Cole M. Bunzel

Bio

I am a historian and scholar of the contemporary Middle East, specializing in the history of the Arabian Peninsula, Islamic theology and law, and modern Islamic radicalism. In addition to more scholarly articles, I have written extensively on the Sunni jihadi movement (also known as Jihadi Salafism) for a more popular audience, including such monographs as "From Paper State to Caliphate: The Ideology of the Islamic State" (Brookings, 2015), "The Kingdom and the Caliphate: Saudi Arabia and the Islamic State" (Carnegie Endowment, 2016), and "Jihadism on Its Own Terms: Understanding a Movement" (Hoover Institution, 2017). My first book, which grew out of my 2018 doctoral dissertation at Princeton, is titled "Wahhābism: The History of a Militant Islamic Movement" (Princeton, 2023). In it I draw on a wide array of primary sources in Arabic, including rare manuscripts gathered from across the world, to reconstruct the history and doctrine of the controversial Wahhabi movement that arose in central Arabia in the mid-eighteenth century. The movement, as I show, was distinguished not only by a theological exclusivism that cast large swathes of the world’s Muslims as beyond the pale but also by a confrontational ethic encapsulated by the requirement to show hatred and enmity to so-called polytheists and unbelievers. These characteristics of what I call militant Wahhabism defined the Wahhabi mainstream until the early twentieth century, when the founder of the modern Saudi kingdom sought to tone them down and forge a reconciliation of sorts with the wider Islamic world. The militant heritage has been rediscovered and reappropriated, however, by the ideologues of the Jihadi Salafi movement.

My current book project, tentatively titled "Refounding the Kingdom," examines how Saudi Arabia in recent years, under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has tried to distance itself even further from Wahhabism, particularly through the refashioning of the Saudi historical narrative. The founding of the early Saudi state has been backdated (from c. 1744 to 1727) in such a way as to write Wahhabism out of the story, and a new national holiday known as Founding Day has been proclaimed to mark the new 1727 national origin story. The book aims to place this shift in historical (and historiographical) context and in the context of the crown prince's broader reform efforts. A second book project, on which I am working concurrently, is a study of the history of jihadi ideology with a focus on those scholars and actors who most critically shaped it.

Academic Appointments

• Hoover Research Fellow, Hoover Institution

Professional Education

• A.B., Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies (2008)
• M.A., Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, International Relations & International Economics (2012)
• Ph.D., Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies (2018)