Professor Madawi Al Rasheed

Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) and the Beginnings of Unitarian Empire in Arabia
by George Rentz. London Arabian Publishing, 2005 Pp.xlii+275, bibliography, index.  xxxxx(cloth), ISBN 09544792 2 X

Since the 11 September the Saudi regime launched a serious public relations campaign to rescue its reputation in the West and that of its religious establishment. While print and visual media remain the most important platform for this campaign in the West, Saudi sponsored academic conferences and annual lectures in English proved to be equally important as these quasi-academic activities influence a different audience. 

The target here is not the Western masses who are avid consumers of audio and visual media but the selected few in universities, think tanks, economic forums and policy makers. The Saudi public relations campaign has two objectives: first, absolving the Saudi regime from any responsibility for terrorism. Immediately after 11 September, the Saudi regime was portrayed in American media, as an incubator of terrorism, citing its previous association with the Afghan Jihad, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Several books denouncing the regime and exposing its previous association with activities that are now defined as dubious, for example charitable work and overseas educational programmes, appeared in several Western languages

Second, absolving the Wahhabi tradition from any intellectual and religious responsibility as it too became accused of legitimating and inspiring violence against the West. Saudi propaganda aimed to dispel the association of Wahhabism with radicalism and violence while promoting a new image of this tradition as a tradition of tolerance. The public relations campaign was meant to turn Saudi Arabia from “perpetrator’ to ‘victim’ of terrorism. The climax of this campaign was reached with the Riyadh International Counter Terrorism Conference that took place in 2005 and in which hundreds of local and international politicians, policy makers, terrorism experts, academics and journalists participated. Several quasi-academic books sponsored by Saudi Arabia and published in English appeared in Western book markets. The sole purpose was to improve the image of both Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism. 

The rediscovery of George Rentz’s 1947 doctorate thesis on the life of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and its publication after more than half a century by Arabian Publishing, a London based small publishing house, and in association with The King Abdulaziz Public Library, is an attempt to rehabilitate an accused Wahhabi movement. This rediscovery must be considered as part of the on-going Saudi campaign. It seems that the innocence of both the regime and the Wahhabi establishment can only be established by re-inventing the academic contribution of an American ‘expert’ whose career revolved around translating for ARAMCO, the American oil company that was responsible for discovering, extracting and exporting Saudi oil for several decades, and providing the intellectual justification for its later territorial expansion in pursuit of new oil fields. George Rentz was translator, lobbyist and propagandist for both his ARAMCO employees and the Saudi regime that was supposed to protect and cherish oil contracts with this company. After the Saudi regime slipped away from the hand of the British Empire in the 1940s into the hands of American oil companies, the history of the Saudi polity had to be re-invented for a different Western audience.

During the first half of the twenty century, the historiography of the Saudi state, including that of the Wahhabi movement also slipped away from British historians, travellers and others into their counterparts in the USA. Rentz’s thesis was the beginning of a new era whereby the history of Saudi Arabia became part and parcel of the business of ARAMCO, for obvious commercial and political reasons. At the time nobody could have written a ‘better’ history than George Rentz, the son of a Presbyterian minister and chaplain of the US Navy. Presbyterian interpretations of biblical stories seemed a good background to understand Arabian monotheism promoted by its second most famous reformer, after the Prophet Muhammad, at least in the mythology of the Saudi state. Neither the accounts of John Philby nor the monographs of a Lebanese Maronite, Amin al-Rihani were better positioned to discover the historical origins of the so-called Unitarian Empire in Arabia. Rentz inaugurated the beginning of an era, that of the ARAMCO historiography. This historiography shaped not only the historical imagination of the West but also local historians.

Rentz’s thesis is simple and transparent. It proceeds as follows: in the eighteenth century there was a man called Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who was tormented by the blasphemy, corruption and polytheism of his own society, which exhibited religious practices worst than those of the Kafirs of Quraysh at the time of the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century. He took it upon himself to ‘reform’ the polytheists of Arabia. As a man of religion, he needed a man of the sword to launch an uncompromising jihad against all those Muslim-polytheists and innovators who visited holy men for intercession, sought blessing from trees, and chanted supplications to dead men in their graves. A combination of corrupted religious scholars, sorcerers and charlatans had previously sold them amulets and concoctions, thus diverting them from the true path of Islam. The reformer found in Muhammad ibn Saud, the ruler of a small insignificant town called Deriyyah a good pious Muslim who endorsed the religious reformer and put him under his wing. An alliance was struck between the man of religion and the man of the sword, after which a violent ‘Islamising’ Jihadi campaign was launched with the sword to bring people back to monotheism. After half a century of blood shed, raids, expansion, death and famines, as people are not easily convinced to abandon their blasphemy, a state called the Unitarian Empire was born.  The story is meant to be authentic as it draws on local chronicles-legends propagated by eyewitnesses, nobody but those Unitarians themselves who were contemporary followers of the reformer, personalities like Husain ibn Ghannam and the late Othman ibn Bishr, both were ‘Unitarian’ historians. 

Rentz is not concerned with the theological discourse of the reformer himself, but with documenting the history of the Unitarian movement during the life of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) and demonstrating how the faith of those new monotheist Muslims created an empire that spread harmony and peace. As it is, the story would have been extremely appropriate for a Hollywood film in the 1950s. Like Philby and the British government (in the nineteenth century), Rentz wanted his readers to reach the conclusion that the Wahhabi movement, under the banner of Al-Saud was a civilising mission, as admitted by the editor of the thesis, William Facey (p. xx). Even by the standards of the 1950s, Rentz’s thesis falls short of accounting for the real reasons behind the rise of the Wahhabi movement and its expansion in Arabia.

The published thesis consists of five parts. Part I covers most of the first half of the eighteenth century (1703-1746) by focusing on the early life of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, his travels, preaching, and expulsion from his homeland. Part II deals with battles in southern Najd (1746-1773), rivalry between Deriyyah and Riyadh, and timid Wahhabi penetration of Hijazi territory. Part III deals with consolidating Wahhabi control over Najd (1773-1785) and the pacification of other territories in Hasa. Part IV examines the last years of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1789-1792) and the campaigns in the east, north and west of Arabia. The final part includes a short bibliographical essay and a list of Western and Arab sources. 

Rentz’s thesis is a ‘religious’ narrative about a religious reform movement rather than an academic historical account of what happened in Arabia in the eighteenth century. It is a desperate search for the ‘ancient’ origins of a polity that was just beginning to be consolidated when Rentz arrived in Arabia in 1944. Rentz searched for depth and historical continuity of a regime in need of recognition by the new Western power. While ARAMCO was driven by capitalist expansion and profit, it needed its own government to recognise the local ‘agent’ with whom it had already signed a contract in 1933.  ARAMCO needed the sword that would protect its contract against intruders, for example other oil competitors in the region. With ARAMCO, oil contracts came before diplomatic relations. To guarantee the contract, it was incumbent upon the oil company to show that it was doing business with a state whose history exhibited long search for ‘the rule of law’ by those Unitarians, who sacrificed life and livelihood in enforcing law and order. Before Rentz’s thesis, Western accounts of the Wahhabi movement enforced the image of uncivilised Bedouin savages parading as monotheists, while completely ignoring the fact that the Wahhabi movement was a sedentary rather than a nomadic phenomenon. While Bedouins were enlisted as its foot soldiers, sedentary ulama and oasis rulers were its theoreticians and leaders Rentz’s thesis elevated the ‘Arabian savage’ to the status of religious noblility, which laid the foundation in Arabia for ‘nation-building’ and the ‘rule of law’, to use contemporary jargon. 

The ARAMCO version of Saudi-Wahhabi history is unfortunately still popular as a meta-narrative infused with mystification. Its methodology is flawed as it is dependent on chronicles whose main objective was to demonise Arabian society in order to justify the bloodshed, divisions and fragmentation that accompanied Saudi-Wahhabi expansion since the eighteenth century.  The narrative is dominant in Western academic scholarship, Saudi history text books, and Arab historiography. In his desperate search for legitimating the twentieth century polity, Rentz overlooked important events mentioned in the Wahhabi sources themselves. Ibn Ghannam, the most loyal of Wahhabi ulama-chronicle used by Rentz tells us that after Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was accepted in Deriyyah, one year the town suffered from hunger and famine. The people went outside the town, found a group of Bedouins, raided and killed them. They stole their sheep and returned with the booty, which they distributed amongst themselves according to the rules stated in the sharia. Was this a Jihad in pursuit of purifying Arabia from polytheism and innovations or was it an act of thugry and banditry in pursuit of booty for the public purse that was controlled by nobody but Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad ibn Saud? Was this a Jihad in pursuit of monotheism or was it a desperate attempt by a desperate population to survive in one of the harshest environments in the Arab world? Was this raid in pursuit of the Unitarian Empire or was it a local practice as old as Arabia itself?  Survival and political domination were pursued under the rhetoric of Jihad, very much like contemporary callers for jihad who disguise political struggle using religious rhetoric?  Rentz failed to interrogate and interpret his own sources.

Rentz propagates one of the most popular myths about Arabian society in the eighteenth century, namely its alleged blasphemy, polytheism, and savagery. Men were driven by ignorance of their own religious tradition and blind political rivalries while women succumbed to lust, prostitution, sorcery, and witchcraft. Pre-eighteenth century Arabia was depicted as a second jahiliyyah, age of ignorance. This inaccurate narrative does not only ‘insult’ the inhabitants of Najd, where Wahhabiyyah flourished but is also damming of all of Arabia, including the Muslim inhabitants of its holiest cities, Mecca and Madina. Rentz, like the Wahhabi ulama, uncritically repeats the accusations that Arabian society was immersed in not only religious decadence but also political turmoil. He forgets that Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Muhammad ibn Saud and later Deriyyah rulers had a lot to do with the violence and chaos that dominated Arabian history since the eighteenth century and spelled over beyond Arabia to Iraq and the Levant. Rentz fails to investigate the regional context, the shift in trade routes, the beginning of British interests in the Gulf and other important historical transformations that influenced the rise of the Wahhabi movement.  Rentz considers the reform movement as an ideological and religious foundation for a Unitarian Empire without examining the real historical reasons behind its rise and expansion. Rentz reiterates a foundation narrative that is based on a negative and demonising account of the population of Arabia, in a manner reminiscent of contemporary Saudi historiography. The past is in need of a serious revisionist historiography that deconstructs these well-established myths.

The most important aspect of this thesis is the time of its publication in 2005 at a moment when both the Saudi regime and its religious establishment came under attack in the West. To rehabilitate both, Saudi Arabia uses Western actors who mediate its own interests. The regime depends on Western ‘cultural mediators’, in this case a British publishing house that relies on Saudi business for survival in a tight market with very volatile profit margins.  Rather than consider the thesis as an exemplary work by an ARAMCO historian, the editor William Facey, who is also the man behind Arabian Publishing and is the author of several photographic books on cities such as Deriyyah and Riyadh, most probably commissioned by individual princes, glorifies Rentz’s contribution. In the introduction the editor fails to see how this kind of work was tied to commercial and expansionist oil projects. Interest in Arabia’s geography, religion, and Bedouin tribes was driven by profit rather than academic standards. ARAMCO was heavily involved not only in extracting oil but also in writing the history of Saudi Arabia, drawing its territorial boundaries and supporting the claims of the Saudi regime against those of neighbouring Gulf states where the American oil company did not have a franchise, mainly from Kuwait to Muscat.  As head of Aramco Research and Translation Division, Rentz was not a detached scholar who searched for the history of tribes and the religious movement. His research was used to support claims over disputed territories. Furthermore, nothing would secure ARAMCO’s presence in Saudi Arabia than the narrative of a Unitarian Empire that dates back to the eighteenth century. Facey could have reflected on several fallacies that dominated not only this outdated thesis but several other contemporary works. The so-called Unitarian movement destabilised not only Arabia but also the whole of the Ottoman Empire. The editor could have given more thoughts regarding the myth about the three Saudi states. Neither Facey nor Rentz questions the meaning of a state in eighteenth and even nineteenth century Arabia. It is doubtful whether the eighteenth century Saudi-Wahhabi expansion can be called a state let alone a Unitarian Empire.

The academic community, in particular specialists of Saudi Arabia should rejoice at the publication of this 1947 thesis. The availability of the thesis will give them a readily available evidence of how ARAMCO historians propagated myths that are still adhered to despite evidence to the contrary. Many contemporary Western scholars will no doubt see Rentz’s thesis as an early desperate attempt to cast recognition and historical depth on a regime with whom commercial interests overruled any other considerations. The thesis must be seen as a product of ARAMCO-Saudi relations. Serious Western historians will consider the thesis a vivid example of how academic discourse on Saudi Arabia is entangled with power and oil, a relationship that continues until the present day. Others will see the publication of the thesis after over half a century as a function of local Saudi research centres co-operating with foreign publishers to mediate Saudi interests abroad. It is fortunate, however, that today Western students of Saudi history, society, politics and religion have at their disposal both the methodology and interpretive skills that enable them to revisit the same grounds and reach different and more nuanced conclusions about the Wahhabi movement, the reasons behind its rise and its consequences not only for the future of the country but also its relationship with the outside world. Invoking the language of a Unitarian Empire is no longer part of the academic discourse today. The future generation of scholars will no doubt provide a re-reading of the Wahhabi historical sources such as those of Ibn Ghannam and Ibn Bishr, while a minority of Saudi religious scholars, historians and social scientists are beginning to re-consider the alleged blasphemy of their ancestors and the rationale behind the so-called Unitarian Empire. 

Professor Madawi Al-Rasheed