farmer’s head. “His blood ɻowed like the lace of a
sandal,” swore one witness. Justice thus upheld—the
date spit out, the cow paid for, the farmer and his wife
butchered—they purchased their supplies and went on
their way back to Nahrawan.
They did so with the clearest of consciences. Even the
murder of the wife and unborn child, they maintained,
was called for by God, since women and children of the
enemy shared in the sin of their male kin. There were no
innocents. And in this, the seventh-century khariji
Rejectionists set the pattern for their descendants.
Like his forerunner the Scarred One in the seventh
century, Abd al-Wahhab would “go forth” with his
followers into the desert highlands of central Arabia
eleven centuries later. There, near what is today the city
of Riyadh, he set up a spartan, purist community
uncontaminated by the pagan darkness and corruption
he claimed was rife in Mecca and Medina. As had the
Rejectionists, the Wahhabis soon raided far and wide out
of their desert stronghold. Early in the nineteenth
century, they destroyed the domes over the shrines of
Fatima and others in Medina, and even damaged the
Prophet’s own tomb. Such ornate shrines were idolatry,
they said, and rode on north into Iraq, where they
ransacked the shrines of Ali and his son Hussein in Najaf
and Karbala.
The Wahhabis’ impassioned call for a return to what