The claim that the Islamic Revolution of 1979 forever changed the politics of the Arab world is now a truism. Yet what actually changed for Arabs in 1979? This paper examines political writing within the Arabian peninsula by writers engaged in a renewed comparison between Iran and its Arab neighbours. It assesses how particular intellectuals responded to the revolution not as a geopolitical threat, but as an idea that for better or for worse, also represented the political future. It retrieves political writing that came after the violent siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by millenarian Sunni militants in 1979. Particularly, work by the ‘Father of Arab Atheism’, Saudi Arabian author Abdullah al-Qusseimi who began his career as an exegete of Wahhabism, but is said to have renounced religion during a life in exile in Cairo. Al-Qusseimi made intellectual separations between dynastic and clerical authority, usually to condemn both, by engaging in comparison; between Arabs and Europeans, and between Arabs and Iranians. His later writings on religion and politics often took Iran and its reigning clergy as an historical object-lesson to write from. While the revolution in Iran resolved this distinction by making the moral authority of clerics supreme, in Saudi Arabia a clergy was violently subordinated to royal power, a move he saw as the surest way to finally decouple morality from politics. Yet because obedience to a sovereign and to the laws of the state could only be promoted as obedience to worldly executors of religious doctrine, historians of modern Arabia have only been able to think of political legitimacy in religious, cultural, or ‘tribal’ terms. This is precisely the opposite of how al-Qusseimi viewed the monarchy. He viewed Saudi Arabia's embrace of religion as superficial and perhaps temporary. His ideas disrupt the point at which historians conventionally narrate the history of modern Saudi Arabia without distinguishing between profane and sacred authority. By engaging in comparisons with events in Iran, and European history, he suggests that to begin any such narrative, the relationship between cleric and ruler must first be seen as a contradiction between the ethics of the militant and the cold realpolitik of the prince. Al-Qusseimi’s intellectual contribution thus offer a way to rethink both the contemporary politics modern history of ‘the Gulf’, itself first born as a political idea barely a year after the Islamic Revolution.