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Updated: May 9, 2025
Islam is no longer asleep, and were another and a wiser Abd el Wahhab to appear, not as a heretic, but in the body of the Orthodox sect, he might play the part of Loyola or Borromeo with success. The present condition of the Wahhabites as a sect is one of decline.
The reform preached by Abd el Wahhab was radical. He began by breaking with the maxim held by the mass of the orthodox that inquiry on matters of faith was closed. He constituted himself a new mujtahed and founded a new school, neither Hanafite, Malekite, nor Shafite, and called it the school of the Unitarians, Muwaheddin, a name still cherished by the Wahhabites.
The contract of the bet was deposited in the hands of a man named Sabic, son of Wahhab, and in the presence of a crowd of youths and old men. "What shall be the length of the race?" asked Hadifah of Cais. "One hundred bow-shots," replied Cais, "and we have an archer here, Ayas, the son of Mansour, who will measure the ground."
He established it politically in Nejd on precisely its old basis at Medina, and sought to extend it over the whole of Arabia, perhaps of the world. I believe it is hardly now recognised by Mohammedans how near Abd el Wahhab was to complete success.
The Peninsular Arabs have had their Puritan reformation already, and a strong reaction has set in amongst them in favour of liberal thought. They are in favour still of reform, but it is of another kind from that preached by Abd el Wahhab; and it is doubtful whether a new militant Islam would find many adherents amongst them.
Its second mistake, and that was one that a little of the Prophet's prudence which always went hand in hand with his zeal might have avoided, was a too rigid insistance upon trifles. Abd el Wahhab condemned minarets and tombstones because neither were in use during the first years of Islam.
The movement of reform in Islam was thus put back for, perhaps, another hundred years. Still the seed cast by Abd el Wahhab has not been entirely without fruit. Wahhabism, as a political regeneration of the world, has failed, but the spirit of reform has remained. Indeed, the present unquiet attitude of expectation in Islam has been its indirect result.
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