From the same article

What Is a Wahhabi?

The first thing many Saudis will tell you about Wahhabism is that it does not exist.

“There is no such thing as Wahhabism,” Hisham al-Sheikh told me the first time we met. “There is only true Islam.”

The irony is that fewer people have a purer Wahhabi pedigree than Mr. Sheikh, a direct descendant of the cleric who started it all.

In the early 18th century, Sheikh Mohammed ibn Abdul-Wahhab called for a religious reformation in central Arabia. Feeling that Islam had been corrupted by practices like the veneration of saints and tombs, he called for the stripping away of “innovations” and the return to what he considered the pure religion.

He formed an alliance with a chieftain named Mohammed ibn Saud that has underpinned the area’s history ever since. Then the Saud family assumed political leadership while Sheikh Abdul-Wahhab and his descendants gave legitimacy to their rule and managed religious affairs.

That mix proved potent among the warring Arabian tribes, as Wahhabi clerics provided justification for military conquest in some cases: Those who resisted the House of Saud were not just enemies, but infidels who deserved the sword.

The first Saudi state was destroyed by the Ottomans in 1818, and attempts to build another failed until the early 20th century, when King Abdulaziz al-Saud undertook a campaign that put him in control of most of the Arabian Peninsula.

But the king faced a choice: to continue expansionary jihad, which would have invited conflict with the British, or to build a modern state. He chose the latter, even crushing a group of his own warriors who refused to stop fighting.

Since then, the alliance between the royal family and the clerics has endured, although the tensions between the quest for ideological purity and the exigencies of modern statehood remain throughout Saudi society.

Fast forward to 2016, and the main players have transformed because of time and oil wealth. The royal family has grown from a group of scrappy desert dwellers into a sprawling clan awash in palaces and private jets. The Wahhabi establishment has evolved from a puritan reform movement into a bloated state bureaucracy.

It consists of universities that churn out graduates trained in religious disciplines; a legal system in which judges apply Shariah law; a council of top clerics who advise the king; a network of offices that dispense fatwas, or religious opinions; a force of religious police who monitor public behavior; and tens of thousands of mosque imams who can be tapped to deliver the government’s message from the pulpit.

The call to prayer sounds five times a day from mosques and inside of malls so clearly that many Saudis use it to organize their days.

“Let’s meet after the sunset prayer,” they would tell me, sometimes unsure what time that was. So I installed an app on my phone that let me look up prayer times and buzzed when the call sounded.

And so it was, after the sunset prayer, that I met Mr. Sheikh, a proud sixth-generation descendant of Mohammed ibn Abdul-Wahhab.

Kari, you look good in your new outfit. Stocking cap, corn curls and all.

Bai, in the 70s in Lodge and North Cummingsburg, Georgetown and especially in London, UK when reggae was considered fringe music I was a lil Rasta with the over-sized beanie cap and ting. When I was the President of the City University Afro-Caribbean Society, I once hired Aswad, Inner Circle and a soca band to play at the largest club activity in our university to date.