INTRODUCTION Shaykh Muḥammad Ibn ʿabd Al-Wahhāb Was Born in 1703 in the Village of Al-ʿuyayna in the Remote Region of Najd

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Shaykh Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb was born in 1703 in the village of al-ʿUyayna in the remote region of Najd on the Arabian Peninsula. Coming from a lineage of Islamic jurists and trained within the same discipline, his life took a decisive turn in 1739 when he embarked on an extensive campaign of reforming the religious practices of his contemporaries. As captured in his seminal treatise, Kitāb al-Tawḥid (The Book of God’s Unity), the core point in Ibnʿ Abd al-Wahhāb’s teaching was the return to a total and exclusive worship of God alone. Embedded in this was the rejection of veneration at physical sites such as shrines or graves and other practices generally considered as bidaʿ (innovations). The alliance formed between him and the tribal leader Muḥammad ibn Saʿūd in 1744 provided Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb with the necessary political backing and was the starting point for the political and ideological unification of the Arabian Peninsula. The area was, however, haunted by internal strife and by repeated conflicts with the Ottoman (Egyptian) forces during the larger part of the 19th century, and it was not until 1932 that a lasting polity was established—the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This political entity became pivotal for the dissemination of religious teachings that would later have a deep impact on numerous localities. Whereas I will return to the issue of Salafism more in detail in the next chapter, some remarks on my understanding and usage of the term are in order. The word itself is derived from the Arabical-salaf al-sāliḥ ̣, “the pious ancestors”,1 and refers to a theological trait within Islam emerging during the Abbasid Caliphate. Although I in this study use the term in connection with the teaching Shaykh Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, it does not mean that I equate Salafism with Wahhabism.2 The reason for my avoidance of the term Wahhabism is

1 This refers to the Prophet, his immediate companions and their successors until the third century of the Islamic calendar. 2 My understanding of the term Salafism and the distinction between Salafism and Wahhabism is largely informed by the views of Meijer (2009) and Haykel (2009). 2 chapter one its pejorative connotation, consequently rejected by all my Salafi infor- mants. Also, even if the Salafi movement in Bale was much indebted to Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s teachings, it also incorporated ideas from a wider array of Salafi thinkers, something which became evident during the 1990s when the movement became increasingly fragmented (dis- cussed in chapters eight and nine). Salafism should furthermore not be confused with the 19th-century modernist movement in Egypt often referred to as Salafiyya, based on the ideas of Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghāni (d. 1897), Muḥammad ʿAbduh (d. 1905) and Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935). This movement emerged, as I will elaborate on in the next chapter, under different circumstances, and would later in the 20th century evolve into a more political oriented current, commonly known by its denominator Islamism. At the time of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, the Oromo of Bale had yet to embrace Islam. While Islam was firmly rooted among peoples along the Somali littoral and in the eastern Ethiopian hinterland, it was not until the end of the 18th century that the process of Islamisation com- menced in Bale. Adapting the new faith to their religious and cultural universe, the religious ideas and practices that emerged in Bale differed a great deal from what Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb would have considered as authentic or true Islam. However, Bale and the Arabian Peninsula remained at this stage far apart. In his enlightening study of Islam in 19th century Wollo (north- eastern Ethiopia), Hussein Ahmed observed that although indigenous Ethiopian Islam was an overtly dynamic phenomenon affected by winds of change in the wider world of Islam, “it is interesting to note that Ethiopian Islam did not respond to the Wahhabi call” (2001: 73). The intention of this study is not to show Hussein Ahmed wrong. Yet, looking more than a century ahead, we witness a completely different situation, in which Salafism has appeared as one of the strongest impetuses for religious change in Muslim Ethiopia.

Objectives

Focusing on the locality of Bale, this study tells the story of the emer- gence of Salafism in this part of Ethiopia and follows the movement’s development from the late 1960s, its rapid expansion in the 1990s until 2006. Viewing Salafism from the angle of Bale does not mean that the local-translocal is treated as a “binary world-map”, in which every-