INTRODUCTION

We come now to the second, and more radical, of the two major geographical discontinuities of ḥanbalite history. The scene shifts away from the great cities of the Fertile Crescent altogether; in their place we now encounter the scattered oases of the wilderness of Najd. The ḥanbalite school seems to have been well established in this desolate region of Arabia as early as the ninth/fifteenth century. Its situation here was naturally very different from what it was in the Fertile Crescent. Najdī ḥanbalism had to come to terms with a tribal society that could barely be described as urban, and which lacked political organisation above the level of the local chief who held sway over a single oasis. A further peculiarity of the position of the ḥanbalite school in Najd was that it was not in serious competition with other sects or schools. For the first time in its history, ḥanbalism had a society to itself. This is no doubt part of the reason why two-thirds of the pre-WahhābīNajdī ḥanbalite scholars known to us in the tenth to twelfth/sixteenth to eighteenth centuries were judges; who else could have filled these positions? It would be interesting to know how this exotic environment affected the practice of forbidding wrong. But we hear virtually nothing about it, a circumstance which may reflect no more than the general paucity of information for the pre-Wahhābī period of Najdī history.