You're making the assumption that Wahabism is widely spread across the middle east. It is not, and it never was. It has always been a Saudi phenomenon, and even then not all Saudi citizens are Wahabists. The movement was founded in the Nejd region of Saudi Arabia; Bahrain (eastern Arabia) is Shiite and the Hedjaz was Hanafi for a very long time under the Ottoman empire. Wahabism has always been intristicly tied to the Saudi royal family since the movement's inception, it was never a populist ideology.

If I am assuming correctly, what you want to know is how socially liberal parts of the Middle East were in the 20th century, which is much easier to answer. Like other posters have stated, Wahabism is a Saudi creation and had not spread much beyond its borders. However, religious adherence among Muslims in the Middle East was affected in several ways in the 20th century.

The first issue that needs to be covered is the size of the peasantry in the Middle East. Before WWII, the peasantry comprised almost 90% of the population in most nations in the region. For example, in Egypt, the effendi, the middle class, were only about 10% of the population, the landowners were 1-2%, and the peasantry were the rest. As is seen across the world, less well off people are usually more conservative; as was the case with the peasantry. They were usually strict adherents to whatever beliefs they held (Orthodox, Copt, Islam, Judaism, etc).

However, the rising middle class of this time had been educated in Europe (depending on the country in either France or England). The returning educated middle class undertook several reforms throughout the region. Starting in literature and art, the middle class wanted to liberalize the culture before the government. Educated literati throughout the region began publishing novels and, most importantly, newspapers. The goal was to rile up the peasantry and utilize them to affect change in the country, which worked. In Egypt, the peasantry were given greater educational opportunities and were becoming more dissenting with colonial rule. After an incident in the Nile Delta that resulted in the deaths of several Egyptians, the movement to release Egypt from British colonial rule succeeded. This put the middle class firmly in charge, though they were offset by the King and the British.

While the case example is Egypt, similar circumstances happened in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, etc. With the middle class in charge, the countries social climate drastically changed. Ideas of nationalism, pan-arabism, and others brought with them liberalized reforms that created better working conditions, less religious law, public welfare, education, etc. They were copying the European models from the 19th century and translating them for the Middle East. This was the general trend.

By the time of the Gamel Abd-el Nasser (1940s & 50s), Egypt and much of the Middle East had a larger middle class with a more educated population and liberal societies. Religious dress was not as popular in the cities, jazz had taken hold as a form of anti-imperialist music, universities were opening up across the region, and a general sense of liberalism and modernization had taken root.

However, it wasn't until 1956 that nationalism, the driving force of liberalization in the Middle East up to this point, exploded. The Suez Canal Crisis proved that Britain and France no longer had the pull to dominate in the Middle East, thus Nasser was considered a hero of the Arab people and the third-world. With this new status, Nasser's, basically Egypt's middle class, reforms took hold throughout the region. Public education raised literacy rates, thus allowing for a larger middle class, burgeoning economies, modernization, etc. The hijab was not seen in cities as often as it was 50 years before. People began to secularize for the most part everywhere, following the Turkish/French form of state-sponsored secularism. In Turkey, Ataturk had declared religion to be a private affair and not having a place in the governance of the state. However, where Ataturk differed from most places was how he imposed secularism. To accomplish his goals, Ataturk created a ministry to deal with religion that tightly regulated it and forced it to remain within the home rather than the school or the public forum.

Not much changed between then and 1979. However, it is essential to understand that, for many Arabs, Nasser's dream had failed. Thus, the idea of Pan-arabism was gone and the leading anti-imperialist dissenter was gone. A hole needed to be filled. In 1979, it was, when the Ayatollah with his own forces along with Marxist forces rose up and ousted the Shah. In a quick turn-around, the Ayatollah then ousted the Marxists as well, leaving Iran as an authoritarian theocracy. This served as a beacon for many people who were in tough times in the Middle East and had lost their hero, Nasser. Iran fulfilled this role to a certain extant. While people did not see Iran as a fellow in a cultural sense (Iran was persian, not Arab), they had successfully ousted the foreign powers that were controlling them.

After 1979, many nations in the Middle East experienced an Islamic revival with a more conservative understanding of it. Turkey found itself with large populations of people dissenting against Ankara for its incredibly secular structure; people wanted more places of worship and less restrictions, but Ankara was less than willing. The same happened in the Egypt and Jordan where the Muslim Brotherhood gained a multitude of followers after the Iranian Revolution. The Muslim Brotherhood soon became a huge threat to national security in Egypt until Mubarak began to negotiate with them. The trend was clear. More people were following a more conservative form of Islam and were upset that their countries' governing structures were not allowing it due to their harsh forms of secularism. More people began attending religious schools rather than secular ones (especially among the poor), people began to don religious dress once again, and Islamic traditions were more strictly followed.

Now there is a lot more factors that feed into this, but the 1979 revolution played a huge role in the development of religion place in today's Middle East.

EDIT: Just as a note, after 1979, the Middle East didn't regress. It continued to progress in all sectors of society, but there was an increasingly conservative trend in many countries except a few.

You ask a pretty broad question, and as /u/Blaze86420 notes, a somewhat inaccurate one. The answer is pretty much "it depends". For example, the Nasrid dynasty in Spain could be seen as pretty liberal, as well as the Cordoba Caliphate, while the Almoravids adhered to a much stricter interpretation of Islam. The Ottoman empire was relatively religiously tolerant, although certain Ottoman rulers like Mehmed II voiced their desire to eradicate Christianity. Sources by Hungarian slaves in the Ottoman Empire talk about how repressed women were (not much different to modern Saudi Arabia), while other European sources say that women were relatively free and even discussed how the Ottoman treatment of women was progressive.

Also, the word "liberal" is a bit of a misleading word. When I say these countries are "liberal," they certainly aren't the modern US or UK, but rather I'm comparing them to medieval contemporaries in Europe and the Middle East.

I think OP is assuming that Wahhabism is spread all over the Middle East and that is what people from other parts of the world think of when they think of human rights violations in that part of the world.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/middle_east Check out the Wiki for a bunch of threads that might be closer to what you want to know

So, the "classical liberal" position is a system guaranteeing individual rights (you can see how the non-radical left in America is traditionally called "[social] liberals" and the pro-business right in much of the rest of the world is called "[economic] liberals" despite very different positions today). Today, we think of progressive political movements spreading democracy around the world--that's our metric of political rights. However, in the 19th and early 20th century the measure was much more about constitutional rights rather than voting.

Before World War 1 in the Middle East, there were two big constitutional movements corresponding to the two big empires. The Constitutional Movement in the Ottoman Empire first achieved success in 1876, though tragically the First Constitutional Period only lasted until 1878, when the Empire returned to absolutism. Nader Sohrabi (convincingly) argues that the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) gave a big kick in the pants to constitutionalist movements around the world. Here, for maybe the first time, we see a modern, non-European state decisively defeat a modern, European state. Political liberals pointed out that Japan had a constitution and the modern system worked well, and Russia had no constitution and was incredibly backwards. This helped lead, Sohrabi argues, to a "wave" of constitutionalism.

Two of the most important parts of this wave were in the Ottoman Empire and the Qajar (Iranian) Empire. In 1905, protests broke out in Iran that eventually worked up into the Iranian Constitutional movement. The 1906 constitution, I believe, held until the end of the Qajar Empire in 1925 (when Reza Shah took over in a British-assisted coup). Similarly, the Young Turk movement ended Ottoman absolutism. Almost immediately after coming to power, they restored the 1876 constitution and ushered in the Second Constitutional Period which also lasted until the end of the Empire.

Both the regimes that came after the Empires were politically High Modernist, prizing things like women's rights, secularism, secular education, industrialization, etc. Many of the regimes that took over the colonized parts of the former Ottoman Empire (both the post-War 1 mandates, and the parts of North Africa colonized by the French) once they became fully independent, generally in the 50's and 60's. Tunisia, Egypt, Syria in particular seem to have followed this high modernist models. These were "socially liberal", but were generally not politically liberal. Most have had interruptions of political rights and free and fair elections, but in different proportions. Turkey has had the best record, having elections consistently since 1950 but military interruptions in 1960, 1971, 1980, and sort of 1997. Egypt likely has had the worst record (in terms of elections). Iran has obviously had a period of free elections, a period where foreign powers helped reimpose a monarchy, and the post-1979 period of elections-with-theocratic-rule. Most of the free and semi-free regimes generally tolerated social freedom in the cities (if not political dissent) but meddled less with the socially conservative countryside (which made up the majority of the population). Generally, the social conservatism that existed in these societies, especially pre- the 1979 Islamic Revolution (several other regimes, from Sadat to Saddam to democratic movements in Turkey have tried to use politicized Islam to increase their legitimacy), was society-driven, rather than state-driven. Leaders like Bourguiba in Tunisia, Atatürk in Turkey, and Nasser in Egypt tried to lead their countries into a socially progressive if not politically free "secular modernity" (Bourguiba famously would eat on television during the Ramadan fast). Part of their legitimacy was due to thinks like pushing women's rights. In those countries, the state was really pushing what we associate with social liberalism (but, again, not necessarily political liberalism) on to their populations (the populations generally responded well to this; again, more in the cities than the countryside).

Wahhabism is associated with the Saudi States (the current Saudi Arabia is actually the third Saudi state). Saudi Arabia, and the Arabia peninsula generally, has none of the "core countries"' traditions of political liberalism or social liberalism. Saudi Arabia is today one of the very few countries that doesn't have a constitution. Wahhabism, or even Salafism, have limited influence outside of the Arabian Peninsula. Movements calling for a theocratic, Qom-like Vali-ye faqih-style political order is similarly not particularly prominent in the Shi'a world outside of Iran.

So if we mean the Middle East as a whole, Wahhabism isn't very influential and political liberalism has a long history. There is, however, a long and mixed history of social and political liberalism, particularly in the cities. This started to change in some places in the 1970's and 80's, often in response to Islam-influenced movements (all the major movements in Palestine were left-nationalist until the 1980's, for example; electoral Islamist parties started in the 70's and became important only in the 80's in Turkey; the Muslim Brotherhood started really leading social change in the 1970's in Egypt, though they're a much older movement, etc.). These movements are not necessarily illiberal, and in fact most studies have found that Islamist movements are increasingly liberal (see for example, Kurtzman and Naqvi, or Tezcür). If we mean the Arabian peninsula where Wahhabi-style Salafism is influential, there isn't a significant history of political or social liberalism. You might be interested in the article "No Saudi Spring", which does deal with both recent events and the general structure of political life in Saudi Arabia.

I think a better question would be: How liberal Saudi(Arabia) was before the Wahabist movement?