Saudi Sufis: Compromise in the Hijaz, 1925-40

Abstract

In 1941, Abf'l-'Abbas al-Dandarawi (1898/9-1953) was expelled from Saudi Arabia after a dispute with King 'Abd al-'Aziz ibn Sa'fud over the celebration of the mawlid al-nabi.1 Abf'l-'Abbas, an Egyptian, had until this time been living in Mecca, from where he directed the Dandarawiyya, one of the many Sufi orders which derive from the great early-nineteenth-century Moroccan Sufi, Ahmad ibn Idris (1750/60-1837).2 The Dandarawiyya was at that time a large order, spread very widely, if thinly, across the Islamic world. That a Sufi should be expelled from Saudi Arabia by the Wahhabis seems at first sight to be entirely natural-the hostility of Wahhabis towards Sufism is of course well known-but what, in that case, was a Sufi order doing in Mecca as late as the 1940s in the first place? This article will suggest that although Wahhabi hostility towards Sufism may have abated little on the theoretical level since Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab condemned the activities of