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Updated: May 18, 2025
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.
Neither do they condemn each other's errors as altogether damnable except, I believe, in the case of the Wahhabites, who accuse other Moslems of polytheism and idolatry. The census of the four great The Sunites, or People of the Path, are of course by far the most important of these.
Of the Wahhabites a more detailed account is needed, as although their numbers are small and their political importance less than it formerly was, the spirit of their reform movement still lives and exercises a potent influence on modern Mohammedan ideas.
It is probable that he would not withhold his allegiance from a Caliph of the legitimate house of Koreysh. But this, too, is beyond the subject of the present chapter. With the Wahhabites, then, our census of Islam closes.
When on the verge of our nineteenth century, they tried, as true Moslims, to force by material means their religious conceptions on others, they were combated as heretics by the authorities of catholic Islam. Central and Western Arabia formed the battlefield on which these zealots, called Wahhabites after their leader, were defeated by Mohammed Ali, the first Khedive, and his Egyptian army.
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.
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