—and he replied, “There shall arise earthquakes and tribulations there, and there the horn of Satan will appear.” From this, they take the companions’ words, “And our Najd as well,” to refer to the present-day Najd, and they twist the Prophet’s ﷺ warning about earthquakes into a veiled allusion to Shaykh Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, his mission, and his followers! Yet another transmission records the phrase, “And our Iraq as well,” which clarifies the first narration; that is the reading adopted by the hadith commentators—al-Khattābī, Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, and others. Even so, many shaykhs in our country and elsewhere persist in forcing the hadith into a meaning the alternative report will not bear, solely to malign the Najdīs and their pristine call to monotheism and to the eradication of idolatry. Indeed, it is an attack on anyone who champions this blessed message, even if he does not hail from that “sacred land,” such as the Salafis of Syria, for example.

If, however, by “the people of the sacred land” he intends the inhabitants of Mecca and Medina—most of whom did not respond to Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s appeal and remained attached to their grave-centered pagan practices—then Shaykh Abū Ghuddah has committed yet another malicious deception against his readers in particular and the Najdīs in general. For Mecca and Medina are genuinely consecrated lands, and no reader imagines otherwise; Abū Ghuddah himself underscores this by describing them as “the land visited each year by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from the Muslim world.” Clearly, then, they are not the people he once maligned in his former state of error when he said, “These Wahhābīs feel repulsion and disgust whenever they hear the mention of the Prophet ﷺ.” No one actually accuses the residents of these truly sacred cities of Wahhābism, so Abū Ghuddah had no need to clear them. The label is directed at the Najdīs who govern there. Why, then, did Abū Ghuddah shrink from explicitly absolving those Najdīs?