THE REFORM MOVEMENTS 253landscape, living in scattered oases and eking out a thin survival as traders
and herders. Wahhab attracted some followers among his fellow Bedouins,
and he led his group around the countryside destroying shrines because
they were objects of improper reverence, and Abdul Wahhab preached that
reverence for anything or anyone except God was idolatry. Eventually,
Wahhab achieved the position of judge and began to apply Han bali law as
he saw it with uncompromising zeal. One day, he had a well-known
woman of the town stoned to death as an adulteress. The locals had seen
enough. A mob gathered to demand that Abdul Wahhab be ousted from
his post; there was even talk oflynching. Wahhab fled that town and made
his way to another oasis called Dariyah.
There, the local ruler Mohammed ibn Saud welcomed him warmly.
Ibn Saud was a minor tribal chieftain with very big ambitions: to "unite"
the Arabian Peninsula. By "unite," of course, he meant "conquer." In the
single-minded preacher Abdul Wahhab he saw just the ally he needed;
Wahhab saw the same when he looked at Ibn Saud. The two men made a
pact. The chieftain agreed to recognize Wahhab as the top religious au-
thority of the Muslim community and do all he could to implement his vi-
sion; the preacher, for his part, agreed to recognize Ibn Saud as the
political head of the Muslim community, its amir, and to instruct his fol-
lowers to fight for him.
The pact produced fruit. Over the next few decades, these two men
"united" all the bedouin tribes of the Arabian Peninsula under Saudi-
Wahhabi rule. Each time they confronted another recalcitrant tribe, they
began by called on them to convert. "Convert! Convert! Convett!" they yelled
three times. If the warning was ignored three times (as it generally was)
Wahhab told the soldiers they could go ahead and kill the people they were
confronting; Allah permitted it, because these were infidels.
The call to convert confused the tribes they were attacking at this
point because all of these tribes considered themselves devout Muslims
already. But when Abdul Wahhab said "Convert!" he meant to the vision
of Islam he was preaching. He did not call it Wahhabism because, like
Ibn Taymiyah before him, he maintained that he was simply calling
Muslims back to pristine, original Islam, stripped of all accretions and
washed of all corruptions. He was not an innovator; in fact, he was the
anti-innovator.