I’m currently about 200 pages into Laurence in Arabia by Scott Anderson.

A hundred years ago, T.E. Laurence (Laurence of Arabia) was remarkably prescient about Wahhabi tribal chieftain Abdul Aziz ibn-Saud (the rival of King Hussein bin Ali). From pages 165-166:

…Laurence argued that despite posing as Islamic reformists “with all the narrow minded bigotry of the puritan,” ibn-Saud and his Wahhabists were hardly representative of Islam. Instead, as he warned in “The Politics of Mecca,” the Wahhabist sect was composed of marginal medievalists, “and if it prevailed, we would have in place of the tolerant, rather comfortable Islam of Mecca and Damascus, the fanaticism of Nejd…intensified and swollen by success.”

As with many of Lawrence’s other predictions, his warning about ibn-Saud and the Wahhabists was ultimately to prove true. In 1923, ibn-Saud would conquer much of the Arabian Peninsula and, to honor his clan, give it the name Saudi Arabia. For the next ninety years, the vast and profligate Saudi royal family would survive by essentially buying off the doctrinaire Wahhabists who had brought them to power, financially subsidizing their activities so long as their disciples directed their jihadist efforts abroad. The most famous product of this arrangement was to be a man named Osama bin Laden.

See also Bernard Lewis on Wahhabism.