ABSTRACT
This chapter sheds light on the importance of Saudi Arabia in the rise of Salafism and Jihadism worldwide in the last decades. These two kinds of contemporary Islamic identities are to a large extent due to the interference, desire to export, and founding narratives upon which the State has been built. Through a set of foreign policy actions in the context of different political and religious rivalries across the decades with competing ideologies, Saudi Arabia has explicitly acted as a ‘preaching-State’ with the design to become the central player within the globalized Islamic field. However, given the geopolitical circumstances, Saudi Arabia has been facing an identity crisis as new players have come and tried to discredit its claim to ‘true Islam.’ This is why studying this country’s role in the rise of Salafism and Jihadism since the 20th century and relating it to the context of the many crises the Islamic world has been going through can help us understand the fragmentation of the globalized Islamic field.
