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Al Wahhab, A Great Man, An Honorable Reformer And A Preacher Essay

Decent Essays

To his followers Abd’al-Wahhab was a “great man, an outstanding reformer and a zealous preacher”, proclaiming a message of al-da’wa ila’ l-tawhid, (a belief in the unity of God alone), something which, according to him, Muslims had neglected to their detriment. Like a troubling desert storm he appeared in the Najd region of Arabia in the eighteenth century fulminating against the idolatrous practices and customs of the contemporary Bedouin. “The sheikh started preaching the revival of Islam”, states one writer, and “ripped away the heresies and abuses which had grown up around Islam and . . . preached the faith in its original simplicity”. A small number of tribesmen accepted him as Sheikh-ul-Islam and mujaddid, leader of Islam and renewer of the faith, and began a movement which quickly spread across Arabia. Presenting Abd’al-Wahhab as “the preacher of reform”, and referring to his “great work”, his “powers of persuasion, personal magnetism and the compelling rightness of his cause”, his supporters declare with alacrity how he “hurl[ed] his doctrines into the teeth of the evildoers”. As such Saudis today credit Abd’al-Wahhab as the one who “uprooted polytheistic views [and] eradicate[d] the heresies and accretions” affecting Islam, thereby pulling the Islamic faith “out of the darkness of polytheism and error”. Although no statues or monuments are erected in his honour, for such would be shirk, or idolatry, some Saudis name their sons Abd’al-Wahhab, and, as in the case

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