the two. Public worship and proselytising by non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia, including the distribution of non-Muslim religious materials (such as the Bible), is illegal. Starting in 2017, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, dramatic changes have been made in religious policy, including the elimination of the power of the religious police, the lifting of bans on amusement parks, cinemas, concert venues, and driving of motor vehicles by women. History The Islamic prophet, Muhammad, was born in Mecca in about 570. From the early 7th century, Muhammad united the various tribes of the peninsula and created a single Islamic religious polity under his rule. Following his death in 632, his followers rapidly expanded the territory under Muslim rule beyond Arabia and conquered many parts of Asia, Africa and Europe conquering huge swathes of territory. Although Arabia soon became a politically peripheral region as the focus shifted to the more developed conquered lands, Mecca and Medina remained the spiritually most important places in the Muslim world. The Qur'an requires every able-bodied Muslim who can afford it, as one of the five pillars of Islam, to make a pilgrimage, or Hajj, to Mecca during the Islamic month of Dhu al-Hijjah at least once in his or her lifetime. From the 9th century, a number of Shia sects developed particularly in the eastern part of Arabia. These included the Qarmatians, a millenarian Ismaili sect led by Abū-Tāhir Al-Jannābī who attacked and sacked Mecca in 930. Al Saud and ibn Abd al-Wahhab In 1744, in the desert region of Nejd, Muhammad bin Saud, founder of the Al Saud dynasty, joined forces with the religious leader Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was the founder of the Wahhabi movement, a strict puritanical form of Sunni Islam. This alliance formed in the 18th century provided the ideological impetus to Saudi expansion and remains the basis of Saudi Arabian dynastic rule today. The first "Saudi state" established in 1744 in the area around Riyadh, rapidly expanded and briefly controlled most of the present-day territory of Saudi Arabia, but was destroyed by 1818 by the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Mohammed Ali Pasha. In 1824, a much smaller second "Saudi state", located mainly in Nejd, was established in 1824, but by 1891 its Al Saud rulers were driven into exile in Kuwait. At the beginning of the 20th century, a third attempt was made to conquer this territory