Wahhabism
The austere 18th-century reform movement within Sunni Islam that, fused to the House of Saud, became Saudi Arabia's creed and a global export.
In 1744, in a mud-walled town in the Arabian desert, a preacher and a warlord struck a bargain that still shapes how millions of Muslims worship. The preacher was Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a Hanbali scholar convinced that the Islam around him had rotted into idolatry: people prayed at saints' tombs, venerated holy men, and hung charms for luck. He demanded a return to what he saw as pure monotheism, tawhid, the absolute oneness of God, and branded the rest as shirk, the unforgivable sin of setting up partners beside God. The warlord was Muhammad ibn Saud, ruler of the small oasis of Diriyah. They agreed that Ibn Saud would wield the sword and Ibn Abd al-Wahhab would supply the doctrine. That pact is the seed of Saudi Arabia.
A creed of purity
Wahhabism (its followers dislike the label, preferring muwahhidun, "those who affirm God's oneness") is puritanical and literalist. It strips away centuries of accreted tradition: no shrine visits, no celebrating the Prophet's birthday, no saintly intercession, and deep hostility to anything branded bid'a, "innovation." Its enforcers demolished tombs, including those of the Prophet's own family in Medina, as invitations to idol worship. That austerity was also a source of power. Under the Saud banner, Wahhabi fighters swept across Arabia, and after two collapsed attempts the third Saudi state was declared the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, with Wahhabi clerics as its spiritual backbone.
Petrodollars and export
For two centuries this was a local Arabian creed. Oil changed that. After the 1973 embargo sent petrodollars flooding into Riyadh, the kingdom spent lavishly to spread its doctrine abroad, funding thousands of mosques, madrassas, Quran printings, and scholarships from Pakistan to Bosnia to Britain, a total analysts put in the tens of billions of dollars over decades. The motive was half religious mission, half geopolitics: to blunt secular Arab nationalism and, after 1979, to counter revolutionary Shia Iran. The effect was a measurable hardening of Sunni practice worldwide, as easygoing local traditions gave way to the austere Gulf model.
Wahhabism, Salafism, jihadism
The three words get used interchangeably, wrongly. Salafism is the broad current of Sunni revivalism that looks to the salaf, the earliest Muslims, as the template; Wahhabism is best understood as its Saudi strain. Most Salafis and Wahhabis are quietist, absorbed in personal piety rather than violence. Jihadism, the ideology of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, borrows Wahhabism's literalism and its habit of takfir, declaring other Muslims apostates, but aims it at the Saudi state itself. Riyadh has both funded the creed and been hunted by its most violent offspring, a genuinely fraught inheritance.
The MBS turn
Since 2017, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has moved to loosen the clerics' grip: reopening cinemas, letting women drive, curbing the religious police, and recasting the 1744 pact as national heritage rather than living law. Critics counter that he has centralized religious authority under the throne rather than reforming the theology, while crushing dissent as hard as ever. Even so, the state that Wahhabism built is now, warily, trying to manage the fire it lit in that desert town almost three centuries ago.