In the year 1744, inside the mudbrick oasis town of Diriyah in the arid central plateau of the Arabian Peninsula—a remote region known as the Najd, which had lain outside the direct administrative control of the Ottoman Empire for centuries—an itinerant Islamic scholar and a local tribal ruler swore a historic oath of mutual loyalty. That pact between the theologian Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and the chieftain Muhammad ibn Saud gave birth to a strict, puritanical religious revival movement known to outsiders as Wahhabism (and to its adherents as the Muwahhidun or Salafi reform)—a partnership of religious doctrine and dynastic power that survived two military destructions in the nineteenth century to eventually found the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and 18th-Century Najd
Born in 1703 in the small Najdi oasis town of Uyaynah into a family of traditional Islamic jurists belonging to the Hanbali school—the most literalist and conservative of the four classical schools of Sunni jurisprudence—Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab traveled in his youth to study in Medina and Basra (in modern Iraq). During his travels and upon returning to central Arabia, the young scholar grew deeply disturbed by the popular religious practices of eighteenth-century Muslims across the region.
In the oases of Arabia and the wider Ottoman world, ordinary believers routinely engaged in folk and Sufi devotional customs: visiting the domed tombs of venerated Muslim saints and companions of the Prophet to pray for their intercession (tawassul) with God, making vows at sacred trees or caves, wearing protective amulets, and celebrating the Prophet’s birthday (Mawlid). To Ibn Abd al-Wahhab—heavily influenced by the writings of the fourteenth-century Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyyah—all of these practices violated the foundational pillar of Islam, which he laid out in his concise theological treatise, Kitab al-Tawhid (The Book of the Oneness of God):
- Absolute Monotheism (Tawhid): He argued that merely believing that Allah created the universe was not enough; every single act of worship, prayer, vow, sacrifice, and call for help had to be directed 100% to God alone without any intermediary.
- Condemning Shirk and Bid’ah: Praying at the tomb of a saint or asking a holy person to intercede on one’s behalf was condemned as shirk (polytheism or associating partners with God), while customs introduced after the first three generations of Islam (the Salaf) were rejected as heretical innovations (bid’ah).
- Takfir: Most controversially in the eyes of mainstream Sunni scholars in Mecca, Cairo, and Istanbul—including Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s own brother, Sulayman, who wrote a book refuting him—Ibn Abd al-Wahhab declared that Muslims who persisted in saint-veneration after being warned were no longer true Muslims, but apostates whose lives and property could be fought against in jihad.
The 1744 Pact of Diriyah With Muhammad ibn Saud
When Ibn Abd al-Wahhab began putting his theology into action in Uyaynah—personally taking an axe to chop down a sacred tree revered by locals, demolishing the domed tomb of Zayd ibn al-Khattab (the brother of the second Caliph Umar), and ordering a woman stoned to death for adultery—powerful neighboring tribal chiefs pressured the ruler of Uyaynah to expel the controversial preacher in 1744.
Walking twenty miles south across the desert wadi, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab found refuge in the small settlement of Diriyah (on the outskirts of modern Riyadh), ruled by an ambitious local emir named Muhammad ibn Saud. In 1744, the preacher and the prince sealed an enduring political-religious covenant sealed by marriage:
- Division of Authority: Ibn Saud pledged the military sword of his family to protect and spread Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s religious teachings, while Ibn Abd al-Wahhab provided the religious legitimacy and tax revenue justification (zakat and war spoils) that transformed the House of Saud from minor oasis raiders into the supreme leaders of a holy state.
- Two Dynasties United: To this day in Saudi Arabia, the descendants of Muhammad ibn Saud rule the political state, while the descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab—known as the Al ash-Sheikh (“The Family of the Sheikh”)—have historically led the country’s religious ministries and judiciary.
Three Saudi States: From Ottoman Destruction to Global Oil Wealth
Fueled by missionary zeal and Bedouin military mobility, the First Saudi State (1744–1818) expanded rapidly across the Arabian Peninsula. In 1802, Wahhabi armies raided the Shiite holy city of Karbala in Iraq, destroying the golden dome over the tomb of Imam Husayn, and between 1803 and 1805 they conquered Mecca and Medina—demolishing centuries-old domed shrines over the graves of early Islamic figures in the Jannat al-Baqi cemetery, banning silk, tobacco pipes, and music, and turning back Ottoman pilgrimage caravans.
Humiliated by the loss of Islam’s two holiest cities, the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II ordered his powerful viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, to crush the movement. In a brutal seven-year war (1811–1818), Egyptian forces armed with European artillery marched across the desert, leveled the Saudi capital of Diriyah to the ground in September 1818, and shipped the Saudi ruler Abdullah bin Saud to Istanbul to be beheaded.
Yet the desert alliance refused to die. After a smaller Second Saudi State (1824–1891) centered in Riyadh collapsed in tribal civil war, a towering twenty-six-year-old exiled prince named Abdulaziz ibn Saud rode out of Kuwait in January 1902 with just forty men on camels to recapture Riyadh in a daring dawn raid. Mobilizing settled Bedouin religious brotherhoods known as the Ikhwan, Ibn Saud reconquered the Najd and the Hejaz (Mecca and Medina) by 1925, crushed the Ikhwan when they grew too fanatical for international borders in 1929, and proclaimed the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. Six years later, in March 1938, American geologists struck the world’s largest oil reserves at Dammam Well No. 7—giving an eighteenth-century desert reform movement billions of petrodollars to fund mosques, schools, and literature across the globe in the late twentieth century, before recent twenty-first-century social reforms in Riyadh began curtailing the power of the religious police in favor of modern nationalism.
