Salafi Islam is the state religion of Saudi Arabia. The kingdom is called the "home of Islam"; it was the birthplace of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, who united and ruled the Arabian Peninsula. It is the location of the cities of Mecca and Medina, where Muhammad lived and died. The kingdom attracts millions of Muslim Hajj pilgrims annually, and thousands of clerics and students who come from across the Muslim world to study. The official title of the King of Saudi Arabia is "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques"—the two being Al-Masjid al-Haram in Mecca and Al-Masjid al-Nabawi in Medina—which are considered the holiest in Islam.
In the 18th century, a pact between Islamic preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and a regional emir, Muhammad bin Saud, brought a new form of Islam (Salifism) of Sunni Islam first to the Najd region and then to the Arabian Peninsula. Referred to by supporters as "Salafism" and by others as "Wahhabism", this interpretation of Islam became the state religion and interpretation of Islam espoused by Muhammad bin Saud and his successors (the Al Saud family), who eventually created the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. The Saudi government has spent tens of billions of dollars of its petroleum export revenue throughout the Islamic world and elsewhere on building mosques, publishing books, giving scholarships and fellowships, hosting international Islamic organisations, and promoting its form of Islam, sometimes referred to as "petro-Islam".
The Wahhabi mission has been dominant in Najd for two hundred years, but in most other parts of the country—Hejaz, the Eastern Province, Najran—it has dominated only since 1913–1925. Most of the 15 to 20 million Saudi citizens are Sunni Muslims, while the eastern regions are populated mostly by Twelver Shia, and there are Zaydi Shia in the southern regions. According to a number of sources, only a minority of Saudis consider themselves Wahhabis, although according to other sources, the Wahhabi affiliation is up to 40%, making it a very dominant minority, at the very least using a native population of 17 million based on "2008–09 estimates". In addition, the next largest affiliation is with Salafism, which encompasses all of the central principles of Wahhabism, with a number of minor additional accepted principles differentiating the two.
Public worship and proselytising by non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia, including the distribution of non-Muslim religious materials (such as the Bible), is illegal.
Starting in 2017, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, dramatic changes have been made in religious policy, including the elimination of the power of the religious police, the lifting of bans on amusement parks, cinemas, concert venues, and driving of motor vehicles by women.
In a 2014 survey, conducted for the Boston Consultancy Group report on Saudi youth, it was found that 97% of the young Saudis consider Islam "as the main influence that shapes their identity."
History
The Islamic prophet, Muhammad, was born in Mecca in about 570. From the early 7th century, Muhammad united the various tribes of the peninsula and created a single Islamic religious polity under his rule. Following his death in 632, his followers rapidly expanded the territory under Muslim rule beyond Arabia and conquered many parts of Asia, Africa and Europe conquering huge swathes of territory. Although Arabia soon became a politically peripheral region as the focus shifted to the more developed conquered lands, Mecca and Medina remained the spiritually most important places in the Muslim world. The Qur'an requires every able-bodied Muslim who can afford it, as one of the five pillars of Islam, to make a pilgrimage, or Hajj, to Mecca during the Islamic month of Dhu al-Hijjah at least once in his or her lifetime.
From the 9th century, a number of Shia sects developed particularly in the eastern part of Arabia. These included the Qarmatians, a millenarian Ismaili sect led by Abū-Tāhir Al-Jannābī who attacked and sacked Mecca in 930.
