Page:Thomas Patrick Hughes - Notes on Muhammadanism - 2ed. (1877).djvu/243

 222 sent him a prisoner to Constantinople, where he was executed in the public square of St. Sophia, December 19th, 1818. But although the temporal power of the Wahhábís has been subdued, they still continue secretly to propagate their peculiar tenets, and in the present day there are numerous disciples of the sect not only in Arabia, but in Turkey and in India. It is a movement which has influenced religious thought in every part of Islám.

The leader of the Wahhábí movement in India was Sayyid Ahmad, who was born at Ráí Bareli, in Oudh, in 1786. He began life as a freebooter; but about the year 1816, he gave up robbery, and commenced to study divinity in one of the mosques at Delhi. After a few years study, he performed the pilgrimage to the sacred city; and, whilst at Mecca, attracted the notice of the learned doctors by the similarity of his teaching to that of the Wabhhábí sectaries, from whom the city had suffered so much. He was soon expelled from the town, and he returned to India a fanatical disciple of the Wahhábí leader. His success as a preacher was great, both in Bombay and Calcutta; and having collected a numerous