The Refutation of the Claim That Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab Was the Imam of the Khawarij in His Era

Question:
May Allah reward you, Honorable Shaykh. This questioner says: One of the pretenders to knowledge says that if everyone who rises against the Imam of the Muslims, if… if everyone who rises against the Imam of the Muslims and fights him is a Khariji, then Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab is the Imam of the Khawarij in those eras. I ask for a refutation of this statement, a clarification of its falsity, and a warning against it.

Answer:
Did the Imam Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab (may Allah have mercy on him) rise against the one in authority? The Imam came to a place where there was no single ruler in Najd; there were emirs, with each town having its own emir. So he came and contacted one of the emirs and presented his call to him. That emir supported him out of conviction and faith, and they made a covenant regarding it. At that point, the Imamate was formed; the Imamate was formed over all the lands of Najd, which came under a single Imam. Otherwise, before that, they were scattered, having no Imam, having no Imam before that. Every town had an emir, an emirate that was not called an Imamate. So the Imamate in the lands of Najd did not form until the appearance of the call of Shaykh Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab. They say that he rose against the Turkish state.
And this is a lie. The Turkish state did not control the lands of Najd. Rather, the lands of Najd were in the hands of their people. And the Turkish state had no interest in them. There was no grazing for sheep or goats, no wells, and I do not know what else. There was nothing there. And so they had no desire for it. They left it in the hands of its people. Every town had an emir. In fact, some towns had four emirs. One town, one village, had four emirs.
So when the call of the Shaykh came, the lands were unified and they had an Imam. There became jihad in it, there became enjoining good and forbidding evil, the pre-Islamic age of ignorance (jahiliyyah) rulings by which the Bedouins and desert dwellers judged were abolished, and judgment was made by the Shari'ah. So a state was formed, and praise be to Allah, a state with all the attributes of an Islamic state. Yes.