The report relies heavily on the Memoirs of Mr. Hempher, which describe in detail how a British spy to the Middle East, in the middle of the eighteenth century, made contact with Adbul Wahhab, to create a subversive version of Islam, the notorious sect of Wahhabism, which became the founding cult of the Saudi regime. The movement was temporarily suppressed by the Ottoman armies in the middle of the nineteenth century. But with the assistance of the British, the Wahhabis and their Saudi sponsors returned to power and founded their own state in 1932. Since then, the Saudis have collaborated closely with the Americans, to whom they owe their tremendous oil wealth, in funding various Islamic fundamentalist organizations and other American covert operations, particularly the “jihad” in Afghanistan. But the Saudis simultaneously use the immense wealth at their disposal to disseminate this disruptive brand of Islam to various parts of the world, categorized by some of the largest propaganda campaign in history.
Many who defend Wahhabism as a legitimate reform movement of Islam have tried to dismiss the Memoirs as a spurious fabrication. These include Bernard Hayke, Professor in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, who, without providing any evidence, presumes the Memoirs to have been created by Ayyub Sabri Pasha.
However, while the Memoirs only emerged in the 1970s, Pasha wrote his version of the story already in 1888. Ayyub Sabri Pasha was a well-known Ottoman writer and Turkish naval admiral, who served the Ottoman army in the Arabian Peninsula, writing several works about the region and it’s history. Including The Beginning and Spreading of Wahhabis, where he recounts Abdul Wahhab’s association and plotting with Hempher.
In addition to that revealed in the Hempher Memoirs, the Iraqi intelligence report also makes known some surprising claims, derived from works circulated in Arabic which have not been translated into English. As the report recounts, both Abdul Wahhab, and his sponsor, ibn Saud, who founded the Saudi dynasty, were of Jewish origin.