The austere monotheism of the Prophet was preached in all...

The austere monotheism of the Prophet was preached in all its uncompromising simplicity and the Quran and the Sunnah were taken to be the sole guide for human action. The doctrinal simplification was ac­companied by a most rigid code of morals. Many critics of Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab condemn this movement as retrogressive. But this is an absolutely baseless charge. Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab stood up with determination to bring his people back to true Islam.

He, therefore, tried to purge Muslim life of all innovations and declared a “holy war” against them. The feeling that he voiced was rather one of rationalistic dissatisfaction with the outworn palimpsest of cults than of the destruction of everything that he found before him. He wanted to separate grain from chaff and this work he performed with admirable courage and alertness of mind.

He tried to demolish all those things that he found alien to the spirit of Islam and weeded out all those practices from Muslim society that he considered antagonistic to the spirit of the faith.

He rightly believed that a certain amount of change is always essential in a living civilization, but the change should be organic, that is to say, it should come from within that civilization in response to the genuine needs of the society which claims to own it and should not be a mere imitation of another civilization. Imitation of another civilization implies the surrender of all creative powers that are essential for the life of a progressive society.

The Shaikh was, therefore, very cautious about his decisions. He persuaded the people to discard only those things that he found un-Islamic, while he readily accepted the ideas and practices that could be fitted into the structure of Islam. The Wahhabi movement is, therefore, not essentially retrograde and con­servative in its nature.

It is progressive in the sense that it not only awakened the Arabs to the most urgent need of heart-searching and broke the com­placency to which they had been accustomed for years, but also gave the reformers a definite line of action.

It taught them that for the revival of Islam it was necessary to give up reliance on second-hand formulas and sterile conventions, and that it was equally essential to come back to the realities of Islam and build only on the bases of these solid rocks new modes of thought and action.