This paper examines competition between the Ba‘thist regime in Iraq and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia over the support of Islamist movements throughout the Middle East and North Africa in the 1990s. Relying on archival sources as well as conference proceedings and memoirs, it attempts to integrate the study of Islamism and geopolitics. Thus, instead of seeing Islamism as an expression of indigenous and intrinsic religious inclinations, it shows how interstate competition and shifting global order shaped and bounded Islamist movements. Shifting geopolitics after the end of the Cold War disrupted political alliances and transnational networks in the Middle East and North Africa region. Islamists were often at the center of such shifts. Most Islamist movements had coalesced in the mid-twentieth century and they positioned themselves within the global political context of the Cold War. As such, they positioned themselves as a third option between Western capitalism and Eastern communism. Moreover, in many states, secular socialists had been important rivals for Islamist political parties, and a foil for Islamic thought. The international and regional shifts at the end of the Cold War intersected with the move from a cooperative to an adversarial relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iraq. During the 1980s the two states had cooperated against the shared threat emanating from Iran. In fact, Saudi Arabia had helped Iraq to mobilize Cold War-era networks of Islamists that the Saudis had constructed to meet threats from the USSR and its allies in the Greater Middle East during the so-called Arab Cold War, and then the war in Afghanistan. With the loss of atheistic communism as an adversary, many of these Islamist networks saw their primary international interest as combating post-Cold War American hegemony. During and after the Gulf War of 1990-1, the Iraqi regime positioned itself to wean Islamist support away from the pro-Western regime in Riyadh. This paper will examine the resulting competition between Riyadh and Baghdad. In doing so, it describes the way global and regional trends intersected with state policies to affect transnational Islamist movements. As such it provides a multilevel analysis which is often lacking in the study of Islamism.