Nabil Mouline has described early Wahhābism in terms of a “counterreligion.” A counterreligion is an exclusivist and militant form of monotheism, one that approaches the outside world with an “antagonistic character” and “rejects and repudiates everything that went before and what is outside itself as ‘paganism.’ ”25 In Mouline’s view, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb was the founder of just such a counterreligion, one that “refus[es] all compromise” and in which “exclusion is the golden rule and interaction with other groups is possible only in the framework of conversion or confrontation.”
