A Sunni revivalist movement that began in the Najd region of central Arabia in the eighteenth century, preaching a strict return to the absolute oneness of God and the practice of the earliest Muslims. Its founder, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, condemned saint veneration, tomb visitation, and much popular devotion as idolatry. A pact with the House of Saud bound the movement to a dynasty that would build the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, from which, in the oil age, its influence spread worldwide.
In the oasis towns of central Arabia, around 1740, a preacher ordered the felling of trees that local people honored and the leveling of a tomb they came to for blessings. To him these acts were not vandalism but the rescue of Islam from idolatry. To his neighbors he was tearing down what their grandparents had built. That collision, between a return to a purified faith and the customs of living communities, has followed the movement ever since.