A Concise History of the Middle East

242 • 14 MODERNIZING RULERS IN THE INDEPENDENT STATES

abroad and ulama at home stirred up opposition to the shah. They decried

the erosion of Muslim values, the widening gap between rich and poor, the

huge sums spent on arms, the failure of agrarian reform, and the shah's

oppressive regime. A nationwide revolution, led by Shi'i ulama, sapped the

shah's authority. He left Iran in January 1979, giving way to an "Islamic

Republic." Iran's vaunted "modernization" was only superficial. Billions of

petrodollars could not solve Iran's problems or sustain a ruler whose

people had turned against him. We resume this story in Chapter 19.

THE RISE OF SAUDI ARABIA

Nowadays most people think of Saudi Arabia as a rich, modern, and very
influential country. Yet as late as 1945 it was poor and viewed as backward.
The homeland of Islam and Arabism had been a backwater of history
since the High Caliphate. If Turkey was in the vanguard of westernizing
reform movements in the nineteenth and twentieth century, few parts of
the Middle East opposed reform more than central Arabia, especially the
area known as Najd. Situated among barren hills, lacking an outlet to any
sea, Najd attracted no foreign traders or Western imperialists. Most of its
people were bedouin; a few small towns contained Arab merchants and
ulama. So far we have hardly mentioned the area, except in connection
with the rise of a puritanical Muslim sect called the Wahhabis, whose be¬
liefs still prevail in today's kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Historical Background
The story starts in the mid-eighteenth century, when a wandering young
scholar, Muhammad ibn ("son of") Abd al-Wahhab, became a Hanbali—
an adherent to the strictest of the four canonical rites of Sunni Muslim
law. The latter-day Hanbalis came to oppose certain practices associated
with popular Islam, such as venerating saints, their tombs, trees, and wells.
When this Muhammad began preaching and writing in his hometown
about cleansing Islam of these practices, his own relatives drove him out.
Taking refuge in a nearby village, he converted his protector, Muhammad
ibn Sa'ud, to his strict doctrines. Thus united in their beliefs, the two
Muhammads set out to convert the nearby Arab tribes, with the son of
Abd al-Wahhab as spiritual guide (hence the term Wahhabi for the sect)
and the son of Sa'ud as military and political leader (which is why we
speak of the Saudi dynasty). In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth