Al ash-Sheikh
Saudi Arabia's leading religious family
The Al ash-Sheikh (Arabic: آل الشيخ, ʾĀl aš-Šaykh), also transliterated in a number of other ways, including Al ash-Shaykh, Al ash-Shaikh, Al al-Shaykh or Al-Shaykh is Saudi Arabia's leading religious family. They are the descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab al-Tamimi al-Najdi. In Saudi Arabia, the Al ash-Sheikh family is second in prestige only to the Al Saud royal family. The two families formed a power-sharing arrangement nearly 300 years ago. This agreement, which remains in place today, involves the Al Saud maintaining the Al ash-Sheikh's religious authority and the Al ash-Sheikh supporting the Al Saud's political authority.
Although the Al ash-Sheikh family's dominance of the religious establishment has weakened in recent decades, its members still occupy most of the key religious positions in Saudi Arabia and are closely linked to the Al Saud family through extensive intermarriage. Due to the religious and moral authority of the Al ash-Sheikh, the agreement between the two families is crucial for maintaining the legitimacy of the Saudi royal family's rule over the country.
Etymology
The Arabic name Al ash-Sheikh (آل الشيخ) (which is transliterated in a number of ways) translates into English as family of the Sheikh or House of the Sheikh. The word Al, in conjunction with the name of an ancestor, means family of or House of. The term ash-Sheikh refers to the Islamic religious reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the family's ancestor.
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This entry incorporates text from “Al ash-Sheikh” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.