Countering Wahabism

By Izeth Hussain –February 6, 2016

Izeth Hussain

There are several reasons why it is important, indeed crucially important, to counter Wahabism in Sri Lanka with the objective of eradicating it altogether or reducing it to no more than a tiny minority cult. I will not go into all those reasons at this point. Instead I will focus on one reason that seems to me far more important than all the others. It is that Wahabism is unIslamic. I am not referring to the clones of Wahabism such as the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the IS. Those who are identified as Wahabis almost invariably deny that appellation, declaring that they are Salafis or, most often, that they are practitioners of Islam in its pristine purity and nothing other than that. Therefore the malpractices and horrors for which those clones are notorious have nothing to do with the so-called Wahabis.

Consequently there is only one way of dealing with Wahabism, which is to go back to the original writings of Sheikh Wahab himself. But that poses a problem because most of his writings have not been translated. He was a redoubtable scholar and his writings were voluminous. However, it is generally accepted that the core of his teaching is to be found in just one book, the Kitab al-Thowheed (The Book of Unity). As far as I can judge from that book, Sheikh Wahab was a scholar but no philosopher or theologian, nothing like the giant intellects of the Islamic world such as Imam Ghazali or al-Farabi who is coming to be recognized as Islam’s greatest philosopher. He was essentially a preacher and his book is aimed at the Islamic common reader to make him understand and practice true Islam as he conceived of it. The book would seem to be very persuasive to the common reader because every point he makes is buttressed with citations from the Koran and the Hadiths.

I will not expound that book – it is easily accessible to the interested reader on the internet. Instead I will focus on just one point which is at the core of his message, and indeed at the core of Islam itself. It is Thowheed, Unity, which comes from the key concept of the one true God, from which all the rest of Islam follows. Hardly any Muslim will disagree with Sheikh Wahab over the central importance he places on that concept. The opposite of Thowheed is shirk, polytheism, which most Muslim theologians regard as the one unforgivable sin in Islam. It is there that controversy arises, for Sheikh Wahab had an altogether peculiar notion of shirk that contradicts the accepted beliefs and practices of most Muslims over a period of one thousand two hundred years.Read More