The resurgence of the puritan element

The words ‘fanatic’ and ‘Arabia’ are placed together so often that they almost seem designed for each other. A Syrian friend once asked Charles Doughty, the Victorian explorer, how he could abandon the orchards of Damascus, ‘full of the sweet spring as the garden of God’, and ‘take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?’ Doughty did not really know the answer. He had passed ‘one good day in Arabia’, he recalled, but ‘all the rest were evil because of the people’s fanaticism’.

In the late 1870s Doughty travelled to Nejd, the desert birthplace of the Wahhabi sect, an intolerant, puritanical and — to its adherents — very pure form of Islam. But the sect’s influence did not seem to extend much beyond the solitudes of central Arabia. Rudyard Kipling, who in the 1880s lived in Lahore, remarked that he had never met an Englishman who hated Islam and its peoples. But then he moved among relatively tolerant, Sufi-minded Muslims in a city shared with large Hindu and Sikh populations.