David Commins: belief

Transcript context

…Now, if you drive around North Macedonia, you’ll see some number of Saudi-funded mosques. They’re quite large and elaborate. It’s not obvious that the demand for them is so strong. How do you model why the Saudis do that? Is it some kind of kickback scheme, or they just want to proselytize, or they want to raise their status in the Islamic world? Well, I see that in at least three different frames. One frame is that Islam or Christianity is a proselytizing religion. Muslims are proselytized from the very beginning of the founder of Islam, prophet Muhammad. The Wahhabi mission has been a proselytizing movement ever since its founding in 1740. It was a total failure at proselytizing. The teachings of Wahhabism were rejected completely by almost every Muslim society that encountered it from the 1740s until probably the late 1800s, but they never stopped trying. I think that there’s that. The third is that for the Saudi monarchy, it is a form of soft power. Democracy promotion for the United States, exporting communism for Fidel, marketing Wahhabism for Riyadh. Do they get soft power from it?…

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