What are the roots of today’s militant fundamentalism in the Muslim world? In this insightful and wide-ranging history, Charles Allen finds an answer in an eighteenth-century reform movement of Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab and his followers—the Wahhabi—who sought the restoration of Islamic purity and declared violent jihad on all who opposed them. The Wahhabi teaching spread rapidly—first throughout the Arabian Peninsula, then to the Indian subcontinent, where a more militant expression of Wahhabism flourished. The ranks of today’s Taliban and al-Qaeda are filled with young men trained in Wahhabi theology.
