From a Reformer in Najd to a Ruling Family's Partner

Ibn Taymiyya's argument stayed a minority position within Sunni scholarship for four centuries before it became the foundation of a religious and political movement. Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, an eighteenth century scholar from the Najd region of central Arabia, revived the call to derive rulings from the Quran and Sunna directly and to reject taqlid of the four schools as binding, combining it with an uncompromising demand that Muslims purge practices he considered later accretions, saint veneration and shrine visitation among them. David Commins's history of the Wahhabi mission describes the alliance this produced: in 1744, Ibn Abd al Wahhab, having sought protection in the town of Diriyah, formed a pact with its ruler, Muhammad ibn Saud, dividing authority so that Ibn Saud's family would hold military and political power while Ibn Abd al Wahhab's teaching defined the movement's religious program, a partnership between the same two families that founded the modern Saudi state. Twentieth century Salafism drew on the same anti taqlid argument independently of that specific alliance, spreading as a transnational reform current with no single ruling house behind it, so that the case against following a school of law today reaches readers through two related but organizationally distinct movements rather than one.