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That notion proved attractive in 1744 to Mohammed ibn Saud, an ambitious local chieftain of puritan leanings who wanted ideological approval to treat the Ottomans as a foreign occupying power. Wahhabism gave him religious credibility for an armed campaign to gain stewardship of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The resulting full partnership--Saud granted Wahhab religious and judicial control in his lands and married his daughter--was wildly successful and memorably brutal. Slaughtering thousands of Shi'ites and Sufis (and Sunnis), the House of Saud began a journey that would turn most of the Arabian peninsula into a Wahhabi theocracy. As the Sauds gained territory, they imposed what Paul Hardy, author of Traditions of Islam, calls Wahhabism's "radical intolerance." In 1926 they introduced the muttawa, religious police who enforce prayer five times a day, monitor citizens' cell-phone text messages and arrest women for failing to cover themselves completely with the black abaya robe.
Over the years the profligate ruling family has drawn the ire of its most fervent subjects. To them, the increasing opulence of the princes' lifestyle and the kingdom's openness to dealing with the West are corruptions of the faith's rigid strictures. That dissent increased when the Sauds let Westerners develop their oil.
In the 1980s, when the regime sought to deflect its homegrown militants from domestic agitation by sending them off to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, it midwifed a radical mutation of Wahhabism. There Saudi mujahedin battled alongside cadres inspired by Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb, whose fundamentalism was influenced by notions of violent national liberation. Unlike Wahhabis, these Islamists believed that the time for jihad against infidels and the neocolonialist West was now. Returning home, the Saudi fighters advanced the idea, and soon there were two types of Wahhabism.
Today, notes Hillel Fradkin, an Islamic scholar who heads the neoconservative Center for Ethics and Public Policy in Washington, "it's increasingly hard to distinguish Wahhabism from radicalized Islam." French writer and Islam expert Gilles Kepel says the Sauds until the late 1990s relied on a trio of aging clerics with conservative credibility to keep the young in check. But all three have since died, and the remaining government-sanctioned religious establishment holds little sway with the most hard-core believers. Those imams who still counsel against jihadist terrorism, says Kepel, may be in earnest. But they "inevitably combine it with injunctions to embrace 'real' Islam all the more zealously." In this era, that all too often translates into values and attitudes hostile to Western culture. --By David Van Biema. With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Paris