Born in the vast desert wastelands of eastern Arabia, a region known as the Najd, Wahhabism (its adherents prefer the term “Muwahiddun,” meaning “Unitarians”) is a militantly puritanical movement founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the middle of the eighteenth century. Claiming that the purity of Islam had been defiled by “un-Islamic” beliefs and practices such as praying to saints and visiting their tombs, Abd al-Wahhab sought to strip Islam of what he considered to be its cultural, ethnic, and religious “innovations” (bida’), so as to restore the faith to its original, unadulterated,
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