As al-Maqdisī tells it, his first encounter with the Wahhābī tradition was textual. While pursuing religious studies in Saudi Arabia in the early 1400s/early 1980s, he chanced upon a set of old books in the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina titled al-Durar al-saniyya fī ʾl-ajwiba al-Najdiyya. This was the main compendium of the writings of the Wahhābī scholars from the time of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb to the early twentieth century. The encounter with these texts, he would say, “was my first contact with the books of the imāms of the Najdī mission.”
