The formation of the Saudi education system in the middle of the 20th century, with its parallel religious and modernizing authorities, represents a form of institutional gestation that is quite distinct from the dominant models of modern Middle Eastern history. In Saudi Arabia, unlike elsewhere in the postcolonial Arab world, a religious ideology (Wahhabism) was made a centerpiece of the nation-building enterprise. This paper examines that nation-building process through the lens of the competition between the modernizing authorities of the Ministry of Education (Wizārat al-Ma‘ārif), which controlled the bulk of the kingdom’s new educational institutions, and the Wahhābī religious establishment, which was placed in autonomous charge of religious high schools and universities, as well as girls’ primary schools. This paper explores the opposing strategies of modernizers and ulama as they worked to imprint their priorities on the education sector. I look closely at contests over vocational education, resource allocation and authority, and private religious schooling initiatives, through which I map some foundational aspects of the institutionalization of ulama and technocratic authority in the Saudi education sphere. I argue that competition over the future of education was the impulse for cross-pollination between religious and modernizing educational institutions, and that this competition helps to explain the particular nature of the modern Saudi educational system.