Al-Sahwa’s origins date back to the 1950s and 1960s, when thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood fled violent repression across the region, especially Egypt, and came to the conservative kingdom.

Like the Baathist ideology in its time, IS’s takfirist discourse, excommunicating Muslims on the basis of their supposed apostasy and promoted by Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Iraqi followers, is inseparable from the cycles of civil conflict that have plagued Iraq. It may re-erupt as IS has not been entirely defeated on the ground.

Central to the Saudi deradicalization approach is a process known as munassaha, which roughly translates as ‘counselling’. The process starts in prison and involves clerics engaging with convicts to persuade them that their notions of jihad are based on a misinterpretation of the Koran. However, the Saudi authorities say the success rate of their approach has been as high as 90 per cent