Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies

This article examines the regional (and, in particular, Iraqi) response to the Wahhabi daʾwa (call) as first promulgated by Shaikh Muhammad Ibn Abdul-Wahhab in Najd in the middle of the eighteenth century. The first conclusion drawn from the primary sources of the period concerns the reaction of regional scholars and rulers to the message of the Najdi shaikh, and suggests that, for reasons having to do with the unusual way that the Wahhabis interpreted a central set of beliefs long associated by Muslims with the era of the Prophet and the Companions (and called after them, al-salafiyya), the movement may have promoted a mixed message. That is, while it attracted some adherents from among regional sheikhs and notables, it deterred many more. There was, however, no disagreement with the Wahhabis’ most steadfast principle: its pursuit of takfir, which was to create instant enemies for the cause. The second conclusion, however, points to evidence that the Wahhabi movement elicited a deeper and more ambiguous response from its regional audience, and that it is precisely this constantly shifting zone of interaction and controversy between supporters and enemies of the movement that may be its most interesting legacy. These two features—intense debate over the Wahhabi interpretation of Salafi Islam, and the ambivalence it engendered among its wide regional audience—are particularly important in the life and work of the Iraqi shaikh Mahmud Shukri Al-Alusi (1856–1924). Al-Alusi was an important anti-Wahhabi Salafi in turn-of-the-century Iraq, whose teachings and philosophy still attracted controversy. Although he was virulently against the Wahhabis in some of his books, he was still associated with them by most observers in his time and ours, if only because he was steadfastly reformist, anti-Sufi, and pro-ijtihad.