has led it to misinterpret and distort Islam, pointing
to extremists such as Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Wahhabism’s explosive growth
began in the 1970s when Saudi charities started funding Wahhabi schools (madrassas) and
mosques from Islamabad to Culver City, California.
Document 5
Source: You Can’t Understand ISIS If You Don’t Know the History of Wahhabism in
Saudi Arabia, Alastair Crooke, August 27, 2013
Abd al-Wahhab demanded conformity -- a conformity that was to be demonstrated in
physical and tangible ways. He argued that all Muslims must individually pledge their
allegiance to a single Muslim leader (a Caliph, if there were one). Those who would not
conform to this view should be killed, their wives and daughters violated, and their
possessions confiscated, he wrote. The list of apostates meriting death included the Shiite,
Sufis and other Muslim denominations, whom Abd al-Wahhab did not consider to be
Muslim at all.
There is nothing here that separates Wahhabism from ISIS. The rift would emerge only
later: from the subsequent institutionalization of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s
doctrine of “One Ruler, One Authority, One Mosque” -- these three pillars being taken
respectively to refer to the Saudi king, the absolute authority of official Wahhabism, and its
control of “the word” (i.e. the mosque).
It is this rift -- the ISIS denial of these three pillars on which the whole of Sunni authority
presently rests -- makes ISIS, which in all other respects conforms to Wahhabism, a deep
threat to Saudi Arabia.
Task: Using information from the documents (1-5) and your knowledge of history, write an
essay
 Identifying and explaining the factors which gave rise to and increased the appeal of
the Wahhabi movement
 Discuss the effects the Wahhabi movement on specific nations and/or regions
Create a thesis statement using the “rule of three: - one factor which gave rise to and
increased the appeal of the Wahhabi movement and two effects of the Wahhabi movement
on specific nations and/or regions.
Thesis:
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