International propagation of Salafism

Further information: International propagation of Salafism and Wahhabism by region, Salafi movement, Ahl-i Hadith, Wahhabi movement, Salafi jihadism, Islamism, and Sufi–Salafi relations
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Starting in the mid-1970s and 1980s (and appearing to diminish after 2017),[1] Salafism and Wahhabism[2] — along with other Sunni interpretations of Islam favored by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia[3][4][5] and other Gulf monarchies — achieved[a] a "preeminent position of strength in the global expression of Islam."[6]

The impetus for the international propagation of these interpretations of Islam through the Muslim world was, according to political scientist Alex Alexiev, "the largest worldwide propaganda campaign ever mounted",[b] David A. Kaplan describes it as "dwarfing the Soviets’ propaganda efforts at the height of the Cold War"[c] funded by petroleum exports.[3][8][9] On the other hand, scholars like Peter Mandaville have cautioned against such hyperbolic assertions, pointing out the unreliability of inconsistent data estimates based on "non-specific hearsay".[10]

From 1982 to 2005 in an effort to spread Wahhabi Islam, over $75 billion was spent, via international organizations[d] and religious attaches at dozens of Saudi embassies,[3][12] to establish/build 200 Islamic colleges, 210 Islamic centers, 1,500 mosques, and 2,000 schools for Muslim children in Muslim and Non-Muslim majority countries.[13][14] Mosque funding was combined with persuasion to propagate the dawah Salafiyya;[3][12] schools were "fundamentalist" in outlook and formed a network "from Sudan to northern Pakistan".[15][16][17] Supporting proselytizing or preaching of Islam[e] has been called "a religious requirement" for Saudi rulers that cannot [or could not] be abandoned "without losing their domestic legitimacy" as protectors and propagators of Islam.[11]

Other strict and conservative interpretations of Sunni Islam assisted by funding from the Gulf monarchies include the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami (until the break between the Muslim Brotherhood and Gulf monarchies in the 1990s). While their alliances were not always permanent,[18] they were said to have formed a "joint venture",[19] sharing a strong "revulsion" against Western influences,[20] a belief in strict implementation of sharia law,[8] an opposition to both Shi'i and popular Islamic religious practices (the veneration of Muslim saints and visitations of their tombs),[19] and a belief in the importance of armed jihad.[21] A "fusion",[22] or "hybrid", of the two movements came out of the Afghan jihad,[21] where thousands of Muslims were trained and equipped to fight against Soviets and their Afghan allies in Afghanistan in the 1980s.[21]

The funding has been criticized for promoting an intolerant, fanatical form of Islam that allegedly helped to breed Islamic terrorism,[11][23] and takfir. Critics argue that volunteers mobilized to fight in Afghanistan (such as Osama bin Laden) went on to wage jihad against Muslim governments and civilians in other countries. And that conservative Sunni groups such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan are attacking and killing not only Non-Muslims (Kuffar) but also fellow Muslims they consider to be apostates, such as Shia and Sufis.[24] As of 2017, changes to Saudi religious policy have led some to suggest that "Islamists throughout the world will have to follow suit or risk winding up on the wrong side of orthodoxy".[1]

  1. ^ a b DAOUD, KAMEL (16 November 2017). "If Saudi Arabia Reforms, What Happens to Islamists Elsewhere?". The New York Times. New York Times. Retrieved 16 November 2017.
  2. ^ Musa, Mohd Faizal (2018). "The Riyal and Ringgit of Petro-Islam: Investing Salafism in Education". In Saat, Norshahril (ed.). Islam in Southeast Asia: Negotiating Modernity. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing. pp. 63–88. doi:10.1355/9789814818001-006. ISBN 9789814818001. S2CID 159438333.
  3. ^ a b c d Wagemakers, Joas (2021). "Part 3: Fundamentalisms and Extremists – The Citadel of Salafism". In Cusack, Carole M.; Upal, M. Afzal (eds.). Handbook of Islamic Sects and Movements. Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion. Vol. 21. Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers. pp. 333–347. doi:10.1163/9789004435544_019. ISBN 978-90-04-43554-4. ISSN 1874-6691.
  4. ^ Hasan, Noorhaidi (2010). "The Failure of the Wahhabi Campaign: Transnational Islam and the Salafi madrasa in post-9/11 Indonesia". South East Asia Research. 18 (4). Taylor & Francis on behalf of the SOAS University of London: 675–705. doi:10.5367/sear.2010.0015. ISSN 2043-6874. JSTOR 23750964. S2CID 147114018.
  5. ^ "6 common misconceptions about Salafi Muslims in the West". OUPblog. 5 October 2016. Retrieved 20 August 2021.
  6. ^ a b Kepel, Gilles (2003). Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. New York City: I.B. Tauris. pp. 61–62. ISBN 9781845112578.
  7. ^ a b Gaffney, Jr., Frank (8 December 2003). "Waging the 'War of Ideas'". Center for Security Policy. Retrieved 8 July 2017.
  8. ^ a b Kepel, Gilles (2006). Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. I.B. Tauris. p. 51. ISBN 9781845112578. Well before the full emergence of Islamism in the 1970s, a growing constituency nicknamed `petro-Islam` included Wahhabi ulemas and Islamist intellectuals and promoted strict implementation of the sharia in the political, moral and cultural spheres; this proto-movement had few social concerns and even fewer revolutionary ones.
  9. ^ JASSER, ZUHDI. "STATEMENT OF ZUHDI JASSER, M.D., PRESIDENT, AMERICAN ISLAMIC FORUM FOR DEMOCRACY. 2013 ANTI–SEMITISM: A GROWING THREAT TO ALL FAITHS. HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON AFRICA, GLOBAL HEALTH, GLOBAL HUMAN RIGHTS, AND INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS OF THE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES" (PDF). FEBRUARY 27, 2013. U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE. p. 27. Retrieved 31 March 2014. Lastly, the Saudis spent tens of billions of dollars throughout the world to pump Wahhabism or petro-Islam, a particularly virulent and militant version of supremacist Islamism.
  10. ^ Mandaville, Peter; Hammond, Andrew (2022). "1: Wahhabism and the World: The Historical Evolution, Structure, and Future of Saudi Religious Transnationalism". Wahhabism and the World: Understanding Saudi Arabia's Global Influence on Islam. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 6–10. ISBN 978-0197532577.
  11. ^ a b c House, Karen Elliott (2012). On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines and Future. Knopf. p. 234. ISBN 978-0307473288. To this day, the regime funds numerous international organizations to spread fundamentalist Islam, including the Muslim World League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, the International Islamic Relief Organization, and various royal charities such as the Popular Committee for Assisting the Palestinian Muhahedeen, led by Prince Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, now minister of defense, who often is touted as a potential future king. Supporting da'wah, which literally means `making an invitation` to Islam, is a religious requirement that Saudi rulers feel they could not abandon without losing their domestic legitimacy as protectors and propagators of Islam. Yet in the wake of 9/11, American anger at the kingdom led the U.S. government to demand controls on Saudi largesse to Islamic groups that funded terrorism.
  12. ^ a b Lacey, Robert (2009). Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia. Viking. p. 95. ISBN 9780670021185. The Kingdom's 70 or so embassies around the world already featured cultural, educational, and military attaches, along with consular officers who organized visas for the hajj. Now they were joined by religious attaches, whose job was to get new mosques built in their countries and to persuade existing mosques to propagate the dawah wahhabiya.
  13. ^ Ibrahim, Youssef Michel (11 August 2002). "The Mideast Threat That's Hard to Define". cfr.org. The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 4 September 2014. Retrieved 21 August 2014. ... money that brought Wahabis power throughout the Arab world and financed networks of fundamentalist schools from Sudan to northern Pakistan.
  14. ^ According to diplomat and political scientist Dore Gold, this funding was for support for Saudi approved Islam in Non-Muslim countries alone. Gold, Dore (2003). Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism. Regnery. p. 126.
  15. ^ Ibrahim, Youssef Michel (11 August 2002). "The Mideast Threat That's Hard to Define". Council on foreign relations. Washington Post. Archived from the original on 4 September 2014. Retrieved 25 October 2014.
  16. ^ House, Karen Elliott (2012). On Saudi Arabia : Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines and Future. Knopf. p. 234. A former US Treasury Department official is quoted by Washington Post reporter David Ottaway in a 2004 article [Ottaway, David The King's Messenger New York: Walker, 2008, p.185] as estimating that the late king [Fadh] spent `north of $75 billion` in his efforts to spread Wahhabi Islam. According to Ottaway, the king boasted on his personal Web site that he established 200 Islamic colleges, 210 Islamic centers, 1500 mosques, and 2000 schools for Muslim children in non-Islamic nations. The late king also launched a publishing center in Medina that by 2000 had distributed 138 million copies of the Koran worldwide.
  17. ^ Kepel, Gilles (2006). Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. I.B. Tauris. p. 72. ISBN 9781845112578. founded in 1962 as a counterweight to Nasser's propaganda, opened new offices in every area of the world where Muslims lived. The league played a pioneering role in supporting Islamic associations, mosques, and investment plans for the future. In addition, the Saudi ministry for religious affairs printed and distributed millions of Korans free of charge, along with Wahhabite doctrinal texts, among the world's mosques, from the African plains to the rice paddies of Indonesia and the Muslim immigrant high-rise housing projects of European cities. For the first time in fourteen centuries, the same books ... could be found from one end of the Umma to the other... hewed to the same doctrinal line and excluded other currents of thought that had formerly been part of a more pluralistic Islam.
  18. ^ Kepel, Gilles (2002). Jihad: On the Trail of Political Islam. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 220. ISBN 9781845112578. Retrieved 6 July 2015. Hostile as they were to the `sheikists`, the jihadist-salafists were even angrier with the Muslim Brothers, whose excessive moderation they denounced ...
  19. ^ a b Roy, Olivier (1994). The Failure of Political Islam. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 117. ISBN 9780674291416. Retrieved 2 April 2015 – via Internet Archive. The Muslim Brothers agreed not to operate in Saudi Arabia itself, but served as a relay for contacts with foreign Islamist movements. The MBs also used as a relay in South Asia movements long established on an indigenous basis (Jamaat-i Islami). Thus the MB played an essential role in the choice of organisations and individuals likely to receive Saudi subsidies. On a doctrinal level, the differences are certainly significant between the MBs and the Wahhabis, but their common references to Hanbalism ... their rejection of the division into juridical schools, and their virulent opposition to Shiism and popular religious practices (the cult of 'saints') furnished them with the common themes of a reformist and puritanical preaching. This alliance carried in its wake older fundamentalist movements, non-Wahhabi but with strong local roots, such as the Pakistani Ahl-i Hadith or the Ikhwan of continental China.
  20. ^ Cite error: The named reference Commins-141 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  21. ^ a b c Kepel, Gilles (2004). The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West. Harvard University Press. p. 156. ISBN 9780674015753. Retrieved 4 April 2015. In the melting pot of Arabia during the 1960s, local clerics trained in the Wahhabite tradition joined with activists and militants affiliated with the Muslims Brothers who had been exiled from the neighboring countries of Egypt, Syria and Iraq ... The phenomenon of Osama bin Laden and his associates cannot be understood outside this hybrid tradition.
  22. ^ Gold, Dore (2003). Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism. Regnery. p. 237. ISBN 9781596988194.
  23. ^ Armstrong, Karen (27 November 2014). "Wahhabism to ISIS: how Saudi Arabia exported the main source of global terrorism". New Statesman. London. Archived from the original on 27 November 2014. Retrieved 8 September 2020. A whole generation of Muslims, therefore, has grown up with a maverick form of Islam [i.e. Wahhabism] that has given them a negative view of other faiths and an intolerantly sectarian understanding of their own. While not extremist per se, this is an outlook in which radicalism can develop.
  24. ^ Pabst, Adrian. "Pakistan must confront Wahhabism". Guardian. Unlike many Sunnis in Iraq, most Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan have embraced the puritanical and fundamentalist Islam of the Wahhabi mullahs from Saudi Arabia who wage a ruthless war not just against western "infidels" but also against fellow Muslims they consider to be apostates, in particular the Sufis. ... in the 1980s ... during the Afghan resistance against the Soviet invasion, elements in Saudi Arabia poured in money, arms and extremist ideology. Through a network of madrasas, Saudi-sponsored Wahhabi Islam indoctrinated young Muslims with fundamentalist Puritanism, denouncing Sufi music and poetry as decadent and immoral.


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