WAHABEES, wa-hd'bfz: Adherents of a reforming sect of Mohammedans. The name is derived from that of the founder, Mohammed ibn Abd alWahab (b. in 1691 at Horemeleh, a town in the Nejd, Central Arabia; d. in 1787). In his early days he traveled extensively, perhaps as far as India; and, comparing Mohammedan life, practise, and theology with his reading of the Koran, he concluded that the essence of the faith was no longer held, its primitive faith no more maintained, and that most Mohammedans were idolaters. He therefore determined to attempt a reform which should do away with the accretions of creed and custom, and restore the religion to its primitive purity and simplicity. He began his preaching when he was about forty, polemizing against appeal to Mohammedan walis or saints, pilgrimages to the shrines, and paying honor there by prayers to or through the saints by dedicatory offerings. He emphasized abstinence from liquors and particularly from tobacco. With this went hatred of the Turks, the natural effect of which was that political consequences attended the results of the religious aspirations as the movement ultimately spread over nearly the whole of Arabia, excepting only its extreme borders, and even surging over into the Euphrates valley.

Interested in the movement was Ibn Saoud, who became patron of the founder of the sect and lent his arms to second the religious propaganda. He reaped his reward in the founding of a kingdom which for a time covered central Arabia. His son, who succeeded in 1765, assumed the titles of imam and sultan. The progress of conquest went side by side with the preaching for half a century. By 1804 Mecca and Medinah were in the hands of the Wahabees, and pilgrimages to those places were permitted only to adherents of the sect. This was a direct challenge to the Sublime Ports, and, besides, aroused the animosity of the entire Mohammedan world. As a consequence the Turkish Government entrusted the curbing of Wahabee power to the Egyptian Mehemet Ali. Piratical operations on the part of some Wahabees brought about also intervention by the British government in the region of the Persian Gulf in 1810 and 1819. The campaigns covered eleven years, and not till 1818 was the political power of the Wahabees disintegrated. The remoteness of the Nejd, the focus of Wahabee feeling, permitted about 1840 a renascence of Wahabee politica,lism, though on a much smaller scale. This region is still devoted to Wahabism, remaining nominally Turkish, but practically independent, and ruled by two powerful sheikhs.

The essential contentions of the Wahabees, apart from those mentioned above as contained in the preaching of the founder, are rejection, as not bind-

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ing, of the decisions in canon law made by the. ortho dox sects and also of ijma (see Mohammed, Mohammedanism, V., § 1) except as embodied in the agree ments of the "companions" (of the prophet). The result is that upon each Mohammedan devolves the duty and privilege of constructing his own doctrine from the Koran and from tradition in its strictest form. As exegetes the Wahabees are extreme liter alists. The theological influence of the sect is wide ly extended, and even in India has been felt as a po litical complication. But that influence is on the whole in the direction of purity and makes for the betterment of Mohammedanism and against its scholasticism.

Geo. W. Gilmore.

Bibliography: D. B. Macdonald, Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence, and Constitutional Theory, pp. 60-62, 283-285, New York, 1903; item, Aspects of Islam, pp. 47, 285, ib. 1911; and the literature under Arabia; and Mohammed, Mohammedanism