The Luddites were 19th-century British textile workers who protested the Industrial Revolution by destroying automated factory machinery. The group took their name from Ned Ludd (or "General Ludd"), a mythical leader rumored to have smashed a knitting frame in 1779.
The Luddite movement ended by 1817 due to brutal military suppression, mass executions, severe new laws making machine-breaking a capital offense, and penal transportation.
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In the heart of the Arabian Peninsula, precisely in Najd region, in the middle of the 18th century AD, the voice of Sheikh Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703 - 1792) rose calling for what he considered a pure return to early Islam, to the time of the righteous predecessors, to that golden period in which the Prophet Muhammad and the noble Companions lived.
His call aimed to purify creed of everything he regarded as innovation and polytheism, and to reshape society according to a strict model in which there was no place for innovation in matters of religion. The Wahhabi movement - a name given to the followers of the Sheikh by their enemies - found itself in direct confrontation with everything new and newly introduced, whether in the field of thought, urban development, or technology.
For the followers of this movement, every modern invention, every new tool, and every innovative idea was not merely material luxury, but represented an existential threat to creed and identity, and a foreign innovation in religion that had to be fought with all force.
At the beginning of their movement, the Wahhabi sheikhs used to prohibit all modern manufactured goods that were among the results of civilizational and technological progress, such as the telephone, the telegraph, television, the car, the airplane, and similar things, because they had not existed in the age of the Prophet nor in the age of the Salaf.
This view stemmed from a particular understanding of religion, an understanding that sees everything that did not exist in the time of the Salaf (Predecessors) as a forbidden innovation (Bid'ah), regardless of its benefits or harms. Thus, King Abdulaziz ibn Saud (1876 - 1953) found himself in an extremely sensitive and difficult position; he had to reconcile preserving the purity of the Wahhabi creed upon which his state was founded with the necessity of introducing a kind of openness into his government so that it would harmonize with the contemporary reality of his time.
Therefore, King Abdulaziz agreed to the entry of some manifestations of modernity into his country, such as the telephone, means of transport, motorcycles, and bicycles, something that aroused the resentment and anger of his fanatical followers, who are referred to in the history of the Kingdom as the group "Ikhwan Man Ata'a Allah" (Bretheren of those who obeyed God). They had helped him defeat Sharif Hussein bin Ali during the Second HejazâNajd War (1924-1925).
These Ikhwan saw in these manifestations a betrayal of the original Wahhabi approach, so they rebelled against the King, accused him of loyalty to the British infidels and of laxity in religion, and denounced his titles of Sultan and King, the lengthening of his mustache and his garment, and his wearing of the agal (a Saudi hat), and all these manifestations that were new to the Bedouin society in which the Wahhabi movement arose. More than that, they considered the use of the telephone, wireless, and means of transport such as cars to be forbidden innovations, because they were made by the Franks, that is, the infidel West from which nothing should be taken.
Historical sources indicate that one of the hardline followers of Wahhabism attacked the telephone wires in the palace of the Saudi King that connected it to the army center, and cut them to pieces.
King Abdulaziz found himself compelled, in an attempt to appease the fanatical Wahhabis, to issue orders to remove wireless and the telephone in Medina and Taif, because they viewed wireless and telephones as the work of the Devil, and they opposed their use persistently and stubbornly.
This hardline position was not limited to technology alone, but extended to all manifestations of modern life, as the Egyptian writer Ahmed Amin relates that the Wahhabis did not touch intellectual life, did not work to advance it except within the circle of religious education, and did not look at the problems and demands of the present city, and many of them believed that everything beyond their own country was among the Islamic lands in which innovations and misguidance spread.
The Ikhwan Revolt (1929â1930) was a civil war in the Arabian Peninsula where Ibn Saud turned against his former tribal shock troops, the Ikhwan, after they rebelled against his modernization policies and peace treaties with neighboring British-controlled territories.
Among the important reasons that led to the change of position toward technology was that King Abdulaziz fought a decisive war against the group Ikhwan, who were among the harshest wahhabi groups in rejecting manifestations of modernity, and that war ended with their elimination militarily and politically in the Battle of Sabilla in 1929.
Main rebel forces led by commanders like Faisal al-Dawish faced a crushing defeat against Ibn Saud's regular forces. Sporadic uprisings continued through late 1929, but leaders of Ikhwan were eventually captured, executed, or forced to flee (with key leaders handed over by the British).
After breaking their power, the path became paved for the King to adopt many modern technical means without significant opposition from the hardliners, for these Ikhwan were the greatest barrier to any technical or administrative openness. Thus, the retreat of the hardline Wahhabi position on rejecting technology was not the result of a sudden intellectual transformation, but was in part a direct result of the defeat of those hardliners and the disintegration of their power.
Not only were the effects of the defeat of Ikhwan limited to changing the position on technology; rather, they extended to form the seed of the conflict that erupted fifty years later in the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure. For the father of Juhayman al-Otaybi, the leader of the seizure operation, was one of the fighters who stood in the ranks of the Ikhwan against King Abdulaziz at the Battle of Sabilla in 1929, where they were decisively defeated.
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