WINNING THE WoT:

On a prominent podcast two years ago, a Saudi academic spoke of the need to rewrite the history of his country by disconnecting the story of the state from the fight against un-Islamic practices initiated by a tribal-religious alliance between Muhammad bin Saud and Muhammad bin Abdel Wahhab in 1744. As long as the two stories are connected, Khaled al-Dakheel argued, the Saudis are stifled by Wahhabism both at home and abroad. Dakheel, whose book on the subject was until recently banned, said the Saudis should emphasize that the kingdom had been established 17 years before Wahhabism entered the political equation. In his words, to Saudi podcaster Abdulrahman Abumalih:

We've written the state history improperly, which is why most Saudis don't know the history of the Saudi state or the Arabian Peninsula, unfortunately. You've reduced it all to polytheism. You've told people that the whole story was about polytheism: Sheikh Muhammad bin Abdel Wahab came to fight polytheism, Muhammad bin Saud joined him, and together they fought polytheism. ... By doing so, you've dwarfed the state. We should instead teach the history of the state, which is bigger than that. We haven't studied the history of our state; we've only been taught the words of Ibn Ghannam and Ibn Bishr (the biographers of Wahhabism) and we're still doing it.

Dakheel's revisionist remarks were not particularly rare for Saudi intellectuals to make against Wahhabism. However, talk about the need to revisit the historical connection is remarkable, and its timing was unlikely to be spontaneous. It came against the backdrop of unprecedented statements and moves made by the crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, or MbS, involving the role of Wahhabism in the country, from restraining the clerics to announcing initiatives to revise and update religious texts.

The latest of these moves to marginalize Wahhabism is the setting of a new official date to mark the founding of the Saudi state ("youm al-ta'sees" in Arabic) on Feb. 22, in addition to the usual national day ("al-youm al-watani") on Sept. 23. The national day in September celebrates the formation of the nation under the name of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, while the new date celebrates Muhammad bin Saud's takeover of Diriyah, now widely referred to as "the founding capital," in 1727. The new date marks the official beginning of the new dynamic that Dakheel called for.

What makes this story more significant than a simple political decision to rewrite the national narrative is that the fate of Wahhabism is no longer up to Saudi Arabia, just as the interests of Saudi Arabia is not tied to Wahhabism any longer. Wahhabism's decline as a movement has been many years in the making, and this has something to do with the political shift pushed by bin Salman -- but only to a certain degree. The decline preceded him and would have happened without these political changes, if not at the same speed or so quietly. This distinction matters, because it means that other factors contributed to the waning power of Wahhabism both in the kingdom and in the wider region, and it is this internal decay and the surrounding environment that make Wahhabism's current troubles deep and permanent.

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