The Instrument That Escaped Its Handlers : How Wahhabism Became Global Islam

Why a regional eighteenth-century theology became the default Islam for millions, and what Britain and America each needed it to do

The standard account of Wahhabism treats it as an indigenous Arabian phenomenon. It supposedly became consequential through its own internal logic, a theology so compelling, or so extreme, that it couldn't stay local. Both assumptions are wrong.

Wahhabism spread because of decisions made far outside Najd, not because its ideas outcompeted its rivals on their own terms. First a colonial power found its specific features useful. Then, a century and a half later, a superpower found them useful again. What changed between the eighteenth century and the twentieth were the patrons, and what they needed from it. The theology itself never changed.

I. The Selection

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab wasn't the only Islamic reformist of the eighteenth century. Bunzel identifies a whole field of revivalist movements operating across the Muslim world in this period, each responding to what their founders saw as the corruption and stagnation of contemporary Islamic practice. What set Ibn Abd al-Wahhab apart from his contemporaries wasn't the intensity of his reformism. It was its specific targets and its specific logic.

Three features set Wahhabism apart. The first was its hostility to shrine veneration and the cult of saints. These practices were deeply embedded in Ottoman religious culture, and in the Sufi orders that ran as connective tissue across the Muslim world from North Africa to South Asia, binding communities across ethnic and political lines into a shared ritual life.

The second was its takfiri tendency. This wasn't just a willingness to condemn other Muslims as sinners or innovators. It was a willingness to excommunicate them entirely, stripping them of legal protections and making them, in principle, legitimate targets of violence.

The third was its explicit rejection of Ottoman political-religious legitimacy. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab didn't just criticise Ottoman religious practice. He denied the Ottomans' claim to represent Islam at all.

Britain's strategic position in the eighteenth-century Gulf was defined by a single structural problem: the Ottoman Empire controlled the land routes east, sat astride the Red Sea, and claimed religious-political authority over the Muslim populations Britain governed across India.

A theology that denied Ottoman legitimacy, and that was prepared to fracture Muslim solidarity from within by branding co-religionists as polytheists rather than fellow believers, wasn't a theological curiosity from a British imperial perspective. It was a solution.

The British made this preference explicit when they favoured Ibn Saud over Hussein. They chose the Wahhabi client precisely because his theological radicalism made the Saudi project illegible as universal Islamic leadership. It was contained within Arabia. Useful, without being threatening.

This argument isn't conspiratorial. Britain didn't manufacture Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. It selected him from a field of available options. The selection criteria were the specific features that set Wahhabism apart from every other reformist tradition of the period: the anti-Ottoman logic, the takfiri mechanism, and its readiness to destroy the Sufi networks that organised Muslim political solidarity across Britain's imperial frontiers.

Other movements existed. They weren't backed. This one was. The question of why isn't answered by the theology. It's answered by what the theology could be made to do.

II. The Containment

Between 1744 and the early twentieth century, Wahhabism was violent, occasionally expansionist, and essentially local. The first Saudi state reached Mecca and Medina, committed atrocities against Shia populations in Karbala and al-Ahsa, and was destroyed by Ottoman-Egyptian forces under Ibrahim Pasha in 1818. What followed was doctrinal consolidation.

The first Saudi state was destroyed. The second collapsed into civil war. Then came the Rashidi interregnum, which lasted until Ibn Saud reconquered Riyadh in 1902. Through all of it, Wahhabi scholars kept the tradition alive through manuscript culture, internal disputation, and a running series of polemics against anyone who softened the doctrine of manifest enmity.

Bunzel documents scholars debating the obligations of hijra under Egyptian occupation, excommunicating those who accommodated the invaders, and preserving every doctrinal position across three generations of the Al al-Shaykh family. They had the intensity of people who believed continuity itself was the mission. The theology didn't need external patronage to survive. It had built its own scholarly infrastructure, and that infrastructure transmitted the tradition intact. What it needed patronage for was something else entirely: to leave Najd.

That distinction matters, because it closes off the most obvious objection. If Wahhabism had spread because of its ideas, it would have spread in the nineteenth century. By then, those ideas were fully formed, and the Saudi state had already shown it would fight and die for them. But it didn't spread.

Egyptian Muslims, Pakistani Muslims, Indonesian Muslims, West African Muslims hadn't adopted Wahhabi practice. Most had never even encountered it. The Indian reformist movements sometimes cited as evidence of spread were actually parallel developments. They drew on shared Hanbali and Taymiyyan sources independently. They weren't downstream of Wahhabi instruction or Saudi funding.

So the explanation for twentieth-century globalisation needs a separate causal mechanism. It has nothing to do with theological persuasiveness. It has everything to do with who decided to transform a regional doctrinal tradition into a managed political project, and why.

III. The Patron

That decision was British. Percy Cox signed the Treaty of Darin with Ibn Saud in 1915, making his territories a British protectorate and providing the subsidies and weapons that underwrote his expansion across Arabia. The relationship actually predated the treaty. Ibn Saud had reconquered Riyadh in 1902 already operating within a British strategic framework. Cox simply formalised what had already become a direct relationship between empire and client.

St John Philby's role makes the management explicit. Britain sent him to Najd in 1918, officially to gather intelligence and establish relations with Ibn Saud. In practice, he began privately advising Ibn Saud on how far he could expand without triggering British objection, even while British policy officially backed Hussein. He calibrated those limits from inside the court of the man doing the expanding. The Secret Service kept paying Philby for five years after his official resignation. This wasn't a rogue operation. It was a calibrated one, run by someone whose value lay precisely in occupying both positions at once.

The fall of Mecca in 1924, the massacre at Taif, and British recognition of the Saudi state in 1926 followed in sequence. Bunzel notes something worth flagging here: in this period, Ibn Saud was actively taming the Wahhabi scholars. He brought in Islamic modernists to staff the Hijaz mosques, held pan-Islamic conferences, and ignored the scholars' objections to oil prospectors and Egyptian pilgrims. He needed international legitimacy. Britain needed a stable client.

Britain knew what Ibn Saud was. It recognised him anyway, and handed him custody of the two holiest cities in Islam. That wasn't a passive observation. It was a policy choice, and it should be named as one.

The outcome, officially proclaimed as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, was a Wahhabi state installed at the geographic and symbolic centre of the Muslim world. Mark Curtis's conclusion closes the loop. Saudi Arabia would go on to act as the world's main propagator of fundamentalist Islam, providing the ideological and financial centre of global jihadism. And the new state gave Britain a foothold in the heart of the Islamic world, in Mecca and Medina. The instrument proved more durable than anyone expected. The consequences are still running.

IV. The Bargain

The mechanism is 1973, and it's economic before it's ideological.

The 1973 oil embargo produced a crisis that transformed the structure of global finance. The Nixon administration was facing the collapse of Bretton Woods and the inflationary pressure of the Vietnam war economy. It needed a solution to the dollar's declining dominance. The Saudis, meanwhile, were facing the accumulated pressure of Nasser's pan-Arab legacy and the genuine threat of a nationalist seizure of ARAMCO. They needed a security guarantee. The bargain struck between Washington and Riyadh in the early 1970s had two components. Neither was publicly announced.

The first was financial. Treasury Secretary William Simon flew to Jeddah and negotiated an arrangement under which the Saudi central bank, SAMA, could purchase US government obligations outside the normal Federal Reserve auction process. This gave the Saudis a privileged and secret channel into American debt markets.

In return, the US government promised complete secrecy about Saudi investments. That assurance directly violated commitments Washington had made to its OECD partners, who'd agreed not to pursue unilateral arrangements to attract OPEC capital.

Under Carter, Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal separately negotiated with the Saudis to keep oil priced in dollars, rather than switching to a currency basket or SDRs. In exchange, Saudi Arabia got a temporary director's seat at the IMF. These arrangements continued across administrations. Each government proclaimed multilateralism in public while conducting bilateral transactions in private.

David Spiro's account of the petrodollar system is precise on this point. The United States didn't just protect the Saudi dynasty. It actively concealed the financial architecture of the relationship from its own democratic partners.

The second component was political. Washington would protect the dynasty militarily, diplomatically, and in terms of its international legitimacy. The House of Saud didn't rest on popular consent. It rested on the Wahhabi religious establishment, which provided theological justification for the dynasty and managed the population on its behalf. So American protection of the Saudi state was, by direct implication, American protection of the Wahhabi religious establishment. The two were structurally inseparable.

What followed was the globalisation of Wahhabism through religious infrastructure spending on a scale that had no historical precedent. Saudi money built mosques across South Asia, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and inside Western Muslim communities. It funded madrassas that replaced existing local curricula with Wahhabi-inflected material, distributed Qurans in Saudi-approved translations, and paid for scholarships that brought students to Medina and Mecca and sent them home with Wahhabi training.

As Adam Hanieh's analysis of the Gulf's political economy shows, this spending wasn't philanthropy. It was the ideological component of a political bargain. And it served both parties with precision.

It served the Saudis by directing religious energy outward, rather than letting it build up against the dynasty at home. The 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque by Juhayman al-Otaybi showed what happened when that energy had nowhere to go but inward. His revolt was rooted in the same classical Wahhabi doctrines of al-wala' wal-bara' and manifest enmity that the scholars had transmitted for two centuries. The answer, after that, was to keep the energy permanently occupied devouring someone else.

It served Washington by achieving what Nasser's pan-Arabism had threatened to prevent. Nasserist pan-Arabism had set out a vision of Muslim and Arab solidarity that was explicitly anti-imperialist, hostile to Israel, and capable of mobilising populations across national borders. That project died for several reasons: partly military defeat, partly political failure, and partly the religious fragmentation that Wahhabi funding actively deepened.

A Muslim world divided between Wahhabi Sunnis and everyone they were prepared to declare apostate wasn't capable of the unified political mobilisation that Nasser's project had briefly made imaginable. The theological division served the strategic interest. It had served a structurally identical interest before.

V. The Continuity

Then came al-Maqdisi. In the early 1980s, while studying in Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian-Jordanian scholar Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi encountered the classical Wahhabi corpus, the al-Durar al-saniyya. He recognised in it a revolutionary toolkit, one the Saudi state had deliberately tamed.

The scholars from Ibn Abd al-Wahhab through Ibn Sihman had trained their machinery of takfir and manifest enmity on the cult of saints and on Ottoman legitimacy. Al-Maqdisi simply redirected it. Apostate rulers who governed by positive law rather than the Sharia were, in his argument, committing the same structural shirk as grave-worshippers. The target had just been updated for the present century.

His book Millat Ibrahim, completed in Peshawar in 1984 and distributed among the Afghan Arabs there, became the founding document of Jihadi Salafism. Its doctrinal core was lifted almost verbatim from the Wahhabi tradition that Saudi petrodollars had globalised. The Islamic State, publishing the same classical texts in Raqqa in 2015, was making the same argument with more territory behind it. The instrument had escaped its handlers.

Britain selected Wahhabism in 1744 because three features made it uniquely suited to the imperial problem of the moment: its anti-Ottoman political logic, its takfiri mechanism for fracturing Muslim solidarity from within, and its hostility to the Sufi networks that organised Muslim political life across imperial frontiers. America amplified Wahhabism after 1973 because the same three features were still useful, for a structurally identical problem. The selection criteria didn't change, because the underlying strategic problem didn't change.

A Muslim world unified around Ottoman legitimacy threatened British imperial control. A Muslim world unified around pan-Arab nationalism threatened American hegemony. Wahhabism, with its built-in takfiri logic and its rejection of any political authority it hadn't itself sanctioned, was the instrument both times. Chosen for the same reasons, by different empires, facing the same problem.

Bunzel is careful to separate the Wahhabi tradition's internal development from the political uses it was put to. That separation is analytically necessary for the kind of scholarship he's doing. But it can't be allowed to obscure the pattern.

So here's the real question. Out of all the reformist traditions available in the eighteenth century, and out of all the Islamic institutions that might have received Saudi petrodollar funding in the 1970s, why did this particular theology become the default Islam for millions of people who'd had no prior connection to it? The theology itself doesn't answer that.

What answers it is who paid for it, and why, and what they needed it to do. Wahhabism didn't globalise itself. It was globalised because the money followed strategic interest. And that strategic interest, across two centuries and two imperial powers, stayed the same: keep the Muslim world divided, and keep the division theological, so it looks as though it came from within.