The Life, Teachings and Influence of Muhammad ... - IslamHouse.com

The Life, Teachings and Influence of Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahhaab
finally defeated in 1860. Many are the scholars who believe that this
movement was definitely influenced by ibn Abdul-Wahhaab’s
teaching. Shareeatullah sought to purify Islam from Hindu and
extreme Sufi thoughts. He even avoided using Sufi terms, such as Pir
(“Shaikh”), and used terms like muallim (“teacher”) instead. 1
Al-Zuhaili 2 includes al-Sayyid Ameer Ali of Calcutta as a
reformer who was influenced by ibn Abdul-Wahhaab. He was of a
different nature than al-Sayyid Ahmad (above), saying that he relied
mostly on education. He wanted to revive the aqeedah of the people.
According to al-Zuhaili, one of his “great works” was The Spirit of
Islam, in which he spoke about the evolution and development of
religion. It is very possible that the Arabic version of The Spirit of
Islam is different from its last edition currently available in English.
Even a cursory reading of The Spirit of Islam would demonstrate that
ibn Abdul-Wahhaab and al-Sayyid Ameer Ali had very little in
common—not to speak of the latter being the result of the influence of
the former. Ali’s work is full of blasphemous statements that ibn
Abdul-Wahhaab and his followers would definitely consider pure
disbelief. For the sake of brevity, only one quote from Ali’s work will
be given here. This quote demonstrates that Ali considered the
Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) the author of the
Quran. Ali wrote,
There is no doubt that in the Suras of the intermediate period
before the mind of the Teacher [the Prophet (peace and blessings of
Allah be upon him)] had attained the full development of religious
consciousness and when it was necessary to formulate in language
intelligible to the common folk of the desert, the realistic
descriptions of heaven and hell, borrowed from the floating fancies
of Zoroastrian, Sabean and Talmudical Jew, attract the attention as
a side picture and then comes the real essence, the adoration of god
in humility and love… 3
Furthermore, in this same work, Ali writes off the “Wahhabis” as
nothing more than the descendents of earlier Khawarij who designate
“all other Moslems as unbelievers.” 4
1 Jumuah, pp. 82-86.
2 Al-Zuhaili, vol. 2, p. 321.
3 Ameer Ali, The Spirit of Islam (New York: Humanities Press, 1974), p. 197.
4 See Ali, pp. 356-357.
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