This book written by a scholar and a retired professor of modern history at King Saud University in Riyadh Abdullah al-Uthaimın. It consists of the almost unchanged text of his doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Edinburgh in 1972. It is essential reading for scholars researching the early Wahhabi movement and the Saudi principality of al-Dir‘ı¯ya or the first Saudi state especially the study of the life and doctrine of Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab. The Saudi religious reform movement of the 18th and 19th centuries known in the west as Wahhabism is one of the most controversial and misunderstood religious movements of the modern Middle East. This biography of its founder Muhammad Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab is the first serious English-language account written not from a Western but an Arabian perspective. Based on exhaustive research of primary sources Abd-Allah Salih Al-Uthaimin reconstructs the social political and spiritual environment of the Arabian peninsula in the time of Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab. The author charts this movement's intellectual development and growing sway and unpicks the historic alliance of its founder with the House of Al-Saud: a uniquely close partnership of political and religious relationships whose legacy is felt in the Saudi state to this day. Al-Uthaimin also provides a detailed exposition and commentary on Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab's doctrines based on his published and unpublished works and explains his perspective on concepts such as tawhid takfir and sharia. This meticulously researched biography offers a unique insight into its complex and often controversial subject. As such it will become essential reading for anyone interested in political Islam Saudi Arabia and the modern Middle East. http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/79...
