The war was
carried into Nejd; Deriyeh, their capital, was sacked, and Ibn Saoud
himself taken prisoner and decapitated in front of St. Sophia's at
Constantinople. The movement of reform in Islam was thus put back for,
perhaps, another hundred years.
Still the seed cast by Abd el Wahhab has not been entirely without
fruit. Wahhabism, as a political regeneration of the world, has failed,
but the spirit of reform has remained. Indeed, the present unquiet
attitude of expectation in Islam has been its indirect result. Just as
the Lutheran reformation in Europe, though it failed to convert the
Christian Church, caused its real reform, so Wahhabism has produced a
real desire for reform if not yet reform itself in Mussulmans. Islam is
no longer asleep, and were another and a wiser Abd el Wahhab to appear,
not as a heretic, but in the body of the Orthodox sect, he might play
the part of Loyola or Borromeo with success.
The present condition of the Wahhabites as a sect is one of decline. In
India, and I believe in other parts of Southern Asia, their missionaries
still make converts and their preachers are held in high esteem. But at
home in Arabia their zeal has waxed cold, giving place to liberal ideas
which in truth are far more congenial to the Arabian mind.
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