252 DESTINY DISRUPTED
These three answers to the challenge of modernity were well-embodied
in three seminal reformers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:
Abdul Wahhab of the Arabian peninsula, Sayyid Ahmad of Aligarh, India,
and Sayyid Jamaluddin-i-Afghan, whose birthplace is disputed and whose
presence was felt everywhere. By no means were they the only reformers.
Their ideas were not always mutually exclusive. They sometimes straddled
two different currents of reformism. Their contemporaries and students
often borrowed from each other. But still, these three men represent three
distinctively different approaches to reforming and reviving Islam.
WAHHABISMAbdul Wahhab was born around 1703 in the Nejd, that desert of yellow
sand dunes that many of us picture reflexively when we think of Arabia. He
grew up in a small oasis town, the son of a judge. When he showed promise
as a Qur'anic student, he was sent to Medina for further schooling. There,
one of his teachers introduced him to the works oflbn Taymiyah, the aus-
tere Syrian theologian who, in the wake of the Mongol holocaust taught
that God had abandoned Muslims and that Muslims must return to the
exact ways of the First Community if they were ever to regain His favor.
These teachings resonated for the young Wahhab.
From Medina the youngster made his way to the cosmopolitan city of
Basra on the Persian Gulf, and what this ultimate country boy saw in
Basra-the clamorous diversity of opinion, the many schools of thought,
the numerous interpretations of the Holy Word, the crowds, the lights, the
noise-appalled him. This, he decided, was the sort of excrescence that
was making Islam weak.
He returned, then, to the stark simplicity of his hometown in the desert
and began to preach religious revival through restoration oflslam to its orig-
inal form. There was only one God, he thundered, and everyone must wor-
ship the one God exactly as instructed in the Holy Book. Everyone must
obey the laws laid down by the revelations. Everyone must live exactly as the
Pure Originals of Medina in Mohammed's time, and anyone who blocked
the restoration of the original and holy community must be eliminated.
The Ottomans considered all of Arabia their possession, but they had
no real authority among the small Bedouin tribes who inhabited this arid