The Wahhabis Seen through European Eyes (1772–1830)

iThe Wahhabis Seen through European Eyes (1772–1830)© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004276338_001

ii  The History of Oriental Studies Editors Alastair Hamilton (University of London) Jan Loop (University of Kent) Thomas Burman (University of Tennessee) Advisory Board Charles Burnett (London) – Bernard Heyberger (Paris) Noel Malcolm (Oxford) – Jan Schmidt (Leiden) Francis Richard (Paris) – Arnoud Vrolijk (Leiden) Joanna Weinberg (Oxford) VOLUME 1 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hos

iii The Wahhabis Seen through European Eyes (1772–1830) Deists and Puritans of Islam By Giovanni Bonacina LEIDEN | BOSTON

iv Originally published as Eretici e riformatori d’Arabia. I wahhâbiti in prospettiva europea 1772-1830.©2011 by Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane s.p.a.Cover illustration: Ibrahim Pasha fighting the Wahhabis, Arabia, 1816–1818. Artist: Jean Adolphe Beaucé(from: E. Gouin, L’Égypte au XIXe siècle, Boizard, Paris, 1847, p. 296).Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataBonacina, Giovanni, 1961- [Eretici e riformatori d’Arabia. English] The Wahhabis seen through European eyes (1772-1830) : deists and Puritans of Islam / by GiovanniBonacina. pages cm. -- (The history of Oriental studies, ISSN 2405-4488 ; volume 1) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-29301-4 (hardback : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-29328-1 (e-book) 1. Wahhabiyah--Public opinion--History. 2. Public opinion--Europe--History--18th century. 3. Public opinion--Europe--History--19th century. 4. Europe--Intellectual life--18th century. 5. Europe--Intellectual life--19th century.I. Title.BP195.W2B6613 2015297.8’14--dc23 2015003500This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters coveringLatin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities.For more information, please see brill.com/brill-typeface.issn 2405-4488isbn 978-90-04-29301-4 (hardback)isbn 978-90-04-29328-1 (e-book)Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi andHotei Publishing.All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,without prior written permission from the publisher.Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv providedthat the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive,Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa.Fees are subject to change.This book is printed on acid-free paper.

v In memory of Anita Fusari, my mother ⸪

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Contents Contents viiContents Preface  ix Introduction  11 A Deistic Revolution in Arabia  12 1 Niebuhr: A New Religion in Najd  12 2 Grounds for Niebuhr’s Impressions and their Early Circulation  20 3 Volney: A Great Political and Religious Revolution in Asia 28 4 Olivier: Wandering Wahhabis and Persian Pilgrims  35 5 Browne: A Najd Rebel 402 Literary Disputes and Colonial Sights 47 1 Silvestre de Sacy: A Hypothesis of Continuity of the Qarmatians  47 2 Rousseau: A Reforming Sheik of Mohammedanism  53 3 Corancez: The Cult of the Koran in its Original Simplicity  64 4 Rousseau, Corancez and their Sources  73 5 Waring: The Fractured Foundation Stone  86 6 Valentia and other English Voices: The Din of Hostile Arms at Mecca  943 Muslim “Puritans” 108 1 Seetzen before the Emir of Wuhabisten 108 2 Badia y Leblich: A Swarm of Bees Round the Kaaba  121 3 European Testimonies of the Redemption of Mecca  136 4 Wahhabi Hostages in Cairo: Mengin’s “Précis”  148 5 Burckhardt: Materials for a History of the Wahhabis  159 6 Burckhardt: Arabia from Puritanism to Infidel Indifference  168 Conclusion  184 Bibliography  199 Index  226

viii Contents

Preface Preface ixPrefaceThis book has its origins in my long familiarity with the works of the nine-teenth-century German geographer Carl Ritter and his influence on Hegel’sconcept of world history. I read the two great volumes dating from 1846–47which Ritter devoted to the geography and ethnography of the Arabian penin-sula, while his Erdkunde provided a wealth of references to the earlier Euro-pean literature, characteristically also on the Wahhabi movement. Myeagerness to study the subject in greater depth was thus aroused by a desire tocomplete and correct Ritter’s material. Although extremely well-informed forthe time, it is now no more than a comprehensive repository of what wasknown on the subject at that moment. The present study is intended to enrichand transform that repository, thereby creating an intelligible and cohesive ac-count of the gradual acquisition of information and the first formulation andrectification of concepts and prejudices surrounding the Wahhabis. Very dif-ferent events have now brought the movement to public notice, to that notonly of specialists but also of those who were unaware of the two hundredyears of Wahhabi history and its impact on European views of Islam. With theaid of recent scholarly publications – the works of Michael A. Cook, EstherPeskes, George S. Rentz and Alexei Vassiliev have proved invaluable – andwithin the limits of my linguistic competence, I have tried to establish andcommunicate to the reader the critical distance necessary when examiningthose past texts juxtaposed to our more advanced knowledge. This now alsoincludes nineteenth-century Arabic chronicles (by Ibn Ghannam and IbnBishr) which were unavailable to early eye-witnesses and writers. Acquain-tance with the later history of the Wahhabi movement, and its key contribu-tion to the creation of the present unified kingdom of Saʿudi Arabia, naturallyconstitute a backdrop against which to study the small group of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century European observers and critics. They actually saw theoriginal nucleus, the rudimentary political structure usually defined by pres-ent-day historiography as the First Saʿudi State, which lasted from about 1745 to1818. Every effort has been made to avoid imputing our own notions to menfrom a different period with very different preoccupations. I have tried not toapportion blame in the name of our own critical preconceptions to any real orsupposed ideology of theirs, while making no attempt to conceal their in­evitably partial, albeit instructive, points of view and the unsuitability of someof their interpretative categories. There remained two gaps to be bridged:one between those European observers of the past and the object of their

x Prefaceobservation, their acquaintance with which matured slowly and only approxi-mately; and the other between the observers and ourselves, since we can nolonger presume to identify with them at first hand. Readers will decide forthemselves how far this book succeeds in meeting such demands. Now that this book is completed I wish to thank in particular ProfessorsAlastair Hamilton of the Warburg Institute in London and Giuseppe Ricupera-ti of the University of Turin, the two main advocates of this undertaking; Mau-rits van den Boogert at Brill; Jan Loop (University of Kent) and Thomas E.Burman (University of Tennessee), the two co-editors of this series; MassimoCampanini (University of Trent), Rolando Minuti (University of Florence), andBiancamaria Scarcia Amoretti (University of Rome, “La Sapienza”) for their ap-preciation of my earlier work (Eretici e riformatori d’Arabia. I wahhâbiti in pro­spettiva europea 1772–1830, E.S.I., Neaples, 2011); Natana DeLong-Bas (BostonCollege), Sabine Mangold (Bergische Universität Wüppertal), Tilman Nagel(Georg-August-Universität Göttingen), Esther Peskes (Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn), and Uwe Pfullmann (Gornsdorf/E.) for their encourage-ment; Stefano Poggi (University of Florence) for persuading me to read Ritter’sGeography in greater detail; and, finally, Angela Gibbon (University of Urbino)for her invaluable help with the translation. My gratitude is also due to the staffand facilities of the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göt-tingen, my favourite place of study for many summers. My bibliography is lim-ited to the texts actually consulted and cited, without any claim to completenessor to the inclusion of the more far-reaching theme of the manifold modernanalogies of Islam with Deism or with Protestant movements which have nodirect bearing on the Wahhabis.

IntroductIinotnroduction 1Introduction The prevalent impression among writers and travellers who have made us acquainted with the progress of the Wahaby power, has been to con- sider it as openly hostile to, and threatening the downfall of, the Mussul- man faith. (…) Mr. Burckhardt, on the contrary, seems to have ascertained, that the sole principle of Abdul Wahab, the founder, was to restore that religion exactly to the state in which it existed under the Prophet and his immediate descendants. The Edinburgh Review, October 1830 ⸪Early in 1799 French troops under General Desaix, engaged in pursuing MuratBey’s Mamluks in Upper Egypt, sustained ferocious encounters with Arab vol-unteers who had arrived from Mecca to help prevent the “infidel” from acced-ing to a region considered the gateway to the Muslim Holy Places. DominiqueVivant Denon, the future general director of the Napoleonic museums, sup-plied an eye-witness account of a battle at the fort of Benhut. His countrymen,outnumbered by adversaries armed with cannon and rifles seized from crewswho had been massacred on French vessels on the Nile, won the day thanks totheir assault on the enemy positions. Forced to extinguish the conflagration ofa munitions depot “with their feet, hands and bodies”, the Arabs appeared“black and naked, running towards the flames”. “It was an image of devils inHell and I could not look at them without a feeling of horror and admiration”.During the following weeks the men from Mecca, in chaos and abandoned bythe Mamluks, devoted themselves to raiding and kidnapping the local “Chris-tian and Coptic” peasants. This induced the Copts to assist the French in cap-turing survivors who were regarded as “animals harmful to society”. At thispoint, however, the narrator lamented the daily killing of innocent victims dueto the inability of the troops to distinguish the enemies “by shape or colour”from “poor merchants in caravans” or common farmers. More generally, he de-plored the unfortunate obligation of the invaders “to punish severely whomso-ever refused to believe that we acted solely for their benefit”. The news that thesharif of Mecca, the supreme authority over the Holy Places, had taken thetrouble to communicate to Desaix his disapproval of the volunteers from© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004293281_002

2 Introduction­Mecca and his personal wish to cultivate friendly relations with Napoleon wasa meagre consolation for Denon.1 As we know, similar complaints accompanied many future colonial wars,especially if they were ostensibly fought in the name of noble ideals such asthose of the French Revolution. Despite, but perhaps also partly as a result of,the higher principles of civilisation and humanity to which the French invad-ers appealed, they ran the risk of endowing the French campaign in Egypt withthe savage character of a divine judgement. An ideal counterbalance to theDantesque image of the Arab combatants in the Voyage was the resoundingproclamation of the sultan protesting against the “Devil’s banner”, the “dia­bolical principles” and the “infernal spirit” of an “army of atheists” who hadrecently appeared in the Nile Delta – like locusts, as the first astonished wit­nesses of the invasion described them. To these European self-styled liberatorsfrom Mamluk despotism the Ottomans imputed the determination to u­ nleashcarnal concupiscence, legalise robbery and, in short, prepare the destruc­tionof Islam in its entirety.21 D. Vivant Denon, Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Égypte, pendant les campagnes du Géné- ral Bonaparte, Paris, an X (1802), I, p. 314; II, pp. 122–36, 142, 151–55, 180, 190–91. “Volontaires de la Mecque” in Upper Egypt, active in a “guerre de partisans” (a term in common use after Napoleon’s experiences in Spain, Russia and Germany), are also descri- bed later by Louis Reybaud in the classic work on that memorable expedition, cf. Histoire scientifique et militaire de l’expédition française en Égypte, Paris, 1830–36, III, pp. 515–20; IV, p. 377; VI, pp. 34, 46–49. On Denon’s experiences in Upper Egypt until his early return to France in the summer of 1799 in the train of Napoleon, cf. Lelièvre (1993), pp. 85–98.2 For the text of the firman against the invaders, a veritable exhortation to Holy War, cf. Histoire scientifique et militaire de l’expédition française en Égypte, cit., IV, pp. 142–52. The opening is eloquent partly because there are traces of the European translator’s concep- tual reformulation, ibid, pp. 142–43: “Le peuple français (Dieu veuille détruire leur pays de fond en comble, et couvrir d’ignominie leurs drapeaux) est une nation d’infidèles obsti- nés et de scélérats sans frein. Ils nient l’unité de l’Être Suprême, qui a créé le ciel et la terre; ils ne croient point à la mission du Prophète, destiné à être l’intercesseur des fidèles au jugement dernier, ou, pour mieux dire, ils se moquent de toutes les religions; ils rejettent la croyance d’une autre vie, de ses récompenses et de ses supplices; ils ne croient ni à la résurrection des corps ni au jugement dernier, et ils pensent qu’un aveugle hasard préside à leur vie et à leur mort; qu’ils doivent leur existence à la pure matière, et qu’après que la terre a reçu leurs corps, il n’y a plus ni résurrection ni compte à rendre, ni demande ni réponse. (…) Les livres divins, inspirés aux prophètes, ne sont, à leur dire, que mensonge et imposture, et ils regardent le Koran, le Pentateuque, et l’Évangile comme des fables. Les prophètes, tels quels Moïse, Jésus et Mahomet, ne sont, selon eux, que des hommes comme les autres, qui n’ont jamais eu de mission, et qui n’ont pu en imposer qu’à des ignorans. Ils pensent que les hommes, étant nés égaux, doivent être également libres; que toute distintion entre eux est injuste, et que chacun doit être le maître de son opinion et

Introduction 3 The Benhut episode was remarkable in itself since one of the future FirstConsul’s reasons for justifying the need to raise the siege of Acre before his re-turn to France was the threat posed by people from Hijaz in supplying rein-forcements for the Mamluks. The Egyptian chronicler al-Jabarti included theepisode in his contemporary account. He describes al-Jaylani, a sheikh fromthe Maghreb, appearing at the sanctuary of Mecca and exhorting those presentto wage a holy war against the aggressors. He was said to have recited from abook on the subject, collected money offers and mustered about six hundredmen. These were immediately joined by further recruits both on their way toYanbuʿ and later, when they reached al-Qusayr in Egypt. Once the sheikh wasdead and his followers routed the survivors sought refuge in the villages wherethey were generally handed over to the French. Few remained to take part inthe first provisional repossession of Cairo by the Turks in 1800. We also learnthat a letter given not to Desaix but to Poussielgue, the general administratorof Egyptian finances, confirmed the altogether different attitude of the sharifof Mecca, Ghalib ibn Musaʿid, who, preoccupied by other domestic concerns,maintained an apparently equidistant position between the two sides.3 What neither the French sources nor al-Jabarti say is that the volunteersfrom Mecca must have included a number of Arab Wahhabis soon to gain no-toriety in Europe as founders of a veritable kingdom in the heart of the Arabi-an Peninsula. About a year earlier the Wahhabis had forced Sharif Ghalib tosign an onerous truce and to accept their presence as pilgrims in the Holy City.It was thus quite likely that some of them had heard al-Jaylani’s address andwelcomed his invitation to war.4 If this was so the encounter described by De- de sa manière de vivre”. For the metaphor of the locusts, the scourge of Egypt in the Bible, cf. T. Philipp, M. Perlman (ed.), Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti’s History of Egypt. ʿAjāʾib al-Âthār fī ’l-Tarājim wa’l-Akhbār, Stuttgart, 1994, III, p. 2. In this case too the French are said to be hostile to any divine mission or prophecy and to deny both the divine attributes and the resurrection. Unlike Jews, Christians and Muslims, they consequently bow to reason alone, ibid, pp. 6, 8, 181. On the image of the French invaders of Egypt as rationalist here- tics, no longer Christians, but simply upholders of the human wisdom of Moses, Jesus Christ and Muhammad, as they appeared to educated Muslims, cf. Delanoue (1982), I, pp. 85–86.3 Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, History of Egypt, cit., pp. 70, 88, 90, 92–94, 107, 145. The friendly letter from Ghalib to Poussielgue, and another addressed by the same sharif to Napoleon, the French authorities solemnly affixed in Cairo, to impress the inhabitants, cf. L. Rey- baud, Histoire scientifique et militaire de l’expédition française en Égypte, cit., V, pp. 157–60; Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, History of Egypt, cit., III, pp. 93–94.4 The inclusion of the account of the French campaign in Egypt in the chronicle of ʿUthman ibn ʿAbd Allah ibn Bishr (1795/96–1871/72), the author of a text entitled ʿUnwān al-majd fī tārīkh Najd (The Symbol of Glory in the History of Najd), one of the main Wahhabi sources

4 Introductionnon would have been the very first contact between regular European troopsand the militia of those Muslims now generally regarded as having been totallyhostile to foreigners and rejecting any customs or values other than their own.Not until 1829, however, did this news begin to circulate almost by chancethanks to a posthumous work by a later informant, the Swiss traveller JohannLudwig Burckhardt (1784–1817). He would continue to be the main authorityon the Wahhabis in Europe for some time to come. Looking back, Burckhardtbelieved that he recognised in the Arabs faced by the French in Upper Egyptthe same spirit and tribal origin as the men he had observed during his stay inMecca in 1814, when they were opposing the successful attempt to subjugatethe Hijaz by the new pasha of Egypt Muhammad ʿAli.5 This view brings to its completion a long intellectual process extendingfrom Denon’s Egyptian experience to Burckhardt’s peregrinations in Arabia.Ignorance about the Wahhabis was not easy to dispel, especially because ofwidespread uncertainty as to their effective adherence to Islam. Four years hadelapsed since Desaix’s campaign in Upper Egypt, when Count Italinskij, theRussian ambassador in Istanbul, observed that, besides the Sublime Porte’sfears of a possible renewal of French interest in the Nile, there was an equal on the earliest history of the religious movement, documents the deep impression that the events on the Nile must have made on the other shore of the Red Sea, at least among the better informed inhabitants of Najd, cf. Philby (1955), p. 91.5 J.L. Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia, London, 1829, p. 209: “When the French invaded Egypt, a Moggrebyn saint at Mekka, called Sheikh el Djeylany, a distant relation of a wealthy merchant at Mekka, and who had for some time been in the habit of delivering lectures in the great mosque, mounted the pulpit, and preached a crusade against the infidels, who had seized upon the gate of the Kaaba – as Egypt is styled. Being a very eloquent speaker, and held in much veneration, many Arabs flocked to his standard (…) The fate of these Arabs (many of whom were of the same Wahaby tribes who afterwards offered so much resistence to Muhammad Ali), and the fury with which they encountered the French in Upper Egypt, are already known to the reader, by Denon’s animated descrip- tion. Sheikh Djeylany was killed, and very few of his followers returned.” The participation of volunteers from Mecca against the French is mentioned in Abir (1971), p. 192; Vassiliev (1998), p. 99, who do not, however, take into account Burckhardt’s information concern- ing the Wahhabis who fought with al-Jaylani’s troops, mostly a mixture of North African pilgrims and inhabitants of Mecca and Yanbuʿ. According to Abir (1971), it is nevertheless very probable that the threat posed by the Wahhabis to the government of Sharif Ghalib prevented his giving full attention to the edict promulgated by the court of Istanbul in August 1798, containing the invitation to all Muslims to take part in the Holy War against the European invaders. The pressure exerted by the Wahhabis would, at least indirectly, have provoked al-Jaylani’s intervention, caused by dissatisfaction with the inertia of the sharif administering the Holy Places in the name of the sultan.

Introduction 5concern with “a rebellious movement of some Arab tribes called Wahhabis”.According to rumours from Damascus and Baghdad its members seemed in-tent on “founding a Monotheistic religion in defiance of Mohammedanism”.6From the Ottoman point of view it was as if the religious preaching and politi-cal and military expansion of those obscure worshippers in central Arabiaposed as great a threat as the French invasion of Egypt. The expressions circu-lating in the Turkish capital about the danger of this horde of Arab assailantswho threatened the very survival of Islam were similar to those in the firmanagainst Napoleon. Who could have identified the Wahhabis described by Ital-inskij with the furious fanatics from Mecca previously observed by Denon?Both the French and their adversaries at Benhut – did they really fight on thebanks of the Nile? – seemed, paradoxically enough, to represent in equal mea-sure the worst risks to stability in the area. To most Muslims the spectre of eachone was equally terrifying. The rumour described by the Russian ambassador was not the only one. Thecapture of the Holy Places in the Hijaz, the challenge to Ottoman authority,echoes of Muslim theological controversies and the abolition of traditionalcultural practices, particularly the pilgrimage to Mecca organised in the greatEgyptian and Syrian caravans, kept the same belief alive in Europe in the earlynineteenth century. At times it was tinged with fear, at others it was attendedby the hope that a possibly fatal blow was about to be dealt not only to thedeclining Turkish Empire but to the very structure of Islam. Even the Egyptiancampaign led by Pasha Muhammad ʿAli in 1811 to restore normality to the Ara-bian Peninsula and which culminated seven years later in the total destructionof the first Saʿudi kingdom (named after the dynasty which had espoused thenew creed) failed to bring about a radical revision of this belief. It was in theinterests of the victor to sustain the common belief in the fearful impiety ofthe Wahhabis, while in Europe the new spiritual climate of the Restorationproduced a strong desire to believe that in the East, as in the West, the violentimpetus of eighteenth-century revolutionary innovations was nearing its end.Repentant mankind would at last be free of its yoke. It was felt that such aprovidential design had also been responsible for the dissolution of both Na-poleon’s Empire and the recent religion-based monarchy established by theWahhabis in Arabia.6 “In the present situation the Porte fears only France’s intentions and the rebel movement of some Arab tribes, called Wahhabis, who amount to nearly 60,000 effectives. They plan to seize the wealth of the Mecca and Medina shrines and undertake to found a mono­ theist religion, defying Mohammedanism”, cf. Vassiliev (1998), p. 99.

6 Introduction This, then, is why the appearance of Burckhardt’s Travels in Arabia (1829)and particularly his Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys (1830) received unani-mous acclaim as contributing to a greater understanding of the phenomenonand thereby dissipating a grave misconception. The materials collected byBurckhardt in Cairo during the last years of his life, and his still more impor-tant observations made during the months spent in the principal cities of theHijaz once again under formal Ottoman authority in January 1813, providedanswers to questions concerning the Islamic orthodoxy of the Wahhabis andproposed an evocative interpretation suggested by Christian history. Far fromcorresponding to previous descriptions and, indeed, undeserving of the nameof “heretics”, as both popular superstition and the clergy depicted them, theWahhabis were to be considered strict Muslims. Their “reformation” of the Is-lam could rightly be called the “Protestantism”, or even the “Puritanism of theMohammedans”.7 Burckhardt was an expatriate from an illustrious Calvinist family in Basel –the great historian Jakob was born to a secondary branch in 1818. He was insympathy with this comparison of the Puritans, if not with the Wahhabis assuch, certainly with those natives of Arabia who seemed to him to oppose cor-rupt Turkish domination and the “Napoleonic” aims of Muhammad ʿAli, whilefavouring stricter norms of behaviour. Ever since his youth, and after theFrench occupation of his homeland – his father Rudolf had led the local resis-tance against the troops of the Directory – this future explorer had grown up toadmire all patriotic and religious opposition to that perpetual aspiration touniversal monarchy nurtured by the great civilised but despotic states. Whilehe was waiting to join a suitable merchant caravan bound for Central Africa,Burckhardt, in the service of the African Association of London, cultivatedthese ideals on his travels through Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Nubia and Arabia.He did not hesitate to interpret the events in Arabia as a war of national libera-7 J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys, London, 1830, p. 58: “I think myself authorised to state, from the results of my inquiries among the Arabs, and the Wahabys themselves, that the religion of the Wahabys may be called the Protestantism or even Puritanism of the Mohammedans.” And ibid, p. 273: “The religion and government of the Wahábys may be very briefly defined, as a Muselmán puritanism, and a Bedouin govern- ment.” The convincing comparison was immediately taken up in a review by the Austrian Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, an authority on Arab matters in the German-speaking world: “Abdulwehhab (…) ist der Calvin des Islams.” And, “die Wahhabi wollen nur Mosli- men strenger Lehre, Reformatoren der Mißbräuche und die Kalvinisten des Islams seyn”, cf. J. v. Hammer-Purgstall, review of: J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys, in Jahrbücher der Literatur, LV, 1831, pp. 34, 54.

Introduction 7tion against the Ottoman Empire and its pashas.8 The theological and politicalaspects of the conflict between the Wahhabis and Muhammad ʿAli in the Mus-lim Holy Places reminded him of the profound desire of European nations forindependence from Napoleon or, in past centuries, the uprisings in small Prot-estant territories – Swiss cantons, German principalities, the Dutch UnitedProvinces – against crusading Catholic potentates.9 This was probably one ofthe reasons why he was so delighted by the idea that the Wahhabis had foughttheir French conquerors in Upper Egypt and had introduced it into his notes. This clarification of the supposedly anti-Muslim nature of the new religiousmovement assured the increasing success of the interpretation. Burckhardt’sideas, moreover, converged with the interests of Great Britain, which contin-ued to project its image as a power counterbalancing any universal monarchyin Europe. National and religious endeavours to destabilise the Ottoman Em-pire and the pashadoms of Cairo and Baghdad could be useful in London at atime of active military and commercial competition with France over theroutes to India. To establish the moral legitimacy of the Wahhabis could justifythe possibility of a future alliance, however problematic it might be. Almost acentury later, with Germany as the new European enemy on the continent,Burckhardt’s sympathies for those “puritan Muslims” would still bear fruitamong the English, gaining supporters for the cause of Arabian independencefrom Turkish domination. Thanks to Harry St. John Bridger Philby (1885–1960)the latent memory of Burckhardt’s Notes contributed to an enthusiastic revi-sion of the entire history of the Wahhabis up to the rise of the current, renewedSaʿudi monarchy in the Arabian Peninsula (1932).108 After completing his studies in Germany (Leipzig and Göttingen) Burckhardt arrived in London in 1806, left for the East in 1809, and reached Egypt in 1812 with the intention of proceeding from there on an exploration of the African interior to follow up previous attempts to chart the course of the Niger. He died in Cairo of malaria contracted during his pilgrimage to Mecca. His notes, written in English, were published posthumously, as from 1819. The notes on Nubia and Syria were edited by William Leake, those on Arabia by William Ouseley (an orientalist and brother of Gore Ouseley, English envoy in Persia dur- ing the final years of the war against Napoleon). The African Association, in the person of its principal animator, Joseph Banks, was responsible for printing the notes.9 Last comparison struck Burckhardt at the time when Muhammad ʿAli was in Cairo pre- paring his military campaign to repossess, or rather “redeem”, Mecca: “All the nations in the Turkish empire united in execrating the Wahabys, and demanded an expedition, resembling our old crusades, against those heretics”, cf. J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys, cit., p. 341.10 His numerous monographs on the subject, cf. H. St. John Bridger Philby, The Heart of Ara- bia, London, 1922, including the posthumous Id., Arabian Oil Ventures, Washington 1964, thus helped to familiarise English and American authorities and public opinion with the

8 Introduction Nevertheless Burckhardt’s conclusions were also, in their own way, the re-sult of a process. Had a premature death not prevented him from revising hisnotes, he might have wished to follow this process through, using the first oraland written Wahhabi testimonies made available through the deportation ofnumerous Wahhabi dignitaries to Cairo at the time of the ephemeral conquestof Najd by Egypt in 1818. The idea of Islamic “Puritanism” as such was not new.Indeed, in the case of the Wahhabis the definition had already been used bythe English resident in Baghdad Harford Jones Brydges and by the English trav-eller Henry Light a few years earlier. Besides, for the sake of absolute clarity thevaguely evocative memory of the Reformation and the complexity of the Puri-tan model might have required further historical research.11 The comparison,though bold, was in fact the development and partial correction of a previous,more audacious hypothesis. The earlier view that Burckhardt had felt calledupon to correct even claimed that the new movement appearing in Arabiaaround the middle of the eighteenth century had had a function in the Muslimworld analogous, in a Europe labouring under disputes about philosophy andreligion, to that of Deist groups professing, in the name of human reason, theexistence of one God as supreme architect of the universe who only requiredobedience to the moral law naturally engraved in our hearts, without any his-torical revelation or positive statutes. The idea originated with the testimony ofthe German traveller Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815), the sole survivor of a memo-rable Danish expedition to Arabia which, ever since its inception in 1761, hadbeen hailed as a turning point in the exploration of the peninsula. In 1772, theyear of Niebuhr’s first publication, the news of a mysterious sect, heresy, orperhaps even a “new religion”, which had assumed the shape of a political soci-ety, gained credibility. The events in France in 1789 were destined to corrobo-rate the hypothesis, with the added attraction of a greater correspondencebetween the developments in Europe and in Asia, until Burckhardt rectifiedthe analogy by asserting that the “revolution” was none other than a “restora-tion” and that the model for the new religious movement in Arabia should besought not in the dry, rational theology of free thinkers, but rather in the claims of the Al-Saʿud principality, the expansionistic and “fanatic” past of which might have placed it in an unfavourable light. Preference might otherwise have gone to the rival dynasty of the Mecca sharifs, much befriended by T.E. Lawrence.11 “A sect of puritan Mahometans” – this is how Light defines the Wahhabis whom he had heard about in Egypt at more or less the same time as Burckhardt, cf. H. Light, Travels in Egypt, Nubia, Holy Land, Mount Libanon, and Cyprus, London, 1818, p. 29. For a previous occurrence of the term “puritans” in a diplomatic report by Brydges, cf. Khan (1968), p. 44.

Introduction 9­current inspired enthusiasm of radical Protestants for a complete regenerationof the faith.12 The information on the Wahhabis from Niebuhr to Burckhardt is not justthe history of the dissolution of a misunderstanding, or the substitution of afirst false analogy by another one which was equally questionable. It is also,and above all, the story of a very natural need to understand the unknownthrough the known (Deism, Puritanism, etc.), and of the instinctive tendencyof these travellers to look for significant correspondences in distant lands withthe fears and hopes deriving from their own place of origin. Such a need andsuch a tendency, in the face of a phenomenon which was difficult even forMuslim observers to understand, cannot blithely be subsumed under themuch abused category of “orientalism”, all too often a sterile derivation fromthe brilliant and instructive work of Edward Said which appeared in 1978. Thetestimony of these first European travellers is indeed sometimes partly invali-dated by lack of personal contact with authentic Wahhabis and the fact that itis thus prevalently based on second-hand accounts. Yet it is still a valuablesource of information on Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (1703/1704–1792)and the early stages of the movement bearing his name, especially when takentogether with chronicles written by his supporters, the polemical writings ofhis adversaries, and the works he himself composed during his long life. Al-though, with hindsight, such European literature must be analysed with cau-tion, attention should be paid not only to the truth of the information contained(and usually verifiable elsewhere), but also to its value in the reconstruction of12 The whole question is well summarised in a timely Scottish review of Notes: “The preva- lent impression among writers and travellers who have made us acquainted with the progress of the Wahaby power, has been to consider it as openly hostile to, and threaten- ing the downfall of, the Mussulman faith. Niebuhr speaks of it as a new religion, which admitted, indeed, Mahommed to have been a great teacher, but denied the inspiration of the Koran; and Lord Valentia, in relating the entry of the Wahabys into Mecca, considers that event shaking to its foundations the fabric of Islamism. Mr. Burckhardt, on the con- trary, seems to have ascertained, that the sole principle of Abdul Wahab, the founder, was to restore that religion exactly to the state in which it existed under the Prophet and his immediate descendants.” cf. [H. Murray], Burckhardt on the Bedouins and Wahabys, in The Edinburgh Review, LII, 1831, p. 82 (a review in all likelihood attributable to Hugh Murray, cf. W.E. Houghton (ed.), The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, Toronto, 1966–89, I, p. 473, n. 1314). DeLong-Bas (2004), p.16, emphasises the fact that the earliest European sources on the movement inspired by Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab lacked any direct knowledge of him and his writings, though she mistakenly maintains that nothing had been published in Europe during the Wahhabi leader’s lifetime, in spite Niebuhr’s evi- dence (cited by her in an English translation of his writings published some twenty years after the German original).

10 Introductionthe cultural background to the process of accumulation and transmission ofsuch a variegated body of wisdom. This investigation, naturally of interest in the perspective of intellectual­history, is not the only reason for investigating the initial information on theWahhabis supplied by Europeans. If we compare the various testimonies cer-tain aspects emerge with which we are still familiar. Perhaps even more nowthan in the past, they contribute to the fabrication of schemes which are bothreductive and opportunistic, whether they be derogatory or laudatory. The re-current accusation that Islamic religious fundamentalism is a threat to peace-ful co-existence among peoples is an example, as is the frequent benevolentassumption of a need to return to the basics of any particular religion as a de-fence against external aggression. The distance in time from the events andvoices recalled here does not allow any superficial references to present events,but it may indeed be a corrective to constantly recurring distortions.13 Weshould remember that the cultural context of the time was completely free ofthe generalised concern in “Western” society today with the dangers accompa-nying a foreign religion recently transplanted in its midst. In the pages of thesepast writers there are, if anything, still signs of an ingenuous trust in the be-neficent function, easily misrepresented today, which European civilisation13 The somewhat controversial, but currently not unusual, identification of the Wahhabi movement with the variegated line of so-called Muslim “fundamentalism”, terrorist impli- cations included, tends to outdate the twentieth-century sympathies of Philby (1930, 1955) and later of Vassiliev (1998) with the triumph of the present Saʿudi monarchy in Arabia. Rather, it produces the effect of posing questions partly analogous to those pro- voked by the phenomenon at its outset, and asked by the first European observers, albeit now with a different emotional charge, on a much wider scale and in a very different guise. Complete identification of the Wahhabi message with “fundamentalism”, or even Islamic terrorism, is proposed by Bascio (2007), pp. 81, 111; Schwartz (2002), pp. 65, 184–85, 205, 242, 273–74, (the latter even declaring that “Bin Laden was the Wahhabi hero par excellence of the twenty-first century”). They interpret the whole spiritual inheritance of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab and his successors as a corrupting factor in traditional Islamic religiosity which would have been undermined by world proselytism and pro- longed Saʿudi control of the Holy Places, rendered possible by the immense resources deriving from trade in crude oil. Seen from this angle, European writers favourable to the Wahhabis were guided by an unacknowledged sympathy for egalitarian and tyrannous regimes, cf. Schwartz (2002), pp. 99–100, 107, 119 (but he does not mention Burckhardt’s Notes or anything else written before the twentieth century). For a discussion of the equa- tion of Wahhabi preaching with Islamic “fundamentalism”, for the assertion that Wahhabi Islam is not a kind of monolith with no history, for the misrepresentation of the writings of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab by some of today’s Muslim commentators, cf. DeLong- Bas (2004), pp. 227, 240, 279, 289.

Introduction 11was thought to fulfil in those Muslim countries considered a prey to irrevoca-ble internal self-destruction. These were not only the Ottoman Empire, butalso the independent political entities in North Africa, the kingdom of Persia,the Mogul Empire in India. These testimonies from the past, however, alsoshow signs of an astonished interest in the Wahhabis, a movement revealingunexpected vitality amid such apparent decadence. This impression is appar-ently contradictory enough to require explanation. The difficult and controversial task of deciphering these signs in Europe, therole played by the manifold clues in modern history, and the various nationali-ties, religious confessions and political factions of the individual observers, arethe true material of this reconstruction. The examination begins with Niebuhr,the father of the better known historian of Ancient Rome, Barthold Georg. Thetitle of a famous novel by Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911), through which theauthor wished to convey his own troubled perception of pre-revolutionaryevents in Russia, could serve as a motto for this overview. Nonetheless, the cur-rent use, or perhaps abuse, of the term “Western” to define a cultural identity,and an increasingly uncertain and troubled historical mission, prevent the useof the term, charged as it is with as yet unresolved historical, philosophical andideological implications. Preference has therefore been given to the term “Eu-ropean”: “European” eyes, “European” witnesses, even if this adjective is in turnconditioned by ancient spiritual and material processes which cannot be in-vestigated here. In other words, it seemed that the conventional geographicseparation of Europe and Asia, and the distinction retained with respect to theAmerican continent – still at the time at a great distance from the “eastern”world, although about to become the epitome of “the West” – would ensure agreater descriptive neutrality and adherence to the nationality of the individu-al authors considered. Deists or Puritans, the mysterious Wahhabis were destined to emerge littleby little from a thick mist of fascinating misunderstandings before the twenti-eth century judged them to be the precursors of the present Muslim “funda-mentalist” movement. Whatever recent convictions concerning the latter maybe, nothing could be more foolhardy than their literal application to the factsand opinions of the past. There is nothing more misleading than the claim ofcontinuity and identity for historical phenomena which have lasted for centu-ries. It is always instructive to verify how pertinent or unfounded analogiessuggested by experience may be. This is why I hope that some benefits can beobtained from the experiment of a new immersion in the primitive impres-sions of that same mist.

12 Chapter 1 Chapter 1A Deistic Revolution in Arabia Ein gewisser Schech (…) wollte besser unterrichtet seyn. Dieser gab vor, Abd ul wáheb lehre seine Schüler Gott als den Schöpfer und Regierer aller Dinge zu verehren und anzubeten; er verbiete ihnen aber in ihrem Gebete weder des Mohámmeds, noch irgend eines andern Propheten oder Heiligen, und selbst nicht seines eigenen Namens zu gedenken, weil dieses zur Abgötterey Anlaß geben könnte. C. Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien, 1772 ⸪1 Niebuhr: A New Religion in NajdNiebuhr’s journeys in the East and his observations in Egypt, Arabia, India,Persia, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Syria, Turkey and, finally, in Warsaw on his wayback to Denmark in November 1767, were the subject of his travel writings –the Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien published in two volumes in 1774–78, fol-lowed posthumously by a third volume in 1837. There was, however, no detailedaccount of the Wahhabis. With the exception of the coastal area of the ArabianPeninsula, he and his less fortunate companions were only able to visit part ofsouth-western Yemen. The author’s previous Beschreibung von Arabien (1772)was conceived and written in a more scholarly manner. It was based not onlyon his own observations, but, to a greater degree, on information garnered atsecond hand from members of the local community.1 The latter supplied1 Already in the subtitle: Aus eigenen Beobachtungen und im Lande selbst gesammleten Nach­richten abgefasset, cf. C. Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien, Copenhagen, 1772. Since Niebuhr was unable to read Arabic, his information consists principally of oral communi- cations from merchants, humble scholars, renegade Christians, and chance companions along his long, solitary return home, about whom he offers little information. On the dif- ficulty of questioning them and the need to compare versions, see ibid, p. xviii. While awaiting a complete examination of the papers concerning Niebuhr in the State Archives in Copenhagen and Schleswig, so far used only in connection with his journey to the East, the best biography is still the one by his son Barthold Georg (1816). For further informa- tion, cf. Carstens (1886), and in particular Lohmeier (2002); Walther (2002). On the© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004293281_003

A Deistic Revolution in Arabia 13important new oral accounts of the birth of “a new sect, or even religion” (ac-tually mentioned in the index), which might, in time, “cause a great change inthe Arabs’ religion and in their present form of government”.2 The life andideas of an otherwise unknown ʿAbd al-Wahhab, the “founder of this new reli-gion” and its “apostle”, were sketched out in a few pages according to a formulawhich became the norm: educational visits to Basra, but also to Baghdad andPersia, the return and the fruitful proselytism in the homeland, the conversionand pacification of formerly rival sheikhs in the province of al-ʿArid, their co-alition against recalcitrant sheikhs, the mutual exchange of accusations, a warof religion and the achievement of political hegemony in the region. “Heretics”was the principal epithet applied to the followers of the mysterious innovator,who in turn dubbed their antagonists “obstinate infidels”. Protected by a “for-tress of mountains”, possibly in the vicinity of the city of al-ʿUyaina in the dis-trict of al-Dirʿiyya or Wadi Hanifa, Niebuhr reports, the “new enthusiasts” hadjust repelled the advance of the powerful sheikh of the province of al-Ahsa⁠ʾand witnessed the disorderly retreat of their besiegers in the direction fromwhich they had come.3 preparation and progress of the expedition to Arabia, with Niebuhr’s famous stops on his solitary return journey to the ruins of Persepolis, Ecbatana and Babylon, on the publica- tion of the diaries and accounts, cf. Bidwell (1995), pp. 32–49; Freeth/Winstone (1978), pp. 61–89; Hansen (1962); Hartwig (2002); Hogarth (1904), pp. 39–63; Klaver (2009), pp. 45–104; Pfullmann (2001), pp. 308–15. The few details given by the traveller concerning his local informers and the rarity of his contacts with the upper echelons of Arab society are treated in Hartwig (2002), pp. 166, 169, 171–72.2 C. Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien, cit., p. 345. The information anticipated in the chapter on the Arabs’ religion, ibid, p. 19: “Ein Schech Mékkrami zu Nedsjerân, und ein anderer Schech Abdulwáhheb in Nedsjed haben auch vor wenigen Jahren besondere Sek- ten gestiftet, deren Namen mir noch unbekannt sind”, is inserted in his treatment of Najd (Die Landschaft Nedsjed), a vast and almost unknown central area of the Arabian Penin- sula. In the Contents, the chapter has a different, longer title: Die Provinz Nedsjed. Neue Sekte eines Abd ul wáhheb.3 Ibid, pp. 345–46: “Der Stifter dieser neuen Religion war einer mit Namen Abd ul wáheb. Er war in Nedsjed geboren, und legte sich in seinen jüngern Jahren auf die arabischen Wis- senschaften in seinem Vaterlande. Er lebte nachher verschiedene Jahre zu Basra, und rei­ sete auch nach Bagdad und Persien. Nach seiner Zurückunft in Nedsjed breitete er seine neue Meinungen in der Religion unter seinen Landesleuten aus, und war so glücklich die Gunst verschiedener Schechs in der Provinz El áred zu gewinnen. Die Unterthanen seiner Freunde, der unabhängigen Schechs, folgten dem Beyspiel ihrer Regenten, und wurden gleichfalls Anhänger dieses neuen Lehrers. Einige von den Neubekehrten unhabhängige Schechs, welche vorher beständig Krieg mit einander geführt hatten, wurden durch die Vermittelung des Abd ul wáheb, Freunde, und vereinigten sich nichts wichtiges zu

14 Chapter 1 unternehmen, ohne ihren Apostel um Rath zu fragen. Hierdurch nun ward das Gleichge- wicht unter den kleinen Prinzen in El áred gänzlich aufgehoben. Verschiedene Schechs, die vorher ihren Nachbaren allein kaum gewachsen gewesen waren, konnten nun der vereinigten Macht so vieler gar nicht widerstehen, und die Kriege wurden immer heftiger, weil der Pöbel von beyden Seiten glaubte, daß er seiner Religion wegen verfolgt würde, und daß er verpflichtet wäre selbige gegen die Ketzer, oder gegen die hartnäckigen Ungläubigen, welche in den alten vermeinten Irrthümern verharren wollten, zu verthei- digen.” There follows the account of the conflict with the sheik of al-Ahsa⁠ʾ, who had inter- vened on behalf of the local leaders “mit einem Heer von 40000 Mann, mit 4 alten portugisischen oder türkischen Kanonen und einem Mörser.” On al-Dirʿiyya, “ein Distrikt welcher in den ältern Zeiten Wad Hanife genannt ward”, on al-ʿUyaina, “eine Stadt die in den letztern Jahren durch ein Abd ul wáhheb berühmt worden ist”, ibid, p. 343. On the early formative travels of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, difficult to arrange in a plausi- ble chronology and still the subject of controversy among critics, on their description by the Wahhabi chronicler Husain ibn Ghannam (d. 1811) and his follower Ibn Bishr, who merely note that Muhammad studied in Medina, Basra and the province of al-Ahsa⁠ʾ, while also mentioning that he gave up the idea of a further journey to Damascus, cf. Caskel (1929), p. 3; Laoust (1939), p. 508; Laoust (1965), p. 321; Peskes (1993), pp. 68, 221 nt., 228; Philby (1930), p. 8; Philby (1955), pp. 35–36. The main scholars contemporary with Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab who had some influence on him over and above his fam- ily education, or whom he at least frequented during his travels, were in all probability ʿAbd Allah ibn Ibrahim ibn Saif al-Najdi al-Madani and Muhammad Hayat al-Sindi al- Madani, whom he met at Medina, followed by Muhammad al-Majmuʿi, visited in Basra, and lastly ʿAbd Allah ibn Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Latif, active in the province of al-Ahsa⁠ʾ – although it is difficult to ascertain how far he was indebted to these masters, cited in Wahhabi sources, cf. Laoust (1939), pp. 507–508; Peskes (1993), pp. 226–30, 253–56; Rentz (2004), pp. 30–36; Voll (1975). Nor should the influence of the indigenous tradition of studies in Najd be underrated. It developed as a reaction to the decline of the Hanbali law school in the principal centres of the Ottoman Empire and was connected with a more general eighteenth-century reform movement of Islamic theology, but which was mainly concerned with questions of interpretation and application of the laws and judicial s­ entences (fiqh), cf. DeLong-Bas (2004), pp. 8–9, 20–22; Juhany (2002), pp. 128–39. Sources only external or even hostile to the Wahhabi movement, anxious to cast suspicions of heresy, suggested that Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab would have received some instruction in Aristotelian philosophy and Sufism in Persia. Above all ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿIsa al-Muways (d. 1763/64), a judge at Harma, liked to present his rival’s doctrine as a danger- ous innovation from Khorasan, and the same could be said of an anonymous biography of 1817, entitled Lamʿ al-shihāb fī sīrat Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (Glow of a Meteor in the Life of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab), with no theological hostility, but in evident disagreement with Wahhabi doctrine and drawn on Persian sources. It was perhaps intended for an English client – the manuscript was found among the papers of the widow of Capt. Robert Taylor, who had for long been active in the Persian Gulf. It says that Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab travelled from Basra to Baghdad and Kurdistan, then to

A Deistic Revolution in Arabia 15 The chronicle, inevitably brief because of the extensive ignorance of placesand dates, introduced the theme which would be of the greatest interest inEurope – the nature of the “new religion”. Niebuhr admitted that he had nevermet any of its adepts but that he had noticed an evident antagonism towardsthis faith among Sunni Muslim informers as well as an ambivalent hope amongthem either to render the new message unacceptable or to diminish its origi-nality. “A scholar of Basra” also reported with certainty that the followers of thenew preacher did indeed recognize Muhammad’s divine mission and prayedand fasted like other Muslims, merely condemning the invocation of saintsand the Prophet. Their doctrine therefore simply corresponded to “pure Sunnidoctrine” (it is not clear whether this conclusion was Niebuhr’s or his inter-locutor’s), since, without actually punishing the popular cult of the saints,higher Sunni clerics were believed at all times to advocate prayer to God alone.4It was uncertain what conclusion the “scholar” drew from this opinion. Nor didthe implications seem quite clear to Niebuhr himself. Although the wordscould be read as an apology for the return of the new sect to orthodoxy, or atany rate to normality, they might equally well denote a sense of displeasurethat the founder, ʿAbd al-Wahhab, should expect popular manifestations of thecult directed towards saints and the Prophet to be prohibited in contrast to themore tolerant custom. As if to correct this first response, however, Niebuhr immediately added theopinion of a certain anonymous “sheikh”, a camel merchant who, in his youth,had travelled in Najd and over the whole of Arabia and was apparently notaverse to the new message, although much less concerned with the rectitude Hamadhan, Isfahan, Aleppo, Damascus, Jerusalem and Cairo under different names for twenty-four years, cf. Abu Hakima (1965), p. 128 nt.; Cook (1986); Cook (1988), p. 674; Cook (1992), pp. 191–97; Margoliouth (1934), p. 1176; Vassiliev (1998), pp. 65–66. But rumours of study in Persia may have been encouraged by the fact that Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wah- hab’s writings show considerable knowledge of Shia theology and law, one of which, Risāla fī al-radd ʿalā al-rāfida (A Treaty Confuting the Rafidah), was intended to correct the errors of an extremist Shiʿi faction (the Rafidah or “Dissenters”) who refused to acknowl- edge the legitimacy of the Abu Bakr and the ʿUmar caliphates, cf. DeLong-Bas (2004), pp. 85, 87, 90, 94.4 C. Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien, cit., p. 348: “Ein Gelehrte zu Basra behauptete, daß die Anhänger des Abd ul wáhheb, noch beständig Mohámmed ihren Propheten nennen, daß sie beten und fasten wie die übrigen Mohammedaner, und daß der Unterschied zwi- schen ihnen und den Súnniten nur darinn bestehe, daß sie von den Heiligen derselben nichts wissen wollen. Hiernach sollte man glauben, daß Abd ul wáhheb nichts gelehrt habe, als die reine Lehre der Súnniten. Denn die großen Geistlichen von dieser Sekte bestrafen zwar den Pöbel nicht, wenn dieser etwa einen Heiligen anruft; aber sie billigen so wenig die Anrufung Mohámmeds, als anderer vermeinten Heiligen.”

16 Chapter 1of its doctrine. According to him, ʿAbd al-Wahhab and his followers consideredthe invocation of saints and inspired harbingers, “Muhammad, Christ, Mosesand thousands of others included by the Sunni among the prophets”, to bepure “idolatry”. They naturally showed the greatest respect to all ambassadorsof a single God as “great and worthy men”, but they did not allow them to behonoured in any religious sense – a practice from which the new leader wassaid to have recommended their complete exclusion, and indeed his own. Yet,more surprisingly, ʿAbd al-Wahhab was said to have taught that no holy bookhad been written on divine dictation or by the Angel Gabriel. The true religionshould be observed by simply “venerating and praying to God, maker and rulerof all things”.55 Ibid: “Ein gewisser Schech, der von Jugend auf in der Wüste herumgereiset war, und bey Gelegenheit, da er seine Kameele an Kaufleute vermiethete, nicht nur die vornehmsten Städte in Nedsjed, sondern fast in ganz Arabien gesehen hatte, wollte besser unterrichtet seyn. Dieser gab vor, Abd ul wáheb lehre seine Schüler Gott als den Schöpfer und Regierer aller Dinge zu verehren und anzubeten; er verbiete ihnen aber in ihrem Gebete weder des Mohámmeds, noch irgend eines andern Propheten oder Heiligen, und selbst nicht seines eigenen Namens zu gedenken, weil dieses zur Abgötterey Anlaß geben könne. Mohám- med, Christum, Mosen und viele tausend andere, die die Súnniten unter die Zahl der Propheten setzen, soll er bloß als große und würdige Leute ansehen, deren Geschichte man ohne eine Sünde zu begehen, lesen und hören könne. Er soll es aber läugnen, daß jemals durch die göttliche Eingebung, oder von dem Engel Gabriel Bücher geschrieben worden sind. Ich weiß nicht, wie viel man sich auf die Nachricht dieses Arabers verlassen kann; denn die Beduinen nennen sich zwar Mohammedaner, sie bekümmern sich aber gemeiniglich weder um Mohámmed noch um den Korân, und ich glaube deswegen fast, daß mein Schech die erwähnte Lehrsätze selbst billigte.” The controversy over the cult of the saints, their tombs and prayers for miracles, immunity, sacrifices and oaths connected with such places of popular veneration (sometimes extended to caves, rocks and plants deemed sacred), was, from Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s perspective, based on the assumption that such practices led away from monotheism, in many cases lapsing back into Paganism, jāhilīya, “era of ignorance”. Hence the precautionary order to destroy mau- soleums, domes, rich tombs, starting with the tomb destroyed by the Wahhabi leader at al-Jubaila, that of Zaid ibn al-Khattab, a brother of the caliph ʿUmar, which followed an explicit disposition said to have descended from Muhammad. Hence also the disagree- ment with less intransigent Sunni scholars, in the first place Sulaiman ibn ʿAbd al-Wah- hab, brother and adversary of Muhammad and both leader and inspirer of the tenacious resistance of the city of al-Riyad to the penetration of the new doctrine, who advocated a traditional acceptance of these rites which was later also supported by nineteenth-cen- tury anti-Wahhabi writers such as Da⁠ʿud ibn Sulaiman ibn Jirjis al-Baghdadi and the his- torian of Mecca Ahmad ibn Zaini Dahlan (1817–86), cf. Haj (2002), pp. 256–58; Laoust (1939), pp. 529–30; Nallino (1937); Peskes (1993), pp. 25–26, 45, 126, 195–96, 229; Peters (1989), p. 94; Philby (1930), pp. 4–6, 24, 71; Puin (1973), pp. 53–59; Rentz (2004), pp. 19–22,

A Deistic Revolution in Arabia 17 This may have been a distorted echo of earlier controversies about the un-created origin of the Koran. Niebuhr consequently warned that the camel sell-ing sheikh’s ideas were modelled on the vague religiosity of the Bedouin,“Muhammedan” only in name, and that his interlocutor may have attributedhis own ideas to the sect. The seed had in any case been sown and on the basisof such composite information it was easy for readers of the Beschreibung toconclude that, in the far reaches of Arabia, there existed an on-going discus-sion within the Muslim camp concerning the authentic character of Islamicmonotheism. As a result of the assertions of Niebuhr’s “sheikh”, the convictionmust have developed among Europeans that someone had appeared in themiddle of the Arabian peninsula to preach a religion independent of writtenrevelation and not dissimilar to the philosophical religion north of the Medi-terranean known as “Deism”. This hypothesis was corroborated by an analogy merely suggested byNiebuhr between the teaching of ʿAbd al-Wahhab and that of another religiousinnovator, a sheikh named Makrami from Najran, the region between Najd andYemen. Makrami was also said to have recognized the prophetic gift of Mu-hammad. He seemed, however, to have distanced himself from the beliefs ofhis Sunni and Zaydi fellow-countrymen (the latter a majority in Yemen) sincehe refused to attribute particular honour to the first four caliphs, and success-fully practised the occult – the invocation of rain and the sale of amulets, evenincluding a place in Paradise – thus collecting numerous followers whom heled in brilliant military campaigns. It was further reported that this second re-ligious leader was in alliance with ʿAbd al-Wahhab against their common ene-mies, the refractory sheikhs of al-ʿArid and their protector, the sheikh ofal-Ahsaʾ⁠ . But this was denied in Basra where it was asserted that Makrami hadbeen fortunate enough to impose taxes on the Wahhabi population. Confirma-tion of this was supplied by Niebuhr’s companion on his travels through Persia,an Arab Shiʿi from al-Ahsaʾ⁠ , the German explorer’s third main source.6 216; Vassiliev (1998), pp. 68, 71. For a different, more benevolent reconstruction, underlin- ing that juridical opinions, fatāwa, promulgated by common eighteenth-century “ulāma” in Najd actually sentenced to death anyone guilty of the illicit cult of the sepulchres, while Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab considered such a sentence excessive and pro- moted instead a re-educative missionary activity, da”wa, cf. DeLong-Bas (2004), pp. 66–69.6 C. Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien, cit., pp. 273–74: “Dieser Schech Mékkrami ist in Arabien nicht allein als ein großer Officier, sondern auch als ein großer Geistlicher berühmt. Er hat in der Religion von den Súnniten und Zéiditen ganz verschiedene Mei- nungen. Die Araber sagten, daß er ein Mittel erfunden hätte schon in dieser Welt einen guten Nutzen von dem Himmel zu ziehen; denn er verkauft das Paradies, nach ihrem Ausdruck, Ellenweis, d. i. er weiset einem jeden, nach dem er ihm bezahlt, einen großen

18 Chapter 1 oder kleinen Platz im Himmel an, und die einfältigen und abergläubigen unter den Ara- bern kaufen dergleichen Zettel, so wie andere Amuleten von ihm und von seinen Bevoll- mächtigten, in der Meinung, daß es wenigstens nicht schade einen solchen Paß zu haben, wenn er auch nichts nutzen sollte. (…) Ein Araber aus Lachsa, welchen ich in Persien antraf, meinte, daß der Schech Mékkrami, Mohámmed für einen Propheten erkenne, daß er aber die vier ersten Chalîfen nicht höher schätze als die übrigen, und andere weltliche Fürsten.” Also, ibid, p. 347: “Einer aus Láchsa, mit welchem ich in Persien reisete, wollte behaupten, daß beyde, Abd ul wáheb und Mékkrami einerley Grundsätze in der Religion haben, und dieses ist nicht unwahrscheinlich. (…) Ich glaube deswegen, daß Mékkrami sich zu dieser Zeit mit der Armee des Abd ul wáheb oder vielmehr seines Sohnes Mohám- med, vereinigt habe, wie der erwähnte Araber aus Láchsa mich versicherte. Indessen wollte man zu Basra behaupten: daß Mékkrami und die Anhänger des Abd ul wáheb keine Freunde wären, ja daß ersterer nach seiner Zurückunft aus Láchsa, mit 700 Mann eine Armee von 3000 Mann in El áred geschlagen, und die Schechs dieser Landschaft genöthigt habe, nicht nur eine große Summe Geldes baar zu bezahlen, sondern auch zu versprechen nachher jährlich einen Tribut zu geben. Vielleicht hatte Abd ul wáheb ein Bündniß mit Mékkrami, so wie die Súnniten in Nedsjed mit dem Schech von Láchsa, gemacht, und so wäre es nicht unwahrscheinlich, daß beyde, Abd ul wáheb und Mék- krami verschiedene Schechs in den Provinzen El áred und El cherdsje sich unterwürfig gemacht hätten. Diejenigen Schechs in El áred, welche sich noch zur alten Religion bekennen, sind von der Parthey des Abd ul wáheb dergestalt in die Enge getrieben, daß sie zu der Zeit, da ich zu Basra war, an alle benachbarte Araber um Hülfe geschrieben hat- ten.” That this Arab witness of Niebuhr’s was a Shiʿi who specialised in making pilgrim- ages for third parties to Mecca and Mashhad in Khorasan is mentioned later, ibid p. 366 nt. The Makramids, an Ismaili dynasty in Najran which originated in the seventeenth cen- tury, were at the height of their power during the reign of Diya⁠ʾ al-Din Ismaʿil (d. 1770), who extended his possessions as far as the Hadramaut where he imposed divine law, sharīʿa, instead of the still widespread tribal customs. His fame consequently also grew as a religious reformer. He was probably the Makrami mentioned by Niebuhr, although Wahhabi sources name his successor and brother as Hasan ibn Hibat Allah (d. 1775), who in turn led a less fortunate military campaign against the Saʿudi kingdom shortly before his death, cf. Madelung (1991), p. 191. On the first military campaign from Najran (1764), which Niebuhr must have meant; the obscure circumstances of the truce stipulated between the two contenders, with Saʿudi payment of tribute money and exchange of pris- oners; the disastrous consequences of this peace because of the almost contemporary anti-Wahhabi foray by ʿUraiʿir ibn Dujain, emir of al-Ahsaʾ⁠ , who besieged al-Dirʿiyya with cannon and mortar, but failed to recover the powerful Makrami to his cause with the promise of a hundred thousand gold pieces, cf. Abu Hakima (1965), pp. 131–32; Hartmann (1924), p. 193; Philby (1930), pp. 20–21; Philby (1955), pp. 57–58; Rentz (2004), pp. 108–11; Vassiliev (1998), pp. 84–85, 489. Although they do not name Makrami, the Wahhabi chroniclers censure veneration of the local Ismaili leader in Najran and do not hesitate to label him the “accomplice of Satan” (qarīn iblīs), cf. Puin (1973), p. 60; Rentz (2004), p. 108. The frequent attacks of the Banu Yam in Najran on Yemenis and even on the imām of

A Deistic Revolution in Arabia 19 It was not at all clear on what doctrinal basis the association of the two Arabprophets might rest. A holy man and a sorcerer also returned from Persia, andindeed from India, Makrami seemed to have brought back from those landsfruits quite different from the simple, humane teachings attributed to his col-league. In European eyes it came as no surprise that the lax dogma and a cer-tain license in matters of faith linked to the name of ʿAbd al-Wahhab couldlead to totally irrational beliefs, as the brilliant career of Count Cagliostro wassoon to illustrate. So it hardly seemed unlikely that a bizarre synergy had devel-oped between Makrami the sorcerer and ʿAbd al-Wahhab the religious preach-er, both intent on combating Muslim orthodoxy in Arabia. The encounter between ʿAbd al-Wahhab and Makrami which, according toNiebuhr, occurred in 1763–64, was the only precise chronological reference inthe account. Since the author’s stay in Yemen came to an end in June 1763,when he set sail for India, and since he had prepared his personal notes onArab customs only after the death of his more scholarly companions, the Dan-ish philologist Christian von Haven and the Swedish naturalist Peter Forsskål,both of whom had died of malaria in Yemen, we are entitled to believe that hehad gathered his information on the “new religion” while passing through Per-sia and Mesopotamia on his long homeward journey. His stay in Basra, fromAugust to September 1765, seemed particularly important. It was there that hemet at least the first of the three informers he mentions – a man described inthe Beschreibung as a scholar (ein Gelehrter). And the founder of the sect wassaid to have spent a period of his youth in Basra, where he may still have beenremembered. Travellers, merchants, messengers and refugees from Najd musthave come by with stories and requests for help while Niebuhr was still in thetown. They appeared to know that, on the death of his father, a son of ʿAbd al-Wahhab called Muhammad had become leader of the movement, had intro-duced a tax “under the name of sikka”, had forced the Sunnis still following thereligion of their forefathers to emigrate, and had imposed an almost papal au-thority over the province of al-ʿArid.7 Sanʿa, confirmed by Arabic sources, do not appear to have been included in Niebuhr’s information on Makrami, cf. Hartwig (2002), pp. 179, 182.7 C. Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien, cit., p. 349: “Nach dem Tode des Abd ul wáheb ist sein Sohn Mohámmed in des Vaters Fußstapfen getreten, und jezt gleichsam Pabst in El áred. Er wird zwar als Geistlicher angesehen, und die verschiedenen kleinen Herrschaften werden dem Namen nach, noch immer von ihren Schechs regieret. Mohámmed ibn Abd ul wáheb aber ist ihr Anführer. Er verlangt schon von alle seinen Unterthanen gewisse Schatzungen unter dem Namen einer Sikka oder Beysteur zur Unterhaltung der Armen und zur Vertheidigung seiner Religion gegen alle diejenigen, welche er für Ungläubige hält. Die Súnniten, welche so halsstarrig sind, daß sie die Religion ihrer Vorfahren nicht

20 Chapter 1 Amazement in Europe could only grow on the arrival of such news. Despitethe more generous universal principles attributed to the founder, intoleranceand despotism appeared to characterize “the new religion” no less thanthe traditional Muslim faith. It was also suggested that there was a vagueresemblance to the hierarchy in the Roman Catholic church, hardly accom-modating or liberal, at least according to the disenchanted views of the Lu-theran Niebuhr.8 The uncertainty was vastly increased by the lack of a namefor the movement and its devotees. It seemed impossible to hazard a properopinion about such a contradictory phenomenon.2 Grounds for Niebuhr’s Impressions and their Early CirculationNiebuhr’s information was largely based on reports from outside the Wahhabimovement and was inevitably affected by his heterogeneous sources. He him-self admitted that strange accounts “will [always] be produced by the followersof one Mohammedan sect, when they are asked about the principles of theothers”.9 Hence the question of how far this was also true for the “new religion”in Najd. Niebuhr’s faith in the reliability of his own account was, by and large,well placed. At the time of the author’s presence in Arabia two dangers hadappeared to threaten the nascent Wahhabi kingdom (perhaps better definedas Saʿudi). The capital al-Dirʿiyya had been unsuccessfully besieged by ʿUraiʿiribn Dujain (Ärar in Niebuhr’s transliteration), the emir of the Banu Khalid inthe al-Ahsa⁠ʾ region, while an invasion from Najran had been checked only bynegotiation and the payment of tribute money. The name Makrami, used toindicate the great leader who originated from the area, proved to be correct,although it in fact corresponded to a dynasty rather than an individual ruler. verlassen wollen, werden von ihm und seinen Anhängern dergestalt gedrückt, daß schon viele ihr Vaterland verlassen, und in fremden Ländern ihre Freiheit und Sicherheit gesucht.” It should be noted that in the Reisebeschreibung, written slightly later and con- taining a considerable section on the author’s stay in Basra, Niebuhr makes no mention of these meetings and events, cf. C. Niebuhr, Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegenden Ländern, Copenhagen, 1774–78, II, pp. 209–40: Anmerkungen zu Basra.8 This reference to the papacy sounded so strange that the translator Robert Heron chose to replace the German “gleichsam Pabst” with the circumlocution: “supreme ecclesiasti- cal character”, cf. Travels through Arabia, and other countries in the East, performed by M. Niebuhr, Edinburgh, 1792, II, p. 133.9 C. Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien, cit., p. 22. The few details given by Niebuhr con- cerning his local informers and the rarity of his contacts with the upper echelons of Arab society are treated by Hartwig (2002), pp. 166, 169, 171–72.

A Deistic Revolution in Arabia 21Later information to reach Europe about the Wahhabis provided no immedi-ate confirmation of the entire episode.10 A political and military pact betweenthe parties may have formed the basis for dubious rumours that a religiousagreement also existed. Two further elements were of equal importance, confirming the impressionthe Wahhabis liked to give of themselves as the moralizers of Arabia. In thefirst place the scanty religious observance Niebuhr attributed to the Bedouin, aconstant theme among European authors, was supposed to have had someconnection with the rapid spread of the new faith. In the second place therewas the acknowledgement that ʿAbd al-Wahhab had been able to settle the sav-age feuds which, since time immemorial, were believed to have weakened thetribal groups of Najd, condemned by discord to political insignificance.11 Therewas, if anything, a greater confusion about the identity of the mysteriouspreacher ʿAbd al-Wahhab who, in Niebuhr’s works, appeared as distinct from ason and successor named Muhammad, but who was in fact the same personand the true founder of the movement and still at the height of his power atthe time of the Danish expedition to Arabia.12 Even more surprising was the10 Not until 1823 did more information reach Europe, via a Frenchman, Mengin (infra, Chap- ter III, note 66). After that, in 1843, a French naval officer, Passama, brought news of a dynasty still extant in Najran, founded in 1762 by a “premier Makkrami” at the expense of the Yemeni imam of Sanʿa, the former owner of the territory. “Grande réputation de sainteté” and rumours of an improbable Indian origin of the founder still seemed to accompany his memory among the Bedouin Banu Yam, cf. Passama, “Notice géographique sur quelques parties de l’Yémen”, in Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, deuxième série, XIX, 1843, pp. 224, 229–30.11 In connection with the Abu Arish, Niebuhr writes about the vague religious practices of the Bedouin: “Sie nennen sich zwar Mohammedaner, wenn sie von Mohammedanern nach ihrer Religion gefragt werden. In Jemen aber redet man selten von ihnen ohne sie Ungläubige, Kafrs und Räuber zu nennen, weil sie die Reisende gern plündern, und auch eine von den Sunniten und Zéiditen ganz verschiedene Religion haben”, cf. C. Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien, cit., p. 269. The inhabitants of the province of al-Sahan are also said to know the Koran almost solely by name, ibid, p. 271.12 Uncertainty over the name and identity of the founder, whether ʿAbd al-Wahhab or Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, was destined to continue. The first option is still to be found in Burckhardt (infra, Chapter III, note 77) in spite of the more accurate information acquired in the meantime, as also in the entry for Abd-al-Wahab in Michaud’s universal dictionary, cf. Biographie Universelle, Ancienne et Moderne, Paris, 1811–57, Supplément, LVI, 1834, p. 16 (entry signed: A-t. The author Pierre Hyacinthe Audiffret includes a specific reference to Niebuhr). This uncertainty was caused both by the name “Wahhabi”, which seemed to refer back to the actual founder of the sect, and by some confusion about Arab traditions. In particular there was a legend confirmed by European writers after Niebuhr’s

22 Chapter 1complete lack in the Beschreibung of any mention of the local dynasty – that ofSaʿud – which had adopted the apparently novel cult with the utmost enthusi-asm. However, this omission, and the division of one figure into two, probablyhad the same explanation. Muhammad ibn Saʿud, lord of al-Dirʿiyya and thefirst man to lead his tribe to espouse the Wahhabi cause, died in 1765. Histhrone was then occupied by a son called ʿAbd al-ʿAziz. It may thus have ap-peared to an outsider that the dynastic succession meant that the founder ofthe sect himself, wrongly identified with the dead prince, transmitted a hypo-thetical papal office. The result was that the name Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab was believed to indicate the present heir, rather than the originalfounder of the religious movement.13 This and other imprecisions – Niebuhr seemed not to realize that the taxintroduced by the Wahhabis which he called sikka, meaning “coin”, was com-pulsory charity, the Arabic zakāt, a regular tax on all property ordained by theKoran – were naturally related to the real nature of the new religious teaching.14The difficulty lay not only in the scarcity of information, in the fact thatNiebuhr did not meet any informers who were professed Wahhabis, but alsoin the contemporary debate among Muslim scholars concerning the true time which told of a fire foreseen in a dream by a certain Sulaiman, grandfather to Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, which had been set alight by a son rather than a grand- son representing symbolically the furious advance of the new message, infra, Chapter II, notes 16, 29.13 Niebuhr’s duplication of the real founder of the Wahhabi movement with his son and successor named Muhammad was not such a bad mistake as to impair the exceptional value of this first report of the new preaching in Najd. It can be explained as a possible misunderstanding about the death of Muhammad ibn Saʿud (d. 1765), who reigned in al-Dirʿiyya and of whom there is no further mention in the Beschreibung. Niebuhr’s informers might perhaps have mistaken this for news of the death of the Wahhabi leader, in fact still living, cf. Freeth/Winstone (1978), pp. 87–89. The fact remains that the name Muhammad, belonging to the religious reformer and to the dead monarch, was taken to be the name of a son and successor of the presumed first innovator ʿAbd al-Wahhab. On the problem of Niebuhr’s silence concerning the Saʿudi dynasty, but also the intrinsic value of his information on the Wahhabis (“containing no positive errors”), cf. Hogarth (1904), p. 72. On the different roles of imām and “emir” in the Holy War (jihād) according to Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, probably influencing Niebuhr’s information on the separation of religious and political power, cf. De-Long-Bas (2004), pp. 219–20.14 The Wahhabis established alms imposed by law, the zakāt, one of the five pillars of Islam, as the basis of their system of taxation, also imposing it on the Bedouin, who regularly ignored it, cf. Fahad (2004), pp. 43–44; Laoust (1939), p. 528; Vassiliev (1998), p. 76. Muham- mad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab imputed rejection of this obligation even to the caliph Abu Bakr, although allowing late payment in certain cases, cf. DeLong-Bas (2004), pp. 49, 55–56.

A Deistic Revolution in Arabia 23character of the new doctrine held by many to be heterodox. Under discussionwas the more or less strict definition of the concept of divine unity (tawḥīd)and its foundation in scripture, and a re-examination of the relationship be-tween free interpretation (ijtihād: “independent judgement”) of the sacredtexts and faithful adherence (taqlīd) to ancient commentators. This was ac-companied by a veritable conflict over both theological authority and customs.Niebuhr must have heard enough to be aware of a widespread aversion to thesectarians and to register accusations of “heresy” and “infidelity” among theopposing parties. Nevertheless, in spite of his attempt to remain impartial, hewas ultimately guided by his own sympathies which lay with the more radicalhypothesis. This was proposed with apparent benevolence by the camel-sell-ing sheikh, but it must equally have reflected some of the main accusations ofheterodoxy advanced in Arabia by the critics and victims of that most contro-versial man, ʿAbd al-Wahhab.15 Only in this perspective could such frequentrecourse to the expression “new religion” in the Beschreibung be accounted for.15 It is interesting to note how, from his preface onwards, Niebuhr attempts to reclaim mer- chants and camel-renters from their bad reputation as unreliable informers, cf. C. Nie- buhr, Beschreibung von Arabien, cit., p. xxiv. Rumours of heresy and even repudiation of Koranic revelation by Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, contradicting the evidence in his writings and preaching, appear to go back to his first critics from his own region, in par- ticular Sulaiman ibn Muhammad ibn Suhaim, Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Rahman ibn ʿAfaliq and the aforesaid Sulaiman ibn ʿAbdal-Wahhab. Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab was said to have attributed to himself prophetic powers, nubuwwa, even greater than those of Muhammad, and personal revelation of a diabolic nature, going so far as to establish his own authority as the sixth pillar of Islam. Seen thus, the sense of Niebuhr’s recourse to the formula “new religion”, originally used by these authors in a purely polem- ical sense, may well be considered to reflect the learned opposition in Najd against the Wahhabi movement, cf. Peskes (1993), pp. 66–67, 90, 107–109, 112, 120; Schwartz (2002), pp. 71, 74, who assumes the truth of the accusation that Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab claimed infallibility; Vassiliev (1998), p. 78. Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab in fact delib- erately tended to ignore customary recourse to the juridical principle of consensus, ijmāʿ, among the learned, and to make unconventional use of the first person singular in the formulation of some of his opinions. He thus incurred accusations of innovation, bidʿa, cf. Cook (1992), pp. 200–202; De-Long-Bas (2004), pp. 53, 97–100, 229, 333. In Ibn Ghannam’s chronicle, but not in that of Ibn Bishr, there even seems to be a trace of personal obedi- ence, bayʿa, “profession of loyalty”, lasting beyond death, which the Wahhabi leader is thought to have imposed on his followers, cf. Peskes (1993), pp. 234, 260. Consequently, for the public, Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s teaching could have objectively endowed with prophetic power notwithstanding his own quite different intentions, cf. Philby (1930), pp. 54–55.

24 Chapter 1 In Europe such audacious ideas cannot have seemed very distant from theMuslim tradition. Interpreters of a freethinking, illuminist orientation – themost eloquent champion was Boulainvilliers, but they also included GeorgeSale, the English translator of the Koran – had for some time been convincedthat “Mohammedanism” was at heart a more reasonable religion than Chris­tianity, free of mystery and incomprehensible dogma. There had even beenechoes of theological rationalism in the interpretation of Islam of some impor-tant German exponents of Lutheranism.16 Consequently the attractive pos­sibility of a spontaneous evolution of the popular Muslim faith in the desirabledirection of a so-called natural religion in the native land of Islam may haveseemed a perfectly likely development. Niebuhr’s Arabia appeared to have been created for the very purpose ofbearing out this hypothesis. It was described from the philosophical stand-point typical of the eighteenth century, guarding against confessional preju-dice and propending towards the comparison of Christian and Islamicsocieties. A surprising variety of religions existed within the confines of theArabian Peninsula. Independent Jewish communities in the mountainous ar-eas of Khaibar and Hijaz (unconfirmed information which led to fruitless en-quiries by later comers), indigenous Christians in the province of al-Ahsa⁠ʾ (theso-called Christians of St. John), immigrant Hindus and Buddhists (“Banyans”)in Yemen, Oman and Basra, and more or less pagan Bedouin, all still co-existedwith the followers of Muhammad. All sorts of Muslim sects were less tolerantof each other than of other faiths. Turks and Persians seemed to be divided bya perennial war of religion. Sunnis and Shias respected Jewish and Christianplaces of worship more than their own. In Yemen the contempt shown for Sun-nis by Zaydis was similar to that shown in Europe by Christians for Jews whowere not well liked in Asia either, but were allowed to practise professions for-bidden to them elsewhere. Proselytisation hardly existed. The stake for here-tics was unknown, even if the death sentence was meted out to commonblasphemers and to non-Muslims who had sexual intercourse with Muslim16 On the eve of Niebuhr’s departure for Arabia the theologian Johann Salomo Semler had released for publication a preface to the corresponding German volume of the Universal History on Muhammad, in which he concentrated on refuting English authors’ accusa- tions of Sale, their fellow Englishman, suspected of sympathetic Deistic leanings towards Islam. The providential justification of the Prophet as the destroyer of paganism in Ara- bia, praise for his early followers, often “gewissenhafter und redlicher” than corrupt Byz- antine Christians (though the latter comparison could well be considered to extend to the condition of the principal eighteenth-century confessions), were Semler’s arguments, cf. Übersetzung der Algemeinen Welthistorie. Neunzehnter Theil. Mit einer Vorrede begleitet von Johann Salomon Semler, Halle, 1759, p. 21.

A Deistic Revolution in Arabia 25women.17 In view of such a variegated, not to say contradictory, panoramathere was nothing to prevent the supposition that, at a time when revealedreligion was under attack in Europe, where its enlightened critics sought pub-lic consensus, so also in the unexplored regions of Arabia’s interior a sect ofDeists had initiated armed hostilities against the dominant cult. Niebuhr, however, was too sober to develop the comparison to the full. Hisreaders were left in considerable doubt as to the effectively non-Muslim, oreven merely heretical, character of the new sect.18 It was another scholar whoavailed himself of Niebuhr’s prestige in order to advance further along thesame trail. In 1779 the learned orientalist Joseph de Guignes edited a Paris edi-tion of the Beschreibung, in the preface to which he noted the important dis-covery of a “new sect, or rather a new religion, in the province of Elred”.19A purely Deistic interpretation of the original information was effectivelypropagated in a French compendium of Niebuhr’s writings which appeared inSwitzerland during the same period, based on a German abridgement of them(perhaps by the Swiss naturalist Jacob Samuel Wyttenbach) and rivalling morecomplete and faithful translations.20 In a chapter intended to illustrate the17 C. Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien, cit., pp. 18–25, 40–47. The author was also impressed by the fact that anti-Christian hatred common among Turks seemed less vehement among Persians and Arabs (at least in Yemen and Oman) who were more courteous to foreigners than to their Ottoman co-religionists. Their hospitality to Europeans was usu- ally no less than that which a civilised European would offer in his own country to an Arab visitor, ibid, pp. 40–41. As to the proliferation of Islamic sects, Niebuhr refers back to one of Muhammad’s sentences, which his interlocutors seemed to identify as a prophecy already fulfilled even if they were unable to enumerate the over seventy schisms announced by the Prophet, ibid, p. 19.18 Niebuhr makes no further mention of the subject, even in his article: Von den verschie­ denen Nazionen und Religionspartheien in dem türkischen Reiche, where we merely find: “Von den Beiasi [i.e. Ibadi] oder Chawaredsji [i.e. Kharijites], von den Zeiditen, von den Messalîch, Mekkrami, Dsjedsjâl und Schähareâri habe ich in dem otmannischen Reiche nichts gehört [but only in Arabia and Persia]”, cf. Id., “Von den verschiedenen Nazionen und Religionspartheien in dem türkischen Reiche”, in Deutsches Museum, IX, 2, 1784, pp. 4–5.19 Description de l’Arabie. Par M. Niebuhr. Nouvelle Édition, Paris, 1779, I, p. 54 (a revision of a first, mediocre French translation, which appeared in Copenhagen in 1773, edited by Frédéric Moïse Mourier).20 Voyage de M. Niebuhr en Arabie et en d’autres pays de l’Orient, en Suisse, 1780 (in the sub- title: Avec l’extrait de sa description de l’Arabie et des observations de Mr. Forskal). In the preface the translator says that he intends to “séparer dans un abrégé” (not only the Be­­ schreibung von Arabien but also his subsequent Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien) that which “ils contiennent de connoissances généralement utiles & agréables”; but his work

26 Chapter 1new religion more amply Niebuhr’s somewhat cautious account of the scholarfrom Basra was cut in favour of the far bolder description given by the camelmerchant. The “great change”, a mere hypothesis in Niebuhr, was thus trans-formed into a “revolution” already underway. The “new prophet” ʿAbd al-Wah-hab, the promoter of a “reform of Mohammedanism” intended to revive its“original simplicity”, was seen as preaching such a total repudiation of externalmanifestations of the Muslim faith as to threaten the very credibility of revela-tion in the Koran not only in the eyes of the uneducated, but also in those oflearned Sunnis. The latter were here accused of being the actual artificers ofpopular ignorance rather than of just being its all too moderate critics (as inNiebuhr’s original text). The alliance with Makrami, who also repudiated thetraditional cult, was presented as the symptom of a profound crisis. Appar-ently lacking any connection with the noble “spirit of reform” in Najd, Makra-mi’s “quackery” was clarified in the light of the entire period, during which asmuch attention was paid to the magic of prayer, even among Christians, as tothe intelligibility of dogma.21 So in Arabia, as in Europe, rationalism was sup- seems to depend on a contemporary rewritten German version of Niebuhr’s volumes, which appeared in Bern without the author’s name and ambiguously entitled Reise und Beobachtungen durch Egypten und Arabien aus den grossen Werken verschiedener gele- hrten Reisenden, Bern-Winterthur, 1779–81 (with a preface to the second volume, absent in the corresponding French, clearing the editor of the accusation of “sorgenlos und unüber- legt” altering or mutilating what Niebuhr had originally dictated). Although it was issued a year later with a more suitable title (Neue Sekte eines Theils von Nedsjed, ibid, II, pp. 143– 48), the report on Abd Ul Uahheb (sic) forms in fact the basic working script for the cor- responding French translation (De la nouvelle religion d’une partie du Nedsjed, cf. Voyage de M. Niebuhr en Arabie, cit., II, pp. 140–46), excepting some occasional important modi- fications by the translator himself, who must have consulted the original Beschreibung in person and intended to make a more dramatic impression by using the terms “nouvelle religion”, “prophète”, “apôtre”, “novateur”, which, in his text, give the idea of an even more radical break with the established religious system. In the Reise und Beobachtungen we only find “neue Sekte”, “neue Lehre”, while the term “Pabst” hazarded by Niebuhr himself is replaced by Wyttenbach with the Arabic term mufti. Translations and re-elaborations of Niebuhr’s writings are not as yet a subject of specific study. Voyage de M. Niebuhr en Ara- bie is attributed without further justification to Mourier by Ehrencron-Müller (1927), p. 448; Ehrencron-Müller (1929), p. 79, probably because in 1773 he was responsible for the first translation of Niebuhr’s Beschreibung. The corresponding German version (Wytten- bach is cited in some library catalogues, including that of the Universitätsbibliothek Bern) is not registered in Ehrencron-Müller (1929).21 Voyage de M. Niebuhr en Arabie, cit., II, pp. 144–46: “Ce récit du schech ne s’accorde pas entiérem­ ent avec ceux que m’ont fait quelques sunnites, des dogmes d’Abd ul Wahheb. Mais on ne peut pas croire, sur cet article, les disciples d’une secte superstitieuse, dont toutes les fausses opinions sont combattues par la nouvelle religion. La religion

A Deistic Revolution in Arabia 27ported by new forms of credulity when it came to the eradication of old super-stitions. While Niebuhr had preferred to adhere strictly to the accounts given by hisArab informers, the controversy about the cult of the saints and the authorisedinterpretations of the Koran were more evident in the Swiss compendium. Theexistence of a deep split between the new religious reformer and the MuslimSunnis as such, partly confirmed in Niebuhr’s original text, was now taken tobe an established fact. Thanks to the contempt of the Sunnis, an “obstinate andsuperstitious sect”, however, it also acquired the appearance of an Illuministcontest between reason and prejudice, the outcome of which was only uncer-tain because of the obtuseness of the masses and the vested interests of thetheologians. The appearance of such a brilliant compendium of the Be­schreibung in French was bound to have an influence on the reception of thefull version of the original, in some cases even making it dispensable. Heron’saforesaid English translation was not based on Niebuhr’s works as published inCopenhagen, but on this Swiss abridged version.22 It confirmed the suspicion musulmane, telle que la professent les sunnites, a été surement bien altérée depuis le tems de Mahomet. Cette secte adopte l’autorité de quelques commentateurs, qui expli- quent l’alcoran suivant leur caprice, & qui érigent en dogmes leurs opinions particulieres. Elle reconnoit une foule des saints, qu’elle invoque dans ses nécessités, & auxquels elle attribue une infinité de miracles absurdes, opérés en faveur de ceux qui se sont adressés à ces saints, préférablement à Dieu. Elle croit aux amulettes & à l’efficacité de tous les vœux insensés. Enfin elle s’est livrée successivement à un grand nombre de superstitions condamnés par l’alcoran, mais légitimées par les explications des docteurs. (…) On peut donc envisager la nouvelle religion d’Abd ul Wahheb comme une véritable réforme du mahométisme, qu’il veut ramener à sa premiere simplicité. Il est allé plus loin peut-être que d’autres réformateurs: mais un Arabe n’est pas obligé de connoître les ménagemens. Il faut voir par l’expérience, si une religion si détachée de tout ce qui frappe les sens, pourra se soutenir chez un peuple ignorant, comme sont les Arabes. La charlatanerie du schech Mecrami ne contredit pas cet esprit de réforme. Ce schech profite de la grossiéreté de ses compatriotes, par l’opinion fanatique de l’efficacité de ses prieres, par lesquelles il prétend obtenir de Dieu meme tout ce qu’il lui demande. Ce fanatisme d’attribuer trop de pouvoir aux prieres, se combine avec la simplicité du dogme: nous avons sous nos yeux des exemples, qu’il embrâse de têtes trop combustibles, dans un siecle des lumieres, & au milieu de la religion la plus épurée.”22 In the preface the translator is deliberately vague about the all but complete correspond- ence with the Swiss epitome (with the curious discordance of the aforesaid modified translation of the French pape: supra note 8); there is no more than a passing reference to the abbreviation of the full account of Niebuhr’s travels and observations, cf. Travels through Arabia performed by M. Niebuhr, cit., I, p. xii. It is to this English compendium that Barthold Georg Niebuhr refers in his biography of his father, where he recalls having seen the volumes in the libraries of numerous great country houses during his stay in

28 Chapter 1that something serious was afoot, hidden from indiscreet eyes, affecting thereligion and politics of the Arabian Peninsula. The Muslim faith, or rather whatwent by the name of “Muhammedanism” in Europe, seemed to be challengedby an ambiguous new religious upheaval.3 Volney: A Great Political and Religious Revolution in AsiaIn spite of widespread interest in the Danish expedition to Arabia, the earlyreception of Niebuhr’s works was neither smooth nor extensive. This was duepartly to the altered circumstances since his departure – the deaths of FredericV of Denmark and of Count Bernstorff, the former Danish prime minister –and partly to the dry style which had little appeal for the current taste in narra-tive. The theologian Johann David Michaelis at Göttingen, who originallyinspired the undertaking, reviewed Niebuhr’s works amply and meticulously,but without a word about the “new religion”.23 In 1775 François Turpin, an un-original biographer of Muhammad, was still able to dispense with all the morerecent information on the Prophet’s country, limiting his account to the con-ventional praise of the “scholars who had penetrated the regions of Arabia”,bearers of new fuel for the “torch of criticism”.24 Even the Vicomte de Pages,who travelled round the world and was informed in Basra of the “irreconcilablehatred felt for Muhammedans” by an Arab leader in the interior, the worship-per of a pure divinity “without cult or mystery”, took the liberty of informinghis readers of this as if nothing were already known from Niebuhr, the authorof a far richer account already of ten years’ standing.25 Great Britain, cf. “Carsten Niebuhrs Leben”, in B.G. Niebuhr, Kleine historische und philolo- gische Schriften, Bonn, 1828, p. 66.23 Reviews appeared at several intervals between 1773 and 1775 and in 1778 in the Orien- talische und Exegetische Bibliothek edited by Michaelis. There is a similar omission in the reviews which appeared in the homonymous journal edited by Johann Friedrich Hirt in 1773 and 1775. On the relations between Niebuhr and Michaelis, strained towards the end, when Michaelis refused Niebuhr’s request to revise his own manuscript, cf. Hartwig (2002), pp. 159–61; Hübner (2002); Klaver (2009), pp. 64, 69–70; Marchand (2009), p. 40.24 F. Turpin, Histoire de l’Alcoran, Londres, 1775, I, p. xxxv. Basing his opinion on Sale, whom he fails to mention, Turpin asserts that the Hanbali Muslim school of law, “autrefois nom- breuse & aujourd’hui presqu’éteinte”, perhaps is barely surviving “dans quelques contrées obscures de l’Arabie” referred to in his work, ibid, II, pp. 338, 340. He could have learnt from Niebuhr that this tradition was prevalent and flourishing among the Najd Sunnis, cf. C. Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien, cit., p. 345.25 P.-M.F. de Pages, Voyages autour du monde, et vers les deux poles, Paris, 1782, I, p. 294: “L’on m’a dit qu’il y a dans les déserts voisins de cette Ville [i.e. Basra], un Cheikr ou Chef Arabe qui a une haine irréconciliable pour les Mahométans, et qui n’adore qu’un seul Dieu, sans

A Deistic Revolution in Arabia 29 A person who did take advantage of the Beschreibung, who drew on thecomplete French translation, and who cast a particularly penetrating eye overrecent events in Najd, was Edward Gibbon. He had been interested in the Is-lamic East ever since his youth and was anxious for information about localreligious life to include in the philosophically orientated chapters on the Arabworld and its relations with Christianity in his History of the Decline and Fall ofthe Roman Empire (1776–88). According to Gibbon the Koranic faith enjoyedan admirable stability due to a healthily strict opposition to any indulgence ofthe senses and the imagination, and was in clear contrast with the numerousvariations undergone by the religion of Christ (“If the Christian apostles, St.Peter or St. Paul, could return to the Vatican, they might possibly enquire thename of the Deity who is worshipped with such mysterious rites in that mag-nificent temple”). But Islam seemed to be in the throes of an unusual experi-ence. The very territory of al-Yamama, which had once been the scene of theprophetic, military and amorous exploits of Muhammad’s most insidious rival,the impostor Musailima, now appeared, according to Niebuhr, to be “occupiedby the visions and arms of a modern prophet” who was practically unknown.26 Gibbon merely touched on the subject in a note. Nevertheless, two curiousdifferences emerged with respect to Niebuhr. First, there was nothing in aucun culte ni mystere; tous les autres Habitans de ces contrées, sur-tout des bords du désert, sont bons Mahométans et très-religieux; mais l’on dit que dans le centre du désert il y a des Tribus fort ignorantes, semi-Juives et semi-Chrétiennes, ou plutôt sans un culte bien décidé.” Pages, who died in 1793, massacred in Santo Domingo during a revolt of the slaves, had stayed in Basra for a few days in 1770 (almost five years after Niebuhr), and then left for Aleppo by caravan.26 Gibbon, who paid especial attention to the worldly reputation of the “favourites of Heaven”, describes Musailima as involved in long “mystic and amorous converse” with a passionate priestess – their obscene dialogue is veiled in Johann Jacob Reiske’s Latin ren- dering of Abu l-Fida – and notes that in the province of al-Yamama, the scene of these events, “in the present century, the same ground is occupied by the visions and arms of a modern prophet whose tenets are imperfectly known.” cf. E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, London, 1776–88, V, p. 277 nt. For a comparison of Christianity with Islam, see ibid, pp. 272–73. Niebuhr, clearly mentioned by Gibbon, knew that the descendants of the tribe to which the prophetess belonged (a branch of the Banu Tamim) still lived in Najd, cf. C. Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien, cit., p. 399. Gibbon’s attribution of immutability to the religion of Muhammad, lacking dogma, clergy and schisms, is noted by Giarrizzo (1954), pp. 502–503; Lewis (1993), p. 96. On the potentially deformed perspective caused by such an interpretation of Islam, as it is found in many authors (Stubbe, Toland, Boulainvilliers, Voltaire etc.), and on Gibbon’s comparatively more complex opinion on Muhammad, cf. Lewis (1993); Womersley (2002), p. 169. Gib- bon’s interest in Niebuhr’s information on a “new religion” in Arabia is noted by Hogarth (1904), p. 47; Rentz (2004), pp. 4–5.

30 Chapter 1Niebuhr about ʿAbd al-Wahhab having prophetic visions. This, if anything, wasa standard theme in Christian polemics against Muhammad. But, based ontheir common geographic origin, there was a more original and perceptive sug-gestion in an analogy with Musailima, the Muslim prototype of the religiousliar. The intuition was remarkable because Gibbon involuntarily introduced asubject typical of the theological polemic in the Muslim camp against theWahhabis, criticized for believing in a self-styled divine envoy. There was anattempt by Sunni scholars to discredit Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab by adishonourable comparison with Musailima, resting on a statement attributedto Muhammad denouncing Najd (in particular the province of al-ʿArid) as theland elect of the Devil, religious ignorance and false prophecy. In spite of theuncertainty as to what the new faith actually involved, Gibbon’s words showedthat the events described by Niebuhr had at least one sensational precedent inthe history of Islam, and he unhesitatingly included ʿAbd al-Wahhab, a veryrecent armed prophet, among the interminable throng of messengers from theheavens generated by otherwise sterile deserts.27 It was, however, Constantin François de Volney (1757–1820), an illustriousreader of Niebuhr, who, at the same time as Gibbon and to a far greater degree,established a new approach by redirecting traditional deistic sympathies forIslam to Wahhabi teachings. While the author of The Decline and Fall of the Ro-man Empire was working on the final volumes of his masterpiece in the tran-quillity of Lausanne, the French philosopher was returning from Egypt andSyria, where vivid personal experiences had warned him against any benevo-lent approach to the religion of Muhammad. Volney tended to paint an ide-alised picture of the serene spiritual and material independence of theBedouin he had met – a not particularly original variation on the theme ofman in the state of nature. Nonetheless, this judicious author of the Voyage en27 Gibbon’s perspicacity was recognised almost thirty years later by a fellow Englishman, James Morier, secretary to the envoy in Persia: “Gibbon first noticed the singular co-inci- dence, that they [scil.: the Wahhabis] sprung from the same province, Nedsjed, in which Moseilama the great contemporary of Mohamed, had propagated his faith”, cf. J. Morier, A Journey through P­ ersia, Armenia, and Asia Minor, to Constantinople, London, 1812, p. 372 nt. On the polemical comparison of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab and Musailima by early anti-Wahhabi controversialists, a far from uncommon subject in Muslim theological debate; on the related picture of Najd as the land of the origin of the Devil; and on the later deliberate rehabilitation of these places by the pro-Wahhabi historian, Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi (1857–1924), cf. Peskes (1993), pp. 113–14, 154; Schwartz (2002), p. 73. On the same subject, but also the common membership of the Banu Tamim tribe of both the Wahhabi leader and the ancient prophetess Sajah (Musailima’s companion), cf. Rentz (2004), p. 25.

A Deistic Revolution in Arabia 31Syrie et en Égypte (1787) passed as severe a sentence on Islam as he had onChristian revelation, discredited in his eyes ever since his youth when he hadfrequented the circle of the Baron d’Holbach.28 Still more important was theevidence that Islam, no less than Christianity, showed traces of the decadenceof centuries, the ever more frequent symptoms of an imminent demise. Firstthere was the very recent sacrilegious massacre of the Syrian caravan, attackedby marauders on its return journey from the Holy Places (1757, “twenty thou-sand pilgrims dead of thirst and hunger, or killed by Arabs, numerous womentaken into slavery, the baggage lost”). Then came the ghastly sack of Mecca in1769 by the soldiers of the ephemeral Egyptian despot ʿAli Bey described in achapter dedicated to his reign. This appalling profanation seemed almost toreplicate the early religious rebellion of the Fatimid caliph of Egypt al-Hakimstill venerated by the Druzes whom Volney respected after meeting them inLebanon.29 Such manifest disaffection with the established religion corroborated re-peatedly voiced popular fears of Russian expansion detrimental to the Otto-mans: “The power and religion of the Muslims will soon be destroyed, theYellow King will come to establish a new empire”. This seemed to justify the28 Intrusive in daily affairs, with little positive moral influence, fatalistic, superstitious, sub- servient to despotism – thus did the Muslim religion appear to Volney, cf. Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte. Par M. C-F. Volney, Paris, 1787, II, pp. 371, 420–21, 450. His judgement of the Koran (known in the Savary version of 1780) was particularly severe: a volume reverberat- ing with invective against the “impies”, “incrédules”, “ennemis de Dieu et du Prophète”, “rebelles à Dieu et au Prophète”, dedicating oneself to the study thereof would mean to “passer la vie entière à beaucoup apprendre et à ne rien savoir”, ibid, I, pp. 90–91; II, pp. 361–65, 408–409. For Volney’s biography and, in greater detail, the difficult circum- stances of his journey – the Foreign Minister Vergennes probably desired an unfavourable eye-witness account in an attempt to discourage ambitious schemes for a French con- quest in Egypt circulating at the court of Louis XVI – but also for the scarce information on the Bedouin in his work, limited to a single camp near Gaza, cf. Gaulmier (1951), pp. 56–62, 75–76, 94. His departure from any interpretation of Islam as Deism, his con- demnation of Koranic fanaticism, imposture and theocracy (evils traditionally denounced in the Muslim faith), and his rejection of the religion of Muhammad and all other sacred revelations as obscurantist must be connected with a growing awareness among expo- nents of the Enlightenment of the strength and combative spirit of their own movement, cf. Laurens (1987), pp. 72–73, 83–94.29 C.F. Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte, cit., I, pp. 48, 111, 128; II, pp. 34–35, 95, 237–38, 315. The two episodes already exist in Niebuhr, even though the attack on the pilgrims is here put a year later and explained as a reprisal for the killing by the pasha of Damascus of two sheikhs from the Banu Harb, cf. C. Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien, cit., pp. 368–69, 382–83.

32 Chapter 1hope that more natural alternatives and purer religious ideas might also havespread across the Near East, free of both an omnipotent, bigoted, self-interest-ed clergy and of the ancient authority of written revelation. Volney was pleasedto hear of the Kurds, Muslim only in name, who were concerned with neitherdogma nor ritual, of the Druzes, uninterested in sacred scriptures or the after-life, and even of the Nusayris (“Ansarié” in the Voyage) suspected of a scandal-ous form of paganism.30 He was all the readier to see in Bedouin simplicity thesigns of a rebirth of natural religion. The Koran referred to these nomads asrebels and infidels, but the way they conducted their lives did not seem to havechanged greatly since the time of Muhammad. Witnesses of the recent arrivalof a group of Bedouin horsemen at Acre had seen in these desert nomads, whohad absolutely no religious instruction, a close resemblance to the indigenouspopulations of North America.31 Hence Volney’s desire for closer acquaintancewith those “savages” and the satisfaction of discovering that they conformed tophilosophical canons. They were humane and tolerant, their life and customssimple, like those of French mountain dwellers. They were chaste and capableof real love for their women. Unlike the Turks and the Arabs, the Bedouin be-lieved that the scarcity of resources conditioning their lives made it impossiblefor them to respect Muslim precepts which were meant for others. One of their sheikhs in the Gaza area was sufficiently unfamiliar with reli-gious differences as to invite the miscreant Volney to join his tribe for ever. Hedeclared that he entrusted his own actions to his conscience alone, left reli-gious matters to God, and trusted in the mercy of the universal divinity.32 In30 For the Kurds, cf. C.F. Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte, cit., I, p. 342; for the Druzes, ibid, II, pp. 54–57, 76; for the Nusayri, ibid, pp. 5–6. Of the latter it was said that they wor- shipped the female genitals. In contrast with Niebuhr, however, who was reluctant to believe such an aberration, Volney preferred not to shock (“l’esprit humain est capable des écarts les plus extravagans”), although he claimed that only one branch of the sect observed “un culte particulier à l’organe qui, dans les femmes, correspond à Priape”. Cf. C. Niebuhr, Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien, cit., II, p. 444. For something analogous in Burckhardt, cf. Travels in Syria and the Holy Land; by the late John Lewis Burckhardt, Lon- don, 1822, p. 152.31 C.F. Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte, cit., I, pp. 357–58: “On leur parla des mosquées, de prières, d’ablutions; et ils demandèrent ce que cela signifiait, ce que c’était que Moyse, Jésus-Christ et Mahomet.”32 When Volney, surprised by the proposal, asked: “Comment les Arabes verront-ils un infi- dèle, ou que penseront-ils d’un apostat?” the sheikh is said to have answered: “Et toi- même ne vois tu pas que les Arabes vivent sans soucis du Prophète & du Livre? Chacun parmi nous suit la route de sa conscience. Les actions sont devant les hommes; mais la religion est devant Dieu.” And another interlocutor: “Dieu est juste; il pesera dans ses balances”, ibid, pp. 380–81.

A Deistic Revolution in Arabia 33the light of such teachings it was hardly surprising that “analogous principles”should have recently been included in a widely shared “new religion”. This in-formation taken from Niebuhr was included in a note in support of such apromising hypothesis and to document the beginning of an “insurrection” inNajd, inspired by this rule of “general tolerance” and supported by the “reason-ing” of two Arabs who had been struck during their travels by the variety ofcults in Persia and Malabar. To Volney it therefore seemed right to suggest thefacility, not to say the imminence, with which an outbreak of a “great politicaland religious revolution could come about in Asia”.33 Historic irony, often inclined to play tricks on philosophers’ forecasts, de-creed that the revolution evoked in the Voyage in connection with the MuslimEast should soon break out in France with Volney, back from Gaza, taking anactive part in it. As we know, the designs on Egypt and Syria of Napoleon, whohad read the work and met the author for the first time in Corsica in 1793, wereprobably directly influenced by Volney. Yet Volney’s reinterpretation of Niebuhrconditioned by the philosophy of the moment was also destined to bear fruit.Thanks to their travels in distant lands Volney transformed ʿAbd al-Wahhaband Makrami into merchants and then freethinkers rather than presentingthem as prophets who lacked any merit in the detached view of an atheist. In33 Ibid, pp. 381–82 nt.: “M. Niebuhr rapporte dans sa Description de l’Arabie, tome II, page 208, édition de Paris [the aforesaid complete French version revised by Guignes], que depuis trente ans il s’est élevé dans le Najd une nouvelle Religion, dont les principes sont analogues aux dispositions d’esprit dont je parle. “Ces principes sont, dit ce Voyageur, que Dieu seul doit être invoqué & adoré comme auteur de tout; qu’on ne doit faire mention d’aucune Prophète en priant, parce que cela touche à l’idolatrie; que Moyse, Jésus-Christ, Mahomet, &tc. sont à la vérité de grands-hommes, dont les actions sont édifiantes; mais que nul livre n’a été inspiré par l’Ange Gabriel, ou par tout autre esprit céleste. Enfin, que les vœux faits en un péril menaçant ne sont d’aucune mérite ni d’aucune obligation. Je ne sais – ajoute M. Niebuhr – , jusqu’où l’on peut compter sur le rapport du Bedouin qui m’a raconté ces choses. Peut-être était-ce sa façon même de penser, car les Bedouins se disent bien Mahométans, mais il se n’embarassent ordinairement ni de Mohammed ni du Coran”. Cette insurrection a eu pour auteurs deux Arabes, qui après avoir voyagé pour affaire de commerce, dans la Perse & le Malabar, ont formé des raisonnemens sur la diver- sité des Religions qu’ils ont vues, & en ont déduit cette tolérance générale. L’un d’eux, nommé Abd-el-Ouaheb, s’était formé dans le Najd un état indépendant dès 1760: le second, appelé Mekrâmi, Chaik de Nadjerân, avoit adopté les mêmes opinions; & par sa valeur il s’était élevé à une assez grande puissance dans ces contrées. Ces deux exemples me rendent encore plus probable une conjecture que j’avais déjà formée, que rien n’est plus facile que d’opérer une grande révolution politique & religieuse dans l’Asie.” These semi-legendary mercantile journeys to Persia and India in Volney recur to this day in Bas- cio (2007), p. 78; Schwartz (2002), pp. 66–67.

34 Chapter 1much the same spirit Gibbon remarked ironically that the Deist Boulainvil-liers, in his biography, had already made Muhammad travel farther than theadventurous Telemachus in Fénelon’s homonymous work. The religion of thetwo wandering Arabs appeared in the Voyage not to be Islamic, but rather anelementary, rational faith, with neither “priests, nor temples, nor any regularcult”, grafted onto a Bedouin existence. This Deistic bias, a mere hypothesis inNiebuhr even if it was one of his favourite conjectures, had become an almosttotal certainty for Volney. The “great change” forecast by the author of the Be­schreibung took on the still more fascinating, almost terrifying, semblance of a“great revolution”, judged probable on the basis of unequivocal symptoms andin store for Asia possibly even in the near future. The religious authority presumed absolute and irreversible not only of theKoran, but of any revelation in written form had been dealt a considerableblow. Morality and religion, if not at irrevocable variance, were by now at leastseparate entities. The information derived from Niebuhr did not appear inother works by Volney, although these contained condemnations of the Koranand Christian and Muslim claims to universality (in the Ruines and Leçons surl’histoire), but it was repeated word for word in a new edition of the Voyage(1799). The author never truly retracted, but merely had implicit secondthoughts in 1814 when the knowledge and scale of the phenomenon had in-creased considerably. The Wahhabis, now commonly denominated as such, nolonger seemed to fit the forecast of an imminent liberation of the Muslim Eastfrom the yoke of religious revelation. For Volney they lent themselves tocomparis­ on with the pugnacious Israelites during the period of the Judges,who were equally “ferocious and superstitious”.34 Meanwhile an interpretative canon had been established based on the cor-related notions of “Deism” (only the word is missing in the Voyage) and “revo-lution”. It was easy to reread Niebuhr from the perspective of Voltaire’s Essaisur les moeurs, with the “new religion” in Najd shown in its subversive potentialas equivalent to the original inspiration of Muhammad. However, the fabrica-tions and lies to which the Prophet constantly resorted in order to convincehimself and others of his mission and to reinforce his own power had become34 [C.F. Volney], Recherches Nouvelles sur l’Histoire Ancienne. Première partie, Examen de l’his­toire des Juifs jusqu’a la captivité de Babylone, Paris, 1814, p. 34: “Tout l’espace de tems appelé période des Juges, se passe dans une anarchie orageuse, violente, pendant laquelle les Hébreux féroces et superstitieux comme des Ouahabis, ne cessèrent d’être agités de guerres civiles ou étrangères; il faut considérer que ce petit peuple divisé en tribus indé- pendantes et jalouses, subdivisées en familles aussi indépendantes, était une démocratie turbulente de paysans armés, mus plutôt que gouvernés par des Bramines avides et par des inspirés fanatiques.”

A Deistic Revolution in Arabia 35unnecessary. The simple, natural religion could now be propagated by rationalpersuasion. In France more than anywhere else this idea was to survive forsome time to come, albeit with an increasing number of modifications ren-dered necessary by the growth of experience.4 Olivier: Wandering Wahhabis and Persian PilgrimsThe success of the Voyage was enormous. Numerous translations followed andindeed, from 1798 on, success was assured by the French troops back from theNile who were greatly impressed by the close correspondence between narra-tive and reality. Even twenty years later the chapter on the Bedouin, though notthe most original, was influential in the representation of the nomads in thefamous Description de l’Egypte, a colossal epitome of the discoveries made dur-ing the Egyptian Campaign.35 Though doubts were fairly soon expressed con-cerning the actual presence of the traveller in some of the places described,such as the much praised ruins of Baalbek and Palmyra, this cast no discrediton the author. The Muslim East as represented by Volney was free of the faciledistortions of a Christian perspective, nor was it embellished or transfigured tosuit a taste for the exotic. This time an early reviewer, Michaelis, showed aninterest in the “simple, natural religion” of Najd, albeit not without noting theweak points in Volney’s description. Niebuhr, he pointed out, had expressedhimself with greater caution and in no way could Muslim ritual duties (ablu-tion, fasting, alms-giving) be seen as being in contrast with Bedouin life.3635 Here the proverbial hospitality, generosity and religious moderation of the inhabitants of the desert are praised: “Ils n’ont ni haine ni mépris pour les autres religions; (…) ils ne sont guère Mahométans que de nom, et les autres peuples attachés à ce culte les regardent presque comme des infidèles”, cf. Du Bois-Aymé, “Mémoire sur les tribus arabes des déserts de l’Égypte”, in Description de l’Égypte, Paris, 1809–28, État moderne, I, 1809, pp. 586–87, 589–90. A partial exception is made for the Egyptian Bedouin who had been spoiled by contact with the sedentary populations and with the Mamluks and had lost their notoriously good qualities some time earlier, becoming avid and disloyal, cf. E. Jomard, “Observations sur les Arabes de l’Égypte moyenne”, ibid, pp. 569–70, 574–75.36 J.D. Michaelis, “Voyage de Volney, P. I”, in Neue Orientalische und Exegetische Bibliothek, IV, 1787, p. 167: “Wäre ich Muhammedanischer Theologe, so wüßte ich wol darauf zu ant- worten: sie sollen sich mit Sand, Staub, oder Erde waschen, u.s.f. aber das ist meine Pflicht nicht, sondern die, zu erzählen.” On the success of Volney’s Voyage, confirmed by both military and civilian members of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign and more in general by European travellers from every nation (“Tous ceux qui en firent partie ont reconnu que l’auteur avait constamment dit la vérité” – Stanislas Girardin noted in his diary), cf. Gaul- mier (1951), pp. 117–18, 478.

36 Chapter 1 The Voyage, however, contained no concrete new information, while thefate of the sect remained an open question. Only when complete control overNajd had been achieved and the sect’s ambitions had spread in every direction,leading to conflicts with the sharif of Mecca, the sultans of Muscat and Sanʿa,the pashas of Baghdad and Damascus and, on an even wider scale, with theOttoman Empire, Persia and the East India Company, would curiosity aboutthe followers of the “new religion” extend beyond the readers of Niebuhr. Theimminent revolution in Asia forecast by Volney must indeed have appeared tobe on the point of breaking out. The dramatic events of 1789 in France and re-newed Anglo-French world competition provided the premises for the devel-opment of a more intense interest. And yet the information available in theprincipal Near Eastern centres frequented by Europeans, namely Istanbul, Cai-ro, Aleppo, Damascus and Baghdad, mirrored local political and religious con-cerns not easy for foreign observers to fathom. For them the Arabian Peninsulaproper was destined to remain almost impenetrable until the time of Muham-mad ʿAli’s invasion. By an unfortunate chance, the observations of the only twoEuropean visitors to the Hijaz during the Wahhabi occupation, the Catalan Do-mingo Badía y Leblich (1766–1819) and the German Ulrich Jasper Seetzen(1769–1811), were not published until after the Restoration and were in partlost. It was consequently only many years later that European opinion could bemodified in the light of first-hand knowledge of the people and the events. Inthe meantime confused information about the growth of the sect at times cor-roborated, and at others weakened, Niebuhr’s conjecture amplified by Volney. One of the first men to receive new information was a chance witness, thenaturalist Guillaume Antoine Olivier (1756–1814). In 1796, during an excursionfrom Baghdad to the ruins of Babylon, Olivier heard of a formidable “Arabtribe”, one-hundred-thousand horsemen strong, whose dominion extended atthe time more than a hundred leagues over the territories south-west of Basra.He referred to these men as “Wahhabis” (Ouhabis), an unusual term just then,but did not say whether he had heard it from his Arabic informants, chancecompanions on his journey to al-Hilla, or had derived it later from anothersource. This hospitable, frugal, nomadic people considered pilgrimages, fast-ing, alms-giving, ablutions, in a word the “precepts of the Koran”, with the ex-ceptions of circumcision and polygamy, to be worthless exercises. Thoughrespectful of Muhammad for his saintly customs, but not his propheticmission, the Wahhabis prayed only to the one supreme Being. To Olivier it thusseemed right to consider such devotees “true Deists” or, in other words, simplebelievers in one “God, always just, always good, always ready to forgive trans-gressions of imperfection and weakness committed in this world”.

A Deistic Revolution in Arabia 37 This flattering portrait adhered faithfully to Volney’s model (generally ad-opted by Olivier). It was, however, apparently contradicted by further evidenceincompatible with the mildness expected of the followers of such a benignGod. “An ardent and exalted spirit”, the founder of the movement, Abd al-Wah-hab, was depicted as a religious imposter, greedy for power, “inspired”, very dif-ferent from Volney’s portrait of an unprejudiced merchant and traveller. Hisfollowers, in their turn, seemed inclined to be ferociously intolerant. “Always atwar with the Sharif”, they harassed pilgrims bound for Mecca, particularly Per-sians, so that those who fell into their clutches preferred to keep silent abouttheir own religion or pretend to subscribe to the new doctrine. Whoever madea “solemn profession of the Muhammedan faith” or attempted to establish anyother religious cult had to fear the worst from the “fanaticism” of such sectari-ans.3737 G.A. Olivier, Voyage dans l’Empire Othoman, l’Égypte et la Perse, Paris, 1801–1807, II, pp. 440–41: “Pendant notre course à Hellé, on nous parla beaucoup des Ouhabis (Waha- bis), tribu arabe qui occupe une étendue de plus de cent lieues à l’occident de Bassora et du golfe Persique, et qui se fait redouter du pacha de Bagdad, de l’iman de Mascate et du schérif de la Mecque, car elle peut facilement réunir cent mille cavaliers. Les Ouhabis ont, outre leur ville principale, nommée Neldsg ou Négeds, résidence ordinaire du scheik, quelques bourgades situées dans les lieux les plus fertiles; mais la plupart sont errans, et n’ont d’autre habitation que leur tente. (…) Les Ouhabis ne croient point à la mission de Mahomet, qu’ils révèrent seulement comme un saint personnage: ils ne suivent point les préceptes du koran, et n’ont conservé du culte mahométan de leurs ancêtres, que la poly- gamie et la circumcision; ils n’adressent des prières qu’à l’être suprême, de sorte qu’on les regarde aujourd’hui comme de vrais déistes. Ils ne font point le pélerinage de la Mecque, et sont même toujours en guerre avec le schérif. Quoiqu’ils soient humaines, hospitaliers, et tout aussi probes que les autres Arabes, ils poussent le fanatisme jusqu’à massacrer chez eux quiconque ferait à haute voix la profession de foi mahométane, ou tenterait d’établir chez eux quelque autre culte religieux. Les pélerins persans qui traversent leur territoire en allant à la Mecque, sont très-circonspects; ils évitent de parler de leur reli- gion, ou feignent de croire à l’excellence de celle des Ouhabis. On n’était pas d’accord à Bagdad sur l’origine et l’époque de cette religion: le plus grand nombre pourtant s’accor- dait à dire qu’elle a pris naissance vers le milieu du siècle dernier, en la personne de Abd- ul-Ouhab, arabe, né à Neldsg, qui joignit, à toutes les connoissances qu’il avait pu acquérir à Bassora, à Bagdad et en Perse, un esprit ardent et exalté, et de plus l’ambition de com- mander aux hommes en les trompant. Abd-ul-Ouhab, absent depuis quelques années, parut dans sa patrie comme un inspiré: il était instruit, il étonna; il parlait au nom de Dieu, il se fit écouter; il était éloquent, il persuada. La religion qu’il présentait, dégagée des aumônes, des ablutions et de toutes les puériles cérémonies du mahométisme, dispen- sant du jeûne long et pénible du ramazan, devait plaire à des hommes pauvres, presque toujours errans sur des déserts arides; à des hommes dont la nourriture est peu

38 Chapter 1 Olivier could find no explanation for such behaviour, but his account em-phasised the existence of an already patent conflict over the pilgrimage andthe Holy Places and a rift between the nomadic and the sedentary followers ofthe new preacher (with villages in fertile places) who were explicitly defined as“Deists” – an ambivalence that made the situation all the more interesting. Un-like Niebuhr, who was careful to keep his sources separate, Olivier mixed infor-mation collected on the spot with that gathered from his predecessors, thuspreventing his readers from making any more specific attribution. This wastrue of the travels of the young ʿAbd al-Wahhab, already included in the Be­schreibung, as also of Niebuhr’s assertion that a son called Muhammad hadsucceeded his father to the rank of “supreme head of the new religion”. Theindigenous informers may have been Muslim Shiʿis, judging at least from theirinsistence on the danger posed by the sect to Persian pilgrims and their justifi-able dissimulations. The result was that information culled locally was deliber-ately unfavourable. This was in total contrast with Niebuhr and Volney, the twoearlier more benevolent travellers whose sympathies lay with the followers ofthe new cult, even if their effect was attenuated by the impersonal formula-tions of their judgement.38 Despite such differences of opinion there was atleast a general agreement that the Wahhabis did not belong to the so-calledMuhammedan tradition. For Olivier this was a definite merit, since he adheredto the modern school of criticism of religious revelation which scorned “puer-ile Muhammedan ceremonies”. The crux of the matter was consequentlythe outrage shown by the sectarians at the profession of the Muslim faith(shahāda). The exasperation of these supposed Deists may well have beencaused not by the entirely reasonable formula of divine unity (“There is noother god than God”), but rather by the ritualistic mention of Muhammad asthe supreme envoy of the Almighty.39 abondante, peu variée: elle ramenait d’ailleurs à la croyance pure et simple d’un Dieu toujours juste, toujours bon, toujours prêt à pardonner les fautes qui se commettent dans ce monde d’imperfection et de faiblesse.”38 In Olivier’s French: “On les regarde aujourd’hui comme de vrais déistes’ clearly refers to Niebuhr, ibid, p. 441. Indeed, with this explicit reference to the Beschreibung, it is hard to understand how Olivier could mistake Najd (“Nejd” or “Neged”) for a city and the Wah- habi capital, in contrast not only to Niebuhr but also to the medieval Arab geographers.39 Olivier’s assertion that the Wahhabis avoided mentioning Muhammad in their profession of faith is a typical distortion by their detractors. This rumour was probably fuelled by Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s insistence on the greater antiquity of the monotheist commandment (predating Muhammad), and by the specification that merely reciting a formula, though indispensable, was inadequate as an observance of, or testimony to, the true faith, which also included the practice of monotheism in the cult, tawḥīd al-uluhīya).

A Deistic Revolution in Arabia 39 It was not easy to establish how exact the information in the great volumesof the Voyages dans l’Empire Othoman really was. This was partly owing to thetime lapse between the author’s return to France in 1798 and the actual print-ing of the book. Olivier had set out on the mission assigned to him by the Gi-rondist Minister Roland in 1792. The journey, later extended to Persia, lasted sixyears, and was followed on his return to Europe by the unfortunate death of histravelling companion Bruguières. Editorial work on the text only began in 1801and work on the publication of the second volume, which included the ac-count of the Wahhabis, continued until 1804.40 In just a few years the worldpolitical scene had changed considerably, not only as a result of Napoleon’sEgyptian campaign, which Olivier boasted of having helped to prepare, butalso because of ever more recent events in the East, by then widely known,which made it all the harder to establish with any certainty just how far Olivierhad remodelled his original information on them. There was only a brief re-mark in the Voyage on further threatening advances by the Wahhabis in thedirection of Medina, Mecca, and even Egypt, and on the savage incursion intoKerbela in 1802, whence the sectarians were said to have carried off “immensebooty”.41 This correction was acknowledged with the usual enthusiasm typical of the Wahhabi chronicler Ibn Ghannam as an interpretation hitherto more or less unknown to all other theologians of whom he knew. When faced with such expectations of greater consistency between words and acts, however, Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s adversaries usually objected by claiming that men were in any case unable to distinguish the sincerity or hypocrisy of the faith professed by their coreligionists, cf. DeLong-Bas (2004), pp. 59–60, 223; Margoliouth (1934), p. 1176; Peskes (1993), pp. 21–22, 24, 80–81, 225; Peskes (2002), p. 40; Philby (1930), pp. 71–72.40 On the circumstances of the mission of Olivier, the entomologist turned traveller for fear of Robespierre’s growing authority (which he had already opposed), see G. Cuvier, “Éloge historique de Guill.e-Ant.e Olivier”, in Recueil des éloges historiques lus dans les séances publiques de l’Institut, Strasbourg, 1819–27, II, pp. 242–43. Olivier sent memoranda from the banks of the Nile to the French ambassador in Istanbul, but failed to do much in Per- sia to foment local hostility to Russia, ibid, p. 252. Nonetheless, his movements around the region gradually extended to originally unforeseen countries. With the additional objec- tive of an alliance with Tippu Sahib against the English in India, and the concession of bases to France at Bandar Abbas, Shiraz, Isfahan and on the island of Kharaq, they aroused enough suspicion among the English to justify the order sent, without effect, by the Brit- ish authorities in India to the agent of the East India Company in Bushir to proceed, if possible, to his arrest and deportation to Bombay together with all his papers, cf. Kelly (1968), p. 64 nt.; Lorimer (1915), I, pp. 151–54, 1879.41 G.A. Olivier, Voyage dans l’Empire Othoman, l’Égypte et la Perse, cit., II, p. 442 nt. For the attack on Kerbela Olivier refers to Le Moniteur (3 prairial, year XII), in which the episode

40 Chapter 1 It was left to later commentators to establish how far these developmentshad modified public opinion, or even exploded the inconsistencies in Olivier’saccount. Further emissaries sent at the behest of Napoleon to the court at Te-heran were also of assistance. In the meantime, however, Volney’s hypothesiswas at least half confirmed. The traditional Muslim religion was apparently inthe throes of a crisis which seemed to point towards a radical simplification ofboth the dogma and the precepts of the Koran.5 Browne: A Najd RebelBefore the Wahhabis had gained further notoriety for their attacks on famousMuslim sanctuaries, another curious traveller, the Englishman William GeorgeBrowne (1768–1813), emulating Volney and the Nile navigator, James Bruce, butwith a greater appreciation of the East, was able to send information to Europeno less important than Olivier’s and published with greater alacrity. He hadspent five adventurous years in Egypt and as a prisoner in Darfur, and, whilecrossing Syria in June 1797 on his way back to Europe, he gathered informationat Aleppo concerning rebels in Arabia locked in an insoluble conflict with theOttoman authorities. Local merchants and caravaneers from Basra told of acurrent military expedition sent by the pasha of Baghdad against a “rebel” inNajd. ʿAbd al-ʿAziz ibn Saʿud al-Wahhab (the name given to the Arab leader)was an implacable adversary on a supposedly “divine mission” and appeareddetermined to “withstand the Porte”. This information corresponded to an ear-lier serious though unsuccessful attempt by the Ottomans to block Wahhabiexpansion. It evaporated with the killing of an Arab leader of the Muntafiqtribe who was an ally of the pasha of Mesopotamia.42 Starting from here, is dated 2 April 1802. However, the date remained controversial for some time afterwards; others suggested 20 April as the day and 1801 as the year (infra, Chapter II, notes 23, 33, 37, 48; Chapter III, note 67).42 A military expedition launched by the pasha of Baghdad in 1797 against the Wahhabis, in which regular Ottoman troops from Basra took part, was led by Thuwaini, the head of the Arab tribe of the Muntafiq which had been active on the same front ten years earlier. After an initial success it ended in failure caused by the assassination of the commander at the hands of a slave of African origin named Tuʿayyis, who appeared to have embraced the religious cause of the enemy. The results were the defection of the Banu Khalid allies and the consequent hasty retreat of the invaders, abandoning as they fled a quantity of weaponry, pack-animals and food supplies. The Wahhabi chroniclers, in particular Ibn Ghannam, celebrated the event as a marvel of divine providence, cf. Abu Hakima (1965),