When Britain decided to support Ibn Saud and his Wahhabi troops in the 1930s, Indian Muslims were prepared to welcome the creation of Saudi Arabia. The ground for this welcome had been laid once Istanbul, or for that matter Cairo or Baghdad, was replaced by Mecca and Medina not only at the geographical center of Islam but also as the historical models for an ideal Muslim society.

The new geography of Islam was also a Protestant one, with Rome’s decadence mirrored in Istanbul and forsaken for Geneva’s austerities as found in Arabia’s holy cities. At its birth, Saudi Arabia looked very much like Mr. Blunt’s vision of it, the center of Islam protected by the Royal Navy and placed firmly in the camp of Christian powers.

After World War I, the American Navy replaced the British, and oil turned the kingdom into a crucial resource for Western capitalism. But its religious and economic centrality was contradicted by Saudi Arabia's continuing political marginality, with Britain, the United States and even the Pakistani Army responsible for its internal stability and defense from external threats.

Today, Saudi Arabia is ostensibly countering Iran, but its claims to dominance are also made possible by the decline of Egypt and the decimation of Iraq and Syria. Turkey remains its only and as yet ambiguous rival apart from Iran.

And Prince Mohammed’s kingdom is looking more like a “secular” than a “theocratic” state in which sovereignty has finally been wrested from clan and cleric to be claimed directly by the monarchy. But Saudi Arabia can assume greater geopolitical power only by putting its religious status at risk, defined as this has been by its marginal role in geopolitics.

What will the subordination of religious to secular if despotic authority mean for the geography of Islam? In the aftermath of World War I, when the Ottoman defeat placed Islam’s sacred cities under indirect European control, Muslim thinkers debated the idea of neutralizing Mecca and Medina politically on the model of the Vatican or internationalizing them in the name of the world’s Muslims. Iran still refers to the latter option when trying to prise the holy cities from the grasp of the Saudis.