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Memoirs of Mr. Hempher, The British Spy to the Middle East
From Wikipedia.
Memoirs of Mr. Hempher, The British Spy to the Middle East or Confessions of a British Spy is a document purporting to be the account by an 18th-century British agent, Hempher, of his instrumental role in founding the conservative Islamic reform movement of Wahhabism, as part of a conspiracy to corrupt Islam. It first appeared in 1888, in Turkish, in the five-volume Mir'at al-Haramayn of Ayyub Sabri Pasha.[1] It has been described as "an Anglophobic variation on `The Protocols of the Elders of Zion`".[2] It has been widely translated and disseminated, and still enjoys some currency among some individuals in the Middle East and beyond.
The book tells a story of a British spy named Hempher, working in the early 1700s, who disguises himself as a Muslim and infiltrates the Ottoman Empire with the goal of weakening it to destroy Islam once and for all. He tells his readers: "when the unity of Muslims is broken and the common sympathy among them is impaired, their forces will be dissolved and thus we shall easily destroy them... We, the English people, have to make mischief and arouse schism in all our colonies in order that we may live in welfare and luxury."[3]
Hempher intends ultimately to weaken Muslim morals by promoting "alcohol and fornication," but his first step is to promote innovation and disorder in Islam by creating Wahhabism, which is to gain credibility by being on the surface morally strict. For this purpose, he enlists "a gullible, hotheaded young Iraqi in Basra named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab". [4] Hempher corrupts and flatters Wahhab until the man is willing to found his own sect. Hempher is one of 5,000 British agents with the assignment of weakening Muslims, which the British government plans to increase to 100,000 by the end of the 18th century. Hempher writes, "when we reach this number we shall have brought all Muslims under our sway" and Islam will be rendered "into a miserable state from which it will never recover again."[3]
The "Memoirs" have been described as "probably the labor of a Sunni Muslim author whose intent is to present Muslims as both too holy and too weak to organize anything as destructive as Wahhabism."[2] Bernard Haykel of Harvard's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies describes the document as an anti-Wahhabi forgery, "probably fabricated by one Ayyub Sabri Pasha".[1] Sabri Pasha was an Ottoman writer who studied at the naval academy, and earned the rank of naval officer, serving for a time in the Hijaz and Yemen. He wrote historical works on the Saudi dynasty and died in 1890.[5] In "The Beginning and Spread of Wahhabism", Pasha recounts the story of Abdul Wahhab's association with Hempher the British Spy, and their plot to create a new religion.[6]
A debunking by a Wahhabi author (Abul Haarith) points out that no evidence of Hempher can be found in computer database searches of libraries and rare books, and that facts and incidents related in the book do not conform to facts known from contemporary sources.[7] The "Memoirs" claim Hempher travelled to Basra in 1712 and there met Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, a student who spoke Turkish, Persian and Arabic. In fact, ibn Abdul Wahhab would have been 9-10 years old and living in his native region of Najd at that time, since he was born in 1115H (1703/1704 CE) and did not leave Najd, except for hajj, to "travel to seek knowledge until 1722".[7] The book has Hempher boasting that the British Empire "was so vast it was said that the sun did not set within its boundaries," when in fact this claim was not, and could not, have been made until about a century later.[7]
Other Wahhabi complaints about the memoir are that it would have been unlikely for the British to have supported and helped bin Abdul Wahhab as "there was no British presence in that region in the mid-18th century", and that there are only two explicit mentions of dates (1710 CE and 1730 CE) in a work purportedly based on a diary, which generally have dated entries.[5]
References
1. Anti-Wahhabism Wahabism was plotted & based on the early Muslim sect known as Khwarij in 1st Hijri Century now termed as Ahle Hadith: a footnote Middle East Strategy at Harvard
2. Caught in the Crossfire by George Packer, 17 May 2004
3. HizmetBooks
4. The Saga of "Hempher," Purported British Spy
5. Evidence That Hempher's Diaries Are a Forgery Abu.Iyaad | wahhabis.com| 20 August 2011
6. The Beginning and Spread of Wahhabism www.sufi.it
7. Who is Hampher (hempher)? scroll down to "Humphrey's 'Memoirs'" by Abul Haarith
