- Sources for his life: The most important sources for the life of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb are naturally the Wahhābī ones, in particular the histories of Ibn Ghannām and Ibn Bishr, discussed in this book’s introduction. An even earlier Wahhābī source, Muḥammad ibn Gharīb’s al-Tawḍīh ʿan tawḥīd al-khallāq (The Clarification of the Oneness of the Creator), provides another account of his life, while yet another is furnished by his grandson ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Ḥasan Āl al-Shaykh in a work known as al-Maqāmāt (The Assemblies). Another indispensable source is the writings of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb himself. This corpus includes numerous epistles and letters; a collection of fatwās and sermons; a number of bare-bones theological tracts consisting of proof texts with minimal commentary, the most noteworthy being Kitāb altawḥīd (The Book of God’s Oneness); similarly unadorned works of Qurʾānic exegesis and ḥadīth commentary in the form of lists of takeaways or important points; several abridgments of Islamic texts including two Ḥanbalī law books and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Zād al-maʿād (Provisions for the Hereafter), a book of prophetic guidance; and a short biography of the Prophet based mainly but not solely on Ibn Isḥāq’s famous sīra.
In the mid–eighteenth century, the emergence of the Wahhābī movement in central Arabia gave rise to a new subgenre of the refutation, that of Wahhābism and its founder. In the early 1150s/early 1740s, a number of heated anti-Wahhābī tracts appeared almost simultaneously in and around the Arabian Peninsula. In the Ḥijāz, al-Aḥsāʾ, and southern Iraq, Sunnī Muslim scholars took aim at what they considered a new heresy gaining strength in Najd and were merciless in their denunciations. They condemned the leader of the perceived heresy in the strongest possible terms, asserting, among other things, that he was mentally ill, that Satan had whispered into his ear and misled him, and that he was claiming prophecy. The doctrine emanating from Najd was evidently scandalous to these men of religion, a direct challenge to their authority and a grave affront, as they saw it, to certain centuries-old standards of Islamic belief and practice. Some of the refutations came directly in response to Ibn ʿAbd al Wahhāb’s epistles; others were written at the request of Najdī opponents of the new creed. The anti-Wahhābī refuters were by no means neutral witnesses to the rise of the Wahhābī movement. Many of their charges were false and misleading