Lawrence argued that despite posing as Islamic reformists with all the narrow minded bigotry of the puritan, ibn-Saud and his Wahhabists were hardly representative of Islam. Instead, as he warned in The Politics of Mecca, the Wahhabist sect was composed of marginal medievalists, and if it prevailed, we would have in place of the tolerant, rather comfortable Islam of Mecca and Damascus, the fanaticism of Nejd … intensified and swollen by success.
Lawrence criticized ibn-Saud and the Wahhabists for their narrow-mindedness, arguing that their portrayal of themselves as Islamic reformists was misleading. He believed that this sect did not truly represent the essence of Islam. In his work, The Politics of Mecca, he expressed his concern that the Wahhabist movement, composed of reactions from a bygone era, threatened to replace the more tolerant and comfortable versions of Islam found in places like Mecca and Damascus.
Instead, Lawrence warned that the rise of Wahhabism could lead to the emergence of a more fanatical and extreme interpretation of Islam, drawing from the outdated ideologies of medieval times. He anticipated that if the Wahhabist sect gained dominance, it would amplify an already problematic fervor, transforming the religious landscape into one characterized by intolerance rather than the coexistence prevalent in the past.
