Many skeptic observers may easily dismiss contemporary caliphates such as the one that sprung up in Iraq and Syria in June as temporary eruptions playing on Muslims’ emotional dispositions and longing for a glorious past. However, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia seems to have taken the challenge seriously. It quickly joined an international alliance against the Islamic State (IS) and declared the entity a terrorist threat. Given that Saudi Arabia had in the past sponsored and nourished groups very similar to IS that were later designated as terrorist organizations, for example al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, it is surprising that the IS caliphate is now considered a threat to national security. If pan-Islamism was Saudi Arabia’s antidote to the threat of Arab nationalism in a previous era, what is Saudi Arabia’s strategy today to fight IS? Leaving the promise of military might aside, the only solution is to lessen the similarities between the kingdom and the caliphate.

At the heart of the caliphate model of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is the promise of transnational connections that worry Saudi Arabia in a region where political borders had cut across tribal territories since after World War I. The population of northern Saudi Arabia consists of branches of tribes that live across the border in Jordan, Syria and Iraq. For instance, the Shammar of northern Saudi Arabia have “tribal” brothers and cousins as far as Hasakah in Syria and Jabal Sinjar in Iraq. This applies also to the Anaiza tribe and many others. All these transnational entities endorse "fictive" kinship ties that can be mobilized for the sake of forging solidarities and making claims on each others' resources, especially in times of hardship. Such fictive kinship and the trust that it invokes prove to be conducive not only for mutual support but also smuggling and other cross-border activities.

The transnational connections at the heart of the caliphate in its ancient and contemporary IS aberration promise to unite territories and populations that had been divided by colonial powers and later cherished by post-colonial states. Even in those Arab republics that were allegedly nationalistic promising to unite all Arabs, such as Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iraq under Saddam Hussein, we find that populist leaders retained the rhetoric of unity against developing strong local nationalism. Those nationalistic leaders cherished and guarded the famous Sykes-Picot borders despite that they continued to denounce them in every inflammatory nationalistic speech they delivered to their enchanted audiences. Their history research centers celebrated local nationalism despite their commitment to pan-Arab variants of the same thing.

Of course, there is always the fear of terrorism spilling over from nearby countries to major Saudi cities and the good reception that IS quickly received among Saudis, especially after its spectacular success in Iraq and Syria over a short period of time. In its early days, in the summer of 2014, IS did strike a chord among Saudis who had been brought up on cherishing commitment to applying Sharia and erecting Islamic states. But these legitimate reasons for fearing IS do not fully explain the Saudi regime’s deep-rooted aversion to the model of the caliphate that Baghdadi promised last summer.