16. The Ottoman Empire

Constantinople

Not since the Qarmatians in the ninth century, had there been so much desecration brought upon the city of Mecca and Medina as the Wahhabi movement, founded by Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab (d. 1201/1787), who was influenced by the puritanical fanaticism of Ibn Taymiyyah. By supporting the Wahhabi movement, the British were seeking to exacerbate the Ottoman Empire’s growing weaknesses. The typical strategy was that of Divide and Conquer. Much of the Ottoman Empire consisted of numerous ethnicities, united in their allegiance to Islam and to the Caliphate as its guardian. By dividing the Ottoman territories into numerous independent and competing states, separated mainly along ethnic lines, they could be more easily challenged. Effectively, the goal of the British was to weaken the Ottoman Empire by pitting Muslim against Muslim, in this case, Arab against Turk. However, in Islam, Muslims fighting Muslims is of course considered an enormity. Therefore, the only way to convince the Arab Muslims to fight their fellow Muslims was to suggest that they were not Muslims after all, that they had apostatized and become “unbelievers.”

According to two narrations in Sahih Bukhari, the Prophet Mohammed asks God to bless the areas of Bilad al-Sham (Syria) and Yemen. When his companions asked, “Our Najd [central region of Saudi Arabia] as well?” he replied:

 

There will appear earthquakes and afflictions, and from there will come out the side of the head (i.e. “horns”) of Satan.[1]

 

It is well known among historians that Ottoman Empire traced their dynasty to a mythical figure called Oghuz Khagan, who was connected the Ottoman dynasty with Japheth, son of Noah. Less well known is that genealogy was replaced by Ottoman historiography with Esau, whose descendants, referred as the “sons of Isaac” were foretold in a Hadith from the Prophet Mohammed to eventually conquer the city of Constantinople.[2] The Ottoman Empire rose to replace the crumbling Arab empire of the Abbasids. In the thirteenth century, as the Crusades were waning, a great onslaught came in upon the Muslim world from the east: the redoubtable Mongols. Genghis Khan (c. 1162 – 1227), the self-styled “Scourge of God,” moved his hordes westward to Iran, conquering all lands in their path. Many centers of civilization were stormed and sacked, and inhabitants were slain by the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. After taking northern China, their conquests turned west and they poured into Russia, then raided Europe. Pressure continued upon the Middle East. The Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor were defeated in 1243. Starting in 1252, to rid the world of the Assassins and to destroy the Abbasid caliphate, Hulegu Khan (c. 1217 – 1265) razed the fortress of Alamut.

In 1258, following a siege of several months, Baghdad fell and was given over completely to the Mongols. Before laying siege to the city, Hulegu sent emissaries from western Persia to the caliph al-Musta’sim (1213 – 1258) proposing his surrender. The caliph arrogantly replied that with all of Islam behind him, he had no fear. Musta’sim, related Ian Frazier, was “described as a weak, vacillating layabout who liked to drink sherbet and keep company with musicians and clowns.”[3] The assault began at the end of January. When Mongol siege engines breached Baghdad’s fortifications, a desperate Mustasim frantically tried to negotiate, but Hulegu was now intent on total victory. The Caliph eventually surrendered the city on February 10, and the Mongols began looting three days later. Later Muslim writers estimated between 800,000 and two million deaths, while Hulegu himself, in a letter to Louis IX of France, noted that his army had killed 200,000.[4] The Travels of Marco Polo reports that upon finding the Caliph’s great stores of treasure, which could have been spent on the defense of his realm, Hulegu locked him up with his treasure room without food or water, telling him “eat of thy treasure as much as thou wilt, since thou art so fond of it.” When the Caliph protested that he could not eat gold, Hulegu asked him why he hadn’t used his wealth to strengthen his army. After the Caliph responded, “That was the will of God,” Hulegu replied, “What will happen to you is the will of God, also.”[5]

The Mongol invasion was identified with the cataclysmic surge of Gog and Magog, predicted to the Quran and Hadith.[6] As traveler and Friar Riccoldo da Monte di Croce recorded in c. 1291, the Mongols “say themselves that they are descended from Gog and Magog: and on this account they are called Mogoli, as if from a corruption of Magogoli.”[7] Marco Polo placed Gog and Magog among the Tartars in Tenduc, but then claims that the names Gog and Magog are translations of the place-names Ung and Mungul, inhabited by the Ung and Mongols respectively.[8] Mongol campaigns in Northern China, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East caused extensive destruction, but there are no exact figures available for that time. According to Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones in Atlas of World Population History, the death toll for the Mongol conquests reached as many as 40-60 million. Theories also propose that the Mongols brought the Black Plague from Central Asia, resulting in the deaths of as many as 50 million people, perhaps 50% of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century.[9] This recalls another Hadith which reports that to kill off the Gog and Magog, God will send a Naghafan, a kind of worm, at the back of their necks.[10] Among the symptoms of the plague are smooth, painful lymph gland swelling called a bubo, commonly found in the groin, but may occur in the armpits or neck, most often near the site of the initial infection.[11] As a result of the devastation, the Prophet Mohammed explained, “By the One Who has the soul of Mohammed in His Hand, the beasts of the earth will go fat and will find sufficient nourishment from their flesh and blood.”[12]

In the thirteenth century, Osman I (1323/4), as leader of Turkish clansmen, began to acquire by capture or alliance a number of small towns in Anatolia, founding what came to be called the Ottoman Empire, which over the next two centuries, began asserting control over an increasingly large area, including eastern Thrace, most of Bulgaria, Macedonia, and parts of Serbia, Bosnia and Hungary, even crossing the Danube, as well as extensive advances into Asia. However, the empire was yet to contain the Roman capital of Constantinople. This task would be left to Mehmed the Conqueror in the fifteenth century, to fulfill the long awaited prophecy. When Mohammed was asked which city the Muslims would conquer first, Constantinople or Rome, he answered, “the city of Heraclius,” and, “truly you shall conquer Constantinople, and truly what a wonderful leader her leader will be, and truly what a wonderful army will that army be.”[13]

The Prophet Mohammed is to have said: “Verily, you shall conquer Constantinople. What a wonderful army will that army be, and what a wonderful commander will that conqueror be.”[14] The Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 commanded by the 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II (1432 – 1481), commonly known as Mehmed the Conqueror, was perhaps one of the greatest battles in history. Constantinople, or Stambul as the citizens called their city, was the last remaining stronghold of the former Byzantine Empire. Constantinople had remained virtually impregnable for centuries because of its particular geographical formation. The city was located on a peninsula on the Bosphorus, the channel that separates Europe from Asia, and the northern walls of the city were flanked by an inlet known as the Golden Horn, entry into which could be prevented from its mouth. In one of the greatest military maneuvers’ in history, Mehmed II constructed a greased wooden ramp from the shore of the Bosphorus, and sixty-seven ships of the Ottoman fleet were hauled up over land and down to the Golden Horn. In a massive assault launched on May 29, 1453, cannon fire breached the walls, and the city was taken. Mehmed II entered the city, and went to the famous Hagia Sophia, which was converted into a mosque and offered prayers. Byzantine historian George Sphrantzes (1401 – c. 1478), an eyewitness to the fall of Constantinople, described the Sultan’s actions:

 

On the third day after the fall of our city, the Sultan celebrated his victory with a great, joyful triumph. He issued a proclamation: the citizens of all ages who had managed to escape detection were to leave their hiding places throughout the city and come out into the open, as they were to remain free and no question would be asked. He further declared the restoration of houses and property to those who had abandoned our city before the siege. If they returned home, they would be treated according to their rank and religion, as if nothing had changed.[15]

 

Suleyman (1494 – 1566), who succeeded Selim I, was called The Magnificent by the Europeans, and Kanuni, “The Lawgiver,” by his own people. Within the first year of his reign he conducted a campaign against Belgrade in 1521, and the following year, assembled his forces in Asia for an attack on the island of Rhodes. Setting out from Istanbul in 1526, he opened all of Hungary. Suleyman also waged the first of attacks against the city of Vienna. On October 12 1529, mines seriously damaged its wall, and infantry attacks nearly succeeded in opening the city. Both sides grew weary however, and the Ottomans decided to retreat, which was deemed as a miracle by the defenders of Vienna, who were on the verge of surrender. Suleyman equipped and beautified Constantinople and other cities with mosques, schools, hospitals, palaces, mausoleums, bridges, aqueducts and public baths, two hundred and thirty-five of which are said to have been built by his chief architect Sinan. Originally a Christian from Anatolia, Sinan developed into the most distinguished architect that Turkey produced. His masterpiece was the magnificent mosque named Suleymaniye, named after his master, and designed to eclipse the Hagia Sophia.[16]

Though the Ottoman Turks made significant contributions in three fields: architecture, poetry and statesmanship, they had a particular talent for organization, and implemented one of the most efficient bureaucracies perhaps the world has ever known.[17] The Turks safeguarded the rights of non-Muslims within the empire, by dividing the Jews and Christians into millets. These were autonomous self-governing religious communities, each organized under its own laws, and headed by a religious leader that was responsible to the central government, particularly for the paying taxes and maintaining internal security. Taxes to be paid often included the devsirme, whereby Christian youth from the Balkans were recruited, converted to Islam, and shuttled back to Istanbul to receive their education, and to offer a lifetime of service to the Sultan. The military arm supplied by the devsirme system was known as the famous Janissary corps.

The central administration of the empire consisted of three main parts. The first was the Sultan’s extensive household. Second was the departments of government grouped under the control of the Grand Vizier, who was the Sultan’s deputy in all state matters. Lastly, the Muslim religious institution consisted of functionaries concerned with education and law, grouped under the overlordship of the Shaykh al-Islam. The broad efficiency of the Ottoman political system was dependent on the competence of the most important of these functionaries, the Qadis, responsible for local administration and criminal law. Although, when the Qadis began to issue rulings for political or monetary motives, the entire Ottoman political system started to collapse.[18]

Ottoman successes were interrupted briefly in the early part of the seventeenth century, but were eventually resumed. In 1669 the Venetians were forced to recognize their loss of Crete. Hungary was invaded in 1664. This was the last Turkish conquest of a European kingdom, although the Ukrainians acknowledged Ottoman authority and the Poles surrendered Podolia, and in 1683 the Turks launched their last and unsuccessful siege against Vienna. While the empire lasted several more centuries, from this point forward, due to internal decay, and its inability to keep pace with the technological advancement of the West, its power slowly began to decline.

 

Wahhabism 

The US Department of Defense released a translation of an Iraqi intelligence document in September 2002, titled “The Emergence of Wahhabism and its Historical Roots,” which reproduced research by several Arab historians which indicated that Abdul Wahhab, and his sponsor Ibn Saud, who created the Saudi dynasty that now rules Saudi Arabia, were secretly of Jewish origin.[19] Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab, wrote Dr. Mustafa Turan in The Dönmeh Jews, was a descendant of a family of Dönmeh.[20] Turan maintains that Abdul Wahhab’s grandfather, Sulayman was actually Shulman, having belonged to the Jewish community of Bursa in Turkey. From there he settled in Damascus where he feigned Islam but was apparently expelled for practicing sorcery. He then fled to Egypt, where he again faced condemnation and so made his way to the Hijaz, in the western portion of the Arabian Peninsula, where he got married and fathered Abdul Wahhab’s father. The same is claimed in The Dönmeh Jews and the Origin of the Saudi Wahabis, by Rifat Salim Kabar.[21]

The Aniza tribe—to which the Saudis as well as the ruling Sabah family of Kuwait belong—originally issued from Khaybar in Arabia, which was initially inhabited by Jews before Islam. A report of the Saudi family also being of Jewish ancestry was published by Mohammad Sakher, who, it is claimed, was ordered killed by the Saudi regime for his revelations. The Wahabi Movement/The Truth and Roots, by Abdul Wahhab Ibrahim al-Shammari, relates a similar account to Sakher’s, according to which Ibn Saud is apparently descended from Mordechai bin Ibrahim bin Mushi, a Jewish merchant from Basra. Purportedly, when this Mordechai was approached by members from the Arabian tribe of Aniza, he then claimed to be one of them and traveled with them to Najd where his name became Markhan bin Ibrahim bin Musa.[22]

The Iraqi intelligence documents also resorted to the Hempher Memoirs. British collusion in Wahhab’s mission is detailed in a work that appeared in the 1970s entitled Memoirs of Mr. Hempher. The work has been dismissed by critics as a hoax, but already in 1888, Ayyub Sabri Pasha, a well-known Ottoman writer and Turkish naval admiral who served the Ottoman army in the Arabian Peninsula, recounted Abdul Wahhab’s association and plotting with a British spy named Hempher, who “inspired in him the tricks and lies that he had learned from the British Ministry of the Commonwealth.”[23] Whatever the case may be, the absurdity of Abdul Wahhab’s claims and the direction and ramifications of his pronouncements point to the fact that he was, in one way or another, in the service of British colonialism. Most importantly, despite their fervent disavowals, the mission of the Wahhabis only managed to survive against adversity from other Muslims through British support.

What makes Abdul Wahhab’s mission so suspicious, then, is that his teachings provided precisely the pretext the British required. Instead of addressing where true reforms were needed in the Ottoman Empire, he instead chose to fixate on a far more trivial issue. The particular practice that Abdul Wahhab condemned was known as Tawassul, where Sufis would ask intercession from God through their Saints, or Walis. This, Abdul Wahhab characterized as Shirk, or polytheism, and therefore amounting to Kufr, or apostasy, because he believed it to involve indirectly attributing divinity to the Saint. In other words, it treated these saints as gods. Therefore, in his mind, it constituted an act of apostasy which supposedly justified the perpetrator being killed.

Refutations of Abdul Wahhab began with his own brother and father. Abdul Wahhab claimed, declared his brother Sulayman:

 

….to follow the Holy Quran and al-Sunna [the example of the Prophet and his companions as accepted by Sunnis] and dares to deduce from their teachings, paying no heed to any opposition. Anyone who opposes him he calls a heretic, although he possesses none of the qualifications of the mujtahedeen [those who exercise independent reasoning].[24]

 

During Abdul Wahhab’s early studies in the Hijaz his teachers Mohammed Hayet Sindi and Mohammed Suleiman Kurdi had suspected him of atheism. In Najd itself, Abdul Wahhab’s native region, the campaign of criticism was led by a Hanbali scholar named Mohammed bin Abdarahman Afaleq. Refutations spread rapidly to Iraq, Yemen and to North Africa. In 1743 Ahmad ibn Barkat Tandatawi, a Shafi scholar in Mecca wrote a refutation, which was endorsed by ten scholars, including the Muftis of the four Madhhabs. But the most important refutation was that of Ahmad ibn Zayni Dahlan, the Shafi Mufti of Mecca, who wrote Fitnatul Wahhabiya (“The Wahhabi Controversy”).[25] The celebrated early nineteenth-century Hanafi scholar Mohammed Amin ibn Abidin (d. 1836 AD) harshly condemned Abdul Wahhab and his theology:

 

He claimed to be a Hanbali, but his thinking was such that only he alone was a Muslim, and everyone else was a mushriq [polytheist]. Under this guise, he said that killing the Ahl as-Sunnah [those who follow Sunni tradition] was permissible, until Allah destroyed his [people] in the year 1233 AH [AD 1818] through the Muslim army.[26]

 

In about 1744, a partnership was forged between Abdul Wahhab and Mohammed ibn Saud, who married his eldest son Abdul Aziz ibn Saud to Abdul Wahhab’s daughter, the founding father of the Saud–Wahhabi dynasty, the future rulers of Saudi Arabia. In 1746, Abdul Wahhab issued a formal proclamation of “jihad” against the Ummah, that is, against all except those who followed his prescriptions for “purifying” his version of monotheism (Tawhid). The exceptional nature of Wahhab’s declaration is remarked upon by David Commins, in The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia:

 

Since early Islamic history, Muslims have differed on the essential point of what constitutes correct belief, but at most times, such differences did not result in military conflict or the adoption of coercive measures as in an inquisition.[27]

 

With the support of al Saud, and fired by Abdul Wahhab’s “Fatwas,” the Wahhabis went on a rampage, killing thousands of Muslims, taking their women and children as slaves, confiscating their property, and destroying numerous Islamic shrines and relics. They destroyed as many tombs of the Prophet’s Companions as they could find and in Medina plundered the treasury of the Prophet’s mosque. But, in the words of one nineteenth century English writer, they were notorious for “preferring slaughter to booty” in their conquests.[28] Also, setting the precedent for the unusually cruel interpretation of Islam which has come to characterize perceptions of the Sharia, Abdul Wahhab ordered the stoning of an adulteress. Contemporary reactions indicate the punishment was quite rare. As David Commins’ explains, “In the chronicles, there is something of a ‘Yes, it is hard to believe, but it is true’ tone to the account of the stoning.”[29]

 

Horns of Satan

In 1801 and 1802, the Wahhabis attacked and captured the Shiah holy cities of Karbala and Najaf in today’s Iraq, massacred parts of the population and destroyed the tomb of Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of Mohammed and son of Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali. In 1803 and 1804, the Wahhabis captured Mecca and Medina and destroyed historical monuments and holy sites, such as the shrine built over the tomb of Fatimah, the daughter of Mohammed. When they intended to destroy the grave of Mohammed himself as “idolatrous,” it caused outrage throughout the Islamic world.[30] In Mecca, the tombs of direct relations of Mohammed located at Jannatul Mualla cemetery, including that of his first wife Khadijah, were demolished. The initial dismantling of the sites began in 1806 when the Wahhabi army of the First Saudi State occupied Medina and systematically levelled many of the structures at the vast Jannat al-Baqi cemetery adjacent to the Al-Masjid al-Nabawi (“Prophet’s Mosque”), housing the remains of many of the members of the Prophet’s family, close companions and central figures of early Islam. The various mausoleums constructed by the Ottoman Turks were levelled. Mosques across the city were also targeted and an attempt was made to demolish Mohammed’s tomb, when widespread criticism reaching as far away as India, eventually led to abandoning all such attempts.[31]

Finally, in 1811, the Ottoman Caliph in Istanbul sent an army headed by Muhammed Ali Pasha (1830 – 1895), the Ottoman Albanian viceroy and governor who became the de facto ruler of Egypt in 1805, to fight and annihilate the Wahhabi rebellion. Mohammed Ali Pasha was the second son of a Bektashi Albanian tobacco and shipping merchant named Ibrahim Agha, who also served as an Ottoman commander of a small unit in their hometown.[32] Following their defeat, the Wahhabi leaders, Uthman ul Mudayiqi and Mubarak ibn Maghyan, were sent to Istanbul, and paraded through the streets until they were executed. Ali Pasha also sent troops under his second son, Ibrahim Pasha, to root the Wahhabis out of Syria, Iraq and Kuwait. Those Arabs that had suffered at the hands of the Wahhabis rose in revolt joining Ali Pasha’s forces. In 1818, the Wahhabi stronghold of Diriyah was taken and destroyed, though some of the Saudis received protection from the British in Jeddah. Their leader, Abdullah ibn Saud, was sent to Istanbul where he was executed along with other captured Wahhabis by order of Mustafa Asim Efendi, the Shaykh al Islam of the day. The rest of the Wahhabi clan was held in captivity in Cairo. The much smaller Emirate of Najd was established in 1824.

Nevertheless, throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, the Al Saud contested control of the interior of what was to become Saudi Arabia and repeatedly sought British support against another Arabian ruling family, the Al Rashid, who ruled the Emirate of Jabal Shammar. In 1848, Faisal bin Turki Al Saud (1785 – 1865), the second ruler of the Second Saudi State and a relative of the executed Abdullah, returned to central Arabia from Cairo where Mohammed Ali Pasha had held him captive since 1838, and “appealed” to the British Political Resident in the Persian city of Bushire “to support his representative in Trucial Oman.”[33] Again in 1851, Faisal applied to the British Resident, this time for assistance and support in collecting the Zakat (annual Islamic poor-tax) from Bahrain. Since the local Muslims did not recognize the authority of the Saudis to tax them, the Zakat was in essence a form of extortion.[34] In 1865, enticed by Faisal’s appeals, the British finally decided to send Mr. Lewis Pelly, a Colonel in the British army, to visit him in Riyadh. There were two types of desert warfare, Faisal explained to Pelly at their meeting: religious war and political war. Political warfare involves compromise. But “when the question is one of religion,” he added, “we kill everybody.”[35]

In 1866, a year after Faisal’s death, his son Abdullah bin Faisal Al Saud (1831–1889) signed a “friendship” treaty with the British.[36] However, Abdullah and his younger brother Saud spent most of the rest of the nineteenth century fighting each other over the question of succession. While the Saudis were fighting among themselves, the Ottoman government and its local Arab allies, the patriotic Rashid clan of Hail under the leader Mohammad Ibn Rasheed (d. 1897), asserted their power and position in central Arabia. Eventually in 1891, the Rashidis succeeded in defeating the Saudi/Wahhabi alliance and in capturing Riyadh from them. By 1891, the Al Rashid were victorious and the Al Saud were driven into exile in Kuwait.

 


[1] Sahih Bukhari. Hadith no. 1037.

[2] Evrim Binbaş. “The King’s Two Lineages: Esau, Jacob, and the Ottoman Mythical Imagination in the Subhatu’l-Ahbar.”  In: Markus Friedrich & Jörg B. Quenzer. Genealogical Manuscripts in Cross Cultural Perspective (De Gruyter, 2025); Mohammed Salim Al-Amari, Fauzi Deraman, Benouda Bensaid, Mohd Roslan Mohd Nor, Mahmud Ahmad, Tarik Ladjal & Fadila Grine. “Children of Isaac or Ishmael? A Critical Examination of Abu Hurayrah's Narration on the Conquest of Constantinople.” Middle-East Journal of Scientific Research, 11: 9 (2012).

[3] Ian Frazier. “Invaders: Destroying Baghdad.” New Yorker (April 18, 2005). Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/25/invaders-3

[4] David Morgan. The Mongols. The Peoples of Europe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1986), p. 133.

[5] Ian Frazier. “Invaders: Destroying Baghdad.” New Yorker (April 18, 2005). Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/25/invaders-3

[6] Jean-Pierre Filiu. Apocalypse in Islam (University of California Press, 2011), p. 30.

[7] John Andrew Boyle. “Alexander and the Mongols.” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1979 (2): 123–136.

[8] Deborah Higgs Strickland. “Text, Image and Contradiction in the Devisement du monde.” In Akbari, Suzanne Conklin; Iannucci, Amilcare. Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West (University of Toronto Press, 2008). p. 38.

[9] “Economic life after Covid-19: Lessons from the Black Death.” The Economic Times (March 29, 2020); Mark Wheelis. “Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa.” Emerging Infectious Diseases, 8: 9 (September 2002), pp. 971–975.

[10] Ibn Kathir. Book of the End: Great Trials and Tribulations (Darussalam).

[11] Inglesby TV, Dennis DT, Henderson DA, Bartlett JG, Ascher MS, Eitzen E, et al. “Plague as a biological weapon: medical and public health management. Working Group on Civilian Biodefense.” JAMA, 283: 17 (May 2000), pp. 2281–2290.

[12] Ibn Kathir. Book of the End: Great Trials and Tribulations (Darussalam).

[13] Musnad, II, 176. Hakim al-Nisaburi noted that this Hadith is sound and fulfills the conditions set out by Bukhari. al-Mustadrak ala al-Sahîhayn, ed. Mustafa Abdulkadir Ata, Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyye, 1411/1990, vol. 4, p. 468. Retrieved from https://istanbultarihi.ist/423-the-conquest-hadith-and-the-muslim-sieges-of-constantinople#sdfootnote5sym

[14] Musnad, I, 176; IV, 335; Darimi, “Muqaddima”, p. 43. Retrieved from https://istanbultarihi.ist/423-the-conquest-hadith-and-the-muslim-sieges-of-constantinople#sdfootnote6sym

[15] George Sphrantzes. The Fall of the Byzantine Empire: A Chronicle (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980).

[16] Hitti. History of the Arabs, p. 715.

[17] Karen Barkey. “The Ottoman Empire (1299–1923): The Bureaucratization of Patrimonial Authority.” In: Peter Crooks & Timothy H. Parsons (ed.). Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 102–26.

[18] Ömer Düzbakar. “Bribery in Islam-Ottoman Penal Codes and Examples From The Bursa Shari’a Court Records of 18th Century.” Bilig, 51 (Autumn, 2009), pp. 55-84. Retrieved from https://bilig.yesevi.edu.tr/yonetim/icerik/makaleler/2704-published.pdf

[19] Federation of American Scientists. Retrieved from http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/iraqi/wahhabi.pdf

[20] Correspondence, dated 24 Sep 2002, within the General Military Intelligence directorate (GMID), regarding a research study titled, “The Emergence of AI-Wahhabiyyah Movement and its Historical Roots.” Defense Intelligence Agency. Document #: ISGQ-2003-00046659.

[21] Ibid.

[22] “The Saudi Dynasty: From where is it? And who is the real ancestor of this family?” Retrieved from http://www.fortunecity.com/boozers/bridge/632/history.html

[23] Ayyub Sabri Pasha. Part Two: The Beginnings and Spread of Wahhabism.

[24] Charles Allen. God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad (Da Capo Press, 2006), p. 55.

[25] Hamadi Redissi, “The Refutation of Wahhabism in Arabic Sources, 1745-1932,” Kingdom Without Borders: Saudi Arabia’s Political, Religious and Media Frontiers, ed. Madawi Al-Rasheed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 164.

[26] Allen. God’s Terrorists, p. 68.

[27] p. 26.

[28] William Gifford Palgrave. Personal Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia (1862-1863) (London: Macmillan and Co, 1993), p. 184.

[29] David Commins. The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2006), p. 19.

[30] Ahmed, Irfan. “The Destruction of Holy Sites in Mecca and Medina.” Islamica Magazine, 15, p. 71. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20110713063137/http://islamicamagazine.com/?p=424

[31] Ibid.

[32] Aksan Virginia. Ottoman Wars, 1700–1860: An Empire Besieged (Routledge, 2013), pp. 306–307.

[33] Gary Troeller. The Birth of Saudi Arabia: Britain and the Rise of the House of Sa’ud (London: Frank Cass, 1976), p. 15.

[34] Abdullah Mohammad Sindi. “The Direct Instruments of Western Control over the Arabs: The Shining Example of the House of Saud.” Retrieved from http://www.social-sciences-and-humanities.com/PDF/house_of_saud.pdf

[35] Cited in Robert Lacey. The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Saud (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 145.

[36] Abdullah Mohammad Sindi. “The Direct Instruments of Western Control over the Arabs: The Shining Example of the House of Saud.” Retrieved from http://www.social-sciences-and-humanities.com/PDF/house_of_saud.pd

Divide & Conquer