Of all the currents that have shaped the modern Muslim world, none has flowed farther from its source than the austere and uncompromising creed that arose in the eighteenth century in the deserts of central Arabia and was carried, two hundred years later, on a river of oil money into mosques and schoolrooms on every continent. We call it Wahhabism, after the preacher whose name it bears, though its adherents prefer other names and bristle at this one. By whatever name, it is the purist, literalist, and intolerant strain of Islam that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia adopted as its official creed and then, in the second half of the twentieth century, spent untold billions exporting to the world. To understand the hardening of Muslim attitudes across two generations—and the particular ferocity of the hostility to Israel and to the Jew—one must understand where this creed came from and how it traveled.

We approach the subject, as always, with care for the distinction between a doctrine and a people. The Saudi state is not the whole of Islam, and the great majority of Muslims are not Wahhabis and never were; many regard the creed with active distaste, as a desert puritanism that would strip their faith of its mercy and its beauty. To trace the export of an ideology is not to indict the hundreds of millions on whom it was pressed, many of whom resisted it. It is to follow a particular and consequential idea from its birthplace to its reach, and to ask honestly what it has done in the world and what it means for the people of the covenant.

The Man from Najd

In the arid heartland of the Arabian Peninsula, in the region called Najd, there was born early in the eighteenth century a scholar named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and he looked upon the Islam of his day and pronounced it corrupt. The Muslims around him, he charged, had fallen into idolatry: they venerated saints, made pilgrimage to tombs, sought intercession at shrines, hung charms, and honored holy men in ways that, to his eye, stole from God the worship due to God alone. He preached a return to what he held to be the pure faith of the earliest generations, stripped of every later accretion, centered on the absolute and jealous oneness of God, and intolerant—fiercely, definitionally intolerant—of anything he judged to compromise it. In itself, a call to purify religion is no rare thing and need alarm no one. What made this call world-altering was the use to which it was put and the alliance into which it entered.

For Ibn Abd al-Wahhab did not merely preach; he denounced, and his denunciations had teeth. The practices he condemned were not, in his telling, mere errors of pious men; they were idolatry, and the people who clung to them were not merely mistaken Muslims but, in the logic of his doctrine, not truly Muslims at all. This is the seed from which the movement’s violence would grow, for once a man has persuaded himself that his fellow believers are in truth idolaters and apostates, the classical law’s sanctions against idolatry and apostasy lie ready to his hand. The preacher of Najd took the ordinary diversity of Muslim devotion and recast it as a war between true monotheists and disguised pagans. That recasting is the heart of the whole matter.

The Pact at Diriyah

A preacher alone, however fervent, changes little; a preacher allied to a sword changes history. In the small oasis settlement of Diriyah, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab found his sword in a local chieftain named Muhammad ibn Saud, and the two men struck a bargain that would echo for centuries. The preacher would lend the chieftain’s ambitions the sanction of religion, declaring his conquests holy war for the purification of the faith; the chieftain would lend the preacher’s creed the force of arms, imposing it by conquest on the tribes of Arabia. Creed and sword were wedded, and the marriage has never been formally dissolved. The descendants of Ibn Saud rule Arabia to this day; the descendants and disciples of the preacher have furnished the kingdom’s religious establishment from that day to this. The state and the creed were born together in that pact, and they have lived together ever since.

It is essential to grasp this structure, because it explains the peculiar character of the Saudi state, which is in this respect unlike any other on earth. It is a modern nation with a flag and an oil industry and a seat at the council of nations, governed by a family whose legitimacy rests, by ancient compact, on its championship of the most rigid creed in Islam. The bargain at Diriyah made the purification of the faith a function of the state and the expansion of the state an act of the faith, and that fusion has shaped everything the kingdom has done, including the great project of the twentieth century: the export, by the resources of a petroleum empire, of the desert creed to the wider Muslim world and beyond.

Takfir: The Charge of Unbelief

At the doctrinal core of the movement, and the source of its capacity for violence against fellow Muslims, lies the practice the Arabic calls takfir—the declaration that a professing Muslim is in fact an unbeliever. This is among the gravest things one Muslim can say of another, for it strips the accused of the protections that Islam extends to its own and exposes him, in the harsh logic of the law, to the penalties reserved for apostasy and idolatry. The mainstream of the tradition has always hedged takfir about with severe restrictions, precisely because of its terrible consequences; a long-honored saying warns that he who calls his brother an unbeliever has himself spoken unbelief if the charge be false. The Najd movement loosened those restrictions dramatically, and in doing so opened a door that has never since been fully closed.

Once it became thinkable to brand whole categories of Muslims as secret idolaters—the Shia, the Sufis, the venerators of saints, and ultimately any who rejected the purist creed—the way was cleared for holy war not merely against infidels at the frontier but against Muslims at home. This is the logic that runs, like a buried cable, beneath the most savage movements of our own time, which turn their swords first against other Muslims they have declared apostate. The men who massacre worshippers in a rival mosque are operating, whether they know the genealogy or not, within a framework of excommunication that the eighteenth-century movement did more than any other to revive and legitimize. Takfir is the doctrine that makes the believer’s neighbor into a lawful target, and its loosening was the movement’s most fateful bequest.

The Wars of Purification

The early history of the creed in power was written in blood, and it is recorded by Muslim chroniclers, not by enemies of Islam. As the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance expanded across Arabia, it imposed its creed by the sword and treated the shrines and practices it condemned as idolatry to be destroyed. At the dawn of the nineteenth century its warriors fell upon a city sacred to the Shia, sacked it, and slaughtered its inhabitants, an atrocity that has never been forgotten in the long and bitter enmity between the two branches of Islam. They demolished tombs and shrines wherever their power reached, including, in time, sites venerated for their connection to the prophet’s own family and companions, on the ground that any veneration of the dead trespassed on the worship of God.

This impulse to destroy did not die with the first Saudi state. When the dynasty rose again in the twentieth century and took the holy cities, it leveled historic tombs and monuments on the same doctrinal grounds, an act of erasure that grieved Muslims around the world who saw their heritage bulldozed in the name of purity. The same logic that smashed a saint’s tomb in the desert would, generations later and in other hands, dynamite ancient monuments and behead the keepers of museums, for the creed that cannot abide a shrine cannot abide a statue or a relic or any object that men might honor beside God. The wars of purification were not a medieval episode safely past. They were the opening chapter of a story still being written.

Oil and the Global Pulpit

For most of its history the desert creed was a local affair, confined to the Arabian heartland and of little concern to the wider world. What transformed it from a regional puritanism into a global force was the discovery, beneath the sands of the kingdom, of the largest and cheapest reserves of oil on earth, and the torrent of wealth that flowed from them after the middle of the twentieth century. With that wealth the Saudi state undertook a project without precedent in the history of religion: the systematic, lavishly funded export of its official creed to Muslim communities across the globe, from the cities of the Arab world to the villages of Asia and Africa to the immigrant neighborhoods of Europe and the Americas. Tens of billions of dollars, by sober estimate, were poured over decades into this single enterprise.

The instruments of the export were the institutions that shape a community’s faith at the root. The money built mosques and paid the salaries of the preachers who filled them, and the preachers, trained in or aligned with the kingdom’s creed, carried that creed to the congregations. It built and funded religious schools, the madrassas, in poor countries where the state provided little education and a free religious schooling was a gift the desperate could not refuse. It printed and distributed, by the hundreds of millions, copies of the Qur’an and of religious literature carrying the purist interpretation, and it funded chairs and centers at universities. Where a softer, more tolerant, more locally rooted Islam had prevailed for centuries, the petrodollar pulpit arrived with money no local tradition could match, and over a generation it bent the faith of whole regions toward the harder line.

The Textbooks and the Children

Of all the instruments of the export, none was more consequential than the schoolbook, for the schoolbook forms the child, and the child becomes the world. The kingdom’s own curriculum, and the curricula it funded and exported, taught generations of Muslim children a particular and hardened vision of the faith and of the world: that the purist creed alone was true Islam and the rest deviation; that friendship with the unbeliever was forbidden; that the Jew and the Christian were the enemies of God and the believer; that the world was divided into the camp of faith and the camp of unbelief between which there could be no true peace. Independent examinations of these textbooks, conducted by reformers within the Muslim world as well as by outside observers, documented passages of startling hostility, including toward the Jewish people specifically, presented to children as the plain teaching of their religion.

Consider the arithmetic of this over half a century. A creed that teaches a child to regard the Jew as the eternal enemy of God, repeated across millions of schoolrooms and tens of millions of children over fifty years, does not produce a generation of peacemakers. It produces a vast reservoir of inherited hostility, a default suspicion absorbed before the age of reason and rarely examined after it, upon which the demagogue and the recruiter may draw at will. The export of the creed was, in this sense, the manufacture of an audience—an audience prepared in childhood to receive the message of the extremist as the confirmation of what it had always been taught. The bomb-maker needs his explosives, but first the propagandist needs his receptive ear, and the schoolbook, patiently and at vast expense, supplied it.

The Question of the Offspring

We come now to the most contested question in the whole subject, and we must handle it with scrupulous fairness, for it is easy to overstate and easy to deny. The question is this: did the exported creed give birth to the terrorist movements that have convulsed the world in our time—to the network that struck a great American city, and to the self-proclaimed caliphate that drowned a region in blood? The Saudi state indignantly denies it, and points out, truthfully, that these movements turned their fury against the kingdom itself, declared its rulers apostates, and sought their overthrow. The relationship between the official creed and its violent offspring is not the simple paternity that the kingdom’s critics sometimes allege.

And yet the denial cannot be the whole truth either, and intellectual honesty requires us to say so. The men who founded and filled the great terror network were overwhelmingly products of the world the creed had shaped; its founder was a son of the kingdom, and the majority of those who carried out its most infamous attack were the kingdom’s citizens. The self-proclaimed caliphate, for its part, reportedly used the kingdom’s own religious textbooks in the schools of its territory, finding in them a curriculum congenial to its purposes with little need of revision. The fairest conclusion is neither that the kingdom directed these movements nor that it is innocent of them, but that it spent two generations and a fortune cultivating the doctrinal soil—the takfir, the division of the world, the hatred of the unbeliever—in which such movements could and did take root, and was then horrified by the harvest. A man who sows a field of dragon’s teeth may sincerely deplore the soldiers who spring up, but he ought not to be surprised by them.

The Creed and the Jew

Our particular concern is the bearing of all this upon the Jewish people and the State of Israel, and here the record is grim. The purist creed inherited and intensified the older theological hostility to the Jew, teaching it as settled doctrine and broadcasting it, through the instruments we have described, to a global audience. The division of the world into the camp of faith and the camp of unbelief leaves no room for a sovereign Jewish state on land claimed for Islam; the prohibition on friendship with the unbeliever forecloses the very normalization that peace would require; and the apocalyptic strain in the tradition, with its prophecies of a final reckoning with the Jews, supplies a religious frame within which the destruction of Israel appears not as a political aim but as a cosmic destiny. Where this creed has been successfully exported, the ground has been prepared for the most absolute and least negotiable form of hostility to the Jewish state.

This is why the softening of attitudes that peace would require has been so painfully slow in the regions the creed has touched, and why the courageous Muslims who reach toward reconciliation with Israel do so against the grain of an ideology specifically funded and exported to prevent it. The friend of Israel must understand that the hostility he confronts is not merely the natural resentment of a territorial dispute, which time and negotiation might soften, but in significant part a manufactured hostility, deliberately cultivated over decades by the resources of an oil empire and the authority of a sacred creed. To dismantle it will require more than a treaty; it will require the long, patient undoing of what was taught to the children, and that work has scarcely begun.

And let no one imagine this a counsel of despair, for the very fact that the hostility was made means that it can be unmade. A hatred that grows wild in the soil of human nature is hard to uproot; but a hatred that was planted, watered with money, and cultivated by design is a hatred with a history and therefore with a remedy. What a generation of textbooks built, another generation of textbooks can begin to dismantle; what the petrodollar pulpit preached, a freer and truer preaching can answer. The friend of Israel labors and prays not against an iron destiny but against a human project, and human projects, by the mercy of God, are not forever.

The Anatomy of the Export

It repays a closer look to ask how, in plain mechanical terms, a creed confined for two centuries to a desert backwater came to reshape the faith of communities ten thousand miles away, for the answer reveals why the effect was so deep and so durable. The export was not a matter of armies or of decrees from a distant throne; it was a matter of supplying, free of charge and in overwhelming abundance, the very things that poorer Muslim communities could not afford to supply for themselves. A village that could not build a mosque was given one. A town that could not pay an imam received a trained and salaried preacher. Children who would otherwise have gone untaught were offered a free religious education, with free books and sometimes free board, on the single condition—never stated as a condition—that the teaching be the teaching of the kingdom. Where there is a vacuum and one party alone has the means to fill it, that party shapes whatever fills the space.

And the genius of the method, from the exporters’ point of view, was that it never looked like coercion. No one was compelled to attend the new mosque or send his child to the free school; he was simply offered a good he could not otherwise have, and he took it gratefully, and his faith was bent in the taking. Over a generation the local traditions—the gentler, saint-loving, custom-laden Islam that had grown up over centuries in a thousand particular places—were not banned or burned but quietly starved, outcompeted by a better-funded rival that arrived wearing the prestige of the holy cities and the wealth of the oil empire. This is how a faith is changed without a shot fired: not by conquest but by endowment, not by forbidding the old but by lavishly funding the new until the old withers for want of means. The petrodollar did what the sword of the first Saudi state never could, and it did it more thoroughly.

The Reforms of the Crown Prince

Honesty and hope alike require that we record a genuine change, for in recent years the kingdom that exported the creed has begun, under a young and assertive crown prince, to turn against significant elements of its own legacy. The religious police that once enforced the creed’s strictures in the streets have been curbed; women have been permitted to drive and to enter public life in ways unthinkable a decade before; cinemas and concerts and a whole world of forbidden entertainment have been opened; and, most relevant to our subject, the kingdom has undertaken a revision of its notorious textbooks, removing or softening many of the passages of hostility that examiners had long condemned. The crown prince has spoken openly of returning to a more moderate Islam and of the creed’s export as a historical error driven by the rivalries of an earlier age. These are real changes, and the friend of truth welcomes them without grudging.

But the friend of truth does not gild them either, and a clear eye sees the shadows beside the light. The same reforms have been accompanied by a ruthless concentration of power, the jailing of critics and clerics alike, a brutal war in a neighboring land, and the murder and dismemberment of a dissident journalist in a foreign consulate—an act that revealed the iron beneath the modernizing velvet. The liberalization is real, but it is the gift of an autocrat, granted from above and revocable from above, not the fruit of a free society that could secure it. And the creed exported over half a century cannot be recalled by a royal decree; it lives now in ten thousand pulpits and a generation of minds far beyond the kingdom’s control. The crown prince may regret the dragon’s teeth, but he cannot gather the soldiers back into the ground. The reform is a beginning, and we pray it prospers; it is not yet a cure.

The Strange Convergence

There is a deep irony in the present hour that the student of this history cannot fail to notice, and it concerns the relation of the kingdom to the very Jewish state its exported creed taught a generation to hate. For the rulers of Arabia, calculating the interests of their throne against the rising power of a rival across the Gulf, have in recent years moved toward an unprecedented and once-unthinkable accommodation with Israel, drawn by the logic of a common enemy and the lure of technology and trade. The wider warming between Israel and the Arab states of the Gulf, formalized in agreements that would have seemed fantastical to an earlier generation, marks a genuine and hopeful shift in the politics of the region, and the friend of Israel rejoices in every hand extended to her in peace.

Yet the irony is instructive, and it teaches a sober lesson about the friendship of princes. The same dynasty that funded the global pulpit of hostility to the Jew now finds it expedient to reach toward the Jewish state, not because the creed has been repented at the root but because the interests of the throne have shifted. This is the friendship of calculation, real while the interests align and revocable when they diverge, and it is a frail thing to build a nation’s safety upon. The convergence is welcome, and Israel is right to grasp every genuine hand; but she would be foolish to forget that the hand now extended belongs to the house that for fifty years bankrolled her enemies’ theology, and that a creed sown in the children of half the world is not unsown by a change in the calculations of a court. Welcome the peace; trust the Lord.

The Christian’s Discernment

What, then, shall the believer make of all this? He learns, first, the power of an idea armed with money and time, and the long shadow that a single creed, born in a desert and carried on a river of oil, can cast across the whole earth and a hundred years. He learns that the hostility ranged against Israel is in large part a manufactured thing, taught and funded and exported, and therefore not the inevitable verdict of any people but the achievable project of particular men—which means it can, by other men and by the grace of God, be unmade. And he learns, in the strange convergence of the present hour, the oldest lesson of his own Scripture, that the friendship of princes is a reed that pierces the hand that leans on it, and that the safety of the covenant people was never meant to rest on the calculations of kings.

So he watches the reforms of the crown prince with hope and without illusion, welcomes every step toward peace and trusts no prince to keep it, prays for the Muslim children taught to hate that they may be taught instead to love, and fixes his own confidence where alone it is safe. Put not your trust in princes, the psalmist sang, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help; happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord his God. The oil will run dry and the creeds of men will rise and fall and the calculations of courts will shift with every season, but the keeper of Israel changes not, and He neither slumbers nor sleeps. That is the rock on which the believer stands while the kingdoms of the desert and the sea contend, and from it he loves what is good in every overture of peace without ever bowing to the hand that offers it. He has seen how an idea, armed with gold and patience, can travel from a desert oasis to the ends of the earth and bend the minds of millions; and he has learned from it the corresponding hope, that what was taught can be untaught, that what was sown by men can by other men and a greater grace be unsown, and that no manufactured hatred, however vast its budget or long its reach, is written into the eternal order of things. The dragon’s teeth were sown by a king; they will be answered by the King of kings, in whose hand the heart of every prince is turned as the rivers of water are turned, whithersoever He will.