The wahhābiyya movement may probably be regarded as the ultimate wave of Muslim "renewal"; it turned the actual demands of neohanbalite repristination against distortions within Islam, and did so with a zeal even less compromising than the attitude of its predecessors. From the 1740s onwards the emergence of Muhammad ibn cAbd al-Wahhāb (1703–92) took precise aim at the decline – spiritual, cultural and political – of the Muslim world even before European colonisation. Together with a number of similar movements of the time, it meant in essence arresting the decline and achieving radical reforms in the spirit of the beginnings. All three great Muslim empires (the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran and Mughal India) were going through a grave crisis with which the latter two could not cope, while the first was only being kept alive by the balance of the emerging European powers.2 The emergence of Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624), the "renewer" of the second millennium of the hijra (mujaddīd-i alf-i thānī), and Muhammad cAbd al-Wahhāb may still be regarded as traditional responses to what they regarded as the incorrect responses that were causing the internal crisis. The attempt at "renewal" by Sāh Walī Allāh (1703–62), the Muhammadiyya movement (which tried to cleanse Islam of non-Islamic – mainly Hindu – elements3), took account of the irreversible changes and tried to formulate "more contemporary" responses, that is, ones that would have regard to "the other" too. The political history of the wahhābi movement is well known.4 Several reliable analyses have been made of Muhammad b. cAbd al-Wahhāb's neohanbalite system of ideas and its afterlife. In the context of our subject it is important to point out those characteristics which reveal the particular nature of this "counter-movement" and which helped a movement that was formerly regarded as a "break-away sect", "heterodoxy", little short of heresy,5 to settle into a sunnite orthodoxy in which the traditional culamā intelligentsia – despite a certain undeniable self-restraint – still plays an important part, which, because of participation in constant reform and acceptance of modernisation, moves ever farther from the strict retraditionalisation of the outset and for that very reason becomes the target of further counter-movements.6 This last was spectacularly exemplified on 20 November 1979, when Juhayman b. Sayf al-cUtayba and his supporters occupied the Great Mosque and tried to set up a new fundamentalist state instead of the corrupt wahhābite "establishment", which was straying from Islam.7 At first Muhammad b. cAbd al-Wahhāb's teaching formed a relatively coherent system, and although he had begun in the spirit of a revival of the hanbalite/neohanbalite tradition, from the very first he created a blend of pragmatism and conservatism, both of which came to the fore as circumstances required, but inevitably consolidation of statehood and organisation of the exercise of power were balanced in favour of the former. The popular religiosity of the starting point is well known. In cUnwan al-majd fí ta’ríkh an-Najd, the work of the distinguished chronicler of Najd cUthman b. cAbd Allāh b. Bisr, he speaks of it as follows: "At this time polytheism was rife in Najd and elsewhere. More and more people had faith in trees, tombs, the buildings on them and sacrifices made to them. More and more turned to jinns for aid, sacrificed camels to them, put out food for them in the corners of their houses (after asking) them to heal the sick".8 When cAbd al-Wahhāb came to prominence he called that period a (pagan age), and in one of his books, Masā’il al-jāhiliyya allatī khālafa fí-hā rasūl Allāh ahl al-jāhiliyya,9 he listed more than a hundred non-Islamic practices which the Prophet had abominated, many of which still flourished in his time. In contrast to the period that he considered jāhiliyya, he looked back to Mohamedan Islam as conceived by hanbaliyya, and emphasised two requirements in particular: on the one hand he spurned all kinds of bidca – innovation that was considered heresy – and on the other hand objected even more sternly than Ibn Taymiyya to sūfism, despising every aspect of it; he rejected all sort of the cults previously described as "necrolatry" and called for the implementation of sharica, based as it was on the Koran and prophetic traditions. It must be emphasised that it was not only popular Islam that he spurned but also the intellectual currents that were emerging within Islam (in this he anticipated the opposition of present-day fundamentalism to culture and intellectual activity), and accordingly he rejected all the orthodox madhābs except hanbaliyya. He emphasised two basic doctrines, and these defined the peculiar character of wahhābiyya: one was tawhid, the assertion of the one-ness and uniqueness of Allah, which on the one hand attacked the most various particular tendencies (sūfism, popular beliefs, shica, etc.) and on the other hand he proclaimed the firm unity of the community, which he tried to achieve by the indissoluble trinity of faith, economy and politics.10 This served basically – in the spirit of wahhābi conservatism – the coherence of the clans and the assumption of unified statehood, based on religious law. The other important doctrine – based on the Koran and sunna – was licence for independent judgement, ijtihād,11 which Ibn Taymiyya too had permitted. This position on the one hand followed logically from their previously mentioned anti-intellectual stance (the interpretation of it that had become a dogma of classical Islam was rejected), and on the other hand it was thus possible more easily to establish their politics, system of institutions and quite variable relationship to the "other". We must add that independent judgement in religious law was never taken to excess, and they were rightly called "imitators" (muqallidūn)12 of the early traditions. In assessing the character of wahhābiyya it is worth drawing attention to an antinomy which is detectable as early as in the hanbalite/neohanbalite movements and which is also typical of the fundamentalist currents that adhere to the classical model: the rejection, in the interests of the integrity of the community, of what is perhaps the most important characteristic of Islam, ijmac.13 In this the point is clearly that a movement acting on behalf of the people is forced to reject living and extremely variable ijmac (always ready to compromise and bargain) if it reaches a point at which the original character of Islam is jeopardised, and at such a time the original doctrine must be absolute, forgetting that when it was taking shape, Islam was a prophetic movement in which doctrine was very much able to change in accordance with circumstances.