Thirty years ago, when the constitutional Basic Law was announced, King Fahad gave a speech which epitomized the official narrative of Saudi state history. “In modern history,” he said, “the First Saudi state emerged…when a covenant was made between two men: Imam Mohammed bin Saud and Shiekh Muhammed bin Abdulwahhab.” The former was the ancestor of the al-Saud dynasty, and the latter was the founder of the Wahhabi religious movement. On January 27, 2022, Fahad’s brother king Salman issued a royal decree designating the 22nd of February to be a national holiday called the “Foundation Day.” According to the decree, this day commemorates “the beginning of the reign of Imam Mohammed bin Saud and his foundation of the First Saudi state.” What was erased in this new sanctioned narrative was Muhammed bin Abdulwahhab and his movement. Indeed, this decision is the culmination of a steady process of separation between the Saudi state and the Wahhabi movement. The significance of this shift in the relationship between the state and religion stems from the fact that Saudi Arabia is the place of the two holy cities of Islam and its role in the global dissemination of Wahhabism, financing of Muslim institutions around the world, and its hegemonic influence on Islam as a religion in the past half a century. How might we explain this shift? Why would a state break with its main source of legitimacy and adopt a risky approach of introducing a new national narrative that centers a transformed relationship with religion? In answering these questions, this paper goes beyond explaining the shift as either a regime survival strategy or an inevitable secularized byproduct of modernization. Relying on methods of discourse analysis and process tracing, this paper argues that this shift was a result of an intellectual movement known domestically as “Tanwīrīs,” or the enlightened ones, which sought to democratize and secularize the Saudi state. This movement dominated the political and cultural scene in Saudi Arabia from the late 1990s to the early 2010s. Although the Tanwīrīs were crushed and its democratization efforts failed with the rise of the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, its criticism of Wahhabism and the alternative vision it offered for the country was its legacy. By highlighting the movement’s impact, this paper challenges the modernist/traditionalist binary through which the Saudi history is often told and complicates our understanding of the role of religion in politics.