In the early 19th century, barely a decade after the passing of the Shaikh, Saudi-Wahhabi armies stormed the Shi’ite holy city of Karbala, massacred its inhabitants, and looted the shrine of Imam al-Husain.
(This is well-documented by Uthman ibn Abdalla ibn Bishr in his book Unwan al-Majd Ta’rikh an-Najd [The Title of Glory in the History of the Najd], a primary source of early Saudi history. He was a Najdi insider who narrated from a perspective of believers fighting infidels)
The attack, in 1802, was not simply an atrocity; it was an announcement. A new kind of state had been born in Arabia—one that fused religious absolutism with political ambition, declaring much of the Muslim world heretical and in need of saving.
More than two centuries later, Saudi Arabia is doing something almost unimaginable in light of that history: reconciling with Iran, restraining proxy wars, rewriting its religious identity, and seeking regional stability over ideological struggle.
Yesterday, Riyadh appointed Fahd bin Abduljalil bin Ali Al-Saif, a senior executive from the Public Investment Fund (PIF), as Minister of Investment, succeeding Khalid Al-Falih, who moved to the role of Minister of State. He’s Shi’ite.
At PIF, Al-Saif led global capital finance and investment strategy—precisely the skill set central to a state repositioning itself as a magnet for global capital.
This is coming just 10 years after Shaikh Nimr an-Nimr, a Shi’ite cleric, was publicly executed against much widespread protest for inciting sectarian strife and criticising Saudi officials.
What has happened in this short span of historical time?
Under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the kingdom seems to be quietly ending the revolutionary era that began with the Wahhabi-Saudi pact of 1744.
MBS seemed poised to turn out as the most consequential Saudi ruler since the founding of the first Saudi state. He is undoing the revolution that started with that first beginning.
Most people describe this simply as liberalization. I’m more inclined to see it as something far more historically significant: the transformation of Saudi Arabia from a militant ideological state into a post-religious, nationalist power whose survival depends not on clerical authority but on economic growth, technological modernization, and geopolitical pragmatism.
Let’s go back in history and see its long arc.
The First Saudi State was nothing short of a revolution. The alliance between Shaikh Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Shaikh Muhammad ibn Saud in 1744 did not merely create a dynasty; it created a revolutionary movement.
Wahhabism was not conservative. It was more than that. It was puritanical, iconoclastic, and militantly expansionist. It declared centuries of widespread Islamic practice corrupted and entire populations apostate.
This theological radicalism provided the ideological engine for Saudi territorial conquest across Arabia, Iraq, and the Gulf from its base on the plateau of Najd.
Al-Hasa and Qatif; the Hijaz; Asir, Najran and Jazan; and al-Jawf and the Northern territories, were soon swallowed up by the relentless campaigns of the Saudi forces.
The sack of Karbala to the North was probably its most infamous moment, but it was not unique. Wahhabi armies destroyed tombs, massacred communities, and challenged Ottoman sovereignty across the region.
The Ottomans brutally crushed the first Saudi state in 1818, but the Najdi da’wah survived.
When the modern kingdom—the third Saudi state—was established by Abdulaziz ibn Saud in 1932, the Najdi da’wah became institutionalized as the kingdom’s legitimizing creed.
The Saudi state was conservative in appearance, but revolutionary in its theology.
But that tension exploded in 1979. There was a blowback on the peninsula and a threat from across the Gulf.
The Iranian Revolution and the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca forced the House of Saud into a historic bargain. It dug in, it re-radicalised.
Facing ideological challenge from Shiite Iran and rebellion from their own puritan followers, Saudi rulers surrendered immense power to the religious establishment.
Clerics gained control over social life, education, and public morality. In exchange, they legitimized the monarchy.
Saudi Arabia responded to Iran not with reform, but with ideological escalation. It globalized the Najdi da’awah, financing mosques, schools, and preachers across the Muslim world, including Nigeria.
It entered proxy wars from Afghanistan to Yemen. The kingdom became the epicentre of a transnational Sunni counter-revolution.
This strategy stabilized the monarchy—but at catastrophic long-term cost. It generated jihadist movements that eventually turned against Saudi Arabia itself.
It fuelled sectarian conflict with Iran. And it trapped the oil-rich kingdom inside a conservative framework that made economic modernization nearly impossible.
By the time Mohammed bin Salman rose to power in 2017, Saudi Arabia was stuck inside a system that could no longer sustain it in the globalised world.
MBS’s rule represents a fundamental break with the post-1979 order. He has systematically stripped clerics of power, arrested dissenting preachers, taken control of religious funding, and rewritten national identity.
The kingdom now celebrates pre-Wahhabi history. It promotes archaeology, tourism, and entertainment. Women drive. Cinemas operate. Music festivals fill Riyadh.
These are not cultural reforms. They are political ones.
MBS is dismantling Wahhabism as a governing ideology. Saudi Arabia is being rebuilt not as a religious project, but as a developmental state whose legitimacy rests on growth, investment, and social stability.
Nothing illustrates this transformation more clearly than the kingdom’s new investment architecture.
The appointment of the Shi’ite finance technocrat signals several shifts at once.
First, it underscores the centrality of the PIF as the engine of Saudi transformation. The kingdom’s future is being built not by clerics or oil technocrats, but by sovereign wealth strategists integrating Saudi capital into global markets.
Second, if confirmed as the first Shiite minister in the kingdom’s cabinet history, the appointment carries symbolic weight far beyond bureaucratic reshuffling.
In a state whose founding ideology treated Shiism as abomination, elevating a Shiite technocrat to cabinet rank reflects a recalibration of national identity—from sectarian guardianship to functional citizenship.
Third, the reshuffle reinforces a governing principle of the MBS era: loyalty and competence over ideological pedigree. The new Saudi elite is composed not of religious authorities but of financiers, engineers, and project managers tasked with delivering Vision 2030.
The message is unmistakable: legitimacy now flows from economic performance, not doctrinal purity.
But why is the the Kingdom making peace with its old ideological enemy?
For decades, hostility toward Iran was one of the organizing principles of Saudi foreign policy. Yet in 2023, Saudi Arabia restored diplomatic relations with Tehran under a China-brokered agreement.
By 2025, senior Saudi officials were visiting Iran. In early 2026, Riyadh publicly pledged it would not allow its territory to be used in attacks against Iran.
This is not appeasement. It is strategy.
MBS understands that perpetual conflict blocks everything Saudi Arabia now needs: foreign investment, technological partnerships, tourism, and supply-chain integration.
Missiles scare capital. Proxy wars kill megaprojects. Regional chaos makes Vision 2030 impossible.
Saudi Arabia seems to be choosing commerce over creed.
It is also making a deeper statement: the kingdom no longer sees itself as the vanguard of Sunni Islam, but as a sovereign power pursuing national interest.
Revolutionary states often radicalize before they normalize. France had the Terror before Napoleon. China had Mao before Deng. Saudi Arabia had Wahhabism before MBS.
Like Deng Xiaoping, MBS is subordinating ideology to development. The new Saudi legitimacy rests not on theology but on GDP.
That Beijing, rather than Washington, brokered the Saudi-Iran détente signals a world shifting from ideological alignments toward commercial geopolitics—the environment in which Saudi Arabia intends to thrive.
However, every post-revolutionary transition carries a danger: if growth fails, ideology returns.
Saudi Arabia is probably betting that jobs, prosperity, and social opening will permanently weaken the clerical system.
So far, the bet is holding. Saudi youth overwhelmingly support the changes. The religious establishment, stripped of independent power, has acquiesced.
But what if Vision 2030 must falters?
Well… If and when we get there.
This is the story so far:
Saudi Arabia was born as a revolutionary religious empire. It spent two centuries exporting faith and fighting heresy.
Under Mohammed bin Salman, it is becoming something radically different: a post-ideological state that seeks stability more than salvation and prosperity more than doctrinal supremacy.
The elevation of technocrats like Fahd Al-Saif, the détente with Iran, and the dismantling of clerical dominance are not isolated reforms. They mark the closing of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi revolutionary age.
The sons of ibn Saud have abandoned the call of ibn AbdulWahhab. They have broken the nearly three-century old pact of Dir’iyyah.
