From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, thousands of Saudis left quiet lives of material comfort to fight in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Bosnia and Chechnya. They put their lives at risk for people they had never met and for territories they could barely place on a map. In a time of low oil prices, the Saudi state spent billions of dollars to liberate countries thousands of miles away. Its army was too weak to defend Saudi oilfields against Iraq in 1990, yet it encouraged its young men to take part in other Muslims' wars in Europe and Central Asia.

The driving force behind this curious behaviour was pan-Islamism, an ideology based on the view that all Muslims were one people who had a responsibility to help each other in times of crisis. In the 1980s the Muslim world witnessed the rise of an increasingly militarised interpretation of pan-Islamism, which saw the umma as threatened from the outside and placed a special emphasis on helping Muslims involved in conflicts against non-Muslims. The most extreme proponents of this ideology sought to convince average citizens to get militarily involved in other Muslims' struggles of national liberation.