The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project
KRITHIKA VARAGUR
(COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS, 232 PP, £11.99)
Tablet bookshop price £10.79 • Tel 020 7799 4064
The pervasive influence of Saudi petrodollars and Saudi proselytisation has become a commonplace, but one seldom fortified by hard data and cool analysis. Krithika Varagur, who covers Indonesia for The Guardian, examines this influence in a novel way by taking case studies from across the Muslim world – from Indonesia to Nigeria to Kosovo. The result is illuminating.
The Saudi da’wa (or call) got under way in the 1970s when King Faisal adopted Islamic solidarity as the cornerstone of his foreign policy. Flush with new oil wealth, the Kingdom started a programme of building mosques and schools, and distributing Qur’ans, scholarships and medical aid, around the world. Along with the aid it exported its own brand of Islam, Wahhabism, part of the wider family of austerely conservative Sunni Islam known as Salafism.