Wahhabism

Wahhabism is the eighteenth-century Sunni religious reform movement founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in central Arabia (Nejd), built on a strict definition of correct belief and bound from the 1740s to the political fortunes of the House of Saud. The historian David Commins, author of The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia, treats it less as a theological curiosity than as the state-building engine without which Saudi Arabia could not have been formed.

The distinguishing move: active negation

What sets Wahhabism apart, in Commins’s account, is not merely affirming the oneness of God (tawhid) — common to all Islam — but the founder’s insistence that one must actively negate any deviation from it. That activist impulse turns theological disagreement into grounds for action against perceived heresy or unbelief, a sharp break from the older Sunni tradition whose four legal schools tolerated one another. This is the mechanism that made the movement politically potent: it supplied scattered, poor Nejdi towns with a common cause around which to rally behind the Saud dynasty.

Why the least cosmopolitan region built the state

Central Arabia was poorer and more isolated than the Red Sea coast (Hejaz, with the holy cities) or the Gulf coast, yet it supplied both the mission and the dynasty. The richer, more worldly coasts had always been dependencies of outside Muslim empires and never generated the cohesion to conquer inward; Nejd, thoroughly purged of the older Sunni schools, did. The conquest proceeded ‘almost inch by inch’ — thirty years merely to take Riyadh — sustained by persistence, leadership, and religious commonality rather than resources or firearms.

Compromise, rebranding, and export

The doctrine sits in visible tension with Mecca, open to all Muslims: when Abdulaziz annexed the holy city in 1924 he installed Wahhabi clerics willing to work with other Sunni traditions rather than impose a purge that would alienate the world’s Muslims. In the twentieth century Wahhabism rebranded itself as Salafism (invoking the pious founders, the salaf) and spread widely through Saudi-funded mosques abroad — which Commins reads through three frames at once: Islam as an inherently proselytising faith, the mission’s own long history of proselytising, and pure soft power (‘democracy promotion for the United States, exporting communism for Fidel, marketing Wahhabism for Riyadh’).

Where mainstream views differ

A common Western narrative treats Wahhabism as inherently and uniquely extremist, and dates Saudi radicalisation to the 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque. Commins contests both. He steelmans the movement as a strong conviction about correct belief rather than a synonym for terrorism, and dismisses as a ‘convenient, concocted narrative’ the official Saudi claim that the country was moderate until 1979 and only then adopted extremism — the 1979 seizure was itself a millenarian breakaway (led by Juhayman al-Otaybi, awaiting a messiah on 20 November 1979) that regarded the Saud family as betrayers of true Wahhabi principle, closer to a David Koresh movement than to the mainstream. At the same time he does not romanticise it: the Shiites of the Eastern Province hold the legal status of citizens with few rights and have endured cycles of persecution. He doubts Salafism will win hearts and minds long-term, citing Iraqi Sunnis’ exhaustion with intrusive Salafi ‘busybodies’ during the 2006–07 surge and al-Qaeda’s discrediting of the tendency, and expects King Salman’s curtailing of funding to leave Saudi religious influence as a diminishing residue.

In the wiki

• David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States — the full conversation, from which this page is drawn: Wahhabism as state-building theology, the Nejd-over-Hejaz puzzle, the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure, and the Salafism rebrand.

See also

• David Commins — historian of Saudi Arabia and the movement