Background

The modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 by Ibn Saud, who unified most of the Arabian Peninsula through a series of military campaigns starting in 1902. The Saud family was allied with the Wahhabi religious movement, a strict reformist version of Sunni Islam founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the eighteenth century. The political alliance between the Saud family and Wahhabi clerics has continued for nearly three centuries and remains the foundation of the kingdom's legitimacy.