A report on Saudi Arabia, House of Saud, Wahhabism and Grand Mosque seizure

The House of Saud (آل سُعُود ) is the ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia.

The Grand Mosque seizure occurred during November and December 1979 when extremist insurgents calling for the overthrow of the House of Saud took over Masjid al-Haram, the holiest mosque in Islam, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

In 1744, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab formed a pact with a local leader, Muhammad bin Saud, a politico-religious alliance that continued for the next 150 years, culminating politically with the proclamation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.

He united the four regions into a single state through a series of conquests beginning in 1902 with the capture of Riyadh, the ancestral home of his family, the Al Saud.

The ultraconservative Wahhabi religious movement within Sunni Islam has been described as a "predominant feature of Saudi culture", although the power of the religious establishment has been significantly eroded in the 2010s.

They differed from the original Ikhwan and other earlier Wahhabi purists in that "they were millenarians, they rejected the monarchy and condemned the Wahhabi ulama."

Later they were referred to as the Wahhabis, a particularly strict, puritanical Islamic sect, named for its founder.

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the Al-Saud dynasty, and with it Wahhabism, spread to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

However, in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century several crises worked to erode Wahhabi "credibility" in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world – the November 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque by militants; the deployment of US troops in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq; and the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington.

On 20 November 1979, the Grand Mosque seizure saw the al-Masjid al-Haram in Mecca violently seized by a group of 500 heavily armed and provisioned Saudi dissidents led by Juhayman al-Otaybi and Abdullah al-Qahtani, consisting mostly of members of the former Ikhwan militia of Otaibah but also of other peninsular Arabs and a few Egyptians enrolled in Islamic studies at the Islamic University of Madinah.

The second event was the Grand Mosque Seizure in Mecca by Islamist extremists.