Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I do think the Saudis rebranded themselves as Salafis. Wahhabism has an association with Saudi Arabia. If they call themselves Salafis, it says that they are following the ways of the founding fathers. Americans like to say, “We follow the way of the founding fathers.” Sunni Muslims like to say they follow the ways of the founding fathers, which is the Salaf. Salafism became extremely popular around the Muslim world, in Muslim diasporas, and is still extremely influential. Is it dominant among Muslim populations? It is very high profile, but I don’t know that it’s dominant. I don’t really know how to measure that. I haven’t seen public opinion polls, for instance, that ask Muslims in different countries, “Do you favor Salafism over other versions of Islam?” I can cite an anecdote for one of the downsides of this puritanical form of Islam, is that in Iraq, when David Petraeus engineered the surge in 2006/2007, one of his assets was that Iraqi Sunni Muslims were fed up with the busy-body intrusion into their personal lives of the Salafis. They told men they couldn’t just wear a mustache, they had to grow a beard. They punished people for smoking cigarettes. I don’t think that most Muslims around the world, not that I’ve met [most] Muslims, but I’ve lived in several Muslim countries, and most Muslims I’ve met regard Salafis as busy bodies and intrusive. I don’t think they’re going to win the battle for hearts and minds in the long run. They had a very strong run in the ’90s and early 2000s. I think al-Qaeda did a lot to discredit that. To what extent should I think of Saudi as a nation of immigrants? As you know, bin Laden family has roots in Yemen. Prince Al Waleed bin Talal, who I think is still number two owner at Twitter, has Armenian and Lebanese descent. Overall, how many of the Saudis are actually Saudi in origin? I have no idea. I’ll just say that. I’ll say that. Yes, if you take away the one quarter of the population that are foreign workers, of the 75% that remain, I would say probably a very small number are descended from people outside Arabia, because certainly, the royals and wealthy Arabian families in general had a long history of marrying or having children with slaves. That was legal until the early 1960s. It doesn’t seem that the majority, or even close to majority of Arabs, owned slaves in Arabia over the centuries. It was a small number of better-off Arabs. In terms of immigrants, people moving to Arabia, very few people moved to Arabia from other parts of the Middle East because it was very poor. The largest site of immigrant settlement was Mecca and Medina, and that would have been from pilgrims who journeyed months overland from West Africa, or weeks through the Indian Ocean from Southeast Asia, and once you got there, a lot of them stayed. So that you did have permanent colonies from Java, from Bukhara in Central Asia, but central Arabia, the Saudi homeland, very little.…

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