This paper uses the history of the Ma’had ‘Ilmi Sa’udi (Saudi Scholastic Institute), founded in Mecca in 1926, as a basis for exploring how and why educational discourses cross national borders. Run by staff from as far afield as Najd, Egypt, Syria, Morocco and India, including scholars whose names resonate in the history of twentieth-century Salafism, the Ma’had ‘Ilmi represented a key early Saudi experiment in educational reform. Trained in both religious studies and “modern sciences”, its all-male graduates would go on to teach in the gradually expanding Saudi schooling system, as well as achieving fame and high office in other spheres. Engaging with the broadly Foucauldian line of enquiry into modern educational reforms associated with scholars like Timothy Mitchell, Brinkley Messick and Gregory Starrett, I suggest that this key institution represented the emergence of a hybrid mode of disciplinary schooling which drew on pedagogies embedded in Najdi Salafi religiosity, the post-Tanzimat Ottoman education system, and Egyptian and Levantine Islamic modernism. Moving beyond what was now seen as the outdated rote learning and brute violence of the kuttab, this new approach to schooling was instead calibrated to transmit knowledge and mould good character and sound reasoning through mechanisms of observation, correction, systematic evaluation and the promulgation of detailed syllabuses grounded in correct Salafi creed (‘aqida). Reflecting broader processes which played out in schools across the kingdom in the decades that followed, these divergent influences were to be appropriated in the name of supplying the new nation that was being forged by King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Al Sa’ud with an industrious, disciplined, enlightened and pious male citizenry. The history of the Ma’had ‘Ilmi, I argue, points to various factors which have helped to catalyse and sustain transnational flows of disciplinary educational practices in the modern period, including: imperial expansion; cultural affinities; the use of such new methods in the service of local or national political projects; and the inscription of these discourses on the bodies of migrants. It also points to the ways in which such thinking and practices are reworked as they travel and are taken up by different actors, in different contexts, with different goals. I draw on primary source materials including Ma’had ‘Ilmi syllabuses and promotional literature, contemporary media reports, biography collections, and memoirs written by former staff and students, as well as Arabic-language secondary works.