YouSaid · the spoken record

David Commins

lines on the record: 65
first: 2025-09-17
most recent: 2025-09-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“While I'm leaving for Prague in a week and a half, and I'm teaching there next semester for Dickinson College But my next writing project is actually going to be something completely different. It's going to be about Arab travelers to the United States between 1876 and 1940. And I chose 1940 as the terminal date because after World War II, the United States has the rise to globalism and its image and reputation in the Arab world becomes something very different. So I'm going to be going to Buffalo, New York, Long Beach, California, El Paso, Texas with Arab tourists in those 70 years and seeing what they saw. That's it. Be refreshing.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they're not a Muslim? I would urge them to go to Jeddah and see what's happening in Jeddah with the new cultural scene there. Yeah.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I have to say that I was there during a time of high tension between the United States and Saudi Arabia. As I said, I arrived there September 9th, 2001, and I was there until the end of February the next year. Even so, I was really amazed at the hospitality that I found. And I was invited to many people's homes and hometowns. It was just the hospitality that people showed to me. It got through the point that I had to start turning down invitations because they stay up very late when they have company, one, two o'clock in the morning. And I was trying to keep daily work and research schedule. So that's my fondest memory. It really is. Tremendous warmth and hospitality from the people I met there.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is so up in the air because of technological changes and political changes and how oil producing states will manage that? Will they become big data centers? Because they have all this energy? I have no idea.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's very deep. I really do believe that the country has turned away from that puritanical religious legacy. And I do believe that. And one of the things I try to do in my book is I try to show that what I call the modernist or cosmopolitan current in Saudi Arabia is not recent. It goes back 100 years to the annexation of the holy cities in Jeddah and that the very logic of state building nurtured that tendency. Yeah, I'm sure that you have a lot of Saudis, particularly in the older generation, who are furious with the new social reality. But I don't see them regaining power ever again. Now, when it comes to their economic future, and will they be able to transition to a post-petroleum economy? That's an open question. And I have no idea. Because, you know, to my mind, the future of the global economy”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Optimistic Well I have to say that I think that for many Saudis, the opening of social freedoms is wonderful. And I know that many Saudis are extremely happy to have the religious police off their backs, that they don't have to close doors and be harassed if they don't go to the mosque. Of course, women have much greater freedom than they've ever had under the modern Saudi regime. They're free to take creative initiatives in music, in theater, in film, in literature, in a way that they never have been. And in that regard, I do think that the changes since 2015 for many Saudis have made their life a lot better.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They'll see what other Yemenis come up with in the way of an offer to run the country. But to my mind, they don't really have a clear strategic goal other than staying in power where they are.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question, and the people that I think are informed about this see the Hotis as evolving in their aims and becoming more ambitious. And perhaps overreaching as rising movements have a habit of doing. But right now it seems that they do not want to have any power sharing in the part of the country that they control. I don't see how they imagine a unified Yemen with any other political force. I have no idea how they see that. They can't conquer the rest of Yemen. The rest of Yemen doesn't seem capable of conquering them, but they don't seem to be interested in sharing power. So it could be the case that they're concerned with control day to day and”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's forgotten. I think that's forgotten. Again, some people in Yemen might remember it, especially in the border region, because the write up against the Saudi border, and there's a long tradition of trade across that border. When you try to control that trade, it becomes smuggling. But that line was imposed on a territory where people on both sides were accustomed to dealing with each other. It'd be like building a wall between Pennsylvania and Maryland. So, you know, people between Baltimore and York, between Frederick and Gettysburg would find that appalling.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“May have been responsible for tempering some of the adventurous foreign policies. So, I mean, if anything, what the Saudis did by intervening in Yemen in 2015 was similar to what Nasser did when he intervened. He sent 40,000 Egyptian troops to Yemen eventually in the 1960s. And that was a terrible mistake for Nasser. It fatally weakened his regime. And I think some Saudis may not have read what they did in terms of what Nasser did, but looking at it from the outside, it was comparable mistake. And it just reminds me that foreign policy is always a matter of experimentation and seeing what works. I hear a lot of talk about grand strategy. It's hard to think of a case where grand strategy really worked out. There's a lot of luck involved in achieving foreign policy success, no matter what country we're talking about.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think Yamana's forgotten about it, and I don't think everybody in Saudi Arabia has forgotten about it. I think the men around Hamad bin Sulman, the crown prince, are quite aware of the history of relations between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. And I think that”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did they screw it up? Well, I don't know if they screwed it up. I have no idea how they look at it. I know that the current leadership thinks that they needed to adopt a more active as foreign policy. And in the very early years of King Salman's reign, a lot of that backfired. They seem to have adopted, I would say, a more cautious approach in dealing with Yemen and Iraq and Lebanon and Syria. And that is more in line with traditional Saudi diplomacy. It's the difference between deciding to invade and embalm Yemen and deciding to try to negotiate with Houthis and renew relations with Iran, of course brokered by China a couple of years ago, and see if there's a way to manage what they regard as a strategic threat than pursue the elimination of a strategic threat, which seems to have backfired for them.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't even stop a conversation in 2001, 2002, when I was there and conversations about teenage or somewhat older children having to go to rehab. And they had a whole cadre of therapists trained at American universities in drug rehabilitation. Now, would building a wall on the Saudi Yemeni border, I imagined at some point there will be the technology to conduct surveillance on that border. I mean, the world does seem to be moving in a direction of greater surveillance capabilities by states. So I don't think it's as far-fetched as it was 10 years ago. But yeah, to the extent that the monarchies seek certainty for suppressing any challenge, yeah, they might build a wall. They might.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, some of them certainly do it. It would enhance their security against smuggling. I mean, in the early 2000s, there was a lot of weapon smuggling, a lot of drug smuggling happening through Yemen, and also through the northern border. There was a serious drug problem in Saudi Arabia. I don't know if there still is or not, but a lot of families were worried about this.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Val, they're very proud of their new buildings, and it's a little bit like the United States in Europe, right? People come to the United States and from Europe and they think it's a fabulous country, but we don't really have medieval cities. So you would say that Europe has a much deeper, richer cultural history than United States is a great commercial and military power producer of popular culture. But I think Europeans might feel that, you know, the United States is still parvenue on the world stage. Maybe that's how they look at it.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, they didn't really they didn't really Yemen has some oil and gas, but not very much, not enough to set up the kind of national social welfare system that gets people to a certain standard of living and education. They haven't had that. And because of the weakness of the state, outsiders like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, Iran, Saudi Arabia, they've been able to intervene and make a mess of things, much like happened in Lebanon for 15 years.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think a Yemen expert could give a better answer than I could. But my understanding is that the Yemenara Republic that formed the 1990 from the Union of North and South Yemen was stable because of a very Between powers in different parts of the country. And that political compromise, of course, has been exploded by a number of different factors, among which is this phenomenon of Zaidi revivalism represented by the Houthis, which represents a very strong regional religious tendency that is different from the rest of the country. And then, of course, outside intervention has made it difficult for Yemenis to see that, look, we have to live with each other. We can't reach out to one power or another to clobber our local rival. So it's a lot like Lebanon was for 15 years from 1975 to 1990.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Yemen has a history of kingdoms going back a few thousand years, although in terms of the modern global economy, it's the poorest part of Arabia. And Yemen's future is sort of a cohesive country is a big question mark. It seems to me that the strong secessionist movement in the South, Bahrain, Will probably be as long as there are American forces there, an independent country is the biggest American naval base in the Persian Gulf. If there were to be a withdrawal of Western strategic interest in the Persian Gulf that goes back to about 1820, yeah, it would change everything. It would change everything. It did change everything in 1820 when the British exercised gunboat diplomacy to suppress sort of low-level warfare. They called it piracy. So here we are 200 years on, still sort of an outpost of Western security interest.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. Well, that would be, I don't think it would be like the velvet divorce between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. They can both survive. I think of Rasulima broke away. It would be swallowed up probably by Oman or Saudi Arabia. I mean, I think they stick together because of fear of annexation and then subjugation to a neighbor, one or another neighbor. And I think the UAE is stable. I don't see any threat to the UAE on the horizon, but I could be blind to that.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How are they going to manage without billions in oil revenue every year? And I think that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to diversify their economies. But I don't think they have the technical skills to do that. They've rented it now for many decades by paying high salaries to qualified people from other countries. Maybe they'll get their, maybe they don't need that many people. If AI can replace a lot of technically qualified people in this country, I hear coders are losing their jobs. Maybe countries won't need a large pool of technically qualified manpower”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a reasonable scenario. That's a reasonable scenario. I mean, one of the big questions I won't be around for is what will happen to the entire Gulf political alignment when the global appetite for their one really valuable resource diminishes. That's a big question. But I have no idea. Between extreme heat and autocracy.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have money. I think that you would have to probably replace most of the teachers. They would have to find a way to train up teachers to improve the quality of STEM education in the public schools. They've reduced the religious content quite a bit already. My understanding is they've taken out a lot of the, I would say, xenophobic religious teachings that were part of their education system for about half a century, but they just don't have a cadre of teachers that they can put into the schools and replace people who are there already.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are they not qualified for that? I think if we were to start talking about plans to transform the Saudi economy, I think that the huge hurdle is improving K through 12 education there. And they just have not been able to succeed at changing their public education, the mass public education, to prepare students for challenging college, let alone postgraduate level STEM subjects. And I think it's still the case that families who want their students to excel in STEM typically send their children to private schools and then to the engineering petroleum university, which is their, it's like their Texas A&M. It is an excellent university. And then from there, they tend to go to American graduate schools and then come back and work in the petroleum engineering. Fields, but it just seems that the K through 12 level.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my understanding is that it's not going all that well, that the intention was to provide a global level postgraduate education in STEM and most of the students are foreign students.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I had an edi food and I didn't care for it. It was camel and wheat grain, ranch food, I guess I would say. When I was in Riyadh in the early 2000s, you had every kind of foreign cuisine you could imagine, Chinese, Persian, Mexican, cheesecake factory, Saudis love American food. But I don't know the culinary traditions of hijaz or of other parts of Arabia. I just know the nasdi culinary tradition and it was pretty basic, pretty basic.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, certainly it's pretty common if you're from a poorer country and you want to have the benefits of Saudi citizenship. But yeah, out of 30 million people, how many people are like that? I couldn't put a number on. I'm sorry, I just couldn't.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the Middle East because it was very poor, the largest site of immigrant settlement was Mecca and Medina, and that would have been from pilgrims who journeyed months overland from West Africa or weeks through the Indian Ocean from Southeast Asia. And once you got there, a lot of them stayed so that you did have permanent colonies from Java, from Bukhara and Central Asia. But Central Arabia, the Saudi homeland. Very little, very little”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have no idea. So if you take away the one quarter of the population that are foreign workers, all right, of the 75% that remain, I would say probably a very small number are descended from people outside Arabia because certainly the royals and wealthy Arabian families in general had a long history of marrying or having children with slaves. And that was legal until the early 1960s. So it doesn't seem that the majority of, or even close to majority of Arabs own slaves in Arabia over the centuries. It was a small number of better off Arabs. But in terms of immigrants, people moving to Arabia, very few people moved to Arabia from other parts of the world.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When Dava Petraeus engineered the surge in 2006-2007 One of his assets was that Iraqi Sunni Muslims were fed up with the busy body intrusion into their personal lives of the Salafis. They told men they couldn't just wear a mustache they had to grow a beard. They punished people for smoking cigarettes. I don't think that most Muslims around the world, not that I met Muslims, but I've lived in several Muslim countries. Most Muslims I've met regard Salafis as kind of busy bodies. And intrusive. And so I don't think they're going to win the battle for hearts and minds in the long run. They had a very strong run in the 90s and early 2000s. I think Al-Qaeda did a lot to discredit that.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think that the Saudis have rebranded themselves as Salafis, which has more. Wahhabism has an association with Saudi Arabia. And if they call themselves Salafis, which says that they are following the ways of the founding fathers, right? So Americans like to say we follow the way of the founding fathers. Sunni Muslims like to say they follow the ways of the founding fathers, which is a Salaf. Salafism became extremely popular. Around them Muslim world in Muslim diasporas, and it's still extremely influential. Is it dominant among Muslim populations? It has a very high profile, but I don't know that it's dominant, and I don't really know how to measure that. I haven't seen public opinion polls, for instance, that I Muslims in different countries do you favor Salafism over other versions of Islam? I can cite an anecdote for one of the downsides of this puritanical form of Islam is that in Iraq,”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot about recent developments, but I think that by curtailing financial support for at least Saudi religious institutions to proselytize, that Saudi influence will diminish. It'll leave a residue for sure, but it will diminish.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they do. I think they do. And my sense is that the scholarship on Saudi, Wahhabisoft power Beginning to sharpen the focus on particular case studies in Nigeria, in Indonesia, in Central Asia. And the findings so far is that the Wahhabis are in competition with other Muslim religious tendencies from Iran, from Turkey, even from Kuwait. So just as Catholic and Protestant missionaries competed around the world for converts to what they regarded as true Christianity, Wahhabis are competing, of course they've had a ton of money behind their proselytizing, from the, I would say from the early 1980s until about 2015. And it seems that King Salman has really put the lid on that. And I'll be curious to see the follow-up studies that were really based on research in the period roughly 2005 to 2015. I haven't seen”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I see that in at least three different frames. One frame is that Islam or Christianity is a proselytizing religion. And Muslims are proselytized from the very beginning of the founder of Islam Muhammad. The Wahhabi mission has been a proselytizing movement ever since its founding in 1740. And it was a total failure at proselytizing the teachings of Wahhabism rejected completely by almost every Muslim society that encountered it for from the 1740s until probably the late 1800s. But they never stopped trying. And so I think that There's that. And then the third is that for the Saudi monarchy, it is a form of soft power. So democracy promotion for the United States, exporting communism for Fidel, marketing Wahhabism for Riyadh.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was on their minds that evening not politics. So it's extremely popular, especially with young Saudis, and they are the main constituency of the monarchy today.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do see it as a mix of both. I think that the term of Right? You've probably heard that term, like, Yeah, so Cutter is hosting the World Cup and Saudi Arabia's sort of takeover of the PGA. People look at that as an attempt to whitewash their image by hosting prestigious global sporting events. So many people look at this as part of a political agenda. To my mind, there's no doubt that it's extremely popular with Saudis. Saudis love sports, Tyler. When I was there, I was there in the fall of 2001. I arrived actually two days before 9-11. And I was living downtown in an apartment building. And right after the Americans started bombing Afghanistan to chase out the Taliban and try to apprehend bin Laden, one evening I heard a crowd coming down the main boulevard and I was a little nervous about it that it was some anti-American demonstration. It turned out they were celebrating Saudi Arabia's victory in the Gulf Soccer Cup. So that's what”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, Riyadh has really fantastic modern architecture. Now, it's hard to appreciate because, like Los Angeles, it's an automobile city. You can't really walk there. And in that regard, I really didn't like living there very much. Whereas I lived in Damascus in early 1980s and I really loved Damascus because it was really a walkable city. But Riyadh does have great modern architecture. So I wouldn't say it's ugly. That's not my view.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The American public would go for a new strategic commitment at that time. So, of course, the United States did become strategically committed to the Gulf after the Iranian Revolution and after the Iran-Iraq War. But I would say what accounts for the stability of these small principalities is fear of annexation by larger neighbors.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say his fear of annexation by larger neighbors. Iran has a claim to Bahrain, Iraq has a claim to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia at times has tried to take over Qatar and the Emirates in their history. And what allowed the smaller Gulf states to remain independent was Western strategic intervention. The British established a truce, if you will, in the Persian Gulf in the early 1800s. And that evolved into a series of treaties whereby London guaranteed the independence of the different Emirates that eventually formed the United Arab Emirates and of Qatar and of Bahrain and of Kuwait and of Oman for that matter. Of course, the British left in 1971. There was a great deal of concern who would fill that position. London wanted the United States to do it, but the United States was quite involved in Vietnam and the Nixon administration didn't think.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that the different parts have too much at stake in each other to stick together, to disintegrate. But I don't see it at all similar to Syria or Iraq, I'll put it that way, or Lebanon, which do have much stronger tendencies pulling those countries apart.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say yes. I think that there are definitely groups that would like to dismantle the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But my impression is that generations of Saudi kings and princes and technocrats have succeeded at integrating the population into a nation that looks to certain institutions, looks to looks at outsiders and sees them as different from themselves, which is an essential part of being a nation and thinks of themselves as sharing common value. So yeah, I do think that they are a nation. I think that if By some totally unexpected event, which of course unexpected events happen, that the kingdom were to fall, I don't think the country would disintegrate.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Saudi rulers like to say that their country had what they call a moderate form of Islam until nineteen seventy nine, and then in response to that traumatic moment in Mecca, the Saudi government adopted the agenda of extremists, what they call extremist Muslims. And so they claimed that they want to go back to how things were before 1979. I think that is a convenient concocted narrative, but that's what they say. So they like to point to 1979 as a turning point, and that in response to that event, the government adopted a policy that fostered extremism. And again, I don't think that's true at all, but that's what they say.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having dreams of the Muslim Messiah, and they came to believe that one member of their breakaway faction was indeed the Mahdi or the Muslim Messiah, and they believed that november twentieth, nineteen seventy nine was the day that the Muslim Messiah would appear. And that was really the thinking behind the takeover of the mosque in Mecca. It was a millenarian movement. And in a way, it was a phenomenon that Wahhabism had never generated before this kind of millenarianism. It was very much more like Deva Kuresh movement. Then a mainstream evangelical movement.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Theologically, they are definitely Wahhabis, and they considered the Saudi family to have betrayed fidelity to true Wahhabi principles. Now, they were under the supervision of the official Saudi religious establishment, which is Wahhabi. And some of them broke away from that supervision. And the leader of that breakaway faction was a man named Juhaiman Olotabi. And Zhu Haiman was apparently a very strong charismatic personality. He alienated some people in the group, other people thought that he was speaking the truth to power, if you will. And in late 1978, there was an attempt to arrest him. He was tipped off scenes by relative in the police, and he escaped, and he fled into the desert, as they say, and he was a fugitive for a year. During that year, members of his group started.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So this is carried out by a band that broke off from a puritanical band that had broken off from mainstream Saudi society. So this group is, they're called the Salafi group, but they call themselves the Salafi group. They formed in the mid-1960s. They were alarmed at the arrival of certain customs they considered immoral like television retail stores that would have mannequins with ladies' dress. They didn't like paper currency because it had the face of the king on it that supposedly they would only carry bags of coins weighing twenty pounds instead of carrying paper currency with them. And so you had this pure tannical group form in Medina in the mid-1960s. They were able to establish themselves in other parts of Arabia among people who disapproved of any sign of Our Western cultural influence. And then”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, not in Central Arabia. You have that in Eastern Arabia and you have that in hejaz for sure. Very strong Ottoman traces, but not in Central Arabia.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You do get tribute, it seems, starting in the 1840s after a second Ottoman invasion. And there are reports of tribute. I have not really seen a very year by year account of when the Saudis rendered tribute and when they withheld tribute. But there is some moments when they pay tribute and then in 1913, right before World War I, when the Saudis conquered the eastern province, the heavily Shiite region, they promised some tribute, but World War I broke out and the Ottomans are too preoccupied to enforce that. So there have been a few moments, but it was never really part of the Ottoman sphere.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost never. There was an Ottoman invasion that destroyed the very first Saudi Empire. They were able to destroy the first Saudi Empire. They captured and deported the Saudi ruler to Istanbul, and he was executed in public in Istanbul. But communications from Western Arabia to Central Arabia is so difficult and harsh that it was too difficult to maintain an occupation there. And so after a few years, the Ottomans pulled out.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To a Wahhabi party in different towns in Nejd and to support the Saudis when they were able to get the upper hand over a local ruling family. So I attribute the success of Saudi power to persistence and leadership and having that religious commonality. Some people just did buy into this teaching.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. I would say it was accomplished almost inch by inch. It took 30 years for the first Saudi principality, I would call it, in their very original Hong Deria, which is now an outskirts of Riyadh. It took them 30 years to conquer Riyadh. 30 years. So it was, I would say more a matter of persistence and willpower than resources or strategy. Now, there is one thesis out there, which really doesn't have tremendous amount of evidence to support it, that the spread of firearms has something to do with the success of Saudi expansion. And I think that's an interesting hypothesis, but the evidence for that is pretty thin. So I really think it was a matter of persistence and then the ability of the Wahhabi mission to gain a following, to form, if you would,”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In proximity to Purling banks, which were an important source for income for residents there, and it was part of the Indian Ocean trade between Iraq and India. But the population there was always, it seems, well, always for the last thousand years has been dominated by Bedouin tribesmen. There was a brief Ismaili Shiite republic, if you might say, in that part of Arabia in medieval times. But it just didn't have, it seems, the cohesion to conquer other parts of Arabia. And that's what makes the Saudi story really remarkable, is that they were able to muster and sustain the cohesion to carry out a conquest like that over the course of 50 years.”
2025-09-17 · Conversations with Tyler · David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source