Cole Bunzel is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School. Bunzel is a historian of the Middle East specializing in the history of Saudi Arabia, Islamic theology and law, and modern Islamic radicalism. He is the author of Wahhābism: The History of a Militant Islamic Movement (Princeton University Press, 2023), and has written widely on Middle Eastern politics and Sunni jihadism, including for Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. His research spans the religious thought of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and his followers in the fourteenth century to present-day jihadi ideology. He is the editor of the website Jihadica.
Bunzel’s current book project, provisionally titled Refounding the Kingdom, is a close examination of Saudi Arabia’s recent efforts to refashion the founding narrative of the early Saudi state in the eighteenth century in such a way as to expunge the historical role of Wahhābism, and thereby to transform the very nature of the Saudi state’s identity and basis of legitimacy—an endeavor that is of a piece with Saudi Arabia’s ongoing transformation under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
