Notes — David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States

Notes on David Commins in conversation with Tyler Cowen — Conversations with Tyler (https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/david-commins/), 17 September 2025.

Four questions [Adler frame]

Q1 — What is it about as a whole? A historian’s account of how a puritanical religious movement and a determined dynasty built the modern Saudi state, and of what may become of the Gulf when oil no longer pays. Commins, author of Saudi Arabia: A Modern History, treats Wahhabism not as a Western bogeyman but as a state-building theology essential to Saudi origins, and works outward from that founding to the seizure of the Grand Mosque in 1979, the survival of the small Gulf states under Western protection, the fracture of Yemen, and the open question of a post-petroleum economy.

Q2 — How is it argued? Through the disciplined caution of a working historian rather than confident synthesis. Commins reasons from specific evidence — the 1740s Saud–Wahhabi alliance, the thirty-year conquest of Riyadh, the 1811–1818 Ottoman invasion, Juhayman al-Otaybi’s millenarian faction — to general claims, and repeatedly marks the limits of the record: our sources for early Saudi expansion are ‘few and partisan’, and reliable information about present-day dissent no longer escapes the country. He is unusually willing to answer ‘I don’t know’, and to separate what the Saudi government claims from what he can verify.

Q3 — Is it true, in whole or part? Well-grounded on the historical core he is trained in — the theology of Wahhabism, the geography of Nejd versus Hejaz, the Ottoman episodes, the 1979 seizure — where his claims track the documentary record he cites. Contemporary judgements are appropriately hedged: he flags the thin evidence for the firearms-drove-expansion thesis, declines to confirm improved Shiite conditions, and is candid that economic-future questions are guesses. [?] His figure-free claims about immigrant origins and the scale of Saudi ‘passing’ are explicitly offered as things he cannot quantify.

Q4 — What of it? A transferable case in how a marginal, poorly-resourced periphery can out-organise richer, more cosmopolitan cores through cohesion and shared conviction — and a sober frame for the Gulf’s central vulnerability, that its stability rests on external protection and a single exhaustible resource. It supplies the wiki’s first sustained treatment of Wahhabism, Saudi state formation, and Gulf geopolitics.

Glossary

Wahhabism — the puritanical Sunni reform movement founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the 1740s, defined by the demand that a believer not merely affirm one God but actively negate any deviation from correct belief; its alliance with the Saud family made it the theological engine of the Saudi state. [§ On Wahhabism]

Salafism — the later rebranding of Wahhabism under a name invoking the salaf (the pious founding generations of Islam), which shed the Saudi-specific association and spread widely through the Muslim world and its diasporas. [§ On Saudi influence in the world]

Nejd (Najd) — the poorer, isolated central region of Arabia around Riyadh; homeland of both the Saud dynasty and the Wahhabi mission, and the region most thoroughly purged of the older Sunni tradition. [§ On the development of the Saudi state]

Hejaz — the Red Sea coastal region holding the holy cities of Mecca and Medina plus Jeddah; historically richer and more cosmopolitan than Nejd, but always a dependency of outside Muslim empires that coveted the holy cities. [§ On the development of the Saudi state]

Millenarianism — belief in an imminent, world-transforming arrival (here, the Mahdi or Muslim messiah); the driving conviction of Juhayman al-Otaybi’s faction, which Commins calls a phenomenon Wahhabism had never generated before. [§ On the development of the Saudi state]

Sports washing — critics’ term for a state hosting or buying prestige sporting events and teams to launder its image; Commins reads Saudi and Qatari sports spending as part image-management, part genuine popular enthusiasm. [§ On Saudi influence in the world]

Key claims by section

On Wahhabism [§ On Wahhabism]

The strongest case for Wahhabism is a strong conviction about a specific theology and definition of true belief; Commins argues the Saudi nation could not have been built without it, while noting the early sources are too few and partisan for a firm conclusion.
What is theologically distinct is an activist impulse: it is not enough to affirm one God, one must actively negate deviation — unlike the mutually tolerant schools of the older Sunni tradition. The movement made theological disagreement ‘matter more than it did before’.
Mecca’s openness to all Muslims sits in genuine contradiction with Wahhabism; Abdulaziz resolved it in 1924 by installing Wahhabi clerics willing to work with other Sunni traditions, compromising on strict doctrine to avoid alienating the world’s Muslims.
Eastern Province Shiites are citizens with few rights and a history of persecution and exodus (1790s, 1913); Commins cannot verify Saudi claims of a new tolerant climate because reliable information about dissent no longer escapes the country. [?]
He resists Cowen’s premise that the Saudi establishment dislikes Palestinians, guessing that any coolness reflects the Palestinians being ‘inconvenient’ to a desired seamless integration with the West. [?source]

On the development of the Saudi state [§ On the development of the Saudi state]

The religious establishment is largely Nejdi because central Arabia birthed the Wahhabi mission and the Saud dynasty and was most thoroughly purged of older Sunni practice; the bureaucratic religious institution built in the 1950s–60s recruited there.
The least cosmopolitan part of Arabia built the state: the richer, more advanced Hejaz and Gulf coasts had always been dependencies of outside Muslim empires and lacked the cohesion to conquer inward.
The conquest was accomplished ‘inch by inch’ — thirty years to take Riyadh — through persistence, leadership, and religious commonality rather than resources or strategy; the thesis that firearms drove expansion is ‘pretty thin’ on evidence. [?]
Ottoman rule over central Arabia was almost never real: an 1811–1818 invasion destroyed the first Saudi state and publicly executed its ruler in Istanbul, but harsh terrain made occupation impossible; tribute was intermittent from the 1840s.
The 1979 Grand Mosque seizure was a millenarian breakaway (Juhayman al-Otaybi’s faction) expecting the Mahdi on 20 November 1979 — theologically Wahhabi but convinced the Saud family had betrayed true principles; Commins calls the official ‘moderate-until-1979’ narrative ‘convenient, concocted’.
Saudi nation-building is essentially complete: even a sudden fall of the monarchy would not disintegrate the country, unlike Syria, Iraq, or Lebanon.

On Saudi influence in the world [§ On Saudi influence in the world]

Gulf sports spending is a mix of image-laundering (‘sports washing’) and genuine popular enthusiasm; young Saudis, who love sport, are the monarchy’s main constituency.
Saudi-funded mosques abroad read through three frames: Islam as a proselytising faith, the Wahhabi mission’s long (and largely failed) proselytising history, and soft power — ‘democracy promotion for the United States, exporting communism for Fidel, marketing Wahhabism for Riyadh’.
Wahhabism rebranded as Salafism spread widely, but Commins doubts it wins long-term: Iraqi Sunnis’ exhaustion with intrusive Salafi ‘busybodies’ aided the 2006–07 surge, and al-Qaeda discredited the tendency; King Salman’s funding cuts will let Saudi influence diminish.
On immigrant origins he declines to quantify: excluding the roughly one quarter foreign workers, he guesses few of the rest descend from outside Arabia; central Arabia saw little in-migration because it was poor. [?]

On Saudi education [§ On Saudi education]

KAUST (a $10 billion endowment) is ‘not going all that well’; most students are foreign, and the deeper obstacle is an unreformed K-12 system that fails to prepare students for challenging STEM.
Ambitious families route children through private schools to the petroleum engineering university and American graduate schools; fixing public education would require replacing most teachers, and the cadre to do so does not exist.
The economy has ‘rented’ technical skill for decades via high salaries to foreigners; whether it can build a post-petroleum future is open, though AI might reduce the need for a large technically-qualified workforce. [?]

On Yemen [§ On Yemen]

The small Gulf states’ stability reduces to fear of annexation by larger neighbours, held in check by Western strategic protection running unbroken from 1820 British gunboat diplomacy to today’s US naval base in Bahrain.
Yemen is the exception: too poor to fund the national welfare system that bought Saudi cohesion, and fractured by Houthi (Zaydi revivalist) ambition and outside intervention, much as Lebanon was for fifteen years.
Saudi Arabia’s 2015 Yemen intervention resembles Nasser’s disastrous 1960s Egyptian one; the current leadership around Mohammed bin Salman has since reverted to more cautious, traditional Saudi diplomacy (negotiating with the Houthis, renewing relations with Iran via China).
The Houthis appear to have no clear strategic goal beyond staying in power where they are, and no interest in power-sharing across a unified Yemen. [?source]

On Saudi Arabia’s future [§ On Saudi Arabia’s future]

The post-2015 social opening — women’s freedoms, retreat of the religious police, freedom in music, film, and literature — has made many Saudis’ lives ‘a lot better’ and is, in Commins’s view, very deep and irreversible; he traces the modernist/cosmopolitan current back a century to the annexation of the holy cities.
The economic future is genuinely open: whether Saudi Arabia can transition to a post-petroleum economy (perhaps as an energy-rich data-centre host) he cannot say, given how up in the air the global economy is.
His fondest memory is the warmth and hospitality shown to him during a tense period (he arrived two days before 9/11); his next project turns to Arab travellers to the United States between 1876 and 1940.