see also: islamic liberation theology, religion as revolutionary social justice, radical empathy and a relationship with god, the necessity of doubt, religious law and human fallibility

we have no idea, but let’s rectify that asap.

let’s start with the topical stuff. the saudi ruling family has put a blockade in place, dropped more bombs than have been used in most wars in history, and created the worst man-made famine in decades that is starving the entire country of yemen. they use slave labor for construction, deny women citizens rights, execute activists, and, as they’ve admitted now, murder and dismember foreign journalists on foreign soil. that’s all been covered at length elsewhere and that’s not what we’re gonna cover in this post, which is the fact that the saudi establishment funds massive campaigns of religious colonialism using restricted aid/sponsorship to change entire countries’ practice of islam to a wahhabism that benefits saudi state interests (we’ll get to that in a bit) and the obscene greed of the saudi ruling family:

$1 trillion dollars! that’s an obscene, incomprehensible amount. that’s enough to give all 800 million people on earth living in extreme poverty (under $2 a day) $1200 each, or MVR 20,000. all 800 million people in extreme poverty on this planet, most doing back-breaking work every day, even if they somehow didn’t spend a cent of their income, would take two years to save up that much wealth.

$1 trillion dollars generates about $60-100 billion every year in just interest alone even if it all just sits there in a fund untouched (without compounding, so if you spent all $60-100 billion of that interest every year. that’s roughly the total wealth of mark zuckerburg, EVERY YEAR. it’s such an unbelievable number i want to emphasize it: if the saudi royal family spent SIXTY BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR, they would still have a trillion, that’s one thousand billion, dollars left). that said, it doesn’t stay untouched:

who the fuck needs a gold escalator to move 20 feet? and these are the folks claiming to have some kind of unique religious authority? i don’t remember stories of the sahabah getting custom-made gold caravans shipped over to cross the street.

for context– and remember that the whole conceit of wahhabism is a return to the ways of the prophet and the sahabah– that sounds very different from this:

hmm. everything we know about the lifestyles of saudi royalty (used interchangeably with saudi state, or saudi establishment, as is the case in an absolute monarchy), doesn’t really seem to vibe with those principles. anyway.

and prepare to be even more blown away by obscene wealth and obscene greed, this time even on the doorstep of the kaaba:

what the fuck, man.

it’s also important to note here that these hundreds of billions of dollars spent on extravagant displays of wealth could easily have been a smidge less extravagant and actually paid and treated the workers building all of this well. most human trafficking offenses are legal in saudi arabia, and the state has barely bothered to do anything about it. domestic workers are denied protections under saudi labor law. the government resolves most complaints of foreign worker abuse through mediation, setting up a largely powerless non-citizen worker with no provided legal aid thousands of miles from home to receive any justice in name only, and for the most part just sends victims back to their home countries without investigating or prosecuting crimes against them. that said, we as a country are implicit in doing kinda the same things ourselves and it’s horrific in both cases.

but anyway. now for how they’ve affected us as a country. it’s not a unique path that the saudi establishment has taken with the maldives: it’s right out of a playbook that’s applied around the world.

But Saudi Arabia has, for decades, been making investments of a different sort—those aimed at influencing Indonesian culture and religion. The king’s current visit is the apex of that methodical campaign, and “has the potential to accelerate the expansion of Saudi Arabia’s cultural resources in Indonesia,” according to Chris Chaplin, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asia. “In fact, given the size of his entourage, I wouldn’t be surprised if there will be a flurry of networking activity amongst Indonesian alumni of Saudi universities.”

Since 1980, Saudi Arabia has devoted millions of dollars to exporting its strict brand of Islam, Salafism, to historically tolerant and diverse Indonesia. It has built more than 150 mosques (albeit in a country that has about 800,000), a huge free university in Jakarta, and several Arabic language institutes; supplied more than 100 boarding schools with books and teachers (albeit in a country estimated to have between 13,000 and 30,000 boarding schools); brought in preachers and teachers; and disbursed thousands of scholarships for graduate study in Saudi Arabia. All this adds up to a deep network of Saudi influence.

“The advent of Salafism in Indonesia is part of Saudi Arabia’s global project to spread its brand of Islam throughout the Muslim world,” said Din Wahid, an expert on Indonesian Salafism at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) in Jakarta.

Indonesia may be the largest stage for Saudi Arabia’s cultural diplomacy, but it’s hardly the only one. Saudi Arabia built satellite campuses for Egypt’s Al-Azhar university in the 1980s, funded Bosnian rebels and later built them schools in the 1990s, bankrolled numerous madrassas in pre-Taliban Pakistan and Afghanistan, and sent 25,000 clerics to India between 2011 and 2013. Al-Hattem, of LIPIA Jakarta, was previously stationed at Saudi outfits in Bosnia and Djibouti. [x]

for a little backstory, i’m gonna let the same atlantic article summarize it for me:

It arose in reaction to 18th-century European colonialism in the Middle East, but it took particular root in Saudi Arabia in the hands of the influential preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Al-Wahhab’s alliance with the House of Saud in 1744 cemented Wahhabism as the spiritual backbone of the Saudi Arabian state. And in the 20th century, Saudi Arabia, which had become fabulously oil-rich, started to invest its considerable resources in propagating its ideology abroad.

the pattern starts to become familiar:

“Theology, which is a mandatory subject there, is only taught by committed Wahhabis, and I really think their ideology is antithetical to traditional Indonesian Islam, which is usually syncretic and relaxed,” he explained.

Hundreds of Indonesians receive scholarships to study at Saudi universities every year. A few decades in, alumni of these programs are becoming nationally influential in their home country. Habib Rizieq, the founder of the Islamic Defenders Front, a hardline organization associated with religion-related violence, attended both LIPIA and King Saud University in Riyadh. Jafar Umar Thalib, who founded the militant Salafi group Laskar Jihad, also graduated from LIPIA. Right-wing Islamist leaders like Hidayat Nur Wahid, a member of parliament who earned three degrees on scholarship from the University of Medina, are prominent in mainstream politics.

LIPIA alumni have also set up pesantren, or Islamic boarding schools, across Indonesia. Many of the country’s 100-odd Salafi pesantren are supplied by Saudi Arabia with teachers, especially of Arabic language, and textbooks, according to Din Wahid. For many poor families, these pesantren are the only feasible option for their kids’ schooling, despite ideological quibbles, Wahid said.

Enterprising Saudi envoys have even made inroads in places like Aceh, the westernmost Indonesian province that’s been wracked by natural disasters like the 2004 tsunami. “We have built mosques, hospitals, and schools there,” the Saudi ambassador to Indonesia, Mohammad Abdullah Alshuaibi, told me. “And an Arabic language institute.”

that timeline is important, by the way. the devastation of the 2004 tsunami on many primarily muslim regions around the indian ocean brought in an influx of rebuilding funds from saudi arabia. of course, that money comes with strings attached, and some of that rebuilding occurred in its own image. think about it. think about the timeline, before 2004 and after 2004.

and why is this important? because controlling access to knowledge is a staggering form of power. it allows you to shape the very fabric of reality that exists because, in many ways, “reality” as we see it is a sort of consensus, where we all agree on hearing and seeing and learning about the same things. but when you shape what we know of reality, what we’re told is the way that we actually live. i’m gonna be lazy and quote from something we’d written before:

the material history of islam wasn’t just a matter of interest for the history books, but a cornerstone of the way people practiced their entire faith, and either a potential source of or threat to the legitimacy of the current ruling establishment. control over that history was, and remains, extremely powerful. i am aware of my own fallibility. i don’t know if the history i know is the right history. i don’t know which details might have been shifted by conservative leaders to justify establishment power, or which details may have been added by ideologues in academia.

i don’t know which translations of arabic, a famously subtle and complex language with more ambiguity and possibilities of interpretation than any other major world language, back up my positions, or even whether verbal and oral histories would have captured those subtleties in their exact form instead of as the listener heard and understood it. i don’t know which philosophical and judicial scholarship over the centuries was brought into this history, and which were left out, and what selection bias might have shaped my knowledge of islamic history, thought, and practice…

here is something we do know, that i think illustrates everything above about the multitude of interpretations, histories, traditions, practices, identities that shift and evolve but, at each point during that evolution, insists that the way things are now is in fact how they always were.. let’s take a zoomed-out view and try to describe the maldives as an observer. confirm this with your own memories: think about dragonfly season from your childhood and try to visualize how you saw faith practiced then. think about old men reading salawat, or about amulets or pieces of paper with written dua that your grandparents told you to keep. dhivehi islamic identity from our first conversion, through to as recently as my childhood, was a form of indigenous-traditional sufi-inspired sunnism. abu barakat al-barbari was a somalian with sufi inspirations. religious leaders’ tombs, zikr, mawlud, barakai kiyevun, all sufism inspired. the idea that it was always wahhabi-inspired sunnism, and the idea that modern political religious figures are upholding our traditional identity is revisionism. half our traditional islam, as practiced by generations and generations before us, would be considered bid’a now.

who decided that, anyway? how did that happen, and how did i not even notice? why was there no real public interrogation of such a drastic shift in how institutions defined what religion was and how we should practice it? how does a country that literally defines itself by its faith switch completely from one interpretation to the other? i mean, the maldives considers its muslim identity such a crucial part of national identity that it’s a condition for citizenship. a huge change in what constitutes muslim identity is a crucial question. and i think it’s an important one.

the answer to “who decided, anyway?” is simple. this is who decides what reality is, and how they do it:

people will protest that what they learn and preach is directly from the texts, that they know arabic and know what’s said, but religious scripture is almost by definition incredibly complex and any study of scripture is influenced by the exegesis. nobody becomes a scholar of anything by just knowing the primary texts without a framework built by hundreds of scholars over decades, even centuries.

this applies even more for a text in arabic, a language that (to directly quote myself from earlier) is known for being more subtle and complex, with more room for ambiguity and possibilities of interpretation than almost any other major world language. any understanding of texts in historical dialects of a language that was literally known for a level of ambiguity and complexity that made it a perfect language for poetry, even in the time of the prophet (pbuh), is based on exegesis. the control of exegesis in any religion is, in a sense, exerting control over how people understand the scripture of that religion, and in this case the extreme wealth of the saudi state and its control over the kaaba means that they’re the ones controlling the realities and knowledge of what we consider religion to begin with, and they shape our entire body of knowledge in ways that bolster their objectives. here’s one example:

there’s other forms of control, aside from the massive funding and the control of access to religious knowledge:

One reason Indonesia has been reluctant to push back on Saudi cultural advances is the all-important hajj quota, the number of citizens who can make pilgrimage to Mecca in a given year. Indonesia gets the largest allowance in the world: 221,000 this year. But decade-long hajj waiting lists are common in many provinces, and jeopardizing the national allowance could provoke a huge backlash, said Dadi Darmadi, a UIN researcher and hajj expert.

“That being said, the Indonesian government has to be more wise and stop considering the hajj quota as a political gambit to attract more populist support in this country,” Darmadi said.

and that’s not good for us. having what we believe to be real about our religion and our own history and memory of how we practiced religion be shaped by parties with clear self-interest. this is particularly clear when we look at extremism here, which, again, is part of a pattern around the world:

Some of Indonesia’s leading jihadists have passed through Saudi institutions. Although Salafism is [officially] largely “quietist,” or discouraging of political activity, there is a growing faction of Salafi jihadists in Indonesia, according to Din Wahid.

In 1972, Saudi money helped to found the “ivy league” of jihadist pesantren, the Al-Mukmin school in Ngruki, Central Java. The Indonesian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah received funding from Saudi charities in the early 2000s. Salafi TV, YouTube channels, Facebook groups, and Telegram channels have become a fertile ground for female extremists and ISIS sympathizers in Indonesia in the last few years, according to a 2017 report from the Institute of Policy Analysis and Conflict (IPAC).

“We’ve been seeing some evidence of the transition from Salafism to extremism among female extremists of the ISIS generation,” said Nava Nuraniyah, an IPAC researcher.

“We need King Salman to make a clear and bold statement denouncing radicalism,” said Yahya Cholil Staquf of the moderate Muslim organization Nahdlatul Ulama. Otherwise, he said, “His visit will be easily perceived as more support to radical Islamic movements in Indonesia, as it is already a common public understanding that those radical movements take theological reference from Saudi Wahhabism and have been enjoying various kinds of support from Saudi Arabia.”

“Salafi pesantren, and Saudi-inspired religious education in general, no longer necessarily rely on Saudi donations, as followers have become incredibly adept at raising money locally,” Chaplin said.

As the rise of hardliners, the Arabic language, and Salafi jihadist cells in Indonesia show, Salafism has some undeniable, durable appeal here. In Indonesia, at least, Saudi Arabia is already seeing the fruits of its labor. This new religious ecosystem may be self-sustaining.

“this new religious ecosystem may be self-sustaining.” in other words, we’re now stuck with this shit, just like dozens of countries around the world. i sure hope not, but we may be screwed in ways that will be really hard to repair.

and i’ll leave you on that haunting note: the way things are now may be self-sustaining.