ওয়াহাবিরা দাবি করে যে ইবনে আবদ আল-ওয়াহাবের দাওয়াহ শিরক-সম্পর্কিত অনুশীলনের বিশ্বব্যাপী পতনের জন্য দায়ী যার মধ্যে সাধু পূজা, মৃতদের কাছ থেকে অনুরোধ, জাদু এবং এর মতো।
This is completely false. Prior to the early twentieth century, Wahhabism was viewed by the entire Muslim world as a heretical Kharijite cult resembling ISIS.Hence, its teachings had minimal effect outside of the central Arabian region of Najd.In reality, the global attack on “shirk-related practices” emerged in the nineteenth century, and was spearheaded by (deviant) Muslim modernist movements in South Asia and the Middle East – led by figures like Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Abduh, and Rashid Rida.These figures opposed things like saints’ miracles, requests from the dead, magic and the like because they saw them as embarrassing forms of supernaturalism inconsistent with a modern scientific worldview. They referred to these things as “superstitions” (khurafat).This scientistic attack on supernaturalism was spread throughout the world by journals like Abduh and Rida’s al-Manar. Furthermore, modernist figures who opposed supernaturalism and sought to modernize Islam, were funded and promoted by colonial powers, basically forcing their materialist version of Islam onto the Muslim masses throughout the world.RELATED: Wahhabism Is the Inversion of Ahl al-HadithThe Saudi Wahhabi establishment then absorbed these same ideas between the 1920s and 1970s. Following the advice of Rida, they then rebranded Wahhabism as “Salafism,” and claimed that one of their overriding aims was to purge the Muslim world of non-scientific khurafat – which is why khurafat are constantly mentioned in the fatwas of figures like Ibn Baz.Wahhabis then retrospectively claimed credit for the collapse of supernaturalism across the Muslim world engendered earlier by deviant forms of religious modernism.So when a Wahhabi demands that you thank him for the fact that the Sufi orders have collapsed and that people no longer believe in saints or make requests of them – you should reply that those who really deserve such “thanks” are modernist reformist figures like Khan and Abduh.RELATED: [WATCH] Wahhabism’s War on the Sunni Legal Schools