The Global Spread of Wahhabi Islam: How Great a Threat?

One of the things I’ve noted over the last several years, particularly working in Muslim-majority countries or countries with large Muslim populations, is an increase, of which we are all aware, in more radical forms of Islam, an increase in more extreme versions of Islamic law, and also an increase in Saudi influence.

Just a couple of illustrations. In 1999, the first Nigerian state to introduce a radical form of shariah, at least in the modern period, was the state of Zamfara. When its governor, Ahmed Sani, announced the introduction of this law, he had a Saudi official standing next to him. When I interviewed the governor a couple of years later, he had hundreds of motorbikes out in the courtyard of the governor’s residence. They were going to sexually segregate the taxis, so they would need more motorbikes to transport men. I could find out from no official source where the money came from. All the journalists in town assured me it was Saudi money.

Again, in Nigeria in the year 2004, Sheikh Abdul-Aziz, the Saudi religious and cultural attaché in Nigeria, said he and his government had been monitoring the application of Islamic law in Nigeria and greeted their results “with delight.” I might add that this is a situation in which perhaps over 50,000 people have died in the conflicts around such laws. One finds similar situations in Indonesia and in other countries.

First, on the Freedom House report on Saudi literature in the United States. Beginning in December 2003, we collected over 200 different titles of literature either on bookshelves or in libraries in American mosques across the country. We looked at more titles than that. The 200 we selected had to have at least two of the following characteristics: they were either official publications of a Saudi government ministry; they were distributed by the Saudi embassy; they were comprised of religious pronouncements by those in Saudi State positions; they were representative of the Wahhabi ideology in Saudi Arabia; and/or disseminated through a mosque or center supported by the Saudis. Only if two of those things were true did we look further at the title. We translated portions of 54 of these works.

The House of Saud became very, very wealthy and very, very frightened – wealthy because of the huge spike in oil prices by the end of the decade, taking them from a couple of billion dollars a year in foreign earnings to 20 billion dollars, and frightened because of two events: the fall of the Shah and the coming to power of Islamists to govern in Tehran among the hated Shiites, and the takeover attempt in Saudi Arabia, which was really a coup attempt that resulted in the takeover of the great mosque in Mecca by Islamist terrorists for a time.

The deal that I believe was struck, whether implicitly or explicitly who can say, was for the Wahhabis to be given all of the money in the world they could ever remotely dream of needing or wanting to spread their sect’s beliefs and for them to leave the House of Saud alone. The effect over the last 30 years, at least according to Alexei Alexiev, is that some 85 to 90 billion dollars – that is “billion” with a B – have been spent fostering and spreading Wahhabism in the world – totals that would have been a dream to the Comintern a generation before. You see it in the “madrassas,” or schools, of Pakistan and in the literature that Paul and Nina described in the Freedom House publication. It is there and really rather obvious.

Propagandhi711 wrote:intakaalam turaka bhajana chesi ippudu pisikuntunnadu wahabbism, house of saud ani....maakedo kothaga paatalu.

Another reliable estimate indicates that by 2005 the Saudis had spent some $90 billion to export Wahhabism globally, or twice the estimated rate of $1 billion per annum spent by the Soviet Union on propaganda during the Cold War.

This campaign of "petro-Islamism" has hit Western societies hard and most remain off balance. Britain "is in denial, having allowed the country to turn into a global hub of the Islamic jihad", Melanie Phillips observed in Londonistan. And British courts are being used to suppress details of the complex mechanisms utilised by Saudi interests to fund extremist groups, with at least two books falling victim to Saudi legal action.

In Australia, Wahhabi influence is also expanding. The estimated $120million spent by Saudi Arabia since the 1970s has funded mosques, schools, paid imams, sponsored Australian teachers and clerics to train in Saudi Arabia; financed youth groups and camps; and provided literature, overseas speakers, videos and other propaganda. One notorious video featured an Arabic song used by al-Qa'ida to promote jihad which contains the lines "with the swords we shall exterminate the infidels and death is the desire of the pure". In another infamous incident in 2007 a sheik gave a lecture on the Rulings on Performing Jihad, telling his students that it was permissible to kill children in battle.

In Australia, a Saudi plan for a $2.7 billion scholarship fund was revealed last year, apparently to facilitate the entry of Saudi university students into Australia in the face of restrictions on their entry into the US and Britain.

This occurs as Islamist activity on Australian campuses increases, involving not only students but academics. For example, the hardline anti-Western Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir distributes a magazine on university campuses, targeting bright, highly committed recruits, while the sheik behind the group advocates coups and revolutions against non-Muslim governments. Significantly, four of the seven suspects in the thwarted London and Glasgow terror attacks were linked to a Hizb ut-Tahrir cell in Cambridge.

The grip that Saudi financial power can have on universities extends to their elite centres of learning. As The Australian revealed, Griffith University "practically begged" the Saudi embassy for $1.3 million, offering to "reshape" its Islamic Research Unit in accordance with Saudi wishes.

These donations are already paying off. Last month, Griffith hosted the controversial Islamist ideologue Tariq Ramadan, as keynote speaker at a conference pointedly called The Challenges and Opportunities of Islam in the West: The Case of Australia. The symbolism at the conference was clear: the chairman of the opening ceremony was the head of the unit, whose salary is supplemented by the Saudi grant, and the Saudi ambassador made the welcoming remarks.