The Petrodollar Globalisation of Wahhabism
The 1973 Arab oil embargo, triggered by Arab states' response to US support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War, quadrupled the price of oil in a matter of weeks. Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, suddenly found itself with revenues beyond what domestic consumption or infrastructure investment could absorb. The Saudi state — which had formalized the Wahhabi-Saudi alliance into its constitutional ideology — deployed this surplus into an unprecedented global Islamic project. The mechanism was systematic: the World Muslim League (Rabitat al-Alam al-Islami), founded in 1962 but dramatically expanded with oil money after 1973, funded the construction of mosques, Islamic centres, and madrasas (Islamic schools) across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Saudi-funded institutions were built in Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Senegal, the United Kingdom, the United States, and dozens of other countries. The education provided in these institutions — curricula designed in Saudi Arabia, textbooks printed in Saudi Arabia — taught Wahhabi-Salafi doctrine: the condemnation of saint veneration, Sufi practices, and Shia Islam as polytheism; strict gender segregation; the obligation to enforce Islamic law. The scale of this project was without precedent. Estimates suggest that between 1975 and 2002, Saudi Arabia spent between $75 billion and $100 billion on Islamic proselytism (dawa) worldwide — more, per Gilles Kepel's calculation, than the Soviet Union spent on Cold War communist propaganda. In regions that had practised syncretic, locally rooted forms of Islam for centuries — West Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Central Asia — the Saudi-funded institutions systematically replaced local practices with a standardised Wahhabi orthodoxy. The consequences were profound and uneven. In some contexts the Saudi money funded genuine educational and social services that states could not provide. In others it fuelled the radicalisation that would produce Deobandi networks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and jihadist networks across the Sahel. The most direct line runs through Pakistan: Saudi funding of Pakistani madrasas from the 1980s onward trained the Taliban cohort that would rule Afghanistan, provide sanctuary to al-Qaeda, and generate the human capital for a generation of Sunni jihadism. The Saudi state did not intend to create al-Qaeda; the relationship between Wahhabism and jihadist terrorism is contested and complex. But the ideological infrastructure — the madrasas, the textbooks, the global networks — created an environment in which the transition from Salafi piety to Salafi-jihadist violence was shorter and more common than it would otherwise have been.
- Year: 1973 CE
- Category: Economic
