David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David Commins, author of the new book Saudi Arabia: A Modern History, brings decades of scholarship and firsthand experience to explain the kingdom's unlikely rise. Tyler and David discuss why Wahhabism was essential for Saudi state-building, the treatment of Shiites in the Eastern Province and whether discrimination has truly ended, why the Saudi state emerged from its poorer and least cosmopolitan regions, the lasting significance of the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure by millenarian extremists, what’s kept Gulf states stable, the differing motivations behind Saudi sports investments, the disappointing performance of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology despite its $10 billion endowment, the main barrier to improving its k-12 education, how Yemen became the region's outlier of instability and whether Saudi Arabia learned from its mistakes there, the Houthis' unclear strategic goals, the prospects for the kingdom's post-oil future, the topic of David’s next book, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded August 22nd, 2025.

This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,
0:09.4	bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.
0:13.5	Learn more at Mercadis.org.
0:15.7	For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links,
0:20.4	visit Conversationswithtyler.com.
0:26.8	Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.
0:30.7	Today I'm chatting with David Commons.
0:33.3	David is one of the leading scholars on Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Wahhabism.
0:38.7	He has a new book out, which I enjoyed very much and learned a lot from.
0:42.4	It's called Saudi Arabia, a modern history.
0:45.5	David, welcome.
0:46.9	Thank you. It's nice to be here.
0:48.4	I have so many questions about Saudi.
0:50.9	I mean, let's take Wahhabism, which gets a very bad reputation in the Western press.
0:56.3	If you were to steal man it for me, make the best case for it, that it's not just something
1:00.5	crazy and extreme. What does that case look like? Well, the case looks like it is a very strong
1:05.7	conviction for a specific theology and a specific definition of true belief in the Islamic tradition,
1:13.9	and that's the best case I can make.
1:17.2	Could the Saudi nation have been built without it?
1:19.5	I would argue no, and I would also qualify that by saying that our sources for the early history of Saudi political expansion are so few and partisan, we can't reach a firm historical conclusion about that.
1:36.2	But it seems to me that this religious purification movement, which is Wahhabism purported to be, was essential for state building in that part
1:46.4	of Arabia and the 1700s.
	...

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