and foreign allies that it won, turned the peninsula into a key catalyst of Islamic political change.
Both in Ottoman times and their aftermath, the fiercely independent tribes of the Arabian Peninsula had resisted efforts to subjugate them. In the eighteenth century, the Al Saud tribe allied with an order of warrior monks founded by a local scholar, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. They called themselves Ahl al-Tawhid (the people of monotheism), though others knew them eponymously as Wahhabis.
From their base in Nejd in central Arabia, they launched tribal raids on Shias in neighboring Iraq and the Eastern Province, and rival Sunni tribes in Kuwait and the Hijaz. In 1926, they wrested control of Islam’s holiest places, Mecca and Medina, and assumed the old Ottoman title of Custodians of the Holy Places. They proclaimed themselves kings, stopping short of assuming the caliphate, on the grounds that they were not of the Quraish, the Prophet Muhammad’s tribe.
In both ideology and tactics, they were the progenitors of contemporary jihadis. They denounced their opponents as kaffirs, or unbelievers, who were thereby subject to the sword. On the basis of largely dormant thirteenth-century texts, they hounded Shias and Sunni traditionalists who venerated the Prophet’s family as practitioners of shirk, or polytheism. In the name of deleting the accretions of tradition and purifying the faith, they flattened shrines and demolished the old cities of Mecca and Medina, including buildings 1,300 years old. They leveled the Prophet’s home in Medina, the seven mosques built by his daughter, Fatimah, and the mosques of the first caliphs in Mecca.
After their initial display of zeal, however, Saudi Arabia’s founder, King Abdulaziz, reined in the zealots, or Ikhwan. Hundreds were slaughtered in 1930, and life on the coast regained much of its old tempo. Cinemas in the port city of Jeddah continued to play to packed houses and newspapers advertised parties in the casinos and clubs on New Year’s Eve. In 1979, the Ikhwan—possibly sparked by the revolution in Iran—struck back. Under the leadership of Juhayman al-Otaybi, they seized control of the Grand Mosque of Mecca on the Islamic New Year of the year 1400. French commandos were finally summoned to flush them out and al-Otaybi was promptly executed, but though he lost the battle he won the war. Like-minded militants were directed with handsome support to fight communists in Afghanistan, and to bolster their internal legitimacy, the Al Sauds gave full rein to the country’s conservatives to police social conduct. Application of sharia was sharply tightened, sectarian polemic intensified, and acts deemed to be an innovation at odds with the Prophet’s conduct were proscribed in accordance with the teachings of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab.
Their creed enjoining the scraping away of tradition proved a property developer’s dream. They built skyscrapers, like the Abraj al-Bait Towers, on the demolished Ottoman-era Ajyad Fortress, and erected garish Las Vegas-style hotels that loomed over the Kaaba, the black cube of Mecca. The house of Khadija, the Prophet’s first wife, was replaced with public toilets, and the house of the first Sunni caliph, Abu Bakr, became a Hilton hotel.
The impact of the three revivalist movements on the region’s geopolitics was profound. Petrodollars turned Wahhabism into the world’s best-financed Islamic movement. Over the generation that followed, they exported their fighters and preachers to Afghanistan and beyond. Other armed groups seeking support latched onto them, establishing satellites in isolated mountain caves in Algeria and Libya. Islam’s version of the Knights Templar increasingly seemed to offer dynamism and notch successes (including the defeat of the Soviet superpower in Afghanistan) beyond the muster of moribund Arab regimes. Bankrolled by Nejdi financiers, the transnational networks of sect and clans became the primary sources of solidarity.
The gutting of the state apparatus that followed first America’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein and then of much of Syria following the uprisings of the Arab Spring cleared the ground for the Wahhabi expansion out of Saudi Arabia across the Sunni parts of the Fertile Crescent. The Middle East’s compartmentalization into homogeneous units that began with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire found fresh territory to dismember. Much as in Yugoslavia, another corner of the former empire, the post-Ottoman order fractured into its rival religious parts. Out went the totalitarian nation-state; in came a centrifugal patchwork of bickering one-confessional millet states. As in the creation of Turkey and Israel, minorities left behind posed a question or problem best answered by their removal. The transformation of the non-territorial millet into the territorially demarcated millet-state precipitated mass population exchanges, torpedoing what remained of the region’s pluralist past.
From world religions with universal values, the region’s creeds contracted into local cults clinging to parcels of land. The history of the past century is in many ways a history of ever contracting horizons, ever more fortified border controls, and ever tighter permit regimes, as governments bent on exclusive control erect their defenses around the territorial patches where their power extends. While Europe dissolved its borders, the Middle East crisscrossed its once open expanse with ever more insurmountable barriers.
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