Divine Triumph: Explanatory Notes on the Book of Tawheed

Shaykh Abd al-Rahman ibn Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was a senior Najdi scholar of the second generation of the Wahhabi reform movement and the grandson of its founder, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Born in 1193 AH / 1779 CE in the central Najdi capital of Diriyya, he was raised in the household of his grandfather and uncles during the formative decades of the first Saudi state. He was an eyewitness to its destruction at the hands of Ottoman-Egyptian forces under Ibrahim Pasha in 1233 AH / 1818 CE, after which he was sent to Cairo as a captive — where he spent nearly a decade studying under leading Egyptian scholars at al-Azhar and the broader Cairene scholarly establishment.

Abd al-Rahman returned to Najd around 1241 AH / 1826 CE under the restoration of the second Saudi state and became its leading scholar, serving as Imam al-Da'wa — the chief religious authority — for several decades. His most famous work, Fath al-Majid Sharh Kitab al-Tawhid, is the definitive commentary on his grandfather's foundational treatise on tawhid and remains the standard study text for the work in Salafi educational settings to this day. He also authored Qurrat al-'Uyun al-Muwahhidin in the same tradition, and a substantial collection of letters, fatwas, and epistles preserved in the multi-volume al-Durar al-Saniyya fi al-Ajwiba al-Najdiyya, the great compendium of Najdi scholarly responses compiled by his student Ibn Qasim.

Abd al-Rahman ibn Hasan died in Riyadh in 1285 AH / 1869 CE, having trained the cohort of scholars and his own descendants — including his son Abd al-Latif ibn Abd al-Rahman — who carried the Wahhabi scholarly tradition forward into the third Saudi state under King Abd al-Aziz ibn Sa'ud. Through his Fath al-Majid in particular, his pedagogical voice has shaped the way the doctrine of tawhid is taught across Salafi study circles worldwide for the past 150 years.