Religious consecration reframes resource raiding as holy conquest and legitimizes it.

Evidence

According to French Political Scientist Gilles Kepel, the alliance between Ibn ‘Abd-al Wahhab and the tribal chief Muhammad ibn Saud to wage jihad on neighboring allegedly ignorant Muslims, was a “consecration” by Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab since he renamed the Saudi tribe’s long-standing raids as Jihad. Part of the Najd’s “Hobbesian state of perpetual war pitted Bedouin tribes against one another for control of the scarce resources that could stave off starvation.” And a case of substituting fath, “the ‘opening’ or conquest of a vast territory through religious zeal”, for the “instinctive fight for survival and appetite for lucre”. — Wikipedia contributors, Wahhabism, 188

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The substitution of fatah for appetite for lucre is a compact theory of how sacred vocabulary metabolizes profane violence — worth sitting with as a model applicable to any movement.
• XREF: Echoes Milgrom’s law-merchant and the sacral-kingship material in the sacrifice article: sanctification is the mechanism that converts predation into legitimate order.