While in one sense ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz was merely reiterating a Wahhābī dictum, this being that Wahhābism is nothing but true Islam, he was also pushing back against the idea of Wahhābī separatism. It was important to him that the Wahhābīs shed their self-conception as a sect apart from and hostile to the majority of the Islamic world. Such a change required rejecting the very idea that there was a particular Wahhābī doctrine or creed, and it also required ceasing to self-identify as “Wahhābīs,” as Ibn Siḥmān and some of the other scholars had begun to do.
