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Strenuous efforts have been made by eminent scholars to liberate Islam from the chains of the authority of the past ages on the basis of independent interpretation of the Qoran; not in the way of the Wahhabi reformers, who tried a century before to restore the institutions of Mohammed's time in their original purity, but on the contrary with the object of adapting Islam by all means in their power to the requirements of modern life.
The mosques are new, and offer but little in the way of architectural beauty, for the fanatical Wahhabi from Nejd swept over the island in 1801, and in their religious zeal destroyed the places of worship; and the extensive cemeteries still bear testimony to the ravages of these iconoclasts, with their ruined tombs and overturned headstones.
On the day after our return from El-Haura the venerable old man paid us a visit aboard Sinnar. He declares that he was a boy when the Wahhabi occupied Meccah and El-Medinah that is, in 1803-4. Yet he has wives and young children. His principal want is a pair of new eyes; and the train of thought is, "I can't see when older men than myself can."
The actual holder of the title was Ghaleb ibn Mesaad, and he, finding himself unable to contend against the Wahhabis, became himself a Wahhabi. Consequently, when Mehemet Ali appeared at Mecca in 1812, his first act was to depose this Ghaleb, in spite of his protest that he had returned to orthodoxy, and to appoint another member of the Sherifal House in his place.
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