Refounding the Kingdom: Saudi Arabia from Islamism and Wahhabism to ‘Moderate’ Islam

Abstract

In January 2022, a Saudi royal decree established the holiday of ‘Founding Day’, in recognition of the founding of the ancestral Saudi polity, the first Saudi state, in 1727. The establishment of the new holiday came as a challenge to the conventional historical narrative that dated the first Saudi state to the union of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad ibn Saud in 1744, a date symbolizing the union of Wahhabi Islam and Saudi dynastic power. This revising of the Saudi national origin story is of a piece with the broader reform efforts of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who since 2016 has sought to remake the kingdom in a modern guise, casting off the identity of a conservative Islamic state. The historical revisionism of Founding Day is one strategy that the crown prince has pursued in his efforts to promote what he has called ‘moderate’ Islam. The other is to highlight–and repudiate–the legacy of the Islamist ‘awakening’ (sahwa) movement that arose in the 1980s and 1990s.