Wahhabism And The Rise Of The House Of Saud

This book examines the role of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) and his successors in reconsolidating the religious principles of Wahhabism. It explains the role of the Saudi princes in crystallizing the core of the SaudiWahhabi political entity within their tribal society. Key to this explanation is the interrelation between sedentary and nomadic populations and the consequent impact on the development of Saudi political entities prior to the emergence of the Saudi Kingdom. Texts of Wahhabi scholars are compared with those of the early Hanbali scholars, pinpointing the new religious elements introduced to foster the Wahhabi creed. Discussion focuses on the first and second generations of Wahhabi scholars who maintained the Wahhabi creed with great success, keeping its hegemony as the main doctrine in Saudi Arabia, and developing a takfiri discourse (accusing people of being infidels) which by the nineteenth century had become the main religious and political weapon by which the Wahhabis mobilized supporters against their political and religious adversaries. To better understand this development, the meaning of kufr (heresy) in Islam and its implications in various Islamic doctrines is examined closely. The focus on the role of Wahhabi scholars in the nineteenth century sheds new lights on the principles of continuity and discontinuity in the historical development of Saudi political entities and explains the origin of the modern Saudi State. Although major socio-economic and cultural change is now taking place under the leadership of Prince Muhammad ibn Salman, the main religious structures of the state remain firmly in place. It remains to be seen how two diametric societal viewpoints will integrate or clash. This work is essential reading for all scholars and students of religious, cultural, social and political history of Saudi Arabia and Islam in the Middle East.

What is Wahhabism? What is its relationship with the Saudi state? Does it play a part in Islamist terrorist threats? These are among the complex questions tackled in Religion and Politics in Saudi Arabia. Moving from the historical, social, and political contexts in which Wahhabism originated and flourished to its current internal divisions and its impact on Saudi-US relations, the authors offer thought-provoking, cutting-edge research that helps to unravel the mystery that has long surrounded the subject.

The objective of this collection is to use contemporary documents to depict the gradual spread of Wahhabism within the Arabian Peninsula. It covers the period when Wahhabism and its adherents, a proportion of the al-Saud of Najd, attempted to spread their power base and impose Wahhabism, while enduring numerous defeats and set-backs, but also waves of success. Ultimately it might be argued that the support of the British government was crucial from 1925 to 1932 for Ibn Saud's eventual and ultimate defeat of the Akhwan revolts, in which one type of Wahhabism, that which endorsed constant and forceful territorial expansion, was itself defeated. However, this collection of documents is not presented as a history of the rise to power of the al-Saud, and the formation of the state of Saudi Arabia but instead is an attempt to focus on Wahhabism as the pivotal and driving force to that expansion.

Goldberg's Saudi perspective, unlike the British perspective of earlier studies, focuses on the marked changes in the years from 1902 to the disappearance of the Ottomans in 1918. By focusing on the roots of Saudi foreign policy, he highlights the distinctive characteristics that make Saudi Arabia inherently different from other Middle Eastern states.

If Yemen managed to resist the Ottomans, the British Empire and pretty much all other imperial powers which ever attempted to subdue and control its people, the sons of Hamdan almost lost their freedom and national identity to the hegemonic ambitions of the House of Saud. Today Yemen is breaking free from the shackles of covert imperialism, learning once more to stand tall in the face of oppression. And though the impoverished nation is undergoing the growing pain of political empowerment, stumbling at times as a new generation of leaders are being made in the trenches of the Resistance movement, the sons of Hamdan are defiantly reclaiming their history, their land, their nation. As Yemen rises once more, it is a nation-state which will reclaim its place at the world table - with Yemen, Southern Arabia could witness the rise not of a political giant but a liberation movement echoing of the hopes first enounced by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1979), when he first proposed an alternative to western capitalism as the only democratic model. Betrayed by their leadership, lost to corruption and bogged down by poverty Yemen's long descent to the abyss can be traced back to 1994, when former President Ali Abdullah Saleh made a pact with Riyadh - military and financial support against the Southern Secessionist Movement - in exchange for Yemen's heart and soul. Those Highlands the kingdom knew it could not militarily over-run, it chose to insidiously transform through the export of Wahhabism and Salafism. Former President Saleh opened Yemen up to Al Saud's ideological devolution in the name of territorial unity. And if Yemen's house stood united for a while, forced into a marriage of political and economic convenience by those ambitious men who failed to see past Saudi Arabia's imperial manipulations, the poison of sectarianism came to undo. Yemen's road to freedom would come by way of a counter-revolution, or rather a liberation, as the rise of the Houthis would mark the country's real democratic awakening. Often dismissed by local political observers as they carry the stigma of the former regime, the Houthis, a Zaidi group organised under the leadership of Abdel-Malek Al-Houthi with a tribal base in northern Sa'ada, have long shed their "rebel group" label. They have been reborn as a powerful and popular political movement. If the Houthis, a formerly obscure band of tribal fighters, could be sneered at back in 2009 and shrugged off as wannabe Shia rebels by Yemen's high and mighty, the 2011 uprising levelled the political field to such an extent that they have come out of the revolutionary storm like a shiny new penny. Edited by Sheikh Shabbir Hassanally

The explosive story of the dynasty whose greed and corruption have brought Saudi Arabia to the very brink of bankruptcy - a dynasty now on the verge of collapse

Wahhabism has been generating controversy since it first emerged in Arabia in the 18th century. In the wake of September 11th instant theories have emerged that try to root Osama Bin Laden's attacks on Wahhabism. Muslim critics have dismissed this conservative interpretation of Islam that is the official creed of Saudi Arabia as an unorthodox innovation that manipulated a suggestible people to gain political influence. David Commins' book questions this assumption. He examines the debate on the nature of Wahhabism, and offers original findings on its ascendance in Saudi Arabia and spread throughout other parts of the Muslim world such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. He also assesses the challenge that radical militants within Saudi Arabia pose to the region, and draws conclusions which will concern all those who follow events in the Kingdom. "The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia" is an essential reading for anyone interested in the Middle East and Islamic radicalism today.

What are the roots of today's militant fundamentalism in the Muslim world? In this insightful and wide-ranging history, Charles Allen finds an answer in an eighteenth-century reform movement of Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab and his followers-the Wahhabi-who sought the restoration of Islamic purity and declared violent jihad on all who opposed them. The Wahhabi teaching spread rapidly-first throughout the Arabian Peninsula, then to the Indian subcontinent, where a more militant expression of Wahhabism flourished. The ranks of today's Taliban and al-Qaeda are filled with young men trained in Wahhabi theology. God's Terrorists sheds much-needed light on the origins of modern terrorism and shows how this dangerous ideology lives on today.