Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (born c. 1703 CE / 1115 AH in Uyayna, in the Najd region of central Arabia; died 1792 CE / 1206 AH in Dir'iyya) was a scholar of the Hanbali school — one of the four classical Sunni schools of law (madhhab) — from the Banu Tamim tribe. He came from a family of judges and jurists and studied first with his father, then in Medina. Biographers report further study in Basra (southern Iraq); reports of longer journeys to Baghdad, Iran, Damascus, and Egypt are uncertain, as the earliest sources do not confirm them.

He is best known for an uncompromising emphasis on tawhid (the absolute oneness of God) and a campaign against practices he condemned as shirk (associating others with God) or bid'a (unsanctioned innovation) — among them veneration at tombs and sacred trees. After composing his central work, Kitab al-Tawhid ("The Book of God's Oneness"), and a contested attempt at reform in Uyayna, he moved to nearby Dir'iyya. There, in 1744, he and the amir Muhammad ibn Saud made a pact binding the scholar's mission to the ruler's growing power — the root of the alliance between the Al Saud and his descendants (the Al al-Shaykh).

His movement, called "Wahhabism" chiefly by outsiders, has been embraced by some Muslims as a return to pure monotheism and sharply criticized by others — including, in his lifetime, his own brother Sulayman — as harshly exclusionary. This site reports those as positions held, not as settled judgments.