Wahhab vs. Wahhabism

Wahhabi Islam has received a lot of bad press in recent years and much of the blame for Islamic extremism tends to laid at the Wahhabist doorstep. But what if the association is not entirely accurate? What if Wahhabism isn't supposed to be that bad? Any extremely conservative, orthodox religion will carry a number of inherent dangers with respect to modernity and the Enlightenment, but there are degrees of danger which such religions can present and perhaps Wahhabi Islam has become a lot worse than it needs to be.

The Boston Globe reviewed the book Wahhabi Islam: From Revival to Global Jihad a while back and highlighted the argument that Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was actually a decent guy.

Natana DeLong-Bas argues that the vilification of Wahhabism and its founder gets it all wrong. "The militant Islam of Osama bin Laden does not have its origins in the teachings of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and is not representative of Wahhabi Islam. . .," she writes.

In fact, DeLong-Bas argues, Abd al-Wahhab's writings display "an absence of the xenophobia, militantism, misogyny, extremism, and literalism typically associated with Wahhabism." She describes Abd al-Wahhab's embrace of reason alongside divine revelation, and writes of his commitment to "placing women on a balanced footing with men." Far from being a how-to manual for violent jihad, DeLong-Bas concludes, Abd al-Wahhab's writings provide "a vision that offers hope for the future."

Critics, though, say that she is all wet:

"I'm sad this piece of scholarly trash was published by Oxford," says Khaled Abou El Fadl, professor of law at UCLA who writes frequently on Islamic jurisprudence. "This doesn't qualify as scholarship -- it falls within the general phenomenon of Saudi apologetics."

"DeLong-Bas never challenges the propriety of Abd al-Wahhab's claim to absolute authority -- the authority to declare the believer and the unbeliever (authority God reserves to himself in the Koran) and to impose the most severe sanctions on those he disagrees with," says Michael Sells, author of "Approaching the Qu'ran" and professor of religion at Haverford College. And novelist Michael J. Ybarra, reviewing DeLong-Bas's book in The Wall Street Journal, points out that "where on earth this [tolerant] form of Wahhabi Islam ever existed she doesn't say."

The criticisms are very sharp — and, to be honest, everything I have read about Wahhabi Islam agrees with the critics but contradicts DeLong-Bas. On the other hand, some of their comments make Wahhabi Islam sound worse than typical western religious ideas when in fact the difference is slight or non-existent:

[Abou El Fadl] points to the following Abd al-Wahhab proclamation: "If a person believes that a non-Muslim might go to heaven, he has become an apostate; if someone believes that it is all right to befriend or support or assist or ally oneself with infidels, he has become an apostate."

A Christian who believes that a Muslim or Hindu might go to heaven doesn't thereby become an "apostate," but it's still a belief which contradicts orthodox Christian theology. The idea that non-Christians who don't have faith in Jesus might go to heaven does have a little support in the Bible, and in theory God isn't bound by any rules on who does and does not go to heaven, but strictly speaking Christians are limited to believing that only Christians or even just some Christians will go to heaven. So al-Wahhab's teaching really isn't that far different from orthodox Christianity — and certainly the Christianity of his own day.

Nevertheless, while it may be that Abd al-Wahhab had some ideas which, if pursued, would be helpful Islam, the fact remains that he preached too many violent and nasty things for him to be accepted as anything other than brutish and barbaric. It may be that he wasn't much worse than many people of this time and region, though if that were true it raises the question as to why so many other Muslims in the region rejected him, but this doesn't mean anyone should accept any of his ideas today.