Pax Wahhabica Revisited: Saudi Arabia’s Imperial Theopolitics from Hegemony to Hybridity

Abstract

This paper revisits Saudi Arabia’s religious statecraft through the lens of Pax Wahhabica, interrogating the transnational diffusion, strategic reconfiguration, and evolving instrumentalisation of Wahhabism as a modality of imperial theopolitics and a conduit of ideological projection. Tracing Wahhabism from its eighteenth-century roots, through its Cold War entrenchment as a bulwark against secular nationalism, to its post-9/11 fragmentation, this study offers a conceptual re-evaluation of Wahhabism not as a fixed theological doctrine but as a malleable constellation of norms and discourses continuously calibrated to state interest. Theoretically anchored in soft power analysis, constructivist norm diffusion, Gramscian hegemony, and Foucauldian governmentality, this paper examines how religious norms are mobilised through affective discourse, institutional socialisation, and securitised governance to advance regime resilience. Through empirical case studies on Bosnia, Indonesia, and Nigeria, it elucidates how Wahhabi norms were localised, hybridised, and, in some instances, weaponised against their progenitors. Finally, this paper examines the domestic reconfiguration and international repositioning of Wahhabism under Muḥammad bin Salmān, arguing that contemporary Saudi theopolitics marks not the abandonment of Wahhabism but its reconversion into a strategically curated, domesticated ideology. Pax Wahhabica, thus, persists—not as an unbroken theological doctrine but as a hybrid ideational empire in which Islam is strategically retooled as an instrument of hegemonic statecraft.

1. Introduction: Two Structures of International Politics

Foreign policy is never an uncomplicated, rational pursuit of interest within an anarchic international system. It entails rather a theatre of meaning, where states project identity, enact purpose, and articulate legitimacy. Beneath the language of diplomacy and the metrics of security lie deeper logics of behaviour—civilisational claims, theological grammars, and normative ambitions—that transcend the material contexts. In some cases, foreign policy becomes a vehicle not only for strategic action but for metaphysical assertion, embedding political projects within salvific narratives or transcendent moral architectures. It is within this broader interpretive frame that the present study situates Saudi Arabia’s religious statecraft. At its core lies a dialectic: the Kingdom’s pursuit of regime security has long been entangled with a universalising religious vocation, rendering its foreign policy at once strategic and sacral.

This paper contends that Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy is, on one level, unexceptional, insofar as it synthesises economic and security imperatives with expansive narratives of national mission. States are not merely geopolitical entities; they are narrative projects, continually telling stories about who they are and what they stand for (Weldes 1999). Conversely, Saudi foreign policy has been profoundly marked by exceptionalism, its foundational mythos animated by an evangelistic imperative, operationalised through sustained engagement and entrenchment within Muslim communities worldwide—often undergirded by an unyielding presumption of supremacy as the putative Magnus islamicus. Since the days of the Holy Roman Empire, such a foreign policy profile, eroding the boundaries between the citizen and the non-citizen, is largely unparalleled (Wilson 2016). Saudi “ultramontanism”—the belief that it is the supreme religious custodian over global Islamdom—has reverberated across local, national, and international domains, eluding conventional foreign policy praxis.

While recourse to religious rationales in foreign policy is not unprecedented (Thomas 2005)—nor are alignments grounded in cultural or civilisational affinity (Sheikh 2003)—a state pursuing a global mission to replicate its religious model through external partners and institutions remains without parallel. Equally distinctive is its pursuit of religious uniformity, shaping the aesthetic, linguistic, sartorial, doctrinal, and ethical contours through isomorphic pressures. To describe this phenomenon, I invoke the term “imperialism” not in its classical geopolitical register of territorial acquisition, but as a modality of accumulating adherence—what Julian Go (2016) calls “epistemic empire”, constituted through normative hierarchies, or, in the Foucauldian idiom, as the expansion of a discursive “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980)—both of which operate beyond the juridical strictures of post-Westphalian political sovereignty. Similar to Hardt and Negri’s (2000) conception of empire as a post-territorial formation constituted through the circulation of capital and the governance of subjectivities, I argue that the Saudi political project operates not through territorial conquest but through the transnational production of religiosity, the cultivation of disciplinary mechanisms, and the consolidation of symbolic and spiritual capital via networks of clerics, charities, and educational institutions across the umma, the worldwide body of believers.

Put differently, Saudi religious statecraft—what I term theopolitics—has been both idiosyncratic in form and ideocratic in ambition, projecting a singular model of Islamic authority with both global reach and local resonance. Theopolitics may be understood simply as “religious statescraft”, or more presciently the strategic mobilisation of theological categories, authorities, and discourses in the service of political projects—whether to legitimise state power, shape transnational alignments, or articulate normative orders that blur the boundaries between revelation and raison d’etat. In contrast to “political theology” (Lilla 2007; Schmitt 2005), which often interrogates the theological underpinnings of sovereignty or the metaphysical grammar of the state, theopolitics foregrounds the performative and instrumental use of religion as a domain of contestation and rule-making, particularly in contexts where religious legitimacy forms a parallel or even superior axis of authority to secular institutional frameworks. Theopolitics and geopolitics intersect insofar as they are mutually reinforcing modalities of power, wherein theological legitimacy is mobilised to sanctify positionality, while geopolitical configurations furnish the spatial and material scaffolding through which authority is projected, contested, and reproduced across borders.

Apologetic scholarship has frequently dismissed critiques of Saudi Arabia’s religious statecraft as conspiratorial, attributing them to Islamophobia—“anti-Muslimism” in Halliday’s (1996) terms—while concurrently questioning the very existence of Wahhabism as a coherent religious movement (e.g., Azzam 2003; Davis 2018; DeLong-Bas 2004; Oliver 2004; Zarabozo 2005). Such approaches falter due to a simplistic engagement with Wahhabism—one that neglects its historical metamorphoses, sociopolitical consequences, and the intricate nexus of material and ideational flows between the Arabian heartland and the wider Islamic hinterland. This study seeks to remediate this shortcoming in the literature by interrogating Wahhabism’s transnational articulations and state-mediated dispersals, noting the contingent ways in which it is instrumentalised, institutionalised, or internalised across divergent local and geopolitical contexts, but also the unpredictability of its permutations across time and space, courtesy of reinterpretations and resistance.

Wahhabism, as employed herein, refers not solely to the eighteenth-century revivalist theology of Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb—whose purificatory mission sought to extirpate bidʿa (reprehensible innovation) and shirk (idolatry)—but also to its subsequent institutionalisation and global projection under the aegis of Saudi state patronage (Bunzel 2023). It bears noting at the outset that the term “Wahhabism” (from the Arabic wahhābiyya) is itself an exonym—rejected by adherents and often deployed as a invective of disparagement—yet analytically useful insofar as it designates a set of discursive, doctrinal, and jurisprudential tendencies that, while internally variegated, share a distinctive genealogy traceable to Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (1703–1792) and his theological heirs (Nahouza 2018). It espouses a rigid scriptural literalism—amplified by a textual selectivism—a visceral antipathy toward religious pluralism, and an imaginary of Islam that fuses doctrinal purity with claims to primordialism (Sheikh 2023). In its iterative permutations, however, Wahhabism ceases to function as a purely theological posture and evolves into a regulative orthodoxy, inextricably entwined with statecraft, proselytisation, and the transnational fabrication of religious authority.

Given the polemical weight of the term Wahhabism, Saudi actors and their affiliates have often gravitated towards the more theologically capacious label of “Salafism” for themselves, even as the latter has distinct genealogical roots (Lauzière 2010, 2016). In contrast to Wahhabism—which refers to the Saudi state-sanctioned interpretation of Islam, rooted in the teachings of Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb—Salafism is an umbrella term for broader revivalist traditions oriented toward emulating the pious ancestors (al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ), and encompasses a diverse range of quietist, activist, and militant currents (Sheikh 2021; Wiktorowicz 2006). In practice, Wahhabi doctrinal content often enters via Saudi institutions but is rearticulated in the idiom of Salafi renewal (Commins 2015). The semantic adoption of Salafism as a self-signifier can fulfil several strategic functions: it can transcend the parochialism of Saudi origins, claim affinity with early Islamic precedent, and legitimise transnational outreach. In this article, the term Wahhabism is used in relation to Saudi religious statecraft, whereas Salafism designates localised currents shaped by heterogeneous socio-political terrains.

The extant literature on Wahhabism and Saudi religious diplomacy constitutes a variegated and frequently contested field of inquiry. Broadly, it may be divided into three overlapping strands, each shaped by distinct disciplinary commitments and normative orientations. The first adopts a positionally critical and overtly securitising lens. Often emerging from policy think tanks or polemical commentary, this strand of the literature tends to conflate Wahhabism with militant Salafism or portrays it as the ideological progenitor of jihadist violence and a principal vector of global Sunnī radicalisation (Gold 2003; Oliveti 2002; Schwartz 2003; Silverberg 2005; Valentine 2015; Ward 2017; Williams 2006; Wright 2006). While analytically blunt, this approach has exercised significant influence over security discourses and counter-extremism frameworks in Western policy circles. Yet the preoccupation with Western security imperatives often leads to the sacrifice of analytical nuance in favour of alarmist rhetoric. For instance, Schwartz (2003) and Gold (2003) have been critiqued by experts for adopting a polemical tone, eschewing primary Arabic sources, and advancing a reductionist portrayal of Wahhabism as a monolithic and intrinsically violent ideology.

A second, more historically and theologically grounded corpus, albeit at times somewhat apologetic, seeks to situate Wahhabism (as distinct from the broader school of Salafism) within the longue durée of Islamic reformism, tracing its doctrinal evolution, its symbiotic relationship with the Saudi polity, and the institutional consolidation of its religious authority (Ayoob and Kosebalaban 2009; Bunzel 2023; Commins 2006; DeLong-Bas 2004; Farquhar 2016; Meijer 2009; Mouline 2014; Steinberg 2002). Prominently, DeLong-Bas (2004) offers an erudite, yet arguably naïve, reading of Wahhabism’s foundational texts, largely decoupling its scriptural vision from its political deployment.

A third strand, emerging from International Relations scholarship, approaches Saudi foreign relations through the prisms of soft power and strategic identity construction (Alghannam 2024; Hoffman 2024; Mandaville 2022; Mandaville and Hamid 2018; Sheikh 2003). This literature highlights the deployment of Wahhabi orthodoxy as a vehicle for projecting state influence across the Muslim world, particularly in contexts of geopolitical competition or ideological rivalry. While these works diverge in emphasis, they converge in recognising the complex interplay between religion and geopolitics that underpins the Saudi Arabia’s transnational influence.

The third strand of literature has significantly advanced our understanding of Saudi religious diplomacy but remains constrained by two central lacunae. First, it often abstracts Wahhabism as a uniform ideological export, neglecting the contingent forms it assumes across diverse sociopolitical locales. Second, it lacks a sufficiently integrated theorisation of how religious norms function simultaneously as instruments of attraction, mechanisms of hegemonic consolidation, and technologies of disciplinary governance. This paper addresses these gaps by reconceptualising Saudi religious statecraft through the lens of a normative empire and by analysing how Wahhabism circulates not merely as a foreign policy tool but as a stratified ideological project embedded within global infrastructures of power, pedagogy, and subject formation. At the same time, this paper contributes to the first strand through a historically grounded critique of Wahhabism’s global imprint, and to the second by reframing its institutional evolution as a dynamic process of doctrinal adaptation, regime alignment, and strategic reconfiguration.

Overall, this study underscores the entwinement of religious orthodoxy and geopolitical aspiration, framing Wahhabism as a modality of religious disciplinarity with global ramifications. I contend that Saudi-sponsored Wahhabism has functioned both as a restorationist theological doctrine and a modular ideological apparatus—adaptive, regulatory, and reproductive of normative power. This study thus extends the analytical aperture beyond comparative historical inquiry, centring theopolitical norm diffusion and offering a conceptual lexicon through which to apprehend the Saudi state’s religious internationalism in its imperial modality.

1.1. From Interests to Ideas and Back Again: Towards an Integrative Theoretical Framework

The study of Middle Eastern geopolitics—and indeed global geopolitics more broadly—has long been anchored in a variety of expressions of the theoretical paradigm of realism and its neorealist offshoot (e.g., Ehteshami and Hinnebusch 2002; Gause 2010; Gause 2016; Hansen 2001). These traditions, emphasising states as rational unitary actors operating in an anarchic international system, have provided a durable scaffold for understanding security dilemmas, alliance formation, and the pursuit of power (Mearsheimer 2014; Morgenthau 1985; Snyder 1984; Waltz 1979). Within this paradigm, Saudi Arabia has frequently been portrayed as a status quoist actor, balancing regional threats and preserving regime stability through rentier consolidation and alliance formation (Barnett and Gause 1998; Ehteshami 2018; Gause 2010; Gause 2014; Legrenzi 2011; Lippman 2012; Terrill 2011). While such perspectives yield useful insights into Saudi strategic behaviour, they remain largely inattentive to the ideational infrastructures, religious grammar, and normative ambition that animate the Kingdom’s external projection of Wahhabism. They struggle, in particular, to account for how Saudi Arabia has deployed religious discourse not only to secure material interests but also to shape social imaginaries, construct transnational solidarities, and cultivate theological authority.

To apprehend these dimensions, this article adopts a composite analytical framework that integrates four theoretical registers: soft power, constructivist norm diffusion, Gramscian hegemony, and Foucauldian governmentality. Each framework contributes a distinct lens for analysing Saudi Arabia’s religious statecraft, and their combination allows for a multi-scalar reading of how Wahhabism circulates, embeds, and transforms across local, regional, and global terrains. These are not simply additive concepts, but mutually illuminating tools that together reveal the layered dynamics through which Wahhabi norms are exported, localised, contested, and institutionalised. Below, I shall explicate the value added by each of these theoretic prisms and then argue how their combination into a composite analytic framework promises to throw new light on the dynamics of Saudi religious internationalism.

The theoretical framework takes its point of departure in the dichotomy between material and ideational power. Though frequently marginalised in the genealogies of IR theorising, the field of Peace Studies—both in its American and Scandinavian pedigrees—spearheaded the epistemic challenge to a purely materialist ontology. As early as 1989, Boulding (1989) unsettled the materialist epistemology of power by positing a tripartite modality of power, which he posited as three “faces” of power: threat power (the ability to force or deter action through coercion, punishment, or the credible threat of harm); exchange power (the ability to influence others through trade, negotiation, or mutually beneficial transactions); and, importantly, integrative power (the capacity to mould social relations, shape collective identities, and foster shared values through persuasion, legitimacy, and moral authority). Integrative power, he argued, both emerges from and translates into cultural influence and ideological cohesion. Within a year of its articulation, Boulding’s (1989) idea of “integrative power” was overshadowed by Joseph Nye’s (1990) more commodifiable notion of “soft power” for the state’s ability to influence others through cultural appeal and attraction, rather than coercion or material inducements.

The soft-power framework is premised on the assumption that states and actors can exert influence not merely through coercion or material incentives but through attraction, cultural resonance, and the appeal of values and ideologies (Nye 1990, 2004). While both “integrative power” and “soft power” focus on persuasion and attraction, their mechanisms and scope differ. Soft power operates through cultural production, political ideals, and foreign policy narratives, making it externally directed and instrumental—a tool that states use to achieve (geo)political influence. Integrative power, in contrast, is more diffuse, operating at interpersonal as well as societal levels, fostering cohesion, reconciliation, and ideological unity rather than external influence. While integrative power is applicable not just in geopolitics but in social movements, conflict resolution, and community-building—seeking to foster cohesion rather than political alignment—soft power is most relevant in international relations, where states leverage their media, educational institutions, diplomatic strategies, and cultural products to shape global perceptions and relations. Soft power is, in fact, inextricably enmeshed with the state’s cultivation and dissemination of normative architectures that resonate beyond its own national boundaries, and yet its successful dissemination is not unrelated to fiscal, institutional, and sometimes even coercive capacities (Mattern 2005).

Soft power provides an entry point into understanding how the Saudi state has sought to attract and align, cultivating a form of religious legitimacy that draws on its custodianship of the holy cities, its sponsorship of Islamic education, and its financing of transnational networks. Soft power foregrounds the affective, symbolic, and reputational elements of influence—those dimensions that make Saudi Arabia’s religious message not only heard but accepted by foreign publics and elites. However, while soft power captures the logics of attraction, it offers limited analytical purchase on either interpellation or repellence, viz. how religious authority becomes entrenched or how rival normative orders are neutralised (Althusser 2001).

To extend the analysis, the framework draws on constructivist theories. Nye’s (1990) investigation into the ideational and institutional dimensions of foreign policy emerged in tandem with seismic geopolitical shifts in the bipolar world order and concurrent epistemological reorientations in the last decade of the twentieth century. As the Cold War receded for reasons not reducible to material causality, the explanatory potency of norms, ideas, and identities gained traction—less as post-empiricist ontology and more so as a problematisation of social reality (Goldstein and Keohane 1993). Within this milieu, constructivism emerged to posit that the material is rendered intelligible only through intersubjectively constituted—ipso facto, socialised—meanings (Adler 2005; Onuf 1989; Wendt 1999). In a delayed but determined departure from the (neo)realist orthodoxy that dominated the academic landscape in the Cold War period, it soon became commonplace to assert the mutual co-constitution of norms and interests in the making of foreign policy. This is not simply to assert that foreign policy agents operate in dual ideational–material structures, which ultimately has a bearing on the preference hierarchy of decision makers, but equally that the foreign policy objectives are not defined in detached “rationality” terms (gain optimisation/pain minimisation). Instead, values, norms, and what I have elsewhere theorised as “aspirationality” (or, in Weberian terms, Wertrationalitet) are integral to the formation of policy objectives, whether instrumental or normative, as well as the strategies deployed in their pursuit (Sheikh 2003; Weber 1978).

A resort to normatively imbued ideas or acculturated identities merely affirms the intuitive, for even a cursory comparative analysis of national grand narratives—across both East and West—reveals a recurrent reliance on a totalising “big idea” around which subordinate discourses, and eventually political objectives and procedural norms, are spun. The “big idea” may indeed constitute something as grand as a political soteriology, wherein the salvific mission of humanity—achieved through the global dissemination of a particular political telos—generates a cosmological stratification of peoples or nations into the saved, the aligned, and the adversarial, thereby constituting a contemporary reiteration of sacral cosmologies of yesteryears. In this respect, the schemata of secular “political religion” and its sacralised theological counterparts are not categorically dissimilar; rather, they diverge primarily in their referential and reverential loci (Gentile 2006). Thus, notwithstanding the ostensible recession of the sacred from international affairs and the presumed deicide inflicted by secular ideologies, God may yet persist as the structuring “big idea”.

As identity and normativity are co-opted into policy formation, the nebulous matters of the “spirit” (indeed, the elusive Geist in romanticist political thought) are reconstituted in politics, no longer as distractions to the rationalist cost–benefit analyses of policy entrepreneurs but as integral to the calculation of costs and benefits. In effect, norms delimit not only the identity of political agents but also the horizon of their plausible actions and the objectives of actions (Wendt 2007; Adler 1997). If normative dispersal itself is a policy objective, a fundamental question arises: through what mechanisms do certain normative claims come to be widely accepted, while others fail to gain traction? Finnemore and Sikkink’s (1998) seminal paper on norm diffusion in international relations drew particular attention to the lifecycle of norms, which they argued proceeds through three stages: emergence, cascade, and internalisation. The norm emergence stage is characterised by actors—individuals, states, or institutions—working to frame new norms as solutions to perceived global or local challenges. The cascading phase, in turn, could be viewed in consecutive stages of domestic and international propagation and regimentation. Finally, internalisation denotes a point at which norms are routinised in behaviour and discourse, appearing stable, legitimate, and even self-evident (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998).

In the present paper, I shall draw upon this constructivist conception of foreign policy as simultaneously informed by and committed to norm diffusion. Norm diffusion, in this sense, complements the logic of soft power, as it explicates the pathways through which culturally resonant norms are projected, adopted, and normalised—rendering attraction not merely affective, but structurally embedded in the ideational fabric of international society. Yet, as constructivist and poststructuralist approaches highlight, this process is rarely linear or uncontested, for in the process of localisation, norms are continuously negotiated, resisted, mutated, and hybridised by actors situated within divergent positionalities and interest formations (Wiener 2018). In contrast to Finnemore and Sikkink (1998), I conceptualise norm diffusion as constitutively entangled with contestation, leading, in the final calculus, to new hybridities, in turn predicated on local adaptations and transnational reinterpretations. To Acharya (2004), the concept of “norm localisation” precisely emphasises how local actors adapt and modify external norms to fit indigenous practices and beliefs. Such a theoretic move allows for agency to be conceived of as not only the prerogative of states, as the originating norm entrepreneurs, but also of local communities. In the case studies that form part of this paper, norm diffusion sheds light on the pathways through which Wahhabi doctrines are adopted, reinterpreted, or resisted in diverse contexts, capturing the agency of global and local actors in reshaping Saudi-origin norms, ultimately allowing us to theorise hybridisation rather than mere transmission.

As norm diffusion theory lacks an account of ideological struggle and also fails to interrogate how normative consensus may be manufactured, we need an account of asymmetrical power relations. Enter the Gramscian notion of hegemony, which situates power—soft and hard—as a facet of hegemonic consolidation amidst protracted ideological struggle. Gramsci (1971) provides the structural and historical depth necessary to understand how norms are contested and consolidated within a field of competing ideological forces. While soft power emphasises attraction and constructivism elucidates its mechanisms, Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony, “war of position”, and “war of manoeuvre” reveal that such influence is part of a broader struggle to secure consent and maintain dominance. Using military/strategic metaphors, the war of position—a protracted cultural campaign for ideological ascendancy in civil society and transnationally—augments soft power’s emphasis on attraction, while the war of manoeuvre highlights the moments when attraction gives way to more coercive or confrontational strategies (Egan 2013). Of the two, the war of position (the ideational contest rather than the violent confrontation) can lead to more stable outcomes for the victor, because “once won, it has been won definitively” (Gramsci 1971, p. 239). This enables us to read religious statecraft not simply as a policy tool but as an inducement of a hegemonic (i.e., uncontested) “common sense”, by which is meant pervasive, but uncritical beliefs (Crehan 2016; Patnaik 1988).

In the case of Saudi foreign policy, Gramscian analysis illuminates the Saudi state’s efforts to establish a theological “common sense” by seeking to redefine the global Islamic field through the co-optation of religious elites, control of institutional infrastructures, and neutralisation of dissenting currents The Kingdom’s projection of Wahhabism is thus not only a campaign of influence but an ideological project aimed at reorganising the terrain of religious legitimacy.

The final corner of the analytic square is populated by the notion of governmentality. Through this notion, the analytic framework captures the capillary nature of power, showing how broad ideological projects filter down into quotidian practices and forms of self-governance. In its Foucauldian formulation, governmentality is characterised by dispersion, decentring, and networked modalities of control. Where constructivism addresses the macro-dynamics of norm propagation and Gramsci addresses the politics of norm contestation, Foucault reveals how these norms are internalised, disciplined, and managed within institutions and individual behaviours (Foucault 1982). Governmentality, when construed as the “art of government” or the “conduct of conduct”, elucidates the microphysics of rule: the techniques, rationalities, and subject formations through which conduct is orchestrated by powerful agents (ibid.). As such, Foucauldian governmentality provides the analytic tools to explore how Wahhabi norms are internalised and operationalised at the level of institutions, bodies, and subjectivities. Where Gramsci focuses on the battle for consent, Foucault turns our attention to the microphysics of power: the ways in which individuals are governed through dispersed techniques of discipline, self-regulation, and normative modulation (Jessen and von Eggers 2019). From mosque architecture and textbook design to the digital circulation of sermons, governmentality reveals how religious norms become embedded in everyday practices, thereby shaping conduct without recourse to overt coercion.

Overall, this four-partite theoretical framework progresses from soft power through constructivist norm dynamics, continues into Gramscian hegemony, and culminates with Foucauldian governmentality, creating a coherent model that captures the multifaceted ways power operates across international, ideational, and disciplinary domains. This sequence maps an ontological arc—from the external projection of normative influence to its circulation and adaptation, through to ideological contestation and, ultimately, the disciplining of subjectivities. Cumulatively, this framework offers a comprehensive, multi-scalar analysis of power, beginning with its attractive projection (soft power), moving through normative diffusion and localisation (constructivism), advancing into ideological consolidation and struggle (Gramsci), and culminating in the microphysics of behavioural and normative internalisation (Foucault).

The novel integrated analytic framework presented above allows us to uncover how Wahhabism has functioned simultaneously as a soft power resource, a norm in circulation, a hegemonic aspiration, and a technology of governance. It enables a layered excavation of how influence is projected transnationally, negotiated across epistemic and political nodes, and ultimately sedimented within institutional logics and embodied subject-formation. It is this multi-dimensionality that the term Pax Wahhabica seeks to capture—not a monolithic imposition of religious doctrine, but a dynamic, evolving assemblage of discourses, strategies, and institutions operating across borders and within multiple fields of power. This framework now sets the stage for a historical excavation of Wahhabism’s initial consolidation as a normative project—one rooted in the formative political theology of the Saudi–Wahhabi alliance and its early deployment as a vehicle of religious authority, conquest, and social transformation.

1.2. Norm Emergence: The Wahhabi–Saudi New Deal

Since the formation of the Saudi–Wahhabi condominium through the alliance between the itinerant preacher Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (1703–1792) and the tribal chieftain Muḥammad ibn Saʿūd (1687–1765) in al-Dirʿiyya, Najd, in the 1740s, religious fervour has been harnessed to legitimise conquest, subjugation, and the ideological re-socialisation under the emergent polity (Commins 2006; Firro 2018). What was entailed in this new theopolitical formation (what detractors came to refer to as “Wahhabism” after its eponym) constituted a significant doctrinal rupture from the mainstream Sunnī tradition insofar as four new creedal foci were invoked. First, the assertion that latent shirk (polytheism) and the abomination of ritual accretions (bidʿa) had permeated both the high theology and vernacular praxis of Islam provided Wahhabism the theological warrant to enact collective anathematisation (takfīr) against the Sunnī mainstream (Bunzel 2023). By casting political adversaries beyond the pale of “true Islam”, it became not merely licit but religiously incumbent to wage sacred war (jihād) against them (Kepel 2002). Simultaneously, long-cherished religious practices—whether in the form of calling upon the prophets or the saints (istighātha), seeking intercession (tawassul), or celebrating mawlid festivities—were banned in an effort to engineer a more streamlined, purer version of the faith. That, in the process of this purge, centuries of canonical interpretation had to be discarded as errant (shādh), was an inconvenience which was nonetheless easily reconciled with the new nihilism that emerged from opposition to the ʿulamā and the abandonment of taqlīd (jurisprudential conformity) in relation to the legal schools (Sheikh 2023).

Regional opposition to this emergent puritanism involved both military confrontation and theological mobilisation—albeit short of a full-blown counter-reformation—in what may be seen as a Muslim analogue to Europe’s pre-Westphalian confessional conflicts. In response to Saudi territorial expansion, its enemies mobilised across the Islamic ecumene—from the Ottomans and Hashemites to the Yemenis, Egyptians and, within the peninsular heartland itself, the Rashīdīs (Commins 2006). Lasting little more than three decades, the first Saudi state was extinguished in 1818, with the Emir ʿAbd Allāh ibn Saʿūd (r. 1814–1818) executed—only to be resurrected six years later under the leadership of Turkī ibn ʿAbd Allāh (r. 1824–1834). By 1891, this second iteration of the Saudi emirate was dismantled by its most proximate rivals. Third time lucky rang true, however, for the third Saudi polity, emerging under ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Saʿūd (r. 1902–1953), who over three decades, beginning with the capture of Riyadh in 1902, expanded the Saudi territories in Najd, al-Aḥsāʾ, al-Ḥijāz, and ʿAsīr, finally styling himself King of a new unified Saudi Arabia in 1932 (Al-Rasheed 2002; Niblock 2006).

Although Wahhabi puritanism had served as a potent rallying cry for the Saudi polity, the movement’s theological energies proved increasingly difficult to domesticate within the confines of dynastic statecraft. Antedating the formal “unification” of the state, the Ikhwān revolt against the crown at the Battle of Sabīla of 1929 stands as the paradigmatic moment of mosque–palace estrangement. Here, ultra-Wahhabi rebels, who had decried the debauchery of the Saudi royalty in seeking modernisation and alignment with foreign powers, faced two sets of royal forces, Saudi and British (Al-Rasheed 2002; Silverfarb 1982). From the viewpoint of the royalty, the excesses (ghulūw) of its own storm troopers made it imperative that the religious credo—which, citing charges of heresy and apostasy, had forcefully subdued most of the Arabian Peninsula—be domesticated in the service of the state. In other words, the faithful had to pledge loyalty to the state as part of the (ostensibly) religious doctrine.

In the post-Ikhwān modus vivendi, the Palace (āl saʿūd) would retain primacy within the weightier portfolio of statecraft—in particular sectors such as defence, fiscal, and foreign policy—while the Mosque (predominantly the progeny of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, the āl al-shaykh) secured ascendancy in civil society, in which institutions of education and notably the administration of justice became their primary province (Mouline 2014). Until the recent reconfigurations under Crown Prince Muḥammad bin Salmān, the Saudi polity was thus structured around a spatio-functional power-sharing arrangement between mosque and palace—each co-constitutive of state authority and legitimacy (Al-Rasheed 2020). Yet, as with shifting desert lines, the incessant renegotiation of jurisdictional boundaries between these dual estates engendered recurrent tensions—both ideological and procedural—between the royal court and the custodians of the Kingdom’s official religious orthodoxy. This institutional bifurcation reflected not only a distribution of authority but also a Gramscian division of ideological labour, whereby the state cultivated moral leadership through clerical consent while retaining coercive instruments of domination.

In Foucauldian terms, Wahhabism operated as a disciplinary matrix: simultaneously normalising conduct, codifying belief, and producing docile subjects, loyal to both mosque and monarchy. Constituent of the governmentality of the Saudi polity, official Wahhabism, labelled “true Islam”, constructed a pacifying normativity that upheld the domestic status quo against both political and religious nemeses. However, important questions remained concerning the international role of the movement. Was Wahhabism to have any international role at all? Or would the new orthodoxy retain little inter-state function, while, beyond and below the layered state, Wahhabi institutions and norms extended their reach in international society? If so, did their diffusion conform to soft-power logics of attraction and cultural authority, or to norm cascade mechanisms, as described by constructivist theorists of global norm change? What were the structures, mechanisms, and fallout of the globalisation of Wahhabi doctrine? It is to these questions that the remainder of this paper is dedicated.

1.3. Norm Diffusion: Wahhabism as Both Domestic and Foreign Policy

The fundamental bargain between religion and regency—that is, between the ʿulamāʾ and the umarāʾ—has historically served as a linchpin for the stability, and indeed the survival, of the Saudi state. By way of a policy of co-optation, or “encapsulation”, the Saudi rulers bureaucratised the clergy and, ipso facto, gave it a stake in the state (Steinberg 2005). The senior ʿulamāʾ thus would not function independently but only within the framework of state-controlled and state-funded institutions, the upholding of which became not only the chief interest of the ʿulamāʾ but their very raison d’être (Kostiner 2013; Mouline 2014; Steinberg 2002). For the dynastic House of Saʿūd, the trade-off between (some) terrestrial power and (sustained) celestial sanction has been characterised as a “dial-a-fatwa” arrangement, whereby sovereigns and scholastics co-produced legitimacy and manufactured consensus in moments of acute political stress (Sheikh 2003). The co-production of religious legitimacy and monarchical authority reflected a compact in which clerical consent underwrote state hegemony. Acting as norm entrepreneurs, the clerical establishment propagated compliant norms across Saudi society via, in Gellner’s (1983) terms, “exo-socialisation” through mosques, media, and educational curricula—eventually reconstituting Wahhabism as virtually coterminous with Saudi national identity, sedimented through norm internalisation and recursive acts of religious disciplining.

During the inter-Arab Cold War, Wahhabism would increasingly become a transnational ideological project, serving as a counterweight regionally to the secular republicanism that emerged in twin anti-monarchic embodiments from, respectively, Nasserite and Baʿathist nemeses (Kerr 1971). Under King Saʿūd bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 1953–1964) and his successor King Fayṣal bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 1964–1975), institutional and discursive Islamisation was a strategic bulwark against non-theist ideologies, in particular Arab nationalism, Arab socialism, and their peculiar synthesis in radical pan-Arabism. In the language of soft power, this was not merely defensive statecraft but a calibrated projection of normative attraction—one that sought to reposition Islam as the moral centre of regional leadership.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Saudi Arabia offered refuge to exiled Muslim Brotherhood affiliates from Egypt and Syria, shielding them from the repressive apparatuses of Arab Socialist regimes and enabling them to construct new Islamic infrastructures that fused political activism with creedal puritanism, yielding a hybrid Salafi–Wahhabi synthesis (Lacroix 2011). This project was conceived as a counter-hegemonic offensive against the proliferating secular ideologies that sought to delegitimise the authority of conservative petro-monarchies. From the 1960s onward, Saudi Arabia cultivated strategic ties with a range of Islamist movements—extending from established organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan to newly emerging groups across the Middle East and North Africa, and to Deobandi networks in South Asia. By 1970, Riyadh had won the regional Cold War as decisively as Washington secured victory in the global Cold War two decades later, but by the end of the same decade, a new geopolitical shift—from the Nasserite threat in the west to the Khomeinite spectre in the east—effectuated a radical sectarianisation of the Wahhabi dispensation that had hitherto been a strategy of counter-secularism.

Most spectacularly, the Iranian revolutionary cataclysm was imported into the heartland of the Gulf and revealed itself in a succession of upheavals and generic unrest in the years following the fall of the Shah and the new regime’s operationalisation of the revolutionary “people-to-people” stratagem. The sporadic Shīʿī insurrections in Iraq in 1979; the Shī‘i uprising in Qatif on the Saudi east coast in 1979–1980; the Shī‘i upheaval in Bahrain in 1981; the activities of Hizbollah in Lebanon from 1982 onwards; and possibly some Shī‘a involvement in the bombings which befell Kuwait in 1983–85 all displayed the increasing volatility of the regional scene (Emadi 1995; Wehrey 2013). Within the geographic boundaries of the Kingdom, the most unforeseen manifestation of the politicisation of Islam came already in November 1979 when a group of Salafi ultras, inspired by millennial beliefs seemingly replicating the eschatological references in the Shīʿī insurgencies, occupied the holy sanctuary at Mecca (Hegghammer and Lacroix 2007).

Positioned as the regional counterweight to revolutionary Shīʿism, official Wahhabism itself underwent a process of militarisation, sanctioning jihād in Afghanistan and South Yemen—ostensibly against the Soviets, but equally animated by anxieties over Iranian ideological encroachment across and beyond West Asia (Coll 2004). This shift intensified the securitisation of religious discourse and expanded the repertoire of Wahhabi norm diffusion beyond persuasion to mobilisation, with elements of governmentality taking on martial tones. That the seeds of its religious policies would inadvertently bear the bitter fruit of militant Salafism—and ultimately give rise to al-Qāʿida—was scarcely foreseen in Riyadh (Hegghammer 2010; Lacroix 2011).

Concurrently, the more central role of the Shīʿī divines in Khomeini’s polity on the other side of the Persian Gulf—developing curious resemblances to a papacy, replete with clerical ranks and correlated functions—galvanised the Saudi ʿulamāʾ to push for a greater role in public and private domains. This marked a moment of intensified religious subject-formation, in which competing theologies vied not only for territorial influence but for the governance of Muslim conduct. The Shīʿī revolution in Tehran and the Salafi rebellion in Mecca weakened the credibility of the royals, whilst the religious wave sweeping the Gulf inspired and strengthened the ambition of the ʿulamāʾ. Over the ensuing two decades, these twin pressures—compounded by the perception that only the clergy could contain the threat of an Ikhwān-style insurgency—facilitated the ascendancy of the religious estate within the polity, ultimately manifesting in new ministerial portfolios and widening shares of funding (Mouline 2014).

While Riyadh’s domestic cash-for-compliance strategy is well documented, an international analogue—cash-for-creed—gradually materialised as a vehicle for religious patronage and transnational influence. Here, soft power became entangled with resource power, revealing the hybrid character of Saudi norm diffusion as both ideational attraction and petrodollar-backed material inducement. Norm diffusion was central not only to alliance building but also in influence-seeking across the umma, in Muslim-majority domains as well as Muslim-minority constituencies. Indeed, the Saudi involvement, or indeed embroilment, in Muslim religious communities came to span almost the entire globe—from the Middle East and North Africa to Sub-Saharan Africa, to South Asia and Southeast Asia, to Central Asia and the Caucasus, to Europe and the Americas. Saudi Arabia’s religious internationalism thus functioned as a dispersed regime of norm promotion, operating across multiple nodes, audiences, and cultural terrains.

In the following sections of this paper, I will interrogate the international forms and ramifications of the global suprastructure of Saudi-sustained Wahhabi Islam. Having set out the domestic and geopolitical contexts in which Wahhabism was given a strategic role, the study will proceed to explore the organisational infrastructure of international Saudi–Wahhabi bodies and their chief strategies for dominating the religious discourses of Islamic communities worldwide. Section 2 will interrogate the mechanisms through which Wahhabi norms are projected, institutionalised, and normalised across transnational domains. This coming section thus marks a shift from theorising the architecture of Pax Wahhabica to mapping its operational logics. Subsequently, Section 3 will proceed to three country studies that historicise the global politics of Wahhabisation, before Section 4 considers recent developments in Riyadh and its consequences for Wahhabi internationalism.

2. Riyadh’s Islamic Imperialism: Means and Methods

Together with the Saudi self-appellation as the homeland of Islam par excellence, the fiscal muscle of the Saudi elites— courtesy of hydrocarbon surpluses as well as lucrative investments—constitutes the principal enabling condition for the global project of strategic Wahhabisation. While fiscal affluence may explain the executive capability, it falls short of illuminating the modi operandi of Wahhabi norm diffusion. To decipher the global architecture of institutionalised Wahhabism, one must interrogate the organisational modalities of its principal institutional nodes. This architecture, I argue, functions as a regime of transnational governmentality, wherein normative authority is exercised through the calibrated circulation of religious discourse, clerical emissaries, and material patronage. What follows is a discussion of major structural elements in this international architecture.

2.1. Organisational Players in the Wahhabi International

A fundamental premise of organisational theory is that when ideas are embodied in organisations or embedded in networks of organisations (viz. regimes), they become more resilient to outside influence (Buchanan and Huczynski 2003). Organisations induce learning, both cognitive and behavioural. Analysts refer to this as a process of “double-loop” learning, in which operational strategies, routines, and procedures are altered through institutionalisation, and the organisation’s underlying goals and normative frameworks are also redefined (Grundman 1999). This phenomenon aligns with the constructivist insight that ideas, once institutionalised and routinised, can shape group preferences and recalibrate what is understood to be appropriate conduct. As I shall attempt to show, it is in the organisational network of Wahhabi Islam, or what I refer to as the “Wahhabi International”, that we find the analytic link between cognitive learning and behavioural learning. The term “Wahhabi International” is employed here to designate the transnational assemblage of Saudi-sponsored institutions, clerical networks, missionary initiatives, and educational platforms that function—explicitly or implicitly—as instruments of religious norm diffusion, ideological standardisation, and (geo)political alignment.

Since King Fayṣal (r. 1964–1975), Saudi policy has sought to construct a stratified yet interlinked global infrastructure—integrated both vertically and horizontally—in the pursuit of entrenching its doctrinal influence transnationally. At least one commentator has suggested a resemblance to Comintern in its heyday (Schwartz 2003). Rather than operating under a centralised command structure, however, select bureaucracies, clerical elites, and endowed institutions functioned as semi-autonomous norm entrepreneurs, exercising considerable discretion in policy articulation and religious dissemination. Not always operating as formal branches of the state, the actors instead function within a tiered constellation of institutions whose funding, ideas, and strategic orientation remain closely tethered to the Saudi state. Among the modi operandi is the strategic co-optation of local religious organisations—often augmented by itinerant evangelists or the transnational transplantation of Saudi-trained imams. Khalid Duran noted the novelty of such religious diplomacy, observing that “for the first time in history the imam of the Ka’ba [the Sacred Mosque in Mecca] has been sent on tour to foreign countries as if he were an Apostolic nuncio” (Pipes 1995, p. 20)—a striking symbol of the clerical turn in Saudi diplomacy.

For decades beginning in the 1970s, grassroot organisations in Muslim civil society—Islamic schools, mosques, charities, and youth associations—were systematically seeded with literature, emissaries, and theological oversight—subtle mechanisms deployed to disarm oppositional currents and steer doctrinal outlooks in line with Saudi–Wahhabi orthodoxy. This strategy of influence has, provocatively, been referred to as the “Trojan horse strategy”, through which Wahhabi activists took advantage of the resources and popular credibility of established organisations before seeking to occupy their leadership positions (Oliveti 2002). This strategy corresponds to a “war of position”—a protracted struggle for intellectual and moral leadership conducted within the existing institutional terrain, aiming to displace rival paradigms through epistemic dislocation rather than frontal confrontation. The Gramscian logic here is clear: what is at stake is not merely institutional control but epistemic hegemony (Patnaik 1988). In parallel with the infiltration of existing religious infrastructure, Saudi-backed actors, under the same logic, established independent mosques and organisations linked vertically to Saudi institutions from which they received financial support, clerical personnel, doctrinal literature, and strategic directives. Established as well as aspiring imams could petition for financial patronage from official Saudi emissaries—whether religious attachés in embassies or officials in Saudi-dominated charities or organisations (Oliveti 2002).

The Department of Research, Daʿwa, and Guidance (Idārat Hayʾat al-Buḥūth wa al-Daʿwa wa al-Irshād) operates directly under the aegis of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, (daʿwa denoting proselytism and irshād connoting religious guidance or instruction). Although the Department does not oversee the Kingdom’s 88,000 domestic mosques—a prerogative of the Ministry’s Mosques Affairs Agency— its remit lies in the extraterritorial projection of Saudi–Wahhabi orthodoxy through a matrix of Islamic centres, pedagogical ventures, missionary circuits, print dissemination, and ideological instruction. Unofficially, the Department functions as a discursive bulwark against rival Islamic paradigms—be they doctrinally heterodox or politically oppositional—seeking to immunise Saudi normativity against both internal dissent and transnational contestation. Here we observe a state apparatus that exemplifies soft power by defining and disseminating religious norms not through coercion, but through epistemic framing and symbolic capital.

Still more international is the Mecca-based Muslim World League (Rābiṭat al-ʿĀlam al-Islāmī), founded at the height of the Arab Cold War by then Crown Prince Fayṣal in 1962. It bankrolls religious preachers, activists, and imams in more than 130 nations, and missionaries, mosques, plus magazines have been part of its international propagation efforts (Schulze 1990). Its Supreme World Council of Mosques has a multi-million budget to support the construction and running of mosques and madrasas worldwide, and senior Saudi divines and royals form part of the Constituent Council of the Muslim World League (Schulze 1990, 2022). Though the Muslim World League is not formally part of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, it is state-financed and its operations are synergic of state directorship (the head is government-appointed and works under the guidance of the minister of religious affairs), grassroots activism (in terms of smaller donations and missionary initiatives), and corporate involvement (providing larger donations and exposure to establishment figures). It thereby reflects what might be termed a “hybridised moral bureaucracy”—ostensibly autonomous, yet embedded in etatist objectives and elite networks. This moral bureaucracy operates as a vehicle of ideological hegemony, tasked not merely with the dissemination of doctrine but with cultivating a religious normativity that aligns the global Islamic field with Saudi state orthodoxy.

An all-important appendix to the Muslim World League is the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY). Originally established under the Saudi Ministry of Education in 1972, it has a local or regional presence in fifty-five countries and claims an associate membership of over five hundred youth organisations around the world (MWL n.d.). Until the rearticulation of Saudi foreign policy in the second decade of the current millennium, WAMY’s official website in Britain described its official objectives as an extensive repertoire of activism: “providing financial and moral support to Muslim youth organisations to raise the standard of their Islamic works”, “organizing conferences, symposia, and research circles to address youth issues”, “holding international, regional, and local Muslim youth and student camps”, “publishing books in various languages by capable writers or by research teams”, “publishing brochures and exhibition material that best introduce Islam to non-Muslims in its holistic vision”, “organizing exchange visits, Hajj & Umra trips [forms of pilgrimages] for the Muslim around the World”, and “establish humanitarian and educational projects for the benefit of the needy Muslim communities in various countries” (WAMY–UK n.d.).

In the same period, the corresponding parent website, managed from Riyadh, made the subtext more explicit. Here the objectives were described as “to serve the true Islamic ideology based on Tawheed, the Unity of God” (WAMY n.d.). It should be noted that tawhīd, the doctrine on divine unicity, though integral to Islamic doctrine, has been arrogated by Wahhabism as a watchword ever since the eponymic founder of Wahhabism wrote the sectarian tract Kitab al-Tawhīd around 1740 CE. The Riyadh website continued to define the objectives of WAMY as “to consolidate the factors which are necessary to establish an ideological unity among Muslims” and “to introduce Islam to the world using all appropriate and available means […] and to expose the falsehoods”. That the falsehoods included both theological and political deviations was evident from the e-book on the same website, entitled The Ideological Foundation of Islam, which stated that the Islamic polity is “established to enforce the Law of God [and] cannot be controlled by any political party of a non-Islamic platform or subjected to foreign powers.” In constructivist terms, such language constitutes norm entrepreneurship in its purest form—articulating new boundaries of inclusion and exclusion within global Muslim subjectivity. Clearly, both theological and political norms were disseminated as part of WAMY’s socialisation.

Under the aegis of WAMY, Saudi Arabia financed the hundreds of mosques and Islamic centres across the world. To its own members, as well as to external organisations, educational institutions, and libraries, WAMY was instrumental in distributing Wahhabi-influenced books, magazines, and pamphlets—often translated, with varying degrees of success, into a multitude of languages (Schulze 2022). In its own wording, this was an attempt to propagate “the true meanings and teachings of Islam” and “introduce Islam to non-Muslims in its purest form as a comprehensive system and a way of life” (WAMY–UK n.d.). This projection of a singular, “pure” Islam reflected the monopolisation of moral authority as well as the capacity to arrogate to itself religious authenticity in global discourse. Although WAMY and allied organisations consistently described their outreach as simply “Islamic”, the content they propagate—along with their institutional pipelines, clerical hierarchies, and educational curricula—reveals a Wahhabi imprint on both correct belief (ʿaqīda) and correct method (manhaj). The universalist idiom of “Islamic” thus operates less as a neutral theological category than as a legitimising euphemism for a distinctly Saudi programme of religious standardisation.

Even if their structural origins remain readily traceable, the outcomes of Saudi-backed organisational ecosystems have often defied prediction. For instance, Waʾil Ḥamza Julaydān—a founding member of al-Qāʿida—headed the Muslim World League’s Pakistan office in the late 1980s and also served as director-general of the Rabita Trust, a financial subsidiary of the MWL, later designated by the U.S. government for its alleged material support of terrorism. Osama bin Laden’s brother, Abdullah bin Laden, notably headed WAMY’s Virginia office during the 1980s and early 1990s (Schulze 2022). This is not to suggest that Saudi-funded institutions have operated as covert fronts for terrorist activities; rather, owing to deep ideological consonance and robust institutional patronage, radicals not only found refuge within the Saudi-supported transnational infrastructure but also, until the aftermath of 9/11, regarded it as their ideological hearth. The unintentional empowerment of radical actors within Wahhabi networks demonstrates that norm diffusion is not a linear or wholly state-directed process—it is susceptible to localisation, drift, and repurposing by substate agents.

Having traced the institutional architectures and transnational emissaries of the Wahhabi mission—those norm entrepreneurs tasked with seeding doctrinal fidelity across disparate geographies—I now turn to the composite strategies through which Saudi Arabia has cultivated normative traction among Muslim communities globally. These strategies, operating through a convergence of material patronage, symbolic authority, and ideological messaging, collectively constitute a grammar of norm production whose cumulative effect approaches what constructivist theorists describe as a cascade.

2.2. Strategy A: Charitable Instruments (Used Charitably or Otherwise)

As Morgenthau (1962) argued, far from constituting a benevolent economic transfer, foreign aid operates as a political instrument deployed in the pursuit of national interest. Saudi religious charity, similarly, functions less as impartial relief than as ideational statecraft, seeking not merely gratitude but doctrinal alignment and geopolitical traction. Indeed, charities and relief organisations have long functioned as conduits of Saudi financial outreach and, by extension, as instruments of Wahhabi ideological penetration. One notable example is Hayʾat al-Ighātha al-Islāmiyya al-ʿĀlamiyya (International Islamic Relief Organization, IIRO)—a branch of the Muslim World League—which has offices and orphanages in fifty-one countries worldwide, offering schooling and charitable services to vulnerable children and youth, including tens of thousands of orphans in its care (Derbal 2022; Oliveti 2002). Embedded within Saudi relief operations is a multi-pronged strategy of religious and ideological entrenchment—one that transcends humanitarian provision to encompass social, educational, and political transformation.

Dozens of Saudi-funded charities continue to support orphanages whose pedagogical curricula are calibrated to Wahhabi doctrinal standards. In Pakistan, successive waves of Afghan refugees—first following the Soviet invasion, then after Operation Enduring Freedom (2001), and again after the Taliban’s 2021 return—became focal points for Saudi humanitarian and ideological investment—as has been the case in many states with fragile social cohesion and substantial displaced populations. As Tamara Sonn has observed, this constituted a form of socio-religious engineering that gradually aligned the Deobandi outlook of the Taliban with Wahhabi doctrine: “The Taliban were brought up in refugee camps. […] The education they got was provided by money from the Arabian Peninsula. That education was informed by Wahhabism” (Wallace 2001; cf. Metcalf 2002, 2003). These cases illustrate that norm diffusion tends to be most effective when situated within broader conditions of fragile or failing states—contexts that permit transnational actors to exercise soft power with minimal resistance.

As another case in point, it was hardly unexpected when, within weeks of the cessation of NATO bombings in 1999, the Saudi Joint Relief Committee for Kosovo (SJRCK) pivoted its operations to launch free Islamic studies training courses for imams and muftis in the Albanian capital, Tirana, justifying the initiative by invoking the precedent of gospel-bearing evangelical relief organisations originating in the American Midwest. By the following month, the SJRCK had established itself in Prishtina, the Kosovar capital, engaging simultaneously in repatriation logistics and ideological re-education. Unlike war-ravaged Bosnia—which, though resource-depleted, had retained a functioning religious bureaucracy—Kosovo’s post-war financial recovery was comparatively smooth, yet its Islamic infrastructure remained institutionally rudimentary. Consequently, Kosovo constituted fertile terrain for Wahhabi proselytisation, as reflected in a September 1999 SJRCK press release, which indicated that nearly half its operational budget was allocated to sponsoring 388 religious propagators (duʿāt) (Schwartz 2003). Humanitarian platforms thus functioned as norm carriers, with material aid acting as the medium through which religious ideas were legitimised and socialised (Derbal 2022). Yet beyond their normative function, such platforms also served a hegemonic role: leveraging dependency and infrastructural support to assert Saudi doctrinal leadership in contexts where alternative religious authorities were infrastructurally weak or lacked legitimacy.

In the Levant as well, refugee camps across Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine have long constituted arenas of Saudi engagement. In Gaza, from the mid-1970s onward, Israeli authorities inadvertently facilitated the rise of political Islam—including precursors to Ḥamās—as a counterweight to the secular nationalism of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (Mishal and Sela 2000). In this volatile regional context, the Wahhabi ideological imprint has often acted as a radicalising force, where theological dissent from mainstream Islam gradually morphed into political dissent against entrenched national and regional orders. As part of the process of norm localisation, global religious doctrines are reconstituted to resonate with local grievances—thereby producing hybridised, and at times insurgent, forms of religiosity.

Such ideological entanglements were not limited to volatile geographies but appeared to be a recurrent product of transnational charitable infrastructures. A prominent example of this slippage from charity to militancy was the quasi-official al-Ḥaramayn Foundation, which, alongside humanitarian efforts, pursued mosque construction, Islamic schooling, proselytisation, and the diffusion of Wahhabi doctrine. Closely affiliated with both the monarchy and the clerical establishment, it sponsored thousands of students to pursue religious training in Saudi institutions, many of whom were subsequently tasked with disseminating Wahhabi theology abroad, while circulating more than twenty million religious pamphlets annually from over fifty global offices. It also channelled funds to Islamic movements until it became a target of U.S. counter-terrorism operations in March 2002 (Gurulé 2008), at which point Al-Ḥaramayn was accused of providing financial and logistical support to terrorist operations, and, under much publicity, their offices in Bosnia and Somalia were closed after incriminating material linking staff to attacks on Western targets (Abdelhadi 2004). The organisation was ultimately dissolved by the Saudi state in 2004, marking a moment of introspection and re-evaluation in Riyadh’s approach to religious influence abroad. This case illustrates the fragility and indeterminacy of charitable endowments that are simultaneously agents of theopolitical norm diffusion.

2.3. Strategy B: Constructing (and Controlling) Mosques and Islamic Centres

Beyond charitable ventures, Saudi Arabia is renowned for its expansive international construction campaign centred on the erection of mosques, prayer facilities, and Islamic centres. Under King Fahd (r. 1982–2005), the Saudi state funded the construction of approximately 1500 mosques, 210 educational institutions, and nearly 2000 Islamic boarding schools across multiple continents—chiefly in Muslim-majority countries, though with significant presence in non-Muslim contexts (Alexiev 2002; Cacana 2002).

The orchestrated dissemination of Wahhabism has thus extended well beyond Muslim-majority societies, manifesting as an increasingly globalised phenomenon of religious norm export. Conversion-rich contexts—such as the United States, where nearly a quarter of the five-million-strong Muslim population comprises African Americans and, increasingly, Hispanic Americans—offer added incentive for Saudi outreach, as convert communities often lack both theological resources and entrenched resistance to Wahhabi doctrine. According to al-Ahmari, a Saudi charity official based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, through the 1980s and 1990s, as many as half the mosques and Islamic schools in the United States were constructed with Saudi funding—often channelled through intermediary entities such as the North American Islamic Trust (Harden 2001). Moreover, bypassing institutional intermediaries, the royal family directly financed the construction of several major mosques—including a 77,000-square-foot grand mosque in Culver City, California, named in honour of King Fahd (Clarion Project 2018). Unlike church or synagogue affiliation, mosque attendance in Sunnī Islam does not entail explicit adherence to the institution’s theological orientation—just as enrolment in Islamic studies does not presuppose doctrinal alignment with the instructor. This makes confessional designation malleable, and thus exploitable for strategic norm implantation. Religious institutions in such contexts become ideationally permeable; influence is exerted not by overt indoctrination but through structural saturation—where mimetic repetition creates tacit realignments in behaviour and belief. It is precisely this non-denominational social praxis that enables Wahhabism to embed itself subtly, presenting its creed as Islam purified of theological distortion and ritual innovation.

Shortly after 9/11, Maher Hathout, former imam at the Islamic Center of Southern California and senior advisor of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, decried the Saudi influence on the Muslim community in the United States. He identifies three interlinked mechanisms of influence: the construction of religious infrastructure, the dissemination of doctrinally rigid literature, and the strategic deployment of wealth to marginalise alternative voices. These practices, he argued, do not merely propagate theology but reconfigure power dynamics within Muslim communities by privileging externally funded visions of Islam. In Hathout’s words, “the expectation, whether it is spelled out clearly or not, is that, of course, ‘Islam is what [the Saudis] say’” (PBS 2001). The consequence is a distortion of local religious priorities, where communal autonomy is undermined by implicit expectations of doctrinal conformity. Saudi funding thus functions not as neutral charity but as a vehicle for normative imposition, often cloaked in the language of piety and solidarity.

The establishment of mosques constitutes not merely the construction of places of worship but the creation of nodal spaces for communal discourse and socio-religious activity. Over time, however, both religious discourse and community activity have, in certain contexts, undergone radicalisation through the Wahhabi–Salafi synthesis—manifesting not only in doctrinal exclusivism but also in politicised religiosity. For instance, the Islamic Centre in Tucson, Arizona, emerged as a magnet for radical figures: Waʾil Ḥamza Julaydān served as president before joining bin Laden in Afghanistan, succeeded by Wadi el-Hage, a Maronite convert to Islam who subsequently joined Bin Laden in Sudan and was later convicted for the coordinated 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 and wounded nearly 5000 (IPT 1995; Gold 2003).

Across the Atlantic, the Ibn Taymiya Mosque in Brixton, South London, emerged as a focal point for several high-profile extremist actors, including Richard Reid (the failed “shoe-bomber”), Zacarias Moussaoui (the “twentieth hijacker”), and Abdullah Faisal (the “shaykh of race hate”) (Kennedy and Tendler 2002). Shortly after 9/11, the mosque’s chairman, Abdul Haqq Baker, mounted a PR campaign across Western news media, including the BBC and CNN, to portray its teachings as pacific and moderate. While seeking to dissociate the mosque from militancy, Baker inadvertently laid bare its theological exclusivism, recounting that Reid had been drawn to the mosque “because he said that we were teaching the pure form of Islam […] which is the orthodox Islam. He was happy that we weren’t going to be feeding him […] erroneous beliefs” (CNN 2001). The preoccupation with and arrogation of, the “pure form of Islam” and “orthodox Islam” as opposed to the “erroneous beliefs” are unmistakably Wahhabi tropes, deployed to assert doctrinal hegemony under the veneer of theological authenticity. Baker also implicitly conceded that, in relation to catechetical content, the radicals and the other mosque-goers were difficult to differentiate, stating, “What they do is [to] say, ‘We share the same orthodox [Wahhabi] belief as those at Brixton Mosque and elsewhere. However, those at Brixton Mosque are somewhat passive with their view [of] jihad” (CNN 2001).

Just as other forms of radicalism synthesised with Wahhabism by virtue of Egyptian and Syrian immigration into Saudi Arabia of the 1970s, a similar process of synthesis and permutation has invariably been taking place across the world over the last four decades. The fusion of a theology of dissent and political grievances, whether local or global, reflects the logic of norm localisation as well as norm alteration, when imported religious doctrines are altered, producing hybridised forms of contestatory religiosity that resist both traditional Islam and secular authority. In such cases, strategic norm export does not yield convergence, but fragmentation—spawning vernacularised expressions of Wahhabism that exceed or escape their originators’ control.

2.4. Strategy C: Influencing (or Interrupting) Education and Research

In the realm of ideological dissemination, edifices are often less consequential than edification. Beyond the construction of mosques and the operation of charitable networks, a third and arguably more enduring pillar of Saudi norm projection has targeted the epistemic domain—specifically, education and research. This strategy may be analytically disaggregated into three interrelated techniques of epistemic control. First, in regions where Saudi influence is structurally embedded or politically unchallenged, officials and affiliated actors have sought to restructure educational curricula, aligning them with Wahhabi doctrinal imperatives. This often entails the revision of textbooks, the marginalisation of local religious traditions, and the institutionalisation of Wahhabi exclusivism within state or private schooling frameworks (Doumato 2007; Prokop 2003).

Second, the Saudi state has sponsored the proliferation of madāris (sing. madrasa) across Africa, South Asia, and parts of Southeast Asia, cultivating what may be termed a transnational pedagogical pipeline. These institutions disseminate a Wahhabised form of Islam that frequently promotes suspicion, if not outright anathematisation, of pluralistic or syncretic Islamic expressions (Haykel 2014). The South Asian context—home to more than a quarter of the global Muslim population—has proven particularly acute. In the absence of compulsory education and amid chronic state failure to provide sufficient public schooling, religious boarding schools have emerged as low- or no-cost alternatives—gradually supplanting secular institutions, particularly for impoverished families. According to a 2002 report by Islamabad’s Institute of Policy Studies, the number of madrassas in Pakistan surged from 2861 in 1988—already a product of exponential growth during the Zia ul-Ḥaq era—to 6761 by 2002 with roughly two-thirds under Deobandi influence (predominantly in Pakistan’s western belt) and around 310 affiliated with the Ahl-e-Ḥadīth (the South Asian epithet for the Salafi movement)—some of which operated under direct Saudi sponsorship (ICG 2002). The growth trajectory of Ahl-e-Ḥadīth seminaries—more than doubling in the twelve years prior to 2000—was remarkable even by the standards of South Asia’s rapidly expanding religious training sector. Whereas many madrassas were formerly sustained through zakāh (state-managed almsgiving), affording the government limited oversight, they are now increasingly bankrolled by private philanthropists and Gulf-based public and private donors—further diluting regulatory control (Sikand 2005; Stern 2000).

Third, Saudi Arabia seeks to exert influence over higher education and academic research by endowing university chairs, funding Islamic studies centres, and offering fellowships or research grants to scholars who align with its theological priorities. Such interventions aim not only to shape the intellectual agenda of Islamic studies globally but also to embed Wahhabi interpretations within the epistemic authority structures of the academy. In a bid to influence the intellectual direction of al-Azhar—the historic epicentre of Sunnī scholarship—Saudi involvement began discreetly in 1971, shortly after Gamal Abdel Nasser’s death, when King Fayṣal extended an irresistible USD 100 million donation to then-rector Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm Maḥmūd (Ruthven 2002). Thereafter, the strategy extended to lucrative sabbatical arrangements for faculty. “In six months on sabbatical, they would earn twenty years’ salary”, noted Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl, a leading American critic of Wahhabi practices in the United States. In a personal reflection, Abou El Fadl recalled how his mentor Muḥammad Jalāl Kishk had long ridiculed Wahhabi dogma—yet, following the reception of the USD 200,000 King Fayṣal Award and the USD 850,000 King Fahd Award in 1981, he published a laudatory text titled The Saudis and the Islamic Solution (Al-saʿūdiyyūn wa-l-ḥall al-islāmī) through a London-based publisher (Foer 2002). The investment in elite intellectuals—whether through endowments, honours, or hospitality—represents an attempt to manufacture consent not through coercion, but through the co-optation of symbolic capital.

Fourth, the provision of scholarships for international students to study at Saudi institutions constitutes a long-standing strategy for cultivating ideologically loyal clerical cadres. Graduates of these programmes often return to their home countries to assume positions of religious authority, thereby reproducing Saudi-aligned doctrinal frameworks in diverse cultural and political settings (cf. Jahroni 2013; Mamuda and Mustapha 2021). As with other imperial regimes—from British India to Soviet Central Asia—the Saudi state appropriated education as a mode of socialisation, instrumentalising pedagogy to construct normative subjects attuned to its political theology (Fanon 1963; Mitchell 1988; Viswanathan 1989).

The central hub in this dissemination strategy is the Islamic University of Medina (al-jāmiʿa al-islāmiyya bi’l-madīnat al-munawwara), which emerged as an epistemic anchor amid increasingly turbulent theological seas, designed to consolidate Saudi-defined orthodoxy and project a loyalist cadre of globalised preachers aligned with Saudi religious diplomacy. Established in 1961, the university served not merely as an institution of higher religious learning but as the principal instrument through which Saudi Arabia sought to internationalise Wahhabi pedagogy under the guise of Islamic universalism. In contrast to domestic institutions focused on internal clerical reproduction, the university was conceived for transnational doctrinal export, operating as a centre of theological standardisation and missionary formation. As Farquhar (2015) has argued, the university formed a transnational engine of religious dissemination, offering Wahhabi instruction while accruing what he terms “spiritual capital”: symbolic prestige derived from its sacred geography and state imprimatur. This institutional authority enabled graduates—drawn largely from Africa, Asia, and Muslim diaspora communities—to act as norm entrepreneurs, claiming moral leadership in their home societies while reproducing Saudi theological sensibilities. Through generous scholarships, stipends, and logistical support, the university embedded itself within a broader religious economy sustained by Saudi petrodollars, creating enduring transnational circuits of clerical formation. Its curriculum privileged a doctrinally narrow yet rhetorically universalist Wahhabism, grounded in creedal exclusivism (ʿaqīdat al-ṣaḥīḥa), hostility to innovation (bidʿa), and a rigid methodological scripturalism. Blaine Harden (2001) quotes a Saudi contact in North America, stating that the recruitment strategy extended to North America, “There was a very deliberate recruitment process by the Saudis, trying to find black Muslims who had a real potential for Islamic learning and also for submission to their agenda…They taught Islam with the intent to expand their influence. A principal target was to stop the indigenous Muslim leadership in America from tinkering with the religion [as Wahhabism had defined it]”.

At the same time, the institution demonstrated pedagogical adaptability, incorporating non-Saudi faculty and cultivating a didactic cosmopolitanism that rendered Wahhabi orthodoxy globally portable yet structurally centralised. This duality—doctrinal rigidity conjoined with institutional pragmatism—allowed the university to shape a cadre of ideologues capable of local translation while maintaining epistemic fidelity to Riyadh’s religious authority. The Islamic University of Medina thus operated not merely as a global seminary but as an ideological crucible, forging globally dispersed agents of Wahhabi normativity and demonstrating how religious education, like its secular colonial counterparts, becomes a vehicle of imperial soft power, engineering consensus while effacing its centre of gravity (Farquhar 2016).

Fifth, Saudi epistemic control also operates through the textual infrastructure of norm dissemination. Rather than relying solely on formal education or scholarly authority, this strategy targets the religious public sphere through the mass production and mass distribution of printed materials. Consistent with a dual strategy of institutional infiltration and hegemonic displacement, Saudi actors have supported both the takeover of existing Islamic publishing houses—redirecting their editorial trajectories—and the creation of new ventures such as the state-sponsored King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qurʾan in Madinah. The explicit aim of such institutions is to mass-produce and circulate theological tracts that promote Wahhabi doctrinal positions. These texts—ranging from Qurʾān translations and fatwa compilations to short primers on creed—are disseminated by the millions, often free of charge, across Muslim communities worldwide. Here, norm diffusion occurs not through persuasion or debate, but through epistemic saturation; the repetitive and ubiquitous availability of Wahhabi-authored materials gradually reshapes theological expectations and narrows the interpretive range of what is recognised as religiously normative. This publishing strategy displaces rival discourses both by argumentation and by volume, cultivating a theological doxa in which Wahhabi categories of belief appear self-evident, unmarked, and authoritative.

Together, these five techniques represent more than normative diffusion; they comprise a deliberate effort to reconfigure the global Islamic intellectual field in accordance with the theological and political imperatives of the Saudi state. From the caliphate, which was nominally charged with fighting “heresy”, to the waqf-system, which sustained the independence of the theologico-juristic class, the traditional institutions that historically acted to offset non-conformist creeds no longer exist or, if they do in altered form, have been severely compromised. Wherever traditional epistemic gatekeepers collapse, ideological entrepreneurs are quick to move in. The underexamined paradox lies in the fact that it was the decline—rather than the proliferation—of Islamic scholarly institutions that enabled the rise of theological radicalism, which subsequently transmuted into political radicalism.

2.5. Strategies D–Z: Other Means of Propagation (and Silencing)

While Saudi-trained imams frequently return as missionaries, often denouncing local religious customs with heightened doctrinal zeal, their clerical influence remains largely confined to mosque-attending constituencies. To amplify the confessional message beyond clerical circuits, Saudi Arabia has constructed a parallel infrastructure of mass-mediated epistemic control. The Saudi regime not only monopolises domestic media but also maintains overseas Arabic-language platforms as strategic instruments of narrative control—shielding the regime from external critique. Flagship Arabic-language outlets such as Al-Ḥayāt, al-Sharq al-Awsaṭ, Arab News, Orbit Television, the Arab Media Corporation, and the Saudi Research and Marketing Group—which publishes over fifteen periodicals—are all Saudi-owned (Aburish 2005; Ruthven 2002). This Saudi–Wahhabi media ecosystem enables global dissemination of religio-political messaging via a web of newspapers, journals, magazines, and broadcast platforms. In its media operations, Wahhabism demonstrates an entirely modern logic of symbolic production and dissemination. Through these channels, the regime seeks not only to broadcast doctrine but to secure informational hegemony—shaping the range of permissible speech and marginalising alternative religious visions.

This dynamic extends equally to Wahhabi engagement with the digital sphere. Saudi authorities actively censor digital platforms critical of the regime or Wahhabi orthodoxy. Notably, the Grand Mufti ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Āl al-Shaykh issued a fatwa endorsing “cyber-jihād”, encouraging activists to disable websites deemed Ṣūfī, Shīʿī or “extremist” (Gold 2003). Conversely, Saudi individuals and institutions have saturated cyberspace with a vast array of websites promoting Wahhabi interpretations on both classical and contemporary issues. The new hermeneutics of the Internet—with an emphasis on instant satisfaction of religious curiosity—is by its very nature tremendously disfavourable to the traditional canon, not least because of its exclusion of local scholarly communities. Moreover, with obscured authorship, unverifiable sourcing, and minimal gatekeeping, digital platforms permit individuals and groups to circulate divergent interpretations of Islam beyond the regulatory orbit of traditional authority structures (Bunt 2000, 2003). In this environment, legitimacy is no longer conferred through chains of scholarly transmission (asānīd) but through virality, repetition, fierce claims to authenticity, and ideological affect. Sunnī traditionalists are thereby placed on the defensive—not only in responding to issues framed by radicals but in ceding control over the discursive agenda itself.

Having both carrots and sticks at their disposal, Saudis networks historically balanced incentive structures with deterrent or compellent strategies: While fame and finance could be secured with cooperation, defamation and ultimately devastation could be the end-game of resistance. Such was the case with the late Muhammad al-Ghazali, among the more assertive al-Azhar professors. In 1989, he published a book called The Sunna of the Prophet: Between the People of Fiqh and the People of Hadith (Al-sunna al-nabawiyya bayna ahl al-fiqh wa ahl al-ḥadīth), accusing the Wahhabis of misconstruing Islam, justifying fanaticism, and defiling Islam’s reputation. Within two years, the Saudis subsidised the publication of seven books discrediting al-Ghazali, often resorting to ad hominem aspersions, and, at three Muslim World League-sponsored conferences in Saudi Arabia, scholars lined up to repudiate his arguments. The Saudi newspaper, Al-Sharq al-Awsat, issued its own lengthy rebuttals. But what most pained al-Ghazali, according to Abou El Fadl, was not the Saudi smear campaign but watching his old students—many of whom had received Saudi fellowships and book advances—remain silent amid the uproar (Foer 2002).

This interplay of propagation and repression reveals the wider architecture of Saudi religious statecraft. What began as a reactive parochialism gradually evolved into a proactive transnationalism—entering what norm theorists have termed the “norm cascade” phase, wherein previously marginal religious ideas gain traction across diverse audiences (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). Over successive decades, Saudi-backed institutions matured into nodes of religious production and ideological discipline, interlinked through financial flows, personnel exchanges, and shared epistemic frameworks. In Gramscian terms (Gramsci 1971, pp. 12–13), this constellation of schools, media platforms, religious bodies, and cultural organs exemplifies how hegemony is sustained not simply through coercion but through the active manufacture of consent within civil society. These institutions did not merely transmit norms in a top–down manner but sought to reorganise the moral–intellectual fabric of Islam across multiple national settings—anchoring a new hegemonic bloc. From a Foucauldian perspective, they also constituted a decentralised assemblage of pastoral power: a moral economy of instruction and surveillance designed to produce pious subjects both within and beyond the state.

Still, the very success of this apparatus introduced new contradictions, as the autonomy extended to norm entrepreneurs—preachers, publishers, digital actors—unleashed centrifugal tendencies. Norm diffusion thus proved not merely a unidirectional export but a site of localisation, appropriation, and radical transformation. In some contexts, strategic diffusion metastasised into hybridised or extremist forms, revealing the limits of centralised control and the volatility inherent in ideological globalisation.

3. Saudi Theopolitics Abroad: Three Cases

This section turns to the external projection of Wahhabi norms through an analysis of three distinct yet interrelated case studies: Bosnia, Indonesia, and Nigeria. Each illustrates how Saudi-sponsored religious influence has interacted with diverse socio-political and theological ecologies, producing variegated patterns of diffusion, adaptation, and resistance. These cases are not simply instances of ideological export but reveal the dynamic interplay between Saudi religious statecraft and local actors engaged in negotiation, co-optation, or contestation. Drawing on constructivist norm theory, Gramscian power theory, Foucauldian governmentality, and Acharya’s norm localisation framework, the case studies illustrate how Wahhabism operates less as a fixed script and more as an amphibious set of discursive practices, continually reshaped in the crucible of transnational encounter.

3.1. From War to Vacuum: The Case of Bosnia

Saudi norm projection has found fertile ground in states fractured by socio-cultural ruptures and post-conflict dislocation. Nowhere in Europe is this more apparent than in Bosnia-Herzegovina—a country where war, institutional breakdown, and religious reawakening created a unique crucible for the implantation of Wahhabi doctrines and the challenging of traditional Islamic authority. In the wake of the brutality of the 1992–1995 war, Bosnia became a strategic theatre for Saudi religious statecraft, blending material aid with ideological influence under the guise of reconstruction and revival. In a country with a Muslim population of less than 2 million, Riyadh spent over USD 6 billion, according to official Saudi sources, within the first three decades of the end of the Bosnian War (Alexiev 2002; Bennett 2021).

Norm diffusion intensified in the immediate post-war era, catalysed by the continued residence of foreign fighters—the so-called mudžahedini—who had initially entered Bosnia under the banner of jihād. The Travnik Islamic Centre became the epicentre for radical activity as it began promoting Wahhabi literature, including a polemic entitled Notions We Have to Correct, written by the Egyptian-born Imad el-Misri and published by the Bosnia-Herzegovina Committee of the Organization for the Rebirth of The Islamic Tradition (Jamʿiyyat iḥyāʾ al-turāth al-islāmī) to question the Islamic credentials of Bosniak religious culture (Wiktorowicz 2001). True to the consistent spirit, or programme, of Wahhabi literature, polemical attacks were directed against “deviances” and “distortions” in mainstream Islam; strikingly, even as the paperback was released amid the atrocities of the Bosnian War, the Serbs escaped theological censure, underscoring the intra-Muslim focus of Wahhabi critique. The framing of Bosnian Islam as doctrinally suspect exemplified an early moment of discursive power, in which epistemic authority was seized to redefine theological legitimacy. Though El-Misri first entered Bosnia as part of the foreign Islamic volunteer corps during the war, he remained in the country afterward, emerging as a key figure in disseminating Wahhabi interpretations of Islam and fostering the consolidation of Wahhabi-oriented communities. His activities positioned him within a broader trend of post-war religious realignment, in which external Islamic influences, particularly from the Arab world, intersected with Bosnia’s historically rooted Ḥanafī and Ṣūfī traditions.

Parallel to these early moments of discursive penetration, Saudi financial and institutional investments rapidly escalated. Bosnia-Herzegovina became a site for both “Trojan horse” and “rival group” strategies of normative intrusion. In addition to exercising controlling influence on a number of Saudi-built centres (to the great dismay of the official governing bodies in Bosnia), the Saudi High Commission for Relief of Bosnia and Herzegovina supported secessions from established institutions and the creation of new organisations such as Active Islamic Youth (AIO) and al-Furqan, predictably both non-indigenous in outlook, as well as magazines like Saff, dedicated to draw people to “original Islam” (izvorni islam) (Alibaşiĉ 2003). These developments coincided with a broader Islamic “reawakening” across Bosnia, provoked by the trauma and dislocation wrought by the Balkan wars (Walt 2009).

Saudi sponsorship extended to the construction of mosques, Islamic centres, and academies—including the Bihać Centre (named after then-Prince, now-King, Salmān, who was the first director of the Saudi High Commission for Relief of Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the grand King Fahd Cultural Centre in Sarajevo—thereby sparking debates about whether Saudi Arabia sought to reconfigure Bosnia’s indigenous Islamic tradition along puritan lines (Bardos 2016; Kalan 2019). Beyond the flagship institutions, Saudi-funded networks proliferated across the country, including Quran schools, daʿwa offices, and social welfare organisations (Karčić 2022). While nominally philanthropic, these networks often embedded theological curricula aligned with Saudi orthodoxy, weakening the authority of formal seminaries and religious foundations by offering alternative religious pathways outside official channels. Referring to Saudi philanthropy, Leila Bičakčić, the head of the Sarajevo-based Center for Investigative Reporting, observed, “It’s almost public knowledge that their money is a precondition for religious teaching” (Kalan 2019). In this sense, Bosnia became a testing ground for the transnational export of Wahhabi normativity, enabled not only through material patronage but via the epistemic restructuring of local Islamic institutions.

Still, socially resisted in the immediate postwar era, the first wave of Wahhabi adherents, mostly foreign fighters and their Bosnian wives and students, occasionally withdrew to secluded villages to lead a segregated life of quietist righteousness. Such parallel communities (para-džemati) resisted incorporation into the Bosnian mainstream and also eschewed contestation with the state which they had fought for in the war. Within a few years, however, the leadership of the Wahhabi community had fallen to Bosnian graduates of Saudi institutions, most prominently Jusuf Barčić (1967–2007), who returned from his studies in Madina in 1996 to “set off an open revolt against the Islamic order of Bosnia” (Hesová 2021, p. 601). Seeking first to take over established mosques and then to establish new institutions, the new leadership sought to establish parallel communities not in the rural hinterland but within urban centres, challenging the writ of the official religious body, the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Islamska zajednica u Bosni i Hercegovini, ICBH), which had managed religious leadership in the region since it was established in 1882 under Austro-Hungarian rule (Alibašić 2022). The use of mosque takeovers and communal rupture may be seen as Foucauldian “counter-conducts”—practices that challenged dominant modalities of religious governance by asserting alternative regimes of truth and piety. In Gramscian terms, moreover, these efforts represented a “war of manoeuvre”, wherein Salafi activists sought to rapidly seize control of religious infrastructure in urban centres, displacing the ICBH’s long-standing religious exclusivity.

The first decade following the Bosnian War was marked by both norm diffusion and norm contestation, as the authority of long-standing religious precepts in Bosnia came under challenge from Saudi-trained or Saudi-affiliated norm entrepreneurs—who, in turn, were frequently denounced as foreign agents, provocateurs, or even terrorists. The ICBH adhered to a policy of excluding foreign-educated graduates from employment as imams and initially confronted the Wahhabi wave through a stance of uncompromising rejectionism. Following 9/11, international pressure catalysed greater scrutiny of foreign-funded institutions, leading to a series of bans and expulsions. In 2001, the Bosnian government banned the Saudi High Commission for Relief of Bosnia and Herzegovina (SHC), an aid agency established in 1993 to assist Bosnian Muslims during the Bosnian War, following a NATO-led raid on the SHC’s Sarajevo office, where terrorism-linked materials were discovered. The following year, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation and the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF), both Saudi-based charities, faced scrutiny and subsequent bans due to their alleged connections to terrorism.

Following Barčić’s death in a car accident in March 2007, the Wahhabi movement in Bosnia underwent a process of fragmentation, initially dividing between quietist and militant factions. The militant wing, subsequently, fractured further, with competing allegiances emerging among various groups. As the Arab Spring took hold in Syria, Barčić’s immediate heir Nusret Imamović (b. 1971) gave up on Bosnia altogether, and, in 2013, he relocated with his entourage to Syria to fight for the al-Nusra Front, later reportedly travelling to Libya (Babić 2017). As elsewhere among militant communities, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) had strong appeal, and at its heyday around 2014–16 more than 300 Bosnians joined the group, among the highest per capita rates from any nation (Hesová 2021). As part of the “true believer” repertoire became embroiled in jihadi enterprise, the Bosnian state intervened and outlawed recruitment to ISIS and other foreign militant groups, arresting recruiters as well as returnees from the Middle East. This regulatory presence proved instrumental in limiting the securitised escalation observed in other theatres.

Around the same time, a new generation of Bosnian-born, Saudi-trained Islamic Studies graduates had returned to Bosnia and, in line with the Saudi policy of de-radicalisation, distanced themselves from the militants, while beginning to set up civic groups, community centres, outreach programmes, websites, and social media. The new generation of missionaries (duʿāt; sing. dāʿī) sought to initiate a norm transfusion, a form of glocalisation of Wahhabism, situating it in Bosnian culture and distancing it from its Saudi origin. This marked a shift to adaptive embedding, as Wahhabi norms were strategically rearticulated to resonate with Bosnian idioms, cultural sensitivities, and postwar aspirations.

In the decade following 2010, the new Salafi actors in Bosnia increasingly embraced digital platforms to disseminate religious content and establish parallel spheres of epistemic authority. YouTube channels and Facebook pages run by young Bosnian duʿāt—many educated in Saudi Arabia or influenced by Gulf-based preachers—circulated lectures, fatwas, and religious advice that reflected a softened Wahhabi aesthetic, eschewing overtly confrontational rhetoric while promoting a scripturalist piety. These figures often bypassed traditional religious hierarchies, creating an alternative Islamic public sphere and attracting a youth demographic alienated by Bosnia’s formal religious institutions. Gradually, digitally mediated Salafism became a potent vehicle for norm diffusion and local adaptation, enabling the vernacularisation of scripturalist piety.

Far more successful than the confrontationalist approach of the previous generation, the new generation portrayed a softer image of “Salafism” (selefije) that is not foreign (unlike Wahhabism, which relates to its historic eponym) but authentic (relating to the salaf, the early generations of Islam, and thus presumptive of originalism). The transformation of the urban religious landscape in Bosnia also effected a gradual normalisation of Wahhabi actors in Bosnian Islam, reaching a modus vivendi with the ICBH, who understood the appeal of the new theological discourse and its youthful purveyors. Having previously referred to the Wahhabi (vehabije) dispensation as “extra-institutional interpretations of Islam”, it now refrained from using the label and began accommodating moderate, neo-Salafi leaders in its ranks (Hesová 2021).

Through the same decade, beginning in 2010, Saudi capital was behind some of the biggest infrastructure projects in Bosnia, including not only religious sites but shopping malls and apartment complexes, while also becoming its largest arms purchaser, procuring up to a third of Bosnian military exports. With visa-free entry for Saudi citizens in the summer season, Bosnia-Herzegovina also became a favoured tourist destination, particularly as the post-Arab Spring destabilised the traditional Arab tourist spots in Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon (Bennett 2021). At the same time, Saudi institutions began distancing themselves from strongly proselytising postures. Muharem Štulanovic, the Saudi-educated dean of the Bihac Faculty of Islamic Pedagogy, rejected suggestions that the promotion of Wahhabism was a Saudi state strategy, proffering, “Wahhabism is a virtual thing, a form of hostile propaganda directed against us by the West and Shi’ites” (Kalan 2019). Nevertheless, a 2018 survey in the country by Ipsos on perceptions of foreign influence in Bosnia found that only 10 percent of the respondents had a “mostly positive” view of Riyadh’s influence. The long arc of Saudi engagement in Bosnia thus traverses the full norm life cycle: from emergence to diffusion, localisation, contestation, securitisation, and partial normalisation—though not without reputational cost.

3.2. Between Ideology and Theology: The Case of Indonesia

Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority country following Pakistan’s bifurcation in 1971, has experienced a marked fragmentation of its religious landscape under sustained Wahhabi influence across several decades. Sumatra was likely the earliest locale outside the Arabian Peninsula where Wahhabi-inspired doctrines—introduced in the early nineteenth century—precipitated sectarian strife and internecine warfare. Returning from pilgrimage and theological study in Mecca, reformist Sumatran clerics founded the Padri movement circa 1803, intent on extirpating local religious customs (ʿadāt) and later resisting Dutch colonial authority (van Bruinessen 2002). In West Sumatra—historically a regional melting-pot—Wahhabism synthesised with residual forms of religio-political activism, beginning with the Padris and continuing, more than a century later, with the Darul Islam movement, which, for nearly two decades after 1948, challenged the republican government to accept no suzerainty, except the Shariatic (Azra 2003). This early diffusion of Wahhabi norms in the Indonesian archipelago illustrates the dialectic of norm emergence and contestation, setting the stage for subsequent cycles of ideological alignment and resistance. In its contemporary iteration, Indonesian Wahhabism functions both as a vector for Saudi religio-nationalist ambitions and an expression of embedded theological agency.

Indonesia’s central Islamic Daʿwa Council (Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia, or DDII, est. 1967) became the “Saudis’ preferred counterpart when these began using their oil wealth to finance the spread of conservative and puritan brands of Islamic teaching” (van Bruinessen 2002, p. 123). Sustained by Saudi funding, DDII gradually aligned itself with Riyadh’s theological posture over the ensuing decades—a shift facilitated by its institutional entanglement with the Muslim World League, whose vice-chairman, Mohammed Natsir (1908–1993), was also DDII’s founder (Hasan 2002). Through his dual leadership of Jakarta-based DDII and Mecca-based Muslim World League (MWL), Mohammad Natsir—a former prime minister and head of Masyumi, the largest Islamic political party before Sukarno’s “guided democracy” era —played a key role in aligning Indonesian Islamic movements with Saudi soft power. Though a traditional Shāfiʿī himself, his advocacy for Islamic governance, anti-communism, and transnational Muslim solidarity made him a natural partner for Saudi Arabia’s ideological outreach (Hakiem 2019). Demonstrating how Saudi funding and soft power co-opted local Islamic leaders to advance its global religious agenda, he contributed to the long-term entrenchment of Saudi-backed religious education and institutional networks.

DDII’s alignment with Saudi doctrinal imperatives deepened over time, reflecting not only ideological affinity but also strategic convergence with Riyadh’s transnational religious agenda. As the Saudi state expanded its proselytising operations across Southeast Asia, DDII emerged as a principal local partner, actively disseminating Wahhabi-inflected teachings and norms. These efforts were materially augmented by religious and charitable institutions such as the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), which funded the construction of nearly 600 mosques in Indonesia alone (Roshandel and Chadha 2006). The resulting infrastructure extended beyond the physical to the epistemic: DDII, already “increasingly oriented towards the Middle East, notably Saudi Arabia,” came to exhibit what van Bruinessen (2002, p. 123) describes as “an almost paranoid obsession with Christian missionary efforts.” The Saudi–DDII axis gradually supplanted the moral–intellectual leadership of traditionalist Islam by embedding a new normative “common sense” across civil society institutions. Through philanthropic capital and symbolic affiliation, this quiet campaign sought to re-anchor Islamic legitimacy in a supremacist paradigm.

Saudi financial largesse has undeniably shaped theological debates within Indonesian Islam, systematically promoting specific doctrinal interpretations over alternative indigenous narratives (Varagur 2020a). Translations of Saudi or Gulf-originated literature proliferated within Indonesia’s literary marketplace, recalibrating notions of Islamic orthodoxy, particularly among urban youth and segments of the rising middle class (Murphy 2003). Thematically, the Wahhabi daʿwa emphasised anti-syncretism, scriptural literalism, and ritual purification—seeking to rectify what it perceived as theological laxity, heterodox practices, and the pervasive influence of Javanese mysticism within Indonesian Islam. Through such vectors of influence, Saudi Arabia succeeded in embedding its religious priorities within Indonesian Islamic institutions, paving the way for a deeper consolidation of Wahhabi-inspired discourses under the guise of daʿwa and social welfare. This process reflects what Foucault might describe as the construction of a pedagogical dispositif—wherein epistemic authority is exercised not through coercive apparatuses but via the diffuse normalisation of interpretive boundaries and theological possibility. The imported creed restructured not only doctrinal content but the very conditions of religious intelligibility, rendering indigenous epistemes increasingly peripheral

The Institute for the Study of Islam and Arabic (Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Islam dan Arab, or LIPIA), located in South Jakarta, constitutes a central node in Saudi Arabia’s transnational religious infrastructure in Indonesia. Staffed and administered predominantly by Saudis, LIPIA represents the most conspicuous institutional embodiment of Saudi proselytisation in Indonesia, operating under the direct auspices of the Saudi embassy and often host to royal visits (Hasan 2022). Functioning as a strategically positioned educational outpost, LIPIA offers free tuition, monthly stipends, and a direct pathway to postgraduate study in Saudi Arabia (Hasan 2022). Over time, LIPIA came to serve as a microcosm of broader ideological spectrums, nurturing both politically engaged Islamists and apolitical, quietist Salafis, alongside a significant contingent of financially disadvantaged students attracted by the promise of scholarship and mobility. Its pivotal role in Indonesia’s evolving Islamic landscape was underscored by its function as a principal recruitment base for the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS)—a political formation modelled ideologically on the Muslim Brotherhood and among the most electorally successful Islamist parties in the country (Chaplin 2021).

Mediated through LIPIA and reinforced by the expanding network of Indonesian alumni from Saudi Islamic institutions, a structured effort to indigenise Wahhabism emerged, adapting it into the socio-religious fabric of Indonesian society. Leading Saudi-educated preachers included Abū Nidāʾ (b. 1954), Yazīd bin ʿAbd al-Qādir Jāwās (1964–2024), Aḥmas Fāʾiz Aṣīfuddīn (b. ca. 1965), ʿAwn al-Rafīq Ghufrān (b. 1974), Dhulqarnayn Muḥammad Sānūsī (b. 1976), and Shafīq Riḍā Ḥasan Bāsalamah (b. 1977), who individually established new institutions supported by Gulf charities. In parallel, the Islamic revival also gained traction in prominent state universities—especially technical institutions such as the Bandung Institute of Technology—where student-led movements such as Tarbiyah aligned with activist Salafism, while more purist factions, such as Jamāʿa Salaf, adhered closely to Wahhabi doctrinal rigorism (Hasan 2007). This represented a crucial phase of norm localisation, wherein foreign religious doctrines were strategically adapted to local cultural paradigms, enhancing their legitimacy and resonance. The influx of Indonesian graduates from Saudi universities, combined with assertive diplomatic interventions by the Saudi embassy into local religious discourses, precipitated a fundamental transformation of Indonesia’s Islamic landscape.

These developments coincided with episodes of vigilante-led religious violence against Christian communities—particularly acute in the Molucca Islands and Central Sulawesi—highlighting the tangible societal consequences of doctrinal radicalisation. Jaʿfar ʿUmar Ṭālib (1961–2019), widely regarded as the chief ideologue of jihadist mobilisation in the Moluccas and founder of Lashkar Jihād, pursued theological training at LIPIA, followed by a stint at the Indonesian branch of the Riyadh-based Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University, before studying under Afghanistan’s leading Salafi-jihadist Jamīl al-Rahmān al-Afghānī (1939–1991) and Yemen’s preeminient Wahhabi authority, Muqbil ibn Hādī al-Wādiʿī (1933–2001). Founded in 2000, Lashkar Jihād sought to navigate a precarious position between quietist Wahhabism and the militant currents Ṭālib had encountered during his time in Afghanistan. Keen to distance itself from al-Qāʿida, the organisation prominently displayed a fatwa from Saudi Grand Mufti Ibn Bāz on its website, denouncing Bin Laden as a rebellious transgressor for opposing the Saudi regime (Hasan 2006). Drawing on Saudi religious authority, the group claimed to be apolitical, focused on creedal purification and moral reform among Indonesian Muslim youth, and militant only insofar as the defence of Muslim interests—or euphemistically, Muslim “honour”—so required. Ambiguous in both structure and ideology, Laskar Jihād disbanded shortly after the 2002 Bali bombings, seemingly to forestall an impending state ban, though Ṭālib later attributed the decision to censure from a prominent Saudi scholar who rejected the very premise of organised activism (ḥizbiyya) as antithetical to Wahhabi principles of religious unity and non-partisanship (Hasan 2006).

A parallel movement, the far-right Islamic Defenders’ Front (Front Pembela Islam), similarly courted controversy until its dissolution in 2020 on charges encompassing criminal conduct, anti-state agitation, and incitement of public disorder. Despite their distinctive attire of white Arabian robes, chequered scarfs and turbans, members of the Front were perceived as relatively independent of direct Saudi guidance, primarily directing their vigilantism against religious minorities and perceived immorality, such as brothels and bars, without directly confronting state authority (Fealy 2004). In this capacity, the Front’s vigilante squads operated as self-appointed moral police, invoking the Islamic injunction to forbid vice and enjoin virtue—a role functionally analogous to Saudi Arabia’s religious police (muttawwaʿūn).

The head of Front Pembela Islam, Ḥabīb Rizīq Shihāb (b. 1965), had studied in Saudi Arabia, and, like Jaʿfar ʿUmar Ṭālib, is of Hadrami descent. Critically, though, even as he spent 2017–2020 in exile in Riyadh, Shihāb’s ideology aligns not with the Wahhabi mainstream, but to a jihadist internationalism in quest for the global caliphate and the political application of the sharīʿa. Sympathetic to jihadi movements across the world, he has denounced the narrow creedal preoccupations of the Wahhabis, which, in his view, weaken the international jihād. In 2014, he openly challenged the Indonesian Wahhabi leader Yazīd ibn ʿAbd al-Qādir Jawās, as the latter’s book Mulia dengan Manhaj Salaf (“Honour through the Salafi Path”) declared most parts of the Muslim community as apostates. Shihāb’s repudiation signalled a shift away from Saudi-style doctrinal exclusivism toward a more activist, pan-Islamist Salafism that finds resonance beyond the Arabian Peninsula. The discursive contestation marked more than theological disagreement—it represented a performative reassertion of jihadist agency against the depoliticised script of Saudi-backed Wahhabism. In constructivist terms, it illustrated the capacity of local actors to counter norm diffusion, deploying alternative idioms to articulate antithetical theopolitical projects.

After the devastating 2002 Bali bombings, which claimed the lives of 202 people—mostly foreign tourists—and was, at the time, the deadliest terrorist attack in the world since 9/11, the spectre of domestic terrorism loomed ever larger in Indonesia’s public discourse. The tropical archipelago, traditionally celebrated for its religious tolerance, had become ensnared first in a profound cultural contestation and subsequently embroiled in multiple militant confrontations (van Bruinessen 2018). The Bali attacks were orchestrated by jihadists affiliated with al-Qāʿida, centred at the Pesantren Al-Mukmin in Central Java—an institution established in 1972 with initial patronage from Saudi Arabia. Political and religious elites began critically interrogating what had been euphemistically termed arabisasi (“Arabisation”), explicitly addressing the implications of sustained Saudi influence. A distinguished commentator outlined the didactic challenge: “Perhaps the most important thing is the ideological struggle. […] Although Muslims in Indonesia are mainly moderate, they need help and assistance in expanding their educational systems […] to withstand the extremist influences of Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia” (Wanandi 2002).

A testament to the embeddedness and institutionalisation of the Saudi–Wahhabi legacy, one astute observer remarked, “If every Saudi national could leave Indonesia tomorrow, there would still be a vibrant Salafi ecosystem in place” (Varagur 2020b). Such ideational penetration highlights how Wahhabi norms have become internalised, evolving from external diffusion to local institutionalisation. The transnational movement of finance, preachers, and ideas has not been universally welcomed, however, and initial signs of an anti-Arab backlash have begun to surface among indigenous Indonesian Muslims, who increasingly perceive such radical doctrines as culturally alien. In performative terms, this illustrates the capacity of local actors to engage in counter-norm diffusion, deploying local or indeed global idioms to articulate antithetical ideational projects.

Although Saudi-educated himself, Saʿīd ʿAqīl Sirāj (b. 1953)—chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia’s largest Islamic organisation—was instrumental in formulating and propagating the concept of Islam Nusantara (“Islam of the Archipelago”), advocating a culturally rooted religious identity (Ahmad 2022). Concurrently, there has been a notable revival of indigenous epistemes within Indonesian Islam, spearheaded by charismatic preachers educated in the local pesantren, who utilise vernacular discourse to disseminate Islamic teachings deeply embedded within an Indonesian cultural context. Preachers such as Aḥmad Bahāʾuddīn Nūr Sālim (also known as Gus Baha), ʿAbd al-Ṣamad Batubārā, Jamʿān Yūsuf Manūr (better known as Yūsuf Manṣūr), and Ḥabīb Ḥusayn Jaʿfar al-Ḥaḍar have strategically embraced digital daʿwa through social media platforms, thereby gaining considerable traction and acclaim among Indonesia’s millennial generation (Suryana and Taufek 2021). These developments exemplify the dynamics of norm contestation and counter-hegemonic resistance, illustrating how local actors can actively challenge imported theological frameworks by revitalising indigenous religious discourses. Rather than simply rejecting external influences, these figures creatively rearticulate Islamic norms, underscoring the agency of local religious actors in mediating, adapting, and contesting transnational religious hegemony.

3.3. From Revival to Rebellion: The Case of Nigeria

The Federal Republic of Nigeria offers a third context in which Wahhabi norm diffusion has catalysed both religious reform and violent contestation, as Ṣūfī traditionalism, Salafi revivalism, and jihadist insurgency collided to underscore the volatility of transnational norm transmission. The most populous nation in Africa and home to the continent’s largest Muslim population, Nigeria presents an Islamic landscape distinguished by a rich tapestry of theological pluralism, encompassing longstanding inter-religious as well as intra-Islamic diversity (Clarke and Linden 1984). Islam first permeated the West African region through trans-Saharan trade routes around the 11th century, but Nigerian Islam continued to reflect syncretic dimensions, manifesting the historical intersection between Islamic tenets and indigenous beliefs, entailing the persistence of pre-Islamic customs, folk rituals, and local spiritual practices despite periodic reformist challenges. Chief among them, Usman dan Fodio’s movement, which established the Sokoto Caliphate in 1809, while puritanical, consolidated a form of Islam that integrated rigorous jurisprudential orthodoxy with entrenched local customs and Sūfī orientations (Reynolds 1997).

The predominant form of Islamic practice in northern Nigeria—home to the majority of the country’s Muslims—historically centred around well-established Sūfī orders, such as the Qādiriyya (originating in contemporary Iraq) and Tijānīyya (originating in North Africa), which profoundly shaped religious, social, and political mores, exerting substantial spiritual influence and serving as conduits of social cohesion and inter-ethnic solidarity (Nobili 2021). Even while infighting, the orders sustained extensive networks of zawāyā (lodges), educational institutions, and informal jurisprudential councils, through which they transmitted Islamic knowledge (Loimeier 1997). Traditional ʿulamāʾ, often affiliated with Sūfī lodges, administered justice through informal courts, thereby institutionalising Islam in a manner sensitive to local social norms (Ostien 2007). The Mālikī madhhab, deeply rooted in northern Nigeria, fostered a legal tradition that accommodated local circumstances and customary practices (ʿurf), reflecting a pragmatic flexibility vital for social cohesion in Nigeria’s diverse cultural repertoire.

On the eve of increased Saudi engagement in the late 20th century, Nigeria’s Islamic landscape presented a mosaic of entrenched Sūfī affiliations, pragmatic jurisprudential traditions, and culturally syncretic practices—all of which formed the context against which Wahhabi-oriented reformism would assert itself, often disruptively, in the decades to follow (Thurston 2016). While early Saudi overtures to attract Nigerian students were reportedly obstructed by British administrators, who feared the transmission of radical Middle Eastern ideologies amid the rise of Arab nationalism (Mamuda and Mustapha 2021), this changed following independence. In 1965, the inaugural recruitment tour from the Islamic University in Medina arrived in West Africa, offering attractive scholarships through the Mecca-born Nigerian ʿUmar Fallāta (1925–1999), who had been appointed first assistant secretary and later general secretary to the Islamic University (Varagur 2020a). From the 1970s onward, Saudi religious diplomacy gained traction under successive Nigerian governments, including those of Shehu Shagari (1979–1983), Muhammadu Buhari (1983–1985), and Ibrahim Babangida (1985–1993), who viewed Saudi Arabia as a dependable ally. Riyadh, in turn, saw Nigeria not only as an important trading partner but also as a strategic entry point into sub-Saharan Africa.

Saudi religious outreach to Nigeria intensified during the 1970s and 1980s, following the Salafi–Wahhabi synthesis in Saudi Arabia, which made Wahhabism more activist, coinciding with Riyadh’s post-oil boom strategy to remake regional Islamic identities in its own socio-political image. Rather than deploying a centralised state apparatus, Saudi influence diffused through a decentralised web of NGOs, religious foundations, and missionary networks. Among the most active were the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), and the Muslim World League (MWL), all of which maintained offices in northern Nigeria and channelled funds toward mosque construction, teacher training, and Arabic-language curricula (Thurston 2016). These efforts involved the funding of Islamic organisations, sponsorship of educational exchanges, and dissemination of Wahhabi-inclined literature.

Key among the recipients was the Jamāʿat naṣr al-islām (“Society for the Support of Islam”, or JNI), an umbrella body originally established to coordinate Muslim responses to colonial and postcolonial challenges. Revitalised by Saudi support, JNI—under the leadership of the Grand Qadi of Northern Nigeria Abū Bakr Gūmī (1924–1992), who was also a member of the Constituent Assembly of the Muslim World League—began promoting a more rigid conception of Islamic orthodoxy, increasingly aligned with Wahhabi sensibilities (Kendhammer 2022). Gūmī undertook the vernacularisation of Wahhabi doctrine by translating seminal Saudi texts—including works of Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb—into Hausa, thereby fusing transnational dogma with local linguistic accessibility and embedding Wahhabi precepts into the popular religious imagination (Ben Amara 2020). This ideological recalibration quietly shifted religious authority away from traditional elites toward Saudi-affiliated scholars and preachers, setting in motion a new phase of doctrinal contestation. Gūmī became a central “conduit” and “intellectual locomotive” of the Saudi daʿwa apparatus in northern Nigeria and was duly rewarded with the King Faisal Award in 1988 (Varagur 2020a, p. 96).

A key development in the reconfiguration of religious authority came with the 1978 emergence of Jamāʿat Izālat al-Bidʿa wa-Iqāmat al-Sunna (“Society for the Eradication of Innovation and the Establishment of the Sunna”, or Izāla), which received both ideological and financial backing from Saudi actors (Thurston 2016). Inspired by Gūmī and founded by his student Ismāʿīla Idrīs (1937–2000), Izāla positioned itself as a vanguard movement committed to purging bidʿa (reprehensible innovations) from Nigerian Islam. Its leaders denounced Ṣūfī practices such as dhikr gatherings, the veneration of saints, and the use of vernacular discourses in sermons, advocating a scripturalist theology consonant with Wahhabi-promulgated orthodoxy. From the 1990s onward, a new generation of Saudi-educated preachers spread the new doctrine far and wide. Chief among them was Jaʿfar Maḥmūd Ādam (1960–2007), a Medina-trained cleric whose influence extended nationwide through pamphlets, cassette sermons, and radio broadcasts, while simultaneously establishing himself as the dominant religious figure in the eastern city of Maiduguri (Thurston 2016). Ādam localised Wahhabi norm dissemination through Nigeria’s domestic media ecologies, initiating a Gramscian “war of position” aimed at displacing entrenched moral authority and reconfiguring Islamic orthopraxy.

Izāla itself became a principal institutional vehicle for this transformation, establishing thousands of mosques across Nigeria and disseminating a “true Islam” that eschewed local custom, challenged Ṣūfī devotionalism, and promoted a scripturalist creed through its preachers, media networks, and affiliated schools. The Nigerian state, while officially secular, oscillated between permissive pluralism and selective co-optation, often courting Izāla-aligned clerics for political legitimacy. Rather than marginalising the movement, northern Nigerian political elites thus facilitated Izāla’s access to state-run media platforms, particularly radio and television, enabling its doctrinal positions to reach mass audiences and becoming mainstream (Loimeier 2012). Saudi engagement with Izāla, too, was neither discreet nor merely financial; official delegations—from embassy officials to senior scholars from the Islamic University in Medina—frequently attended Izāla conferences to issue public commendations, thus reinforcing the movement’s legitimacy through visible transnational endorsement (Ben Amara 2020).

By the late 1990s, Izāla’s ascendant public authority and its relentless emphasis on scriptural orthodoxy helped shape the ideological milieu in which twelve northern states formally adopted sharīʿa law—an initiative spearheaded by state governors, seeking legitimacy after military rule, but driven by the new public discourse toward a more legalistic and puritanical religiosity. Following this, several state governments institutionalised ḥisbah boards, as Islamic moral policing units tasked with enforcing public virtue, many of which operated under the informal guidance or tacit influence of Izāla-aligned preachers, thereby translating revivalist ideologies into disciplinary regimes (Last 2008). Yet, far from engendering theological unity, the Izāla movement fragmented Nigeria’s Islamic landscape. Its confrontational posture deepened confessional divides while simultaneously generating internal fissures, as dissenters accused their own leadership of inconsistency, accommodationism, or theological error. These intra-Salafi tensions mirrored the broader centrifugal tendencies of Saudi-funded reformism. As Izāla consolidated its influence, rival Salafi actors began to splinter off, each claiming custodianship of the authentic Salafi path. The result was not doctrinal coherence but an escalating contest over authority, legitimacy, and orthodoxy.

The most explosive manifestation of theological drift occurred around 2002 with the rise of Jamāʿat Ahl al-Sunna li-l-Daʿwa wa-l-Jihād (The Sunnī Association for Daʿwa and Jihād), more widely known by its colloquial cognomen Boko Haram. Under the leadership of Muḥammad Yūsuf (1970–2009), a former student of Jaʿfar Ādam, the group fused Wahhabi puritanism with a millenarian political vision (Thurston 2017). In Maiduguri’s railway district, the Ibn Taymiya mosque—named after the mediaeval Ḥanbalī theologian so central to Wahhabi genealogy—served as a seminary of oppositional religiosity, rejecting both Western education and Izāla’s perceived compromises. Yūsuf’s widely disseminated sermons expressed deep suspicion of Western education (boko) and espoused an absolutist vision of Islamic autarky, arguing that mainstream Salafism had compromised with secularism and betrayed true Islam. In his treatise Hādhihi ʿaqīdatunā wa-manhaj daʿwatinā (This Is Our Creed and the Method of Our Daʿwa), Muḥammad Yūsuf articulated a creed steeped in Wahhabi theological motifs, yet repurposed these within a revolutionary register that disavowed the deferential political conformism of Wahhabi orthodoxy, transforming purification into confrontation and reorienting doctrinal purity toward insurgent rupture (Zenn 2020). The intra-Salafi field, thus, saw its own war of manoeuvre.

Under Abū Bakr Shekau (1973–2021), Boko Haram radicalised further, shifting from theological critique to insurgent warfare. Though Saudi-backed clerics publicly disavowed the group’s violence, Boko Haram’s normative framework drew in part on discourses and institutional infrastructures seeded by Saudi-funded actors. As Loimeier (2012) notes, in contexts of socio-political alienation, the line between reformist zeal and extremist mobilisation can prove perilously thin. Islamic concepts are not transmitted as fixed essences but are marked by “semantic instability” when transplanted into new contexts—becoming amphibious and open to radical resignification (Asad 1993). Indeed, Boko Haram’s evolution reveals the latent volatility of a theology predicated on relentless purification and unmediated textual authority. In Nigeria, this fungibility enabled militant actors, such as Boko Haram, to appropriate and deform inherited notions of jihād, wilāya, and tawḥīd, reanimating them as instruments of rupture rather than continuity. Meanwhile, the federal government’s counterinsurgency against Boko Haram, though robustly kinetic—with emergency declarations, enhanced military deployments, and international training assistance—was rarely matched by a credible ideological or narrative strategy, allowing Boko Haram to exploit state excesses and maintain a framing of persecution that sustained its appeal (Thurston 2017).

Following Shekau’s death in 2021, Boko Haram further fragmented, with a significant faction reconstituting itself under the banner of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), whose more structured command and operational discipline reflected a distinct evolution in jihadist governance—though still undergirded by the doctrinal inheritance of earlier Wahhabi-inflected narratives (Brigaglia 2018). Such outcomes underscore the contingency and context-dependence of transnational religious proselytisation. The genealogical entanglement between Saudi-funded religious networks and Nigeria’s insurgent landscape reveals not a linear causality but a recursive interplay: Wahhabi-inspired normativity furnished the conceptual grammar later radicalised by militant actors.

Brigaglia (2015) compels us to reconceive the putative boundary between normative Wahhabism and its militant derivatives—not as a firewall but as a porous threshold, across which ideational flows travel with remarkable semantic elasticity and destabilising consequence. Nigeria thus exemplifies the outer limit of norm localisation gone awry: a setting in which imported theological frameworks, reinterpreted through local grievances, evolve into self-radicalising discourses with insurgent potential. While Saudi religious statecraft aimed to impose epistemic order and theological discipline, its instrumentalisation of Wahhabi norms abroad lacked the institutional safeguards to forestall subversion. In Nigeria, thus, the attempt to script a uniform Islamic identity inadvertently produced insurgent pluralities—doctrinally rigid, politically volatile, and structurally antagonistic to both state and society. The transformation of exclusivist rhetoric into insurgent praxis reveals how discursive boundaries policed in the name of orthodoxy can, under conditions of institutional frailty, catalyse political violence rather than contain it.

3.4. Paths of Diffusion: How Local Contexts Shape the Outcomes of Saudi Religious Statecraft

When juxtaposed, the cases of Bosnia, Indonesia, and Nigeria reveal both convergence and divergence in the global arc of Saudi theopolitical intervention. All three countries were recipients of Saudi financial largesse and ideological projection, particularly during or after moments of systemic upheaval: the Bosnian War, Indonesia’s Reformasi-era transition, and Nigeria’s prolonged postcolonial volatility. In each case, Wahhabi norms circulated via Saudi-funded mosques, schools, and missionary networks, catalysing new theological currents and contestations. Yet their trajectories diverged markedly in terms of socio-political consequence.

In Indonesia, the enduring legacy of Pancasila pluralism and robust institutional mediation enabled the compartmentalisation of Salafi doctrine, integrating it into the Islamic public sphere as one among many competing discourses (Hasan 2007). In Bosnia, although Wahhabi influence disrupted the Ḥanafī–Ṣūfī mainstream, post-war reconstruction under European oversight curtailed the autonomy of Saudi-backed actors, containing their political reach (Clayer and Bougarel 2017). Nigeria, by contrast, lacked comparable buffers. A permissive environment in which Wahhabi-aligned norms could penetrate institutional frameworks without countervailing checks—compounded by entrenched inequality, a history of religious militancy, and the frailty of the postcolonial state—created fertile ground for Saudi religious exports to mutate into adversarial insurgencies. The state’s failure to monopolise both coercion or religious legitimacy enabled actors such as Boko Haram to exploit doctrinal infrastructures seeded by earlier Wahhabi-aligned reformers (Zenn 2018). In this vacuum of authoritative mediation, non-traditional voices—once merely reformist—were increasingly perceived as sole custodians of Islamic authenticity. This perception emboldened fringe elements to assert not only theological but also political supremacy through militant means. The result was not simply pluralisation but the proliferation of antagonistic theologies that eroded both state authority and communal cohesion.

Rather than yielding a homogenised ummatic consensus, Saudi religious diplomacy has produced variegated—and at times violently contradictory—outcomes. The Saudi state may have sought to project a coherent orthodoxy, but once these norms entered religious marketplaces, they were both contested, resisted, and rearticulated in ways far removed from Riyadh’s purview. This dynamic exemplifies what might be termed the “unintended consequences” of the dissemination of Wahhabism: efforts at theological purification devolving into accelerants of sectarian volatility and epistemic rupture.

The theoretical model adopted here foregrounds norm diffusion as an open-ended process vulnerable to unintended consequences: soft power opens the discursive field; constructivist norm circulation embeds doctrinal content, yet Gramscian contestation fragments the epistemic terrain; and governmental discipline—designed to manage piety—may fail to contain the resistance to or radicalisation of religious subjectivities. Indeed, the Indonesian as well as Nigerian cases illustrate the double-edged nature of transnational norm diffusion. While intended to consolidate orthodoxy and geopolitical influence, Saudi theopolitics in far-away lands inadvertently incubated insurgent logics and destabilising movements. The divergence in the cases highlights the intervening role of local political configurations and institutional resilience.

Taken together, Bosnia, Indonesia, and Nigeria illustrate a spectrum of responses to Wahhabi norm diffusion—ranging from negotiated contestation and institutional containment to hybridisation and, potentially, full-scale radicalisation. If Bosnia represents constrained diffusion and Indonesia selective absorption, Nigeria marks the outer limit of diffusion gone awry, where state fragility, delegitimised religious authority, and theological exclusivism converge to produce a volatile ecology of insurgent Islam. Together, these cases demonstrate that the global diffusion of Wahhabi-inspired norms does not produce uniform effects but rather interacts unevenly with local structures of authority, belief, and governance—yielding outcomes shaped less by the intentions of the sender than by the contingencies of the receiving context.

4. Riyadh and the Rethinking of Wahhabism

Having illustrated the transnational arc of Wahhabi norm diffusion, this section shifts focus to the recent reengineering of religious authority within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Since 2016, under the rubric of Vision 2030, the Saudi state has pursued an ambitious project of religious reconfiguration—curbing the influence of the ʿulamāʾ, reconstituting governing elites, institutionalising a new discourse of “moderate Islam”, and recasting Wahhabism from missionary vanguard to regulatory apparatus. This transformation is not merely a function of top–down reform but reflects deeper shifts in the modes of governance and epistemic control. Employing a Foucauldian reading of pastoral power and governmentality, the analysis interrogates how religious authority is being realigned to state-led modernisation, national branding, and geopolitical repositioning. What emerges is a vision of Wahhabism no longer centred on expansionist daʿwa but on ideological discipline—an apparatus of moral regulation tailored to the demands of a post-oil technocracy.

4.1. Wahhabism Abroad: From Missionary Soft Power to Authoritarian Containment

From the 1950s through the 1980s, Saudi Arabia cultivated strategic ties with a range of Islamist actors, most notably elements of the Muslim Brotherhood. These alliances were integral to Riyadh’s projection of Wahhabism as a counterweight to secular Arab nationalism and revolutionary socialism, positioning the Kingdom as the custodian of a transnational conservative order (Al-Rasheed 2008). Wahhabism, in this context, functioned not merely as a religious doctrine but as a soft power instrument—an ideological bulwark against the perceived subversions of Baʿthism, Nasserism, and Marxism. However, by the early 1990s, this alliance frayed under the weight of geopolitical realignments and internal ideological divergence.

Saudi Arabia’s collaboration with Western forces during the Gulf War alienated Islamist factions, many of whom began to challenge the monarchy’s religious and political legitimacy. Within the Kingdom, this rupture found expression in the emergence of the Islamic Awakening (al-Ṣaḥwa al-Islāmiyya), a movement spearheaded by younger ʿulamāʾ who, influenced by Muslim Brotherhood activism and emboldened by the region’s geopolitical crises at the end of the Cold War, began articulating critiques of the monarchy in the idioms of scripturalist rigourism (Lacroix 2011). The ideological aftershocks of this rupture reverberated across subsequent decades, culminating in a securitised posture that increasingly viewed Islamism—domestically and internationally—not as a partner in moral governance but as a latent threat to monarchical sovereignty. The ensuing decades witnessed the securitisation of Islamism, particularly in the post-9/11 period, and a concurrent attempt to depoliticise—or, more precisely, domesticate—Wahhabism as a loyalist dispensation.

The reconfiguration of Wahhabism under the octogenarian King ʿAbdullāh (r. 2005–2015) emerged not as liberal-minded reformism but as a response to acute internal and international pressures, particularly the wave of global and domestic terrorist attacks that punctuated the early 2000s (Hegghammer 2010). In the aftermath of these assaults on the Saudi state itself, ʿAbdullāh embarked upon a programme of measured theological containment and institutional restructuring. This entailed the bureaucratic disciplining of the religious establishment—most notably through the curtailment of the ḥisba (religious policing) apparatus, the centralisation of fatwa production, and the sanitisation of educational curricula (Lacroix 2019). Simultaneously, the expansion of technocratic projects such as the establishment of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology subtly dislodged the ʿulamāʾ from their central role as epistemic authorities (Al-Rasheed 2007; Jones 2015).

Alongside these domestic adjustments, ʿAbdullāh pursued a discursive softening of Wahhabi exclusivism through interfaith initiatives and tentative overtures toward intra-Sunnī and even Shīʿī ecumenism, signalling a strategic diversification of the Kingdom’s normative disposition. These reforms were complemented by the strategic repression of dissenting clerics—ranging from institutional marginalisation to outright detention—and the concurrent elevation of more compliant, state-aligned voices, effectively reconstituting the religious field as one of executive-managed legitimacy. Under ʿAbdullāh, Wahhabism was not abandoned but reshaped—curtailed at the doctrinal edges, bureaucratised in its operations, and selectively deployed as a tool of legitimacy. Together, these developments inaugurated a modality of what might be termed state-curated Wahhabism: a doctrinal architecture deployed as a source of legitimacy, yet increasingly subsumed under the rationalities of national security, modernisation, and executive coherence (Hertog 2005).

The Arab uprisings of 2010–11 catalysed a decisive inflexion point in Saudi Arabia’s theopolitical strategy, compelling the Kingdom to further reconfigure its longstanding deployment of Wahhabism as a tool of domestic, regional, and global influence (Bianco 2024). Rather than signalling a wholesale “inward turn”, Riyadh’s post-2011 approach reconfigured the modalities of Wahhabi export, shifting from broad-based norm diffusion to a selective instrumentalisation of ideologically loyalist or counter-revolutionary currents, which align more precisely with the imperatives of regime security and authoritarian self-preservation. Saudi Arabia’s strategic response to the Arab Spring, which cascaded across North Africa and the Middle East from December 2010 onwards, prompted a significant rethinking of its approach to hegemony. The new approach was not a rejection of theopolitics but a reassertion of the state’s central role within a revised strategic grammar—one that fused idealpolitik with realpolitik in the context of rising geopolitical uncertainty. Under King ʿAbdullāh, the Kingdom initially sought to curtail revolutionary momentum primarily through instruments of soft power, deploying financial largesse, religious legitimacy, and diplomatic outreach to bolster regime resilience within the Gulf Cooperation Council (Gause 2013). This initial reliance on soft power was broadly consistent with previous Wahhabisation policies, whereby religious norm diffusion served simultaneously as an ideological mechanism for Saudi regional influence and as a means of reinforcing domestic regime legitimacy.

As revolutionary upheavals intensified—particularly following the Shīʿa-led protests in Bahrain and parallel unrest within the Kingdom’s own Shīʿa-majority Eastern Province—Saudi Arabia’s strategy transitioned from consensus-building persuasion to coercive assertion. The 2011 intervention in Bahrain—a small, Sunnī-led, Shīʿa-majority island nation neighbouring Saudi Arabia—exemplified this synthesis: military deployment functioned not merely to secure monarchical allies but to restore a theologically inflected regional order in which dynastic legitimacy and Sunnī orthodoxy were mutually constitutive (Nuruzzaman 2012). In Gramscian terms, this was a “war of manoeuvre” waged to suppress rival norm entrepreneurs—particularly Shīʿī political actors—and reassert monarchical sovereignty as the regional norm.

The accession of King Salmān in 2015 marked a further consolidation of Saudi Arabia’s securitised posture, reflecting a shift in which regime security increasingly structured both domestic governance and regional strategy. This primacy of national security was later articulated through the so-called “Salmān Doctrine”—a term used to capture the Kingdom’s turn toward militarised regional interventionism, ideological containment of Iran, and the strategic reconfiguration of religious authority to serve regime resilience (González del Miño and Martínez 2019). Its most visible manifestation was Operation Decisive Storm, the 2015 military intervention aimed at halting Houthi expansion in Yemen and countering Iranian influence on the Arabian Peninsula (Ragab 2017).

Data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) documents this strategic transformation to hard power with Saudi military expenditure totalling an extraordinary USD 373 billion between 2013 and 2018, peaking at over USD 87 billion in 2015 alone (SIPRI 2024). This reorientation marked a shift in hegemonic practice: from soft-power diffusion to hard-power enforcement, and from transnational propagation to regional disciplining. Yet, rather than constituting a fundamental rupture, this securitised posture illustrates the adaptability of Saudi norm entrepreneurship, wherein religious diffusion previously deployed through international Wahhabisation now found a complementary counterpart in state-led (not vigilante) militancy, thus reaffirming the primacy of Saudi state interests as the enduring core of its norm diffusion strategies.

Since 2015, Saudi foreign policy has actively targeted states and movements aligned with political Islam. Those who had once been aligned with Saudi Arabia’s religious statecraft have been reclassified as ideological threats. The Muslim Brotherhood and similar movements are now construed not as strategic allies but as transnational subversives, inimical to Saudi regime security. In this sense, Wahhabism’s global utility has been reengineered. No longer an expansive doctrinal export, it has become a legitimating framework for the exclusion of rival ideologies both within and beyond the Kingdom’s borders. As such, Riyadh repositioned itself as the chief and normative sponsor of anti-Islamist authoritarianism, deploying financial patronage and diplomatic support to regimes hostile to political Islam—most notably in Egypt, where General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s rise became the linchpin of a Saudi-led, counterrevolutionary restoration policy against Islamist movements in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen (Nuruzzaman 2021). In doing so, Saudi Arabia reconceptualised political Islam not merely as an ideological rival but as an existential threat to authoritarian order—thereby integrating religious normativity into a broader regional security logic (Wehrey 2015). While religious idioms receded in official discourse, the normative architecture of the state remained intact, subordinated to the calculus of strategic containment and regime durability.

The Saudi-led blockade of Qatar from June 2017 constituted a further iteration of this strategic reorientation—a coercive campaign against a rival normative project that challenged Riyadh’s post-2011 regional script. Framed rhetorically as a counter-terrorism initiative, the blockade in practice functioned as a Gramscian war of manoeuvre against Doha’s international sponsorship of political Islam, particularly its patronage of the Muslim Brotherhood and affiliated transnational actors. Doha’s strategic use of soft power—via Al Jazeera, academic institutions, and Islamist networks—and its acting as competing norm entrepreneur came to represent a rival theopolitical axis rooted in discursive influence rather than clerical docility. In response, Riyadh mobilised coercion and norm enforcement, selectively advancing a de-politicised Wahhabi current abroad while branding Qatari Islamism as a subversive deviation (referred to as hizbiyya, or “partisanship”) (Ulrichsen 2020a, 2020b). The Qatar blockade revealed not a retreat from religious norm diffusion, but its reengineering. Wahhabi symbols and discourse were not disavowed but re-scripted to legitimise coercive statecraft in the name of regional stability. This clash was not merely geopolitical but epistemological, however—a contest over what constituted legitimate Islamic normativity in the post-Arab Spring order. Yet it also exposed the fissures within Wahhabi-derived networks—pitting quietist loyalism against activist contestation, each claiming doctrinal purity but grounded in divergent policy agendas. The crisis therefore illuminated the paradox at the heart of Saudi theopolitics—that religious norms, once diffused as soft power, could mutate into rival grammars beyond the Kingdom’s control, thereby destabilising the very hegemonic order they were designed to sustain (Kamrava 2017).

Like the case of Qatar, which ultimately demonstrated the limits of coercive norm enforcement, the detention of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri during his visit to Riyadh in November 2017 offered another manifestation of Saudi disciplinary overreach. By compelling Hariri’s televised resignation, the Kingdom sought to disrupt Lebanon’s governing alignment with Hizbullāh as well as Sunnī Islamists to impose a regional normative order in which Islamist influence—doubly so Shīʿī—was reframed as deviant (Wright 2017). In this context, the episode was not merely a geopolitical manoeuvre but a coercive attempt to discipline an ally drifting toward an ambiguous pluralist posture. Moreover, it illustrated how techniques once reserved for domestic religious dissent—marginalisation and coercion—were now being trialled across erstwhile allies. This extraterritorial intervention too failed to generate epistemic authority and instead highlighted the paradox of Saudi theopolitics: that norms detached from moral credibility cannot be enforced coercively. Hariri’s rapid political reinstatement, coupled with international condemnation—particularly from France—exposed the fragility of Saudi Arabia’s capacity to impose normative outcomes through sheer leverage (Filkins 2018).

4.2. Disciplining Doctrine: From Clerical Autonomy to Epistemic Control

Muḥammad bin Salmān—commonly referred to by his initials, MBS—is the heir apparent to the Saudi throne, the seventh son of King Salmān, and the grandson of the nation’s founder, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Saʿūd. Upon his accession, he will become the first monarch drawn from the generational pool of the founder’s grandchildren, for since the death of the founding monarch in 1953, all six Saudi rulers have been his direct sons through various maternal lineages (Kéchichian 2001). Initially appointed Deputy Crown Prince and Minister of Defence following his father’s accession in 2015, Muḥammad bin Salmān rapidly consolidated power, ascending to the position of Crown Prince in June 2017 amid a palace coup that displaced his elder cousin, Muḥammad bin Nāyif, who was senior to him by twenty-five years and, at the time of writing, remains in detention. Subsequently, in 2022, MBS further augmented his political authority by assuming the role of Prime Minister. This moment inaugurated a new hegemonic grammar: one anchored not in consensus but in centralisation, elite recomposition, and normative reconstitution from above. Throughout his swift ascent within the hierarchical structures of the monarchy, MBS profoundly reconfigured the prevalent norms of Saudi governance, decisively positioning himself as a powerful norm entrepreneur.

Unveiled in April 2016, under the auspices of MBS (then-Deputy Crown Prince), Vision 2030 marked a fundamental reorientation in Saudi Arabia’s economic, social, and political trajectories. Crafted through an extensive collaboration among governmental institutions, international consultancy firms—most prominently the New York-based McKinsey & Company—and a cadre of advisors sympathetic to MBS’s reformist vision, this blueprint transcends mere economic modernisation, heralding instead a comprehensive restructuring of Saudi governance structures, national identity, and global image (Bianco 2024). Vision 2030 emerged as a strategic response to multiple intersecting crises, notably the reputational fallout from post-9/11 international scrutiny, the inherent vulnerabilities of an oil-dependent economy exposed to market volatility in combination with private sector underdevelopment—a phenomenon commonly characterised as the “Dutch disease” (Corden and Neary 1982)—and the pressing necessity to secure strategic partnerships and diversify revenue. Addressing these exigencies, Vision 2030 delineated a diversification strategy, prioritising the development of advanced technological industries, logistics hubs, tourism initiatives, and financial services. Concurrently, it sought the deliberate restructuring of the Kingdom’s social fabric through carefully managed liberalisation of the cultural and entertainment domains.

While nominally an economic diversification blueprint, Vision 2030, functions as a multifaceted project aimed at enhancing Saudi resilience in the face of a multitude of challenges, entwining economic reform, ideological rebranding, and institutional centralisation into a coherent apparatus of state renewal. The operationalisation of Vision 2030 proceeds through an expansive repertoire of governmental technologies aimed at reshaping societal norms, public conduct, and collective sensibilities. In Foucauldian terms, these interventions exemplify a mode of governmentality in which the “conduct of conduct” is subtly reorganised—producing subjects who are economically productive, politically inert, and symbolically aligned with the state’s aspirational global posture (Foucault 1982). Within this new order, religious legitimacy is not abandoned but methodically domesticated, subsumed under the logics of surveillance, loyalty to the state, and state-led modernisation. The transition from consultative monarchy to personalised rule thus coincides with the mutation of Wahhabism from a source of doctrinal outreach to a modality of state control.

The NEOM megaproject, with its science-fictional urbanism and rhetorical emphasis on innovation, functions as both a spatial metaphor and an economic vector. It spatialises the neo-Wahhabi (not post-Wahhabi) imaginary while concentrating infrastructural and symbolic capital in a tightly controlled zone of elite experimentation (Dogan 2021). Simultaneously, the Kingdom’s strategic incursion into global sports—from football and Formula One to esports and the 2034 FIFA World Cup—operates as a dual instrument of soft power and domestic pacification (akin, one might argue, to the Roman dictum of panem et circenses, bread and circuses). Sporting spectacle and lifestyle liberalisation are thereby woven into the regime’s disciplinary matrix, normalising a rebranded national habitus while diffusing pressures for democratic reform. Here, norm entrepreneurship is no longer confined to clerical proclamations or doctrinal propagation; it is embedded in the very architecture of the everyday, orchestrated by executive fiat, market logics, and technocratic governance (Al-Rasheed 2018; Jones 2015).

Yet the “boutique” reformism was undergirded by a parallel architecture of domestic coercion. The Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, utilised only weeks earlier as the gilded venue for NEOM’s grand announcement, was swiftly repurposed into a makeshift detention centre for rival royalty—a transformation that starkly encapsulates the regime’s performative duality, where spectacle and coercion operate not as contradictions but as mutually reinforcing logics of rule. The Ritz-Carlton purge of November 2017 marked the inauguration of a new centralised order. Senior princes, ministers, and business magnates were detained under the guise of anti-corruption, but the effect was the dissolution of competing patronage networks and the centralisation of political clientelism under the Crown Prince (Chulov 2017b; Kulish 2017). In Gramscian terms, MBS initiated a war of manoeuvre within the elite bloc, dismantling the modus vivendi to forge a new hegemonic compact anchored in coercive consent.

Simultaneously, the coercive apparatus extended downward. Dissident clerics, reformist intellectuals, and Shīʿa activists were detained, executed, or disappeared, often through opaque judicial processes or extra-legal violence. This architecture of coercive norm enforcement extended beyond the Kingdom’s borders. The murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018 represented not merely an egregious extrajudicial killing, but a grotesque extraterritorialisation of disciplinary power (Abu Sneineh 2018). Such acts were not episodic deviations but structural features of the emerging political order, wherein ideological dissent was securitised and doctrinal deviation reframed as sedition. What emerged was a system in which Wahhabi legitimacy was neither rejected nor pluralised, but monopolised—designed by the regime, deployed tactically, and enforced through calibrated coercion.

Nowhere was this transformation more explicit than in the securitisation of religious discourse itself. The creation of the Presidency of State Security in July 2017, and the expanded remit of the mabāḥith (secret police), institutionalised a new infrastructure of theological containment. Preaching, education, and fatwa issuance became subject to heightened surveillance, with even minor deviations from the state’s official line treated as latent threats to national security. Religious dissent was increasingly adjudicated not within theological or scholarly registers but through the lens of counter-terrorism and sedition. Divergent religious interpretations were now systematically reframed as existential threats to state stability, reflecting a critical shift from pastoral governmentality toward a mode of sovereign–security governance, characterised by heightened legal repression, pervasive surveillance, and the targeted neutralisation of ideological dissidents (Al-Rasheed 2020). By explicitly securitising religious norms, the regime strategically instrumentalised Wahhabism not only as an ideological foundation but also as a vital technology of control, thereby fortifying its authoritarian resilience and centralising political dominance over clerical autarky.

High-profile detentions of clerics such as Salmān al-ʿAwda, ʿAwaḍ al-Qarnī, and ʿAlī al-ʿUmarī signalled the end of doctrinal diversity within official Wahhabism; in their place, a regime-sanctioned quietism, or more accurately loyalism, was elevated to orthodoxy. Simultaneously, figures such as Nimr al-Nimr and numerous Shīʿa activists were executed or imprisoned under charges of sedition, reinforcing the regime’s confessional red lines. This was not simply a recalibration of state–religion relations but a wholesale redefinition of Islamic authority as a function of security governance. In this sovereign-security paradigm, religious discourse no longer operated in the register of daʿwa or communal ethics but was subsumed under the imperatives of political obedience (ṭāʿa) and epistemic discipline (taʾdīb). Wahhabism (now understood specifically as state Islam) thus became less a missionary theology than a managed archive of state-usable traditions, selectively activated to legitimise governance and neutralise dissent. In contrast to the external projection of Wahhabism explored in the earlier case studies, the domestic configuration under MBS is one of internal discipline—a regime of governmentality interlaced with sovereign prerogative, in which normativity is no longer negotiated but imposed.

4.3. Madkhalism, “Moderation”, and the Authoritarian Repurposing of Wahhabism

The progressive marginalisation of Saudi Arabia’s clerical elite under Muḥammad bin Salmān marks not merely a domestic political shift but the inward consolidation of a broader transformation in the Kingdom’s deployment of Wahhabism. As across-the-spectrum diffusion gave way to selective deployment, the internal religious sphere was reorganised under a model of state-led norm production. What had once been a relatively autonomous domain of clerical influence—functioning as a source of moral authority and doctrinal supervision—has been systematically brought under executive control. This shift, best understood through the dual registers of governmentality and hegemony, reconfigures the mechanisms by which Saudi religious normativity is produced, disciplined, and mobilised. Historically, the ʿulamāʾ provided theological endorsement and social regulation in exchange for institutional autonomy and proximity to royal power. Under bin Salmān, however, this tacit pact has been recast: the state shifted from clerical accommodation (or cohabitation) to a phase of doctrinal purge and executive dominance, marginalising dissenting religious authorities in favour of regime-aligned ideological compliance.

This reorientation is reflected in the regime’s targeted repression of influential clerical figures and the restructuring of key religious institutions. The incarceration of prominent scholars alongside systemic reforms of bodies, like the Council of Senior Scholars (Hayʾat kibār al-ʿulamāʾ), underscores a decisive move to eliminate clerical autonomy and consolidate a state-managed religious discourse. The transformation is not merely subtractive—not only does it remove dissent—but generative, insofar as it recasts selected religious voices as agents of state ideology, aligning Islamic legitimacy with the goals of Vision 2030. What emerges is a form of domesticated Wahhabism, hollowed of its transgressive possibilities and refunctionalised as an instrument of normative conformity.

Integral to this rearticulation of religious authority is the state’s active promotion and instrumentalisation of Madkhalism—a variant of Salafism which emerged in the Islamic University of Medina, shaped decisively by the teachings of one of its emeritus professors, Rabiʿ bin Hādī al-Madkhalī (b. 1933). Emerging initially as a quietist reaction against both Islamist activism and revolutionary Salafism, Madkhalism was intellectually cultivated within Medina’s Wahhabi establishment and operationalised through its expansive transnational alumni networks (Bonnefoy 2016). The University of Medina, long a linchpin of Saudi religious soft power, thus became a crucible for the formation of a new ideological instrument—one marked by unwavering political loyalism and the centralisation of state obedience (ṭāʿat walī al-amr) as its theological axis. Madkhalism’s political theology thus privileges unconditional submission to temporal authority and anathematises all forms of oppositional mobilisation, branding dissent as heresy and revolution as sedition, while valorising not so much quietism as loyalism (Sheikh 2021).

In the hands of the Saudi state, this orientation has been weaponised: Madkhali scholars and preachers function as doctrinal enforcers of authoritarian rule, and their discourse is deployed to delegitimise Islamist rivals, both domestically and across key theatres of intervention. Graduates of the University of Medina have been conspicuous in exporting this ideological position, embedding Madkhali loyalism within religious councils, preaching circuits, and clerical structures (e.g., Sunarwoto 2020). While previously associated with non-activist quietism, it has in recent years exhibited a notable turn toward militarised loyalism, such as in Libya, where Madkhali-aligned militias were integrated into pro-Haftar forces, combining armed enforcement with theological messaging (Wehrey 2015; Wehrey and Boukhars 2019). In this configuration, Wahhabi discourse becomes not a transnational proselytising project but a modular asset. Madkhalism’s theological infrastructure is selectively activated to stabilise regimes, counter Islamist currents, facilitate regime consolidation and, when needed, fight wars (Nagi 2022). For the Saudi state, this has provided a highly adaptable tool—one that renounces political projects yet remains politically compliant.

Far from being discarded, Wahhabism has been recast. The strategic reframing of religious authority has culminated in bin Salmān’s declared vision of “moderate Islam”, a term as ideologically potent as it is deliberately imprecise. His oft-cited 2017 claim—“We are returning to what we were before, a country of moderate Islam” (Chulov 2017a)—signalled not a theological restoration but a political rebranding. Invoking a revisionist myth of a pre-1979 moderation, bin Salmān fabricates an amnesiac genealogy of national religious identity, one that effaces the regime’s own central role in radicalising regional discourse in the late twentieth century. In this revised narrative, moderation becomes the rhetorical antonym of extremism as well as the discursive justification for authoritarianism, retaining Islam as central to Saudi national and international norm projection while simultaneously placing it decisively under state management. In the process, three longstanding nemeses—namely movements associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi jihadism, and Shīʿism—are recast as extremist threats and blamed for the fragmentation, decline, and discord afflicting the contemporary Muslim condition.

While bin Salmān’s rhetoric ostensibly repudiates “extremism”, his invocation of moderation consciously evokes an imagined pre-1979 monarchical order—predating the Iranian Revolution and subsequent regional empowerment of religious elites—in a bid to justify a return to complete monarchical control over religious discourse. Rejecting the historical entanglements of the Kingdom’s religious foundations, he emphatically declared, “We will not spend the next 30 years of our lives dealing with destructive ideas. We will destroy them today” (Chulov 2017a). Saudi Arabia’s evolving religious statecraft thus reveals a dual trajectory: the suppression of oppositional Islam at home, and the selective export of pliant Wahhabi currents abroad, now shorn of their universalist ambitions and redeployed as geopolitical instruments. In this, the rebranding of Wahhabism is neither cosmetic nor merely semantic—it is structural, strategic, and central to the contemporary grammar of Saudi authoritarianism (Farouk and Brown 2021).

Crucially, though, the moderation project does not entail a secular retreat but a managed reorientation. Islam remains central to public life, yet its interpretive institutions are tethered to state prerogatives. In this arrangement, the Kingdom claims epistemic custodianship over Islamic orthodoxy while rendering its institutional expressions politically inert (Ulrichsen and Sheline 2019). The reformulation of Wahhabism under this paradigm reflects not a relinquishing of religious normativity, but its instrumental repurposing—aligned to the demands of economic liberalisation, geopolitical respectability, and regime security. Here, bin Salmān’s “moderate Islam” operates as a floating signifier—ideologically empty yet strategically functional, capable of absorbing liberal expectations while ensuring authoritarian continuity. In this context, religious moderation functions as a cypher for political obedience, epistemic containment, and global image management.

This logic comes full circle in the state’s mobilisation of institutions such as the Muslim World League under Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Karīm al-ʿĪsā and the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID). Originally designed to promote Wahhabi daʿwa and consolidate Saudi influence abroad, these institutions have been refashioned to serve the Saudi state’s image of moderation and interfaith tolerance (Schulze 2022). Al-ʿĪsa’s high-profile gestures—from condemning Holocaust denial to participating in ecumenical forums—signal not theological evolution but political upcycling, as established religious platforms were redeployed to legitimise the anti-radical state (Mekki and Dimich-Louvet 2025). This repurposing culminated in the Makkah Charter, launched in May 2019, as a flagship initiative of the Muslim World League under al-ʿĪsa’s stewardship. Framed as a pan-Islamic charter for interfaith tolerance and coexistence, the declaration brought together over 1200 Muslim scholars from 139 countries to denounce extremism and articulate a vision of Islam compatible with global norms of peace and diversity (MWL 2019). The symbolic multilateralism projecting a revised vision of Islam aligned with the post-2016 Saudi state, albeit nearly 15 years after the Jordanian royals had launched the more far-reaching Amman Message (Aal al-Bayt Institute 2005). While outwardly universalist in tone, it served a strategic function: showcasing Saudi Arabia’s rebranded religious leadership and distancing the regime from its ambiguous legacy through, yet again, soft-power theological diplomacy. But old discourses are hard to break. Not shy to claim that the MWL’s origins lay in the very beginning of Islam, the Charter did not commit to internal Islamic diversity and continued to claim leadership in faith (MWL 2019).

The contemporary language of “Islamic moderation” deployed by the Muslim World League under al-ʿĪsa substitutes the earlier Wahhabi idiom for a more palatable vocabulary, but it is no less prone to exclusivism. The rhetorical shifts have not erased their continued ideological anchoring; rather, they reflect a recalibrated state project wherein “Islamic” iteratively signifies “Saudi” and not pan-Islamic. In embracing ersatz pluralism externally while narrowing religious space internally, the Saudi regime recasts its normative strategy: no longer exporting Wahhabism to shape others but repurposing its discourses to affirm its own political centrality while curtailing the significance of other voices (Juneau 2022).

This authoritarian reorientation was exemplified by the Kingdom’s stance during the Gaza conflict. Despite widespread support for the Palestinian cause across the Muslim-majority world, Saudi authorities actively suppressed public expressions of solidarity within the Kingdom. Individuals were detained for actions as benign as wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh in Mecca or expressing support for Palestine on social media (MHUV 2024). In the United Kingdom, al-ʿĪsa urged British Muslims to “talk less about Gaza” so as to prioritise domestic integration, signalling a state-sanctioned discouragement of transnational activism (Middle East Eye 2025). Saudi state media, such as MBC, reinforced this posture by depicting Hamas as terrorists, underscoring a strategic shift: distancing the state from ummatic politics and Islamist movements, and reasserting control over the international religious and political agendas (Hassanein 2024).

Amid pronounced coercive and securitising turns, soft power continues to play a central role in Saudi Arabia’s international strategy. Through tightly controlled media platforms, the Kingdom now presents itself as a regional bulwark of stability and moderation amid turbulent geopolitical contexts, framing its authoritarian resilience and centralised governance structures as essential guarantees of order, deradicalisation, and modernisation. In this context, religious moderation functions less as a substantive theological programme than as a code for political obedience, epistemic containment, and global image management. What is advanced under the guise of reform is, in effect, a doctrinal repurposing—one that displaces creedal orthodoxy with political orthodoxy and reconstitutes religion as a domain of governed compliance. Saudi Arabia’s evolving religious statecraft thus reveals a dual trajectory: the suppression of oppositional Islam and the promotion of docile Wahhabi currents, stripped of their universalist ambition and redeployed as modular instruments of geopolitical strategy. In this, the rebranding of Wahhabism is neither cosmetic nor merely rhetorical; it is structural, systemic, and foundational to the contemporary grammar of Saudi authoritarianism.

5. Conclusions: Pax Wahhabica and the Changing Metabolism of Islam

For nearly three centuries, modernity and the erosion of traditional meaning matrices have given traction to reformist ideas within Islam. Often misleadingly analogised to the Protestant Reformation, the strategic merger of Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s puritanical theology with the emergent Saʿūdī polity in 1744—when the Wahhabi trahison des clercs first fused with Saudi raison d’état—marked a decisive rupture with tradition. Through an enduring strategy of expansion and normative penetration, the Saudi–Wahhabi condominium came to reshape the epistemic and social fabric of Islam, systematically advancing a doctrinally reductionist and politically combustible “solution” to Muslim predicaments. Despite its otherworldly call, Wahhabism remained profoundly this-worldly. From the outset, it functioned as Islam in the service of the Saudi state, strategically operationalised as a hegemonic instrument of monarchical legitimacy, regional geopolitics, and global ideological projection. In this sense, Wahhabism constitutes not merely a religious discourse but a form of ideational empire, structured through modalities of norm diffusion, soft-power projection, and selective ideological sponsorship well beyond its territorial boundaries.

The global network of relationships which Saudi Arabia cultivated with local mosque committees, NGOs, state institutions, and intergovernmental organisations underscores the imperial ambition entailed in Wahhabism. The expansive infrastructure of religious institutions constituted the scaffolding for a desired normative hegemony, not merely disseminating doctrine but consolidating a geocultural project of pre-eminence. Through a sustained transnational process of diffusion, localisation, and contestation, Wahhabi influence reshaped Islamic identities across diverse cultural contexts. Saudi intervention—manifest in itinerant preachers, mosque construction, proselytising literature, and financial patronage—often fragmented local religious landscapes, generating intra-communal fissures and political schisms. For its patrons, however, the soft-power dissemination was unmistakably multipurpose; it extended political influence abroad, maintained leverage over volatile religion-inflected political movements, and instrumentalised religion as a counterweight to secular challengers (Nye 2004).

The application of constructivist analysis reveals how Wahhabism’s transnational diffusion was mediated by multiple norm entrepreneurs—ranging from state-aligned clerics and bureaucrats to autonomous activists and itinerant preachers—whose agendas were often divergent and occasionally adversarial. What emerged was not a coherent ideological export but a pluralised, and at times unruly, field of normative production that increasingly eluded centralised control. Consequently, the outgrowth of Saudi ideational export was not always predictable. Across the world, Saudi doctrinal ambitions encountered resilient local grammars of religiosity, resisting incorporation into a new ideational empire. Even where successful, localisation could generate hybridisation and, ultimately, outcomes contrary to Saudi expectations, occasionally transforming Wahhabi frameworks into actively oppositional forms of militant Salafism. Indeed, Wahhabi nonconformism could at times transform into neo-Salafi heteropraxy, as theological secession morphed into political sedition, ultimately erupting as a global security menace.

The historical dynamics call for a conceptual synthesis. Saudi Arabia’s global theopolitics cannot be adequately captured by a single theoretical register. Instead, it evolved through a composite logic. Soft power provided the grammar of affective attraction and reputational sway; norm diffusion, the pathways of ideational circulation and local adaptation; Gramscian hegemony, the struggle to entrench a dominant religious common sense; and governmentality, the micro-disciplinary mechanisms through which subjectivities were reshaped. The empirical cases—Bosnia, Indonesia, Nigeria—serve not merely as conceptual illustrations but as sites of analytical crystallisation, where each register of the framework finds concrete expression. The divergent outcomes across these cases underscore how the success or failure of Wahhabi norm implantation hinges not only on Saudi intent nor on modus operandi but on the receptivity, resilience, and rivalries of local epistemic ecologies.

What emerges, then, is not a linear arc of religious expansion but a polymorphic field of transnational norm production, governed as much by friction, drift, and hybridisation as by strategic intent. The soft power of Saudi theopolitics, though vast, is structurally mediated by local institutional capacity, pre-existing religious cultures, and shifting geopolitical constraints. Indeed, the very instruments of Saudi religious outreach—emissaries, literature, charities, mosques, religious education—acted less as vectors of transmission than as catalysts of contestation. Wahhabism thus mutated across terrains—refracted in Indonesia, resisted in Bosnia, and radicalised in Nigeria.

Immediately after 9/11, Vali Reza Nasr candidly characterised Saudi Arabia as “the single most important cause and supporter of the radicalization, ideologization, and the general fanaticization of Islam” (Schwartz 2001). But it was, of course, the rupture with state-sponsored Wahhabism that transmuted Salafi movements into autonomous and thus volatile and violent actors (Kepel 2002). The “Salafi genie” had, effectively, escaped its Wahhabi bottle. Until al-Qa’ida’s actions came back to haunt the Arabian Peninsula, emerging Salafi insurgencies were perceived as merely intensified forms of religious conservatism and thus strategically beneficial to Saudi geopolitical manoeuvres, often undermining regional adversaries. The potential link between radicalisation and militancy remained perilously underestimated as a policy dilemma in Riyadh. Confronted with the growing volatility of transnational Salafi currents from the 1990s onwards, the Kingdom’s policy pivoted toward the disentanglement and domestication of Wahhabism.

Under Crown Prince Muḥammad bin Salmān, this strategic reorientation has markedly accelerated. The dissemination of Wahhabism has experienced profound restructuring, transitioning from a domain of relatively autonomous clerical authority toward overt state-directed religious governance. The Saudi state has strategically promoted Madkhalism—an ultra-loyalist strand of Wahhabism—as a conformist ideological formation, militarising doctrinal obedience to rulers and furnishing theological legitimisation for domestic status quoism. Religious norms have thus been repurposed as instruments of regime support and authoritarian entrenchment.

Saudi Arabia’s contemporary normative strategy exemplifies a mode of governmentality in which consent is manufactured and the state-curated discourse of “moderate Islam” becomes synonymous with state-directed Islam. Religion is not merely tolerated but harnessed by the state apparatus to align with economic modernisation and the imperatives of Vision 2030. Increasingly, Riyadh’s reconfiguration of Wahhabi normativity has served not only domestic governmentality but has also contributed to the formation of a transnational network, wherein theopolitical docility operates as a technology of regime preservation. Behind the discourse of moderation lies an intensified securitisation of religion, marking a transition from persuasive norm diffusion to overt sovereign–security governance—criminalising religious dissent and repressing political activism. This evolution reflects a broader pivot from religious propagation to risk management, wherein Islam is no longer only a soft-power resource but equally a domain of strategic containment.

Underscoring the enduring strategic instrumentalisation of religion in statecraft, Saudi Arabia’s contemporary positioning thus remains deeply interwoven with ideological patronage and norm management. Its trajectory challenges prevailing distinctions between ideology and expediency, secularity and theology, by positing religion not as transcendental belief but as a technology of epistemic control, a mode of transnational penetration, and a medium of geopolitical contestation. Ultimately, Pax Wahhabica is sustained by an intricate interplay between hegemonic assertion and subaltern contestation, continually reshaping Islam’s ideational landscape. The paradox of Saudi-sponsored Wahhabism lies precisely in its Janus-faced character: simultaneously constituting the ideological bedrock of monarchical authority and a persistent source of imperial volatility. It is this tension—between disciplined hegemony and uncontrollable hybridities—that continues to shape contemporary Islam and the political orders it animates.