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Wahhabi DBQ 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. 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