Saudi Arabia is preparing to celebrate its national day on Sept. 23, marking the unification of the country in 1932. The occasion is an opportunity to emphasize patriotism and national identity with a display of power and pomp for all to see. Yet Saudi national identity remains ambiguous and contested by linking the nation to the ruling Al-Saud family and its achievements instead of recognizing the past and diversity of the people. More important, the celebration takes place within the context of a people being encouraged to feel at odds with their past rather than reconciled to it.

Saudi Arabia was unified after 30 years of wars, from 1902 to 1932, in which people were recruited to fight under the pretext of purifying the land by banishing all signs of blasphemy, religious innovation and heresy. The unification of Saudi Arabia was considered a jihad to spread true Islam. From the beginning, it would be an endless, outward-looking project with its mission fought in the name of God.

As a political project clothed in Wahhabi religious garb, the unification effort played on religious sentiments and a desire to spread "true Islam" among a population believed to have fallen in its religious observance and commitment to religious purity. The unification of the country was constructed as a gift from a pious leadership bestowed on a people who had deviated from pure Islam. The salvation of the nation depended on obeying religious and political elites, both being sacrosanct.

This made Saudi Arabia unique in the Arab world, as it forged a religious nationalism different from the secular nationalism dominating other Arab countries. In Egypt, Iraq and Syria, among others, the nation was imagined to have a shared historical, cultural and linguistic heritage aimed on this basis (though without great success) to be inclusive. Arab nationalism in its Nasserite and Baathist versions proved to be a disaster in practice, under the auspices of authoritarian military leaders.