INTRODUCTION

Respecting the Wahábys, various contradictory and erroneous statements have been given in the few accounts hitherto published. Some anecdotes of those remarkable sectaries, collected from the best sources of information to which I could obtain access in the East, may prove interesting to many readers. I must, however, regret, that during my residence in Hedjáz this country was, on account of the war with Mohammed Aly, closed against the people of Nedjd, who, above all others, were qualified to give faithful and accurate details of the Wahábys; while those Bedouins of the common classes, who had adopted the new faith, were, in general, wholly ignorant of its true import and doctrines.

The religion and government of the Wahábys may be very briefly defined, as a Muselmán puritanism, and a Bedouin government, in which the great chief is both the political and religious leader of the nation, exercising his authority in the same manner as the followers of Mohammed did over his converted countrymen. The founder of this sect is already known: a learned Arabian, named Abel el Waháb, who had visited various schools of the principal cities in the East (as is much the practice with his countrymen even now), being convinced by what he had observed during his travels, that the primitive faith of Islám, or Mohammedism, had become totally corrupted, and obscured by abuses, and that the far greater part of the people of the East, and especially the Turks, might be justly regarded as heretics.