Speaker

David Commins

David Commins

Historian of the modern Middle East and Benjamin Rush Chair in the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Dickinson College, where he has taught since 1987; among the leading scholars of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Wahhabism.

Commins earned his PhD at the University of Michigan and works on modern Middle Eastern history with an emphasis on Islamic thought and political movements. His books include The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia, The Gulf States: A Modern History, Islam in Saudi Arabia, The Mecca Uprising: An Insider’s Account of Salafism and Insurrection in Saudi Arabia, and Historical Dictionary of Syria; his most recent is Saudi Arabia: A Modern History (2025). He lived in Riyadh in 2001–02 and in Damascus in the early 1980s, and teaches periodically abroad for Dickinson.

Core positions

  • Wahhabism was essential to Saudi state-building, not incidental to it. He treats the movement as a genuine theological conviction — the demand to actively negate deviation from correct belief — whose alliance with the Saud dynasty in the 1740s supplied the cohesion that let a poor central Arabian periphery conquer the peninsula.
  • The least cosmopolitan part of Arabia built the state. Central Nejd, poorer and more isolated than the Hejaz and Gulf coasts, generated both the dynasty and its religious mission; the richer coasts had always been dependencies of outside empires and never cohered to conquer inward.
  • Gulf stability rests on external protection, not internal strength. The small Gulf states survive through fear of annexation held in check by a Western security umbrella running from 1820 British gunboat diplomacy to the present US presence.
  • Careful about the limits of the record. He repeatedly separates what the Saudi government claims from what can be verified, and answers ‘I don’t know’ where the evidence is partisan, thin, or suppressed.

In the wiki