Advice for the Muslim

He wrote what he learned from the British spy and mixed corrupt
information from the Mu’tazila and other groups of bid’a. Many
ignorant villagers, particularly the inhabitants of Dar’iyya and
their ignorant chief, Muhammad ibn Sa’ûd, followed him. The
Arabs esteemed ancestral distinctions very highly, and because he
did not belong to a wellknown family, he used Muhammad ibn
Sa’ûd as a tool to disseminate his tarîqa, which he named
Wahhâbism. He introduced himself as the Qâdî (Head of the
Religious Affairs) and Muhammad ibn Sa’ûd as the Hâkim
(Ruler). He had it passed in their constitution that both would be
succeeded only by their children.
In 1306 (1888) when the book Mir’ât al-Haramain was written,
the amîr of the Najd was ’Abdullâh ibn Faysal, a descendant of
Muhammad ibn Sa’ûd, and the qâdî was a descendant of
Muhammad ibn ’abd al-Wahhâb.
Muhammad ibn ’Abd al-Wahhâb’s father, ’Abd al-Wahhâb,
who was a pious, pure ’âlim in Medina, his brother Sulaimân ibn
’Abd al-Wahhâb and his teachers had apprehended from his
statements, behaviour and ideas, which he frequently had put
forward as questions to them when he was a student in Medina,
that he would become a heretic who would harm Islam from the
inside in the future. They advised him to correct his ideas and
advised the Muslims to avoid him. But they soon encountered the
very thing they were afraid of, and he started disseminating his
heretical ideas openly under the name of Wahhâbism. To deceive
ignorant and stupid people, he came forward with reforms and
innovations incompatible with the books of the ’ulamâ’ of Islam.
He dared to be so impetuous as to deem the true Muslims of Ahl
as-Sunnat wa ’l-Jamâ’a as disbelievers. He regarded it as
polytheism to ask Allâhu ta’âlâ for something through the
mediation of our Prophet (sall-Allâhu ’alaihi wa sallam) or other
prophets or awliyâ’, or to visit their graves.
According to what Muhammad ibn ’Abd al-Wahhâb learned
from the British spy, he who talks to the dead while praying near
a grave becomes a polytheist. He asserted that Muslims who said
that someone or something beside Allah did something, for
example, saying “such-and-such medicine cured” or “I obtained
what I asked through our master Rasûlullâh” or “such-and-such
walî” were polytheists. Although the documents Ibn ’Abd al-
Wahhâb made up to support such statements were nothing but lies
and slanders, the ignorant people who could not distinguish right
from wrong, the unemployed, raiders, ignoramuses, opportunists
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