THE REFORM MOVEMENTS 255Mecca and Medina, and opened the Holy City up again to Muslim pil-
grims of every stripe. Then he sent Aziz ibn Saud's son and successor to Is-
tanbul to be paraded before derisive crowds and then beheaded.
Little more was heard of the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance for about a cen-
tury, but the alliance did not die. The executed chieftain had a son who
took over the collapsed remnants of the Saudi confederacy. Now he was
just a minor tribal chieftain again, but he was still a chieftain, and he was
still a Wahhabi, and wherever he could still impose his authority, Wah-
habi ulama presided and prospered. Wahhab was dead, but Wahhabism
lived on.
What were its tenets?
You can look long and hard through the actual writings of Abdul Wah-
hab and not find Wahhabism as it is defined today. That's largely because
Abdul Wahhab didn't write political tracts; he wrote Qur'anic commentary
and wrote it strictly in the vocabulary of his doctrine. His single-minded
focus on details of Muslim doctrine, law, and practice might strike out-
siders as obsessive. His major work, Kitab-al-Tawhid (The Book of Unity)
has sixty-six chapters, each of which presents one or more quotes from the
Qur'an, unpacks each quote, lists lessons to be learned from the quote, and
then explains how this quote relates to Wahhab's core creed. There is no
talk here of East or West, nothing about Western influence or Muslim
weakness, nothing recognizably political at all. To read Wahhab's words is
to realize that he looked at the world through purely religious spectacles.
In his own view, his entire theology boiled down to two tenets: first, the
importance of tawhid, or "unity," that is, the singleness and unity of God;
and second, the fallacy of shirk, the idea that anyone or anything shared in
God's divinity to even the smallest degree.
Marx once said "I am not a Marxist," and if Abdul Wahhab were alive
today, he might well say, "I am not a Wahhabi," but nonetheless, Wah-
habism exists, and it now includes many further tenets that derive from
Wahhab's preachings by implication or that developed historically from its
application by Saudi chieftains. This expanded Wahhabism told Muslims
that the Law was Islam and Islam was the Law: getting it right, knowing it
fully, and following it exactly was the whole of the faith.
The Law was all right there in the Qur'an, according to Wahhab and
his followers. The sunna-the life of the Prophet as revealed through