The Pact at Diriyah, the Name, and the Wider Salafi Field

The movement acquired a state in 1744, when Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad ibn Saud made an agreement at Diriyah in which the ruler undertook to support the mission and the scholar to support the ruler. That arrangement, religious authority and political authority held by two families in partnership, has outlived three separate Saudi states. The first was destroyed by an Ottoman-Egyptian expedition in 1818, the second collapsed in the nineteenth century, and the third was built by Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud in the early twentieth.

The name is a live issue rather than a detail. Wahhabism was applied by opponents and carries the implication of a following gathered around a man, which is precisely the charge the teaching exists to refute. Adherents have generally used Muwahhidun, those who affirm the unity, or Salafi, meaning oriented to the earliest generations. Modern scholarship has become correspondingly careful, and several historians now prefer to write about the Najdi mission or the Saudi religious establishment rather than to use a term nobody inside it accepts.

The relation to Salafism more broadly is close and not identical. Salafi movements arose in several places for several reasons, some of them owing little to Najd, and the twentieth century saw sustained contact between them through education, publishing and pilgrimage. Whether the resulting field is one movement or a family of them is a genuine question in the literature, and the answer differs by country.