The early half of the last century was a period of religious stagnation in Islam, almost as much as it was in Christendom.  Faith, morals, and religious practice were at the lowest ebb among Mussulmans, and it seemed to Europeans who looked on as though the faith of Mecca had attained its dotage, and was giving place to a non-curantist infidelity.  Politically and religiously the Mussulman world was asleep, when suddenly it awoke, and like a young giant refreshed stood once more erect in Arabia.  The reform preached by Abd el Wahhab was radical.  He began by breaking with the maxim held by the mass of the orthodox that inquiry on matters of faith was closed.  He constituted himself a new mujtahed and founded a new school, neither Hanafite, Malekite, nor Shafite, and called it the school of the Unitarians, Muwaheddin, a name still cherished by the Wahhabites.  He rejected positively all traditions but those of the companions of the Prophet, and he denied the claims of any but the first four Caliphs to have been legitimately elected.  The Koran was to be the only written law, and Islam was to be again what it had been in the first decade of its existence.  He established it politically in Nejd on precisely its old basis at Medina, and sought to extend it over the whole of Arabia, perhaps of the world.  I believe it is hardly now recognised by Mohammedans how near Abd el Wahhab was to complete success.

Before the close of the eighteenth century the chiefs of the Ibn Saouds, champions of Unitarian Islam, had established their authority over all Northern Arabia as far as the Euphrates, and in 1808 they took Mecca and Medina.  In the meanwhile the Wahhabite doctrines were gaining ground still further afield.  India was at one time very near conversion, and in Egypt, and North Africa, and even in Turkey many secretly subscribed to the new doctrines.  Two things, however, marred the plan of general reform and prevented its full accomplishment.

In the first place the reform was too completely reactive.  It took no account whatever of the progress of modern thought, and directly it attempted to leave Arabia it found itself face to face with difficulties which only political as well as religious success could overcome.  It was impossible, except by force of arms, to Arabianise the world again, and nothing less than this was in contemplation.  Its second mistake, and that was one that a little of the Prophet’s prudence which always went hand in hand with his zeal might have avoided, was a too rigid insistance upon trifles.  Abd el Wahhab condemned minarets and tombstones because neither were in use during the first years of Islam.  The minarets therefore were everywhere thrown down, and when the holy places of Hejaz fell into the hands of his followers the tombs of saints which had for centuries been revered as objects of pilgrimage were levelled to the ground.  Even the Prophet’s tomb at Medina was laid waste and the treasures it contained distributed among the soldiers of Ibn Saoud.  This roused the indignation of all Islam, and turned the tide of the Wahhabite fortunes.  Respectable feeling which had hitherto been on their side now declared itself against them, and they never after regained their position as moral and social reformers.