M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India — Although the U.S. State
Department considers the Wahabbi sect to be engaged in "purifying"
the Muslim faith, in fact what Mohammad ibn Abdul Wahab created three centuries
ago was an entirely new faith, used thereafter to uproot the Sufi-suffused
Islam that had gifted scholarship and success to the Muslims. Neither of his
two biographies is credible, both being the work of admirers of the al-Sauds,
the family later installed as the titular masters of the Arabian Peninsula.
Abdul Wahab developed his teachings to
protect the absolutist rule of the al-Sauds, wrapping them in a cloak of piety
that concealed personal conduct the opposite of the example set by the Prophet
Mohammed. The founder of Wahabbism was an individual who sought to uproot
traditional Islam from the land where it was revealed.
Early in his career as a preacher, Abdul
Wahab formed a partnership with Muhammad ibn Saud, whereby the desert
chieftain's dynasty was declared by the preacher to be the legitimate rulers of
the lands where Islam first took root. A grateful ruler promptly anointed Abdul
Wahab as the only correct teacher of the tenets of Islam. That the Muslim
faith, democratic in its chemistry, explicitly rejects kingship, or that the Prophet
Mohammed is the only transmitter of the Word of Allah, were seen as
inconsequential.
Almost from the start of their sojourn into
fortune, the al-Sauds fastened themselves to the flanks of the British, thereby
gaining assistance in their battles with other chieftains, until their presumed
loyalty finally earned them installation in 1932 as masters of the land they
called "Saudi Arabia." But for British and later U.S. help, the
al-Sauds would have remained just another of several tribal families, very
possibly made extinct by those angered at their incessant aggression.
