Salafism, the Islamic reform movement, has changed markedly since the late nineteenth century. Emerging out of the context of colonialism, it originally focused on Islamic unity and renewing the intellectual and religious vitality of the Muslim world in the face of European domination. It was also a cosmopolitan discourse, spurred by diverse scholars and intellectuals and the Muslim press—exemplified by Rashid Rida's (1865–1935) newspaper al-Manār, which enjoyed broad circulation—linking strands of thought from around the world in its major centers: Cairo, Damascus, and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. As colonialism gradually ended, however, Salafism was transformed; less focused on unity, it became more narrow and exclusionary, with greater emphasis on religious correctness.

Saudi Arabia plays a large role in this history. Mecca and Medina were brought under its control in the 1920s, and their Salafi institutions and scholars were subsequently incorporated into Saudi academia, which quickly became a major patron of Salafism worldwide. Yet Saudi academia is also intimately linked with Wahhabism, the established Islamic school of the kingdom, and the twentieth-century shifts in Salafism reflect its convergence with Wahhabism under Saudi auspices.

While Salafism contains considerable internal diversity and has retained its global character, Saudi academia represents perhaps the foremost institutional center of Salafism today, and it has exerted an immense influence on the movement. The contemporary development of Salafism is thus directly tied to the interconnected histories of Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism.

Saudi Arabia

The geography of Saudi Arabia forms an important backdrop to this narrative. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, founded in 1932, is comprised of three main regions—Najd, al-Ahsa, and the Hijaz—each with a distinct history, society, and religious culture that, with a few isolated exceptions, were only brought into a single polity in the twentieth century. Al-Ahsa (also written Hasa), located near Iraq along the Persian Gulf, and the Hijaz, the western portion of the Arabian peninsula along the Red Sea, had significant settled populations in addition to Bedouins, the latter also containing Mecca and Medina (called the Ḥaramayn, the “two sanctuaries”). The society of Najd, by contrast, comprising central Arabia, was more strongly Bedouin, with far less of a settled presence.