Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have attacked their neighbor, Qatar, for supposedly supporting terrorism. They pretend to be firefighters, but spent years as arsonists. Over the years the Saudis, in particular, financed and staffed terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, which staged the 9/11 attacks. Riyadh’s record has since improved, but only under strong U.S. pressure.
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The KSA spends as much as $4 billion annually promoting its uniquely intolerant brand of Salafist Islamic thought, aimed at the “purification” of the faith known as Wahhabism. By enforcing this rigidly intolerant theology the KSA has acted like a housebroken version of the Islamic State. People have been similarly oppressed and brutalized, but with a veneer of legality. In contrast, ISIS reflects, argued Princeton’s Bernard Haykel, “a kind of untamed Wahhabism.”
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In recent years the Saudi royals have spent $3 to $4 billion a year, roughly $100 billion cumulatively, on educational fellowships and scholarships, Islamic clergy and scholars, academics and journalists, construction projects — madrassahs, mosques, universities, and Islamic centers — operating funds, and school materials. Thus, while Wahhabism is a minority view even within Sunni Islam, it accounts for the vast majority of outside funding. Abdurrahman Wahid, a moderate Muslim who once served as Indonesia’s president and headed the Islamic organization Nahdlatal Ulama, said that “Wahhabi/Salafi ideology has made substantial inroads throughout the Muslim world” because of the Saudis’ wealth.
