Advice for the Muslim

egged him much to forgive them and imploringly cast themselves
at his filthy feet. But, he said, “I conclude from your letter that you
will not obey my orders, that you will not accept my true religion,
that you are trying to deceive me with soft words for you are
overwhelmed by thirst, hunger and distress, and that you are
begging just to get rid of this distress. There is no other way out but
to do whatever I wish. I will make you groan and vanish as I did
with the people of Tâ’if, if you pretend to be accepting my orders
but speak or act unfavourably.” He forced the Muslims to
renounce their madhhabs.
The fallacious, heretical terms dictated to the Medinan
messengers by Sa’ûd are written in detail in the book Târîkh-i
Wahhâbiyyân.
The Medinan messengers went back to Medina after accepting
Sa’ûd’s orders under compulsion. The Medinans, stupefied by
these events, showed acceptance unwillingly, as the one who falls
into the sea grasps the serpent. They surrendered the Medina
fortress to seventy men of Badây as required by the seventh clause
of the agreement. One of the terms of the agreement was that the
shrines in Medina should be demolished. They unwillingly fulfilled
the terms in order not to be tortured. Although they did so
unwillingly, these deeds of theirs gave way to very bad
consequences.
No answer came from the letters written to Istanbul for help.
The Medinans lived under torture and oppression for three years.
When they lost hope of help from Istanbul, they wrote a letter to
Sa’ûd asking for forgiveness and mercy and sent it to Dar’iyya with
Husain Shâkir and Muhammad Saghâyî. But Sa’ûd did not receive
the messengers for he had heard that the people of Medina had
asked Istanbul for help before. He set out for Medina with a large
flock of brigands to increase the oppression and torture on the
Medinans.
All the savages and villagers of the deserts of Arabia
recognized Sa’ûd as the ruler of the Najd, who signed the letters he
wrote to here and there with the title “al-Imâm ad-Dar’iyyat almajdiyya
wa ’l-ahkâmi ’d-da’wati ’n-Najdiyya.”
As soon as he entered Medina, Sa’ûd ordered the servants of
shrines themselves to demolish the shrines. Although the Muslims
had demolished many noble shrines as required by the third
clause of the terms accepted three years before, they had not
dared to touch a few shrines which they knew to be great and
blessed. The servants of these shrines started demolishing them
– 303 –