Three out of four of the Najdi revivalist Muhammad Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab’s key theological epistles are written in a popular register. They possess the oral recitative and/or minimalistic qualities associated with popular religiosity and even Arabian vernacular poetry. Other of his minor theological texts are similarly clipped and spare, suggestive of pamphlets or mnemonic aids. Through a methodologically new treatment of these epistles, I argue that the Wahhabism of the mid-eighteenth century represents the transference of the Arabian oral tradition to the legal and theological realm, in application to a newly emergent sedentary society; that Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab’s revivalist mission reflects a taming of poesy, to mean oral communicative styles, by a scriptural tradition, and the adoption of the former’s assumptions for converting a largely preliterate people. The central artifacts of this confrontation, I suggest, can be found embedded in Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab’s popular epistles.