Pre-oil influence Early in the 20th century, before the appearance of oil export wealth, other factors gave
Salafiyya movement appeal to some Muslims according to one scholar (
Khaled Abou El Fadl). •
Arab nationalism, (in the Arab Muslim world) which followed the Arab Salafi-Wahhabi attack on the (non-Arab) Ottoman Empire. Although the Salafis strongly opposed nationalism, the fact that they were Arab undoubtedly appealed to the large majority of Ottoman Empire citizens who were Arab also; • Religious reformism, which followed a return to
Salaf (as-Salaf aṣ-Ṣāliḥ); • Destruction of the Hejaz
Khilafa in 1925 (which had attempted to replace the Ottoman Caliphate); • Control of
Mecca and
Medina, which gave Salafis great influence on Muslim culture and thinking;
"Petro-dollars" According to scholar
Gilles Kepel, (who devoted a chapter of his book
Jihad to the subject – "Building Petro-Islam on the Ruins of Arab Nationalism"), between $2 and 3 billion per year since 1975 (compared to the annual Soviet propaganda budget of $1 billion/year); and "at least $87 billion" from 1987 to 2007. Funding came from the Saudi government, foundations, private sources such as networks based on religious authorities. In the coming decades, Saudi Arabia's interpretation of Islam became influential (according to Kepel) through • the spread of Salafi religious doctrines via Saudi charities; • an increased migration of Muslims to work in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states; • a shift in the balance of power among Muslim states toward the oil-producing countries. Kepel describes Saudi control of the two holy cities as "an essential instrument of hegemony over Islam." From 1975 to 2005, the Saudi Arabian government donated £49 billion in aid – the most of any donor country per capita. The Saudi ministry for religious affairs printed and distributed millions of
Qurans free of charge. The late king also launched a publishing center in
Medina that by 2000 had distributed 138 million copies of the
Quran (the central
religious text of Islam) worldwide. The European Parliament quotes an estimate of $10 billion being spent by Saudi Arabia to promote Salafi missionary activities through charitable foundations such as the
International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), the
al-Haramain Foundation, the Medical Emergency Relief Charity (MERC),
World Muslim League and the
World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY).
Hajj Hajj—"the greatest and most sacred annual assembly of Muslims on earth"—takes place in the Hijaz region of Saudi Arabia. While only 90,000 pilgrims visited Mecca in 1926, since 1979 between 1.5 million and 2 million Muslims have made the pilgrims each year. In 1986 the Saudi king took the title of the "Custodian of the Two Holy Places", the better to emphasize Salafi control of Mecca and Medina. The
Islamic University of Madinah was established as an alternative to the famous and venerable
Al-Azhar University in Cairo which was under
Nasserist control in 1961 when the Islamic University was founded. The school was not under the jurisdiction of the Saudi grand
mufti. The school was intended to education students from across the Muslim world, and eventually 85% of its student body was non-Saudi making it an import tool for spreading Salafi Islam internationally. Many of Egypt's future
ulama attended the university.
Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy, who later became the grand mufti of Egypt, spent four years at the Islamic University. Tantawy demonstrated his devotion to the kingdom in a June 2000 interview with the Saudi newspaper Ain al-Yaqeen, where he blamed the "violent campaign" against Saudi human rights policy on the campaigners' antipathy towards Islam. "Saudi Arabia leads the world in the protection of human rights because it protects them according to the
sharia of God." According to Mohamed Charfi, a former minister of education in Tunisia, "Saudi Arabia ... has also been one of the main supporters of Islamic fundamentalism because of its financing of schools following the ... Wahhabi doctrine. Saudi-backed madrasas in Pakistan and Afghanistan have played significant roles" in the strengthening of "radical Islam" there. Saudi funding to Egypt's al-Azhar center of Islamic learning, has been credited with causing that institution to adopt a more religiously conservative approach. Following the October
2002 Bali bombings, an Indonesian commentator (Jusuf Wanandi) worried about the danger of "extremist influences of Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia" in the educational system.
Literature The works of one strict classical Islamic jurist often cited in Salafi books —
Ibn Taymiyyah — were distributed for free throughout the world starting in the 1950s. Insofar as curriculum used by foreign students in Saudi Arabia or in Saudi-sponsored schools mirrors that of Saudi schools, critics complain that traditionally it “encourages violence toward others, and misguides the pupils into believing that in order to safeguard their own religion, they must violently repress and even physically eliminate the ‘other.’” A study was undertaken by the
Policy Exchange. Published material was examined from many mosques and Islamic institutions within the United Kingdom. The 2007 study uncovered a considerable volume of Salafi material. The preface-wording of the first (of 11 recommendations of the study) says, "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia must come clean about the publication and dissemination of this material abroad". The study report is entitled,
The hijacking of British Islam: How extremist literature is subverting mosques in the UK.
Literature translations In distributing free copies of English translations of the Quran, Saudi Arabia naturally used interpretations favored by its religious establishment. An example being sura 33, ayah 59 where a literal translation of a verse (according to critic Khaled M. Abou El Fadl) would read: O Prophet! Tell your wives and thy daughters and the women of the believers to lower (or possibly, draw upon themselves) their garments. This is better so that they will not be known and molested. And, God is forgiving and merciful. while the authorized version reads: O Prophet! Tell your wives and thy daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks (veils) all over their bodies (i.e. screen themselves completely except the eyes or one eye to see the way). That will be better, that they should be known (as free respectable women) so as not to be annoyed. And Allah is Ever Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful. In the translation of the
Al-Fatiha, the first surah, parenthetical references to Jews and Christians are added, speaking of addressing Allah "those who earned Your Anger (such as the Jews), nor of those who went astray (such as the Christians)." According to
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University and the editor in chief of
The Study Quran, these explanations of who makes God angry and who went astray have "no basis in Islamic tradition." More than 1,500 mosques were built around the world from 1975 to 2000 paid for by Saudi public funds. The Saudi-headquartered and financed
Muslim World League played a pioneering role in supporting Islamic associations, mosques, and investment plans for the future. It opened offices in "every area of the world where Muslims lived." The process of financing mosques usually involved presenting a local office of the Muslim World League with evidence of the need for a mosque/Islamic center to obtain the offices `recommendation` (
tazkiya) that the Muslim group hoping for a mosque would present, not to the Saudi government, but to "a generous donor" within the kingdom or the United Arab Emirates. Saudi-financed mosques did not adhere to local Islamic architectural traditions, but were built in the austere Salafi style, using marble `international style` design and green neon lighting. Former
British ambassador to Saudi Arabia,
Sir William Patey, has asserted that Saudi Arabia's funding of mosques and promotion of Salafi Wahhabism in Europe has led to radicalization and fundamentalist extremism in the continent. The
Henry Jackson Society has published a report linking Saudi promotion of
Salafism to violent extremism in the
United Kingdom. A leaked intelligence report from Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence agency and Federal Intelligence Service (BND) also asserted that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar supported extremist Islamic groups inside
Germany. The European Union and the United States have remarked in several occasions Saudi Arabia's promotion of
Salafism and its possible link with violent fundamentalism in the
West.
Televangelism One of the most popular Islamic preachers is Indian "
televangelist",
Zakir Naik, a controversial figure who believes that then US President
George W. Bush orchestrated the
9/11 attacks. Naik dresses in a suit rather than traditional garb and gives colloquial lectures speaking in English not
Urdu. Naik has gotten at least some publicity and funds in the form of Islamic awards from Saudi and other Gulf states. His awards include: • the 2015
King Faisal International Prize for Services to Islam worth $200,000; • Islamic Personality of the Year Award 2013 from the
Dubai International Holy Quran Award. The award was presented by
Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum,
Ruler of Dubai and Minister of Finance and Industry of the United Arab Emirates; • The 2013
Sharjah Award for Voluntary Work from the
Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi,
emir of Sharjah (one of the emirates of the UAE).
Ethnic evangelism In the 1980s and 1990 a group of African American Muslims received scholarships to Saudi universities in the hopes that they would "aggressively" spread Salafi Islam when they returned to their home countries. Among them were Abu Ameenah
Bilal Philips who generated wide appeal among Salafi and non-Salafi Muslims. A strong African American Salafi movement emerged following the efforts of Philips and other Saudi-educated African American Salafi along with the regular networks and relationships they established and maintained with the major Salafi scholars in Saudi Arabia such as
Ibn Baz (d. 1999) and
al-Uthaymin (d. 2001) Philips help create an indelible connection between Saudi Arabian Salafism and African American Salafis according to Jefrey Diamant:
Other means According to critic
Khaled Abou El Fadl, the funding available to those who support official Saudi-backed Salafi views has incentivized Muslim "schools, book publishers, magazines, newspapers, or even governments" around the world to "shape their behavior, speech, and thought in such a way as to incur and benefit from Saudi largesse." An example being the salary for "a Muslim scholar spending a six-month sabbatical" at a Saudi Arabian university, is more than ten years of pay "teaching at the Azhar University in Egypt." Thus acts such as "failing to veil" or failing to advocate veiling can mean the difference between "enjoying a decent standard of living or living in abject poverty.” Another incentive available to the Saudi Arabia, according to Abou el Fadl, is the power to grant or deny scholars a visa for
hajj. According to Khalid Abou el Fadl, books by alternative non-Saudi scholars of Salafism have been made scarce by Saudi government approved Salafis who have discouraged distributing copies of their work. Examples of such authors are the Syrian Salafi scholar
Rashid Rida, Yemeni jurist Muhammad al-Amir al-Husayni al-San'ani, and Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's own brother and critic Sulayman Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. One critic who suffered at the hands of Saudi-backed Wahhabi Salafists was an influential Salafi jurist,
Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1996) who wrote a critique of the influence of Wahhabi Salafism upon the "Salafi creed"—its alleged "literalism, anti-rationalism, and anti-interpretive approach to Islamic texts". Despite the fact that al-Ghazali took care to use the term "Ahl al-Hadith" not "Wahhabi", the reaction to his book was "frantic and explosive", according to Abou el Fadl. Not only did a "large number" of "puritans" write to condemn al-Ghazali and "to question his motives and competence", but "several major" religious conferences were held in Egypt and Saudi Arabia to criticize the book, and the Saudi newspaper
al-Sharq al-Awsat published "several long article responding to al-Ghazali." Saudi-backed Salafis "successfully preventing the republication of his work" even in his home country of Egypt, and "generally speaking made his books very difficult to locate." Saudi Arabians also helped establish Islamic banks with private investors and depositors.
DMI (Dar al-Mal al-Islami: the House of Islamic Finance), founded in 1981 by Prince
Mohammed bin Faisal Al Saud, and the
Al Baraka group, established in 1982 by Sheik
Saleh Abdullah Kamel (a Saudi billionaire), were both transnational holding companies. By 1995, there were "144 Islamic financial institutions worldwide", (not all of them Saudi financed) including 33 government-run banks, 40 private banks, and 71 investment companies.
Migration By 1975, over one million workers—from unskilled country people to experienced professors, from Sudan, Pakistan, India, Southeast Asia, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria—had moved to Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states to work, and return after a few years with savings. A majority of these workers were Arab and most were Muslim. Ten years later the number had increased to 5.15 million and Arabs were no longer in the majority. 43% (mostly Muslims) came from the Indian subcontinent. In one country, Pakistan, in a single year, (1983), Muslims who had moved to Saudi Arabia, or other "oil-rich monarchies of the peninsula" to work, often returned to their poor home country following religious practice more intensely, particularly practices of Salafi Muslims. Having grown prosperous in a Salafi environment, it was not surprising that the returning Muslims believed there was a connection between a Salafu environment and its "material prosperity", and that on return they followed religious practices more intensely and that those practices followed tenets of Salafi. Kepel gives examples of migrant workers returning home with new affluence, asking to be addressed by servants as "hajja" rather than "Madame" (the old bourgeois custom). Another imitation of Saudi Arabia adopted by affluent migrant workers was increased segregation of the sexes, including shopping areas. (It has also been suggested that Saudi Arabia has used cutbacks on the number of workers from a country allowed to work in it to punish a country for domestic policies it disapproves of.) As of 2013 there are some 9 million registered foreign workers and at least a few million more illegal immigrants in Saudi Arabia, about half of the estimated 16 million citizens in the kingdom.
State leadership In the 1950s and 1960s
Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leading exponent of
Arab nationalism and the president of the Arab world's largest country had great prestige and popularity among Arabs. However, in 1967 Nasser led the
Six-Day War against Israel which ended not in the elimination of Israel but in the decisive defeat of the Arab forces and loss of a substantial chunk of Egyptian territory. This defeat, combined with the economic stagnation from which Egypt suffered, were contrasted six years later with an
embargo by the Arab "oil-exporting countries" against Israel's western allies that stopped Israel's counteroffensive, and Saudi Arabia great economic power. The
Organisation of Islamic Cooperation—whose permanent Secretariat is located in
Jeddah in Western Saudi Arabia—was founded after the 1967 war. Saudi Arabia has expressed its displeasure with policies of poor Muslim countries by not hiring or expelling nationals from the country, thus denying them badly needed workers' remittances. In 2013 it punished the government of Bangladesh by lessening the number of Bangladeshis allowed to enter Saudi after a crackdown in Bangladesh on the Islamist Jamaat-e Islami party, which according to the Economist magazine "serves as a standard-bearer" for Saudi Arabia's "strand of Islam in Bangladesh". (In fiscal year 2012, Bangladesh received $3.7 billion in official remittances from Saudi Arabia, "which is quite a lot more than either receives in economic aid.")
Influence on Islamism According to one source (Olivier Roy), the fusion/joint venture/hybridisation of the two Sunni movements (
Salafiyya movement and Sunni Islamism) helped isolate Islamist Shia
Islamic Republic of Iran, and move Islamism more towards fundamentalism or "neofundamentalism", where opposition to the West is "expressed in religious terms", i.e. "criticism of Christianity" and "marked anti-Semitism". In Afghanistan for example, the Salafis circulated an anti-Shiite pamphlet titled
Tuhfa-i ithna ashariyya (The gift of the twelver Shia) republished in Turkey in 1988 and widely distributed in
Peshwar. In turn, articles and stories of how Salafism allegedly is "a creation of British imperialism" circulate in some Iranian circles.
Military jihad During the 1980s and ’90s, the monarchy and the clerics of Saudi Arabia helped to channel tens of millions of dollars to Sunni jihad fighters in Afghanistan, Bosnia and elsewhere. While apart from the Afghan jihad against the Soviets and perhaps the Taliban jihad, the jihads may not have worked to propagate conservative Islam, and the numbers of their participants was relatively small, they did have considerable impact.
Afghan jihad against Soviets The Afghan jihad against the Soviet Army following the Soviet's December 1979 invasion of Kabul Afghanistan, has been called a "great cause with which Islamists worldwide identified," and the peak of Salafii-Islamist and Islamic Revivalist "collaboration and triumph." The Saudis spent several billion dollars (along with the United States and Pakistan), supported with "financing, weaponry, and intelligence" the native Afghan and "
Afghan Arabs"
mujahideen (fighters of jihad) fighting the Soviets and their Afghan allies. Other funding for volunteers came from the Saudi
Red Crescent, Muslim World League, and privately, from Saudi princes. At "training camps and religious schools (madrasa)" across the frontier in Pakistan—more than 100,000 Muslim volunteer fighters from 43 countries over the years—were provided with "radical, extremist indoctrination".
Mujahidin training camps in Pakistan trained not just volunteers fighting the Soviets but Islamists returning to Kashmir (including the Kashmir Hizb-i Islami) and Philippine (Moros), among others. In addition to training and indoctrination the war served as "a crucible for the synthesis of disparate Islamic revivalist organizations into loose coalition of likeminded jihadist groups that viewed the war" not as a struggle between freedom and foreign tyranny, but "between Islam and unbelief." The war turned Jihadists from a "relatively insignificant" group into "a major force in the Muslim world." The 1988–89 withdrawal by the Soviets from Afghanistan leaving the Soviet allied Afghan Marxists to their own fate was interpreted by jihad fighters and supporters as "a sign of God's favor and the righteousness of their struggle." Afghan Arabs volunteers returned from Afghanistan to join local Islamist groups in struggles against their allegedly “apostate” governments. Others went to fight jihad in places such as Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. In at least one case a former Soviet fighter –
Jumma Kasimov of Uzbekistan—went on to fight jihad in his ex-Soviet Union state home, setting up the headquarters of his
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in Taliban Afghanistan in 1997, and reportedly given millions of dollars' worth of aid by Osama bin Laden. Saudi Arabia saw its support for jihad against the Soviets as a way to counter the
Iranian Revolution—which initially generated considerable enthusiasm among Muslims—and contain its revolutionary, anti-monarchist influence (and also Shia influence in general) in the region. Its funding was also accompanied by Salafi literature and preachers who helped propagate the faith. With the help of Pakistani Deobandi groups, it oversaw the creation of new
madrassas and mosques in Pakistan, which increased the influence of Sunni Salafi Islam in that country and prepare recruits for the jihad in Afghanistan.
Afghan Taliban During the Soviet-Afghan war, Islamic schools (
madrassas) for Afghan refugees in Pakistan appeared in the 1980s near the Afghan-Pakistan border. Initially funded by zakat donations from Pakistan, nongovernmental organizations in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states became "important backers" later on. Many were radical schools sponsored by the Pakistan
JUI religious party and became "a supply line for jihad" in Afghanistan. Several years after the Soviet withdrawal and fall of the Marxist government, many of these Afghan refugee students developed as a religious-political-military force to stop the civil war among Afghan mujahideen factions and unify (most of) the country under their "
Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan". (Eight Taliban government ministers came from one school, Dar-ul-Uloom Haqqania.) While in power, the Taliban implemented the "strictest interpretation of
Sharia law ever seen in the
Muslim world," and was noted for its harsh
treatment of women. Saudis helped the Taliban in a number of ways. Saudi Arabia was one of only three countries (Pakistan and United Arab Emirates being the others) officially to recognize the Taliban as the official government of Afghanistan before the 9/11 attacks, (after 9/11 no country recognized it). King Fahd of Saudi Arabia “expressed happiness at the good measures taken by the Taliban and over the imposition of shari’a in our country," During a visit by the Taliban's leadership to the kingdom in 1997. According to Pakistani journalist
Ahmed Rashid who spent much time in Afghanistan, in the mid 1990s the Taliban asked Saudis for money and materials. Taliban leader
Mullah Omar told Ahmed Badeeb, the chief of staff of the Saudi General Intelligence: `Whatever Saudi Arabia wants me to do, ... I will do`. The Saudis in turn "provided fuel, money, and hundreds of new pickups to the Taliban ... Much of this aid was flown in to Kandahar from the Gulf port city of Dubai," according to Rashid. Another source, a witness to lawyers for the families of 9/11 victims, testified in a sworn statement that in 1998 he had seen an emissary for the director general of
Al Mukhabarat Al A'amah, Saudi Arabia's intelligence agency prince,
Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, hand a check for one billion Saudi riyals (approximately $267 million as of 10/2015) to a top Taliban leader in Afghanistan.) After the Taliban captured the Afghan capital
Kabul, Saudi expat
Osama bin Laden—who though in very bad graces with the Saudi government was very much influenced by Salafism or the Muslim Brotherhood-
Salafiyya hybrid—provided the Taliban with funds, use of his training camps and veteran "Arab-Afghan forces for combat, and engaged in all-night conversations with the Taliban leadership. The Taliban's brutal treatment of Shia, and the destruction of
Buddhist statues in Bamiyan Valley may also have been influenced by Salafism, which had a history of attacking Shia Muslims whom they considered heretics. In late July 1998, the Taliban used the trucks (donated by Saudis) mounted with machine guns to
capture the northern town of Mazar-e-Sharif. "Ahmed Rashid later estimated that 6000 to 8000 Shia men, women and children were slaughtered in a rampage of murder and rape that included slitting people's throats and bleeding them to death, halal-style, and baking hundreds of victims into shipping containers without water to be baked alive in the desert sun." This reminded at least one writer (Dore Gold) of the
Salafi attack on Shia shrine in
Karbala in 1802.
Other jihads From 1981 to 2006 an estimated 700 terror attacks outside of combat zones were perpetrated by Sunni extremists (usually
Jihadi Salafis such as
Al-Qaeda), killing roughly 7,000 people. What connection, if any, there is between Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia on the one hand and
Jihadi Salafis on the other hand, is disputed.
Allegations of Saudi links to terrorism "have been the subject of years" of US "government investigations and furious debate". In 2013, In July 2013, the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism. Between the mid-1970s and 2002 Saudi Arabia provided over $70 billion in "overseas development aid", the vast majority of this development being religious, specifically the propagation and extension of the influence of
Salafism at the expense of other forms of Islam. There has been an intense debate over whether Saudi aid and Salafism has fomented extremism in recipient countries. The two main ways in which Salafism and its funding is alleged to be connected to terror attacks are through •
Basic teachings. The Salafi doctrine of
''Al-Wala' wal Bara''', encourages hatred towards non-Muslims. Insofar as those hated and found intolerable are subject to violence, Salafi teachings leads to violence. The interpretation is spread (among other ways) by textbooks in Saudi Arabia and in "thousands of schools worldwide funded by fundamentalist Sunni Muslim charities". •
Funding attacks. The Saudi government and Saudi charitable foundations which are run by Salafi institutions have directly or indirectly offered financial aide to terrorists and terrorist groups. According to at least one source (Anthony H. Cordesman) this flow of money from the Kingdom to outside extremist has "probably" had more effect than the kingdom's "religious thinking and missionary efforts". In addition to donations by sincere believers in jihadism working in the charities, money for terrorists also comes as a form of pay off to terrorist groups by some members of the Saudi ruling class in part to keep the jihadists from being more active in Saudi Arabia, according to critics. Zachary Abuza estimates that the 300 private Islamic charities have established their base of operations in Saudi Arabia have distributed over $10 billion worldwide in support of an Salafi-Islamist agenda". Contributions from well off and wealthy Saudi's come from
zakat, but contributions are often more like 10% rather than the obligatory 2.5% of their income producing assets, and are followed up with minimal if any investigation of the contributions results. noting that
Osama bin Laden and fifteen out of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. In 2002 a
Council on Foreign Relations Terrorist Financing Task Force report found that: “For years, individuals and charities based in Saudi Arabia have been the most important source of funds for al-Qaeda. And for years, Saudi officials have turned a blind eye to this problem.” According to a 10 July 2002, briefing given to the US Department of Defense Defense Policy Board, ("a group of prominent intellectuals and former senior officials that advises the Pentagon on defense policy.") by a Neo-Conservative (
Laurent Murawiec, a
RAND Corporation analyst), "The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader," Some examples of funding are checks written by Princess
Haifa bint Faisal—the wife of Prince
Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington—totaling as much as $73,000 ended up with
Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi who hosted and otherwise helped two of the 11 September hijackers when they reached America. They Imprisoned former al-Qaeda operative, Zacarias Moussaoui, stated in deposition transcripts filed in February 2015 that more than a dozen prominent Saudi figures, (including Prince Turki al-Faisal Al Saud, a former Saudi intelligence chief) donated to al Qaeda in the late 1990s. Saudi officials have denied this. Lawyers filing a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia for the families of 9/11 victims provided documents including • an interview with a "self-described Qaeda operative in Bosnia" who said that the
Saudi High Commission for Relief of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a charity "largely controlled by members of the royal family", provided "money and supplies to al-Qaeda" in the 1990s and "hired militant operatives" like himself. • a "confidential German intelligence report" with "line-by-line" descriptions of bank transfers with "dates and dollar amounts" made in the early 1990s, indicating tens of millions of dollars were sent by Prince
Salman bin Abdul Aziz (now King of Saudi Arabia) and other members of the Saudi royal family to a "charity that was suspected of financing militants’ activities in Pakistan and Bosnia".—terrorist groups such as
al-Qaeda, the Afghan
Taliban, and
Lashkar-e-Taiba in South Asia, for which "Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base". Part of this funding arises through the
zakat charitable donations (one of the "
Five Pillars of Islam") paid by all Saudis to charities, and amounting to at least 2.5% of their income. It is alleged that some of the charities serve as fronts for money laundering and
terrorist financing operations, and further that some Saudis "know full well the terrorist purposes to which their money will be applied". According to a January 2010 US intelligence report, "two senior Taliban fundraisers" had regularly travelled to the UAE, where the Taliban and Haqqani networks laundered money through local front companies. As of 2014, "deep-pocket donors and charitable organizations" in the Arabian gulf, are still providing "millions of dollars worth of aid to Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, according to David S. Cohen, the US Department of Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the time.
Teachings Among those who believe there is, or may be, a connection between
Wahhabi movement and Al-Qaeda include F. Gregory Gause III
Roland Jacquard, Rohan Gunaratna, Stephen Schwartz. Among those critics who allege that Salafi influence continues to created ideological "narrative" helpful to extremist violence (if not al-Qaeda specifically) is US scholar
Farah Pandith (an adjunct senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations) who "traveled to 80 countries between 2009 and 2014 as the first ever U.S. special representative to Muslim communities."In each place I visited, the Wahhabi influence was an insidious presence, changing the local sense of identity; displacing historic, culturally vibrant forms of Islamic practice; and pulling along individuals who were either paid to follow their rules or who became on their own custodians of the Wahhabi world view. Funding all this was Saudi money, which paid for things like the textbooks, mosques, TV stations and the training of Imams. in need of destruction. Focus on
Hubal, the seventh century stone idol, follows the Salafi focus on the importance of the need to destroy any and all idols. Biographers of
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed ("architect" of the
9/11 attacks) and
Ramzi Yousef (leader of the
1993 World Trade Center bombing that Yousef hoped would topple the North Tower, killing tens of thousands of office workers) have noted the influence of Salafism through Ramzi Yousef's father, Muhammad Abdul Karim, who was introduced to Salafism in the early 1980s while working in Kuwait. Others connect the group to
Sayyid Qutb and
Political Islam. Academic
Natana J. DeLong-Bas, senior
research assistant at the
Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at
Georgetown University, argues that though bin Laden "came to define Wahhabi Islam during the later years" of his life, his
militant Islam "was not representative of Wahhabi Islam as it is practiced in contemporary Saudi Arabia"
Karen Armstrong states that Osama bin Laden, like most Islamic extremists, followed the ideology of
Sayyid Qutb, not "Wahhabism".
Noah Feldman distinguishes between what he calls the "deeply conservative Wahhabis" and what he calls the "followers of political Islam in the 1980s and 1990s," such as
Egyptian Islamic Jihad and later
al-Qaeda leader
Ayman al-Zawahiri. While Saudi Wahhabis were "the largest funders of local
Muslim Brotherhood chapters and other hard-line
Islamists" during this time, they opposed jihadi resistance to Muslim governments and assassination of Muslim leaders because of their belief that "the decision to wage jihad lay with the ruler, not the individual believer". More recently the self-declared "
Islamic State" in Iraq and Syria headed by
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been described as both more violent than al-Qaeda and more closely aligned with Wahhabism. For their guiding principles, the leaders of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, are open and clear about their almost exclusive commitment to the Wahhabi movement of Sunni Islam. The group circulates images of Wahhabi religious textbooks from Saudi Arabia in the schools it controls. Videos from the group's territory have shown Wahhabi texts plastered on the sides of an official missionary van. ISIS eventually published its own books and out of the twelve works by Muslim scholars it republished, seven were by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism. Scholar
Bernard Haykel states that Wahhabism is the Islamic State's "closest religious cognate," and that "for Al Qaeda, violence is a means to an ends; for ISIS, it is an end in itself." Former
CIA director
James Woolsey described Saudi as "the soil in which
Al-Qaeda and its sister terrorist organizations are flourishing." However, the Saudi government strenuously denies these claims or that it exports religious or cultural extremism.
Individual Saudi nationals Saudi intelligence sources estimate that from 1979 to 2001 as many as 25,000 Saudis received military training in Afghanistan and other locations abroad, and many helped in jihad outside of the Kingdom. According to Saudi analyst
Ali al-Ahmed, "more than 6,000 Saudi nationals" have been recruited into al-Qaeda armies in Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen "since the Sept. 11 attacks". In Iraq, an estimated 3,000 Saudi nationals, "the majority of foreign fighters", were fighting alongside Al Qaeda in Iraq. == Debate about the impact of propagation on Salafi-Jihadist insurgencies ==