Wahhabi, and Who Uses the Word

"Wahhabi" is a word used almost entirely by people describing somebody else. Those to whom it is applied generally reject it, and say Salafi, or ahl al-sunna wal-jamaa, or simply Muslim. The objection is theological before it is political: to name a school after a man is to suggest that he founded something, and the whole claim of the movement is that it founded nothing and restored what was already there.

The term was coined by opponents in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ottoman officials and rival Sunni scholars, and it has carried a polemical charge ever since. In current usage it is frequently a synonym for extremism, applied to Muslims who have no connection to the movement at all. Using it that way is inaccurate and it functions as a slur.

That does not mean the two words name the same thing.

• Wahhabism, properly speaking, is the specific eighteenth-century movement of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in Najd, joined from 1744 to the political fortunes of the house of Saud, with its own scholarly establishment, its own legal tradition within the Hanbali school, and a particular history of destroying tombs and shrines.
• Salafism as it exists now is a broader and later formation. It draws on the Najdi tradition, on the Egyptian Salafiyya of Abduh and Rida, and on the South Asian Ahl-i Hadith, and it took its modern shape from the 1960s, when Saudi funding and Muslim Brotherhood exiles met in the same institutions. Its characteristic method, the direct grading of hadith without deference to a school of law, owes as much to al-Albani, a Syrian-Albanian watchmaker who was not Najdi and was at odds with the Saudi religious establishment, as to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

Scholars disagree about how much of a distinction that is. Some treat Salafism as the export name for Wahhabism and regard the difference as presentational; others hold that the twentieth-century synthesis is genuinely a different thing from what preceded it, and point to the internal quarrels between Saudi state scholars and Salafis who reject their authority.

The practical rule this atlas follows: use Salafi for the movement, because that is what its adherents call themselves; use Wahhabi only for the specific Najdi movement and its institutional descendants, where the word does identifiable historical work; and do not use either as a description of Muslims in general.