 everyone to today's session and book launch. It's a great pleasure to be with you all here today. My name is Adam Hania. I'm a reader in development studies here at SOAS, the University of London. And it's my great pleasure to be the host and moderator of this book launch. We're lucky to hear today from Krithika Varubil, who is launching her very new book, launched I think in April 2020, entitled The Call, Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project. It's published by Columbia Global Reports. Krithika is an award-winning journalist. She's covered Indonesia for the Guardian and has reported widely from Southeast and South Asia for publications including The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Financial Times, The New York Times. She corresponds regularly for outlets like NPR and the BBC, Democracy Now, and she's been supported her work by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the International Women's Media Foundation, among many other institutions and trusts. Krithika is well-known to us here at SOAS because we're very lucky to have her as a Fulbright scholar, where she completed her master's degree here last year. She's currently based in New York, under lockdown, as many of us are at the moment. So it's a great pleasure to be hosting the event and to be hearing from Krithika today. So just to explain a little bit how the format of the session will be, in a second I'm gonna hand over to Krithika, who will speak on her book and some of the major themes and impetus for writing it. Then I'm going to engage with her for a little bit around some questions that I have over her work and her research and her writing for about 10 minutes or so. Then we'll open up for questions from the audience. We have a great attendance today, I think just shy of 80 at the moment. So what we will do is ask people to type in questions through the chat function that you can see on the right hand side of the screen. I will collate those questions and feed them through to Krithika. So we can keep things orderly and make sure that everyone gets a chance to ask what they like. So if that sounds okay to everyone, I'm very happy to pass over now to Krithika and ask her to say some introductory remarks on her book, thank you. Thank you so much, Adam. Can everyone hear me? Just wanna make sure my video and audio are working well. Great. My name is Krithika and I'm really happy to be here with Adam who was my dissertation advisor at SOAS. So my book, the call is about Saudi money. It's about what Saudi money really did in the Muslim world which is something we've heard a lot about in big terms. I think in many of the countries, certainly the one I grew up in, which is the United States. I was seven years old when 9-11 happened and I spent most of my young and adult life and under the so-called war on terror. One of the kind of canards of this era that who we all live in is this idea of Saudi terror finance. The idea that Saudi Arabia has somehow financed or created all manner of terrorists, extremists, jihadists and so on. Infamously, of course, 15 of the 9-11 hijackers were Saudi nationals. So we kind of grew up with this idea and then when I was 22 and after I graduated from college, I moved to Indonesia, which is the world's largest Muslim majority country to work as a journalist. And something crazy that happened once I was there and I was reporting on religion and politics is that I heard this concept of Arabisasi yet again. And Arabisasi, which is Indonesianized word for Arabization was the same idea that Saudi influence or Saudi finance or prostitution had somehow fundamentally changed the religious landscape of their country. So this was really interesting to me that I had gone literally halfway across the world and was hearing this same concept, again in somewhat big terms. So I started reporting on what Saudi money really did in the world's largest Muslim majority country. And what I found was super interesting. It wasn't that they had financed terrorists directly or that wasn't the whole story anyway. There are a very small number of jihadists or terrorists in Indonesia, all things considered. But I did find that there was this six decade long campaign by the Saudi kingdom from the royal family, from the king downward to propagate their conservative brand of Wahhabi Islam since the 1960s in Indonesia. And this took a lot of different forms from scholarships to close personal relationships to key Islamic leaders, to a Saudi religious attaché who was attached to the embassy, to supporting preachers and mosques directly, to supporting Korans and translated books and so on. So there were a lot of different vectors of influence and I reported on what some of these meant including a Saudi university in Jakarta which was the subject of my dissertation at SOAS and which features in my book as well. And as I reported on it, I realized there was a great hunger to learn more about what Saudi money meant to a lot of readers around the world. So I branched out my inquiry and realized that because this Saudi campaign to spread Wahhabism was truly global in nature, a book about the subject would ideally also be global in scope. So that's why I branched out to two other continents beyond Asia. And my book also looks at Saudi influence in Nigeria which is the most populous country in Africa and at Kosovo which is a very small Balkan nation in Europe which is about 98% Muslim and has had a very interesting kind of Saudi influence after the former Yugoslavia. So I took these three case studies which are all majority Muslim countries. I mean, we're pretty sure in the case of Nigeria they don't really take the census in that way anymore because it's very contentious. The three very large Muslim majority democracies which are outside of what we tend to think of is the Muslim world at least in our popular imagination. But to me this was really important to de-center the project and I found a lot of interesting patterns and connections at every country that I looked at there were close personal contacts between the kingdom and these countries and people in these countries that helped see the relationship. So it wasn't like they were throwing money at these countries or I don't know some kind of nefarious plot. It was really a soft power project through and through which I thought found super interesting and wouldn't have necessarily known until I went to report it. So I'm gonna tell you just a tiny bit about based on my research what the shape of this campaign is and I hope that you will read the book for a more detailed picture. So basically, Wahhabism is the state religion of Saudi Arabia. It was founded in the late 18th century by a desert creature named Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab who looked around him and thought that Muslims had lost their way. He saw deviance everywhere. He thought a lot of things that people were doing from venerating saints to praying at tombs to all kinds of folk practices had deviated from Tauheed which is the pure monotheism that he felt was at the heart of Islam. And in pursuit of his goal to return people to the right path as he saw it he advocated violence and he had this kind of marauding band and it was very contentious right from the start. So he was eventually ejected from his home region and sought to establish a new base in with near Biyad's base in modern day capital of Saudi Arabia. So he made a pact with the house of Saud and pledged religious legitimacy for the Saudi royal family's designs on the Arabian Peninsula in exchange for their protection of him and their uptake of his interpretation of Islam as their state religion. So this pact between the Wahhabi clerics and the Saudi royal family is in place up until today. That being said, the country that we now call Saudi Arabia was only came together in 1932. It's a very young country. It's not even a century old. And oil was found there in 1938. So a lot of things that we think are just fundamentally Saudi like oil money and being a theocracy they're all rather new 20th century inventions. And even within a Muslim world even though Saudi Arabia is of course the birthplace of Islam which is the religion of 1.8 billion Muslims and counting today. It didn't really seek to assert itself on a world stage until the 1960s. It was King Faisal the monarch who came to the throne in 1965 who really tried to pioneer this kind of foreign policy based on Al-Tadamun al-Islami or Islamic solidarity. And he was the one who entered this post-colonial world where all these new countries were being invented almost to the scotch in Asia and Africa and saw a lot of hearts and minds that could be won in terms of new transnational Muslim solidarity. So King Faisal was part of the same post-colonial world as Nehru, Sokarno, Nasser, and so on. And it seemed for a while like those people's national projects which were to really pay in broad strokes, pluralist, progressive, liberal, nationalist, nation-states were going to win. And Faisal's idea for this kind of transnational ummah or identifying with the Islamic community more than a new nation was not looking promising. But in the end, it proved to be quite convincing indeed. Part of it was that America really supported the Saudi soft power project. It really dovetailed with the U.S.'s Cold War goals to fight communism worldwide. So from much of the 60s, 70s, 80s, the U.S. and Saudi worked kind of in parallel and definitely with the carte blanche from the U.S. to support this global campaign. And Rikestinger once wrote of the Saudi campaign that he found a helpful Saudi footprint in all the anti-communist theaters where he sought to leave a mark such as Egypt and Somalia and Syria. And then the thing, you know, sometimes this campaign is called Petro Islam, sometimes derogatorily, and that refers to the idea that oil money is the one financing this campaign. That reputation came because of the Arab-Israeli war. So in 1973, there was an embargo that really led Saudi oil revenues to explode. Of course, oil had been discovered there in the 30s, but it wasn't a wash in oil money until 1973. So the combination of King Faisal's globally-minded foreign policy and then this kind of huge windfall after the Arab-Israeli war, which also took up Nasir in Egypt as a competitor in the Islamic world, meant that Saudi Da'wah really exploded. So Da'wah is an Arabic word. It means the call or invitation to Islam. And it gives the title from my book, The Call. The Wahhabi Da'wah is basically proselytizing Muslims around the world to come to their version of Islam, which is, again, quite austere and kind of decries all kinds of folk practices is quite literalist. And in my book, I explain how the golden age of this Da'wah was from 1973 to about 1990. The Gulf War, when U.S. troops were allowed to enter the Najd, really dented Saudi Arabia's Islamic credentials. But then the real close to the golden age of Da'wah was 9-11. So that was the event that really brought Islamic terrorism into the public sphere in an unprecedented way. And Saudi Arabia's reputation really never recovered from that, both because many of the perpetrators of the attack were Saudis, but also because this new discourse and new focus on Islamic terrorism kind of pointed many damning fingers at Saudi Arabia. And to be fair, Saudi charities had supported a lot of Jihadid training camps and al-Qaeda affiliates and so on throughout the 90s from the Balkans to the Philippines. So something I've learned in my travels was that Saudi charity really dropped off substantially after 2001 in all the places I went to. In Nigeria, one man who ran the Muslim World League told me he had to fire every single one of his staff. And today he still runs the charity by himself. So I think it's important to keep in mind because now more than ever, you see Saudi terror finance or Wahhabism or Petro-Islam still being thrown around as an explanatory variable as if they explain all the fundamentalisms in the Islamic world. And it's important to know that's simply not true. Of course, I think if you give a second thought to it, it seems like an empty composition already because how could one country be responsible for all of these? But I do want to make this point because I think it's a common misconception. But what have been the effects of the Saudi campaign if not merely all the terrorism in the world? One big thing that I draw at me was intolerance, especially of Muslim minorities. Antishiyah sentiment specifically, and Jihad did the second main street in Islam, but Sunnis for the Wahhabis are Sunni. Antishiyah sentiment has been a really distinctive mark of the Saudi campaign. In Nigeria, there's been a really violent clash between Salafis and Shia that has led to hundreds of people being killed at the hands of the Nigerian military. In Indonesia today, where fewer than 1% of people are Shia at all, there's a national Antishiyah League. So these kinds of developments are a very distinctive mark of the Saudi campaign to me. Another thing that happened is that Saudi Dawah has ironically supported quite a lot of Islamist movements worldwide, even though Saudi is on paper opposed to political Islam, especially today and is opposed to the Arab Spring and things like that. In Indonesia, the most successful Islamist political party, the Prosperous Justice Party was heavily supported by Saudi Dawah and the Saudi University in Jakarta, which was a hugely important recruiting ground. The third really big effect that I draw out is that the scholarships program was one of the most successful things that Saudi ever did, especially at this university in Medina called the Islamic University of Medina that was founded in 1965, specifically for foreign students to become missionaries of the Saudi cult Islam. And these Saudi alumni in every single country I went to were really influential in shaping their religious landscape. You really see this distinctly in Kosovo, for example, where Saudi charities helped to rebuild the country after the war starting in 1998 for about 10 years. And there was really no one attending despite the huge US and UN presence there to religious life for spiritual life in rebuilding this country that was really overwhelmingly Muslim. So if you want a good education and becoming a mom, the easiest way to do that in Kosovo for a long time was to take a scholarship and go to Saudi. So it's not surprising that so much of their Islamic revival today has a Salafi flavor to it. So this class of Salafi clerics in all three countries I write about has been a really distinctive mark of Saudi Da'wah. And it's in part because of people like them, the fact that they tend to create movements on the ground and the fact that a lot of Saudi institutions still remain standing even without direct Saudi funding is why I talk about the legacy effects of Saudi Da'wah. Even though Saudi Da'wah is down in absolute terms in most of these countries, they have created very resilient, durable, and diverse ecosystems, mostly of a Salafi bent. And by Salafi, I mean the 20th century movement that started in Egypt as an anti-colonial movement to return to the traditions of earliest Islam and follow the traditions of the Salaf, which are the first few generations of Muslims in the eighth century. So there are Salafis all over the world now. In many parts, it's because of the Saudi campaign. The reason that we see a lot of Salafis in the world and not Wahhabis is because Wahhabism is pretty site-specific to Saudi Arabia and also almost no one will ever describe themselves as a Wahhabi, it's kind of like a, it's often used in a derogatory way. Even in Saudi people would probably call themselves just Muslims, they wouldn't say they're Wahhabis. So the presence of so many Salafi communities around the world today has been one of the lasting effects of Saudi Dawa. So in brief, that's the shape of the campaign. And the last thing I wanted to say before I chat with Adam a little bit is probably a lot of you know about Muhammad bin Salman, the S, the very headline-making crown prince of Saudi Arabia and his famous Vision 2030 plan for diversifying the kingdom's economy away from oil. Vision 2030 certainly has had an impact on the Saudi project. The Saudi University in Jakarta, for example, is now draped in Vision 2030 banners and MBS' faces all over it. So, and MBS has also made a lot of pronouncements on the world stage, like we're going to stay extremism within one generation and so on. So it seems that he's pretty sensitive to the image that Saudi has accrued over the recent years and that might have an impact on their Dawa project. But keep in mind, he is no human rights defender. He doesn't need to be said twice to this audience. But in terms of the reigning in of the Wahhabi establishment, the kinds of people he's jailed are not the most extreme or ideologically extreme Wahhabis, but the people who refuse to kind of bend to his authority. And he's jailed a lot of reformists and human rights voices within the clerical establishment. So there is a gap between his rhetoric and his actions that seems to widen by the day. And that being said, there have been some interesting new appointments within the Dawa world. The new head of the Muslim World League, really important Saudi charity that works worldwide, is an unusually progressive voice named Dr. Mohammad Al-Issa, who does things like acknowledge the Holocaust in the audience of Jews in New York. He's gone to the Vatican. These are all really crazy progressive things in a country where it's not unusual to find the protocols of the elders of Zion or other anti-Semitic things. It's not, and even that's even been a feature of Saudi Dawa in the past. So these are pretty big changes. So it'll be interesting to see how this progresses. And the most important thing is that their oil revenues are really down. And what we're entering now is a very multi-polar world. Saudi is not even the only Gulf country subsidizing abroad now. The UAE, Kuwait, Qatar all have their own Dawa projects. Iran is not such a big player on the world stage anymore. They have their own problems now and they tend to work in their own backyard. Turkey, however, is also becoming a new global Islamic power. So it's just a more crowded stage now and this attempt to create a Saudi-centric Islamic world has peaked, in my opinion. But if we learn anything about Saudi royal family is that instability is baked into their succession. So anything could change even tomorrow. Like if a new royal comes in, is really a very pilot so hobby, it's quite possible that we could see start all over again. But that's where things stand right now. And I'm gonna let Adam ask some questions. Okay, thank you very much, Krithika, for that great overview of the book and opening up many avenues I think we can explore. Just before I move into a few questions, just to recap on how we'll run this session. After I've had a brief conversation now with Krithika, I'm going to open up the chat channel and you can just feel free to drop any questions you might have into that chat and I will feed them back to Krithika as we move on. I think we'll aim for another half an hour, 45 minutes or so for this session. So Krithika, to begin with, I wanna actually pick up on one of the things you mentioned right towards the end there, which was the kind of role of the Saudi government, the Saudi state, the Saudi ruling family. And I'm wondering from your research in your travels, could you speak a little bit about what's the kind of connection between, on one hand, the proselytizing efforts of various religious institutions in Saudi Arabia and their relationship with the state and the government and the ruling family. Is this a conscious project that's emanating from the ruling family, or is it something that's more driven by the religious establishment? And relatedly, could you speak a little bit more about how the project actually works? Is this a material benefit, a material inducement that is being provided to places such as Indonesia and Nigeria or Kosovo, or is it more ideological? Is it functioning at an ideological level? Yeah, to answer the first couple of questions you raised, the image I really like using my book, and I think is helpful, is like an idea of an octopus or a starfish. So there's a lot of connected bodies. It's not coming, Saudi Dawah doesn't come from any one single actor. It's from a very densely linked group of actors, including a dedicated Dawah ministry in the Saudi government, it's quite important. It oversees the religious attachés in two dozen countries. We also have the really big multinational charities like Muslim War League or Rabita, IIRO, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. These were all created in the 60s and 70s during this peak Dawah era. And they have dozens of offices worldwide and they've been very influential at kind of just investing funds around the world. We also have independent businessmen, which is kind of an obscure financial flow to analyze, but it's definitely been a dynamic in the past. And then there's a whole network of smaller charities because the Saudi royal family has thousands of members. So it's uncommon for a prince or princess to have their own charity and that might have Dawah aims. And then in terms of whether it's coming from the state or the Ulama, I mean, it certainly has in the past been a highly royal endorsed directive. So I think it's always a political relationship inside between the royal family and the clerical establishment. They've often wholesale taken up the Wahhabi clerics' goal of spreading their Dawah worldwide. So King Faisal, as I said, was really hands-on at cultivating post-colonial leaders on a personal level and really selecting the people who would carry this mission onward. He, for example, had a very close relationship with Muhammad Natsir, the post-colonial Indonesian leader, the first prime minister of Indonesia, who later became one of the chief dais of Saudi Dawah in Indonesia and opened an organization that funneled millions of dollars of Saudi money to Indonesia. So in the 60s and 70s, it was not uncommon for Faisal and then later King Fahad in the 80s to have a really hands-on approach to this. King Fahad had a kind of political reputation before he became the monarch and he kind of to prove a point kind of after given the events of 1979 and the Iranian Revolution, he started a lot of flashy projects too, like the King Fahad Center for printing the Quran, which continues to just print millions of Quran's to this day in so many different languages. So Fahad had a very strong royal imprimatur in the past. Right now I would say that there's less because King Salman too was quite pious, the current King. But I would say under MBS, it's the lowest it has been because he's kind of tried to lessen the hold of the Wahhabi clerics on his power to an unprecedented degree. But as of now, the apparatus is still chucking on. So the Wahhabi clerics still have avenues in which to express their interests. And then, yeah, so I just wanna say really quick, you asked about the specific ways it manifests. It's definitely a material and concrete way that they spread it. So first of all, money, the way that they just burst money was that leaders from these countries go on Hajj or Umarat to Saudi and Gadotazkiah are like an open and recommendation letter. And after that, any Saudi charity could funnel money to them. So in Nigeria and Indonesia, both you had a situation where there were two key leaders, Abu Bakr Gumi, who's an Islamic scholar in Nigeria, and he got direct light of funding to start his Salafi movement and anti-Sufi movement in Nigeria. Indonesia's anything with Nassir and his organization. So on the ground, these people were then delegated to disperse money as they saw fit. So it was actually a really great and effective technique because the people who the monarchs picked out were usually good at identifying players on the ground to continue to build up the Dawah apparatus. And then a lot of these charities like Muslim World League and so on will give their own donations with a lot of local staff people. And in Kosovo, the charities were definitely the main way that money reached them. The Saudi Joint Relief Committee for Kosovo was created, Kosovo and Tachniah was created in the 90s, shortly after the Bosnian War. So that was an umbrella organization overseen by one of the Saudi princes to funnel direct aid to Kosovo. And through your research, did you ascertain any linkages with the formal kind of Islamic financial sector, Islamic banks or other kinds of Islamic financial instruments? Or were these two separate spheres of influence? I think in the 60s and 70s, there was potential for a lot more overlap between things like Islamic finance and even like the OIC and Dawah, like they had elective affinities. But I would say as of the time I was reporting, they had largely decoupled. Okay, perhaps moving on then to, I mean, your researcher, I know having supervised your dissertation, it's very, you did a lot of on the ground work that's evident in the book. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about the challenges of actually doing this kind of research in these varied countries, speaking to actors involved in these circles. There must have been some interesting and difficult kind of research experiences that you went through. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the challenges of course, one, so in Kosovo, a big challenge was language for me. I don't speak Albanian, so I really did have to work quite extensively with fixtures and translators in the ground. Luckily I had a really good team of people there and a lot of people in Kosovo. I found for the most part I actually found that people were very happy to talk unless they were really like jihadists. Like I had a couple of attempted meetings with really extreme types that didn't really pan out. But Salafis are very happy to talk and even to debate. And I had a good time debating with like young Salafi scholars in Nigeria and so on in part because of I had been studying Islamic studies so I actually knew some stuff to say. But I found a lot of Salafis were very keen to talk about a movement that I feel has been misrepresented in world media. So in Nigeria I really felt like I had pretty good access and a lot of people there spoke English too and were very accommodating and open to talking about their history and how the Salaf movement has developed there. In Indonesia I lived there for like quite a long time, two years and then another half a year after that. So I had kind of a deeper network of contacts there and I think it's not a coincidence that I got kind of my most interesting reporting. Some of my most interesting reporting there. For example, I met, you know, I wanted to learn about the impact of the Iranian revolution on Indonesia and I got to meet the Indonesian who sat on the plane with Ayatollah Homeini from Paris to Tehran in 1979. And he was able to tell me directly how that news was received back in Indonesia. So those kinds of deep contacts I think were there in Indonesia and an ideal world would be able to spend two years in all of these countries. Okay. And was there anything particularly surprising or interesting, what really stood out in terms of what you did discover during this field work? I think that the kind of across the board decline in absolute terms was a surprise to me. I, especially in Nigeria, it was kind of put in pretty stark terms by a lot of the people like I spoke with that 9-11 led to a steep drop-off in active funding. And in Indonesia too, I was surprised at how much holophism had become indigenized and was no longer externally supported. Another thing that surprised me in Indonesia and Nigeria was the really strong personal imprint in the legacy of Natsir and Gumi, these two leaders in the 60s who knew their deputies that they had handpicked back in the golden age of Dawa and were still running a lot of these organizations today. So like the guy who runs DDII today, the main instrument of Saudi Dawa in the past to Indonesia, is this Chinese scholar handpicked by Natsir. And something else that surprised me about some of these older generation I met that they really had this, inhabited this very cosmopolitan Islamic world that in its own way was like a product of this post-war globalization. As these big Saudi charities were being created in these universities, like the World Assembly of Michelangelo. It was like really an exciting time is what I thought the sense of that they would go to these big conferences in Jeddah and Riyadh and so on and meet these young Muslim leaders from all over the world and this global Oma consciousness was emerging. And I'm surprised just by how cosmopolitan interconnected it all was. Yes, okay. Thank you very much for that, Krithika. Perhaps we'll open up the chat room now. So if you do have any questions, please just drop them into the chat and I'll start feeding them into Krithika. So we begin, Krithika, if you could speak a little bit, someone was also interested in your fieldwork in particular in Aceh, in Indonesia. If you've had your experience on the ground there, if you could perhaps speak to that. I'm so glad whoever this was asked about Aceh. So Aceh was one of the most surprising place I did my fieldwork. It is the westernmost province of Indonesia and it's widely considered the most conservative place in Indonesia. It's the only province of Indonesia with Sharia and it was also infamously devastated by the 2004 boxing day tsunami. So I went to Aceh in 2017, expecting to find just like so much stuff about Saudi Dawah. And I was right and wrong. There were a lot of Saudi charities that set up in Aceh after the tsunami especially. But I was also very surprised that Salafis and Aceh's traditional clerics had clashed in almost unprecedented terms. Like they had almost come to arms and like violent protests in the grand mosque of Aceh because the Aceh really resented the idea that Salafi or Saudi trained imams were trying to influence their way of praying and their folk practices. So Aceh's mom burned down Salafi schools or schools led by Saudi alumni in their province and they've mounted a pretty serious resistance to perceived Salafism. Even though there remains like a Saudi charity campaign office there, there is an Arabic language school in Aceh run by Saudi charity. So I thought that was so interesting. It just shows how it's not a one way street between Saudi Dawah and Salafism because one of the people I met there was a free Aceh guerrilla leader, had been a free Aceh guerrilla leader, told me, we can take their money but we don't need to take their ideas. I thought that was a very interesting spin. Yes, a couple more questions. There's a couple of questions in the chat around these funding networks and the translatizing networks. In relation to Saudi Arabia's more overt political and military projection of power, in the Middle East obviously it's very clear in many countries particularly post the Arab uprisings. But also there's a question. So if you could speak first I guess to how you see the overlap between that kind of religious outreach and the more political and military growing military and political influence of Saudi Arabia in the region. And secondly, under Muhammad bin Salman, do you think there has been particularly given the rivalry and the conflict with Iran if there's been any, if the anti-Shia component of this movement has been in any way reduced or shifted under Muhammad bin Salman? Yeah, so in terms of military commitments, I was looking specifically at countries where there was not a big Saudi military presence because I was interested in soft power but you're certainly right that there is a very large Saudi military presence in a lot of neighboring countries in the region. And what I'd say to that is that, especially the Saudi Iran dynamic and rivalry is more alive in the neighborhood, just to say the Middle East than it is in the integrated Muslim world. But the countries I was looking at were not countries where there were troops on the ground or anything like that, not places where Saudi intervened. Even in Kosovo where there was a war, it was Saudi relief. It wasn't that they were sending troops there. So I think they're quite distinct in terms of Dava versus military commitments. But I know that Saudi relief apparatus often mobilized relief to war zones and a signature of Saudi relief there is that it is combined almost always with proselytization which has, that model has proven so successful that it's now commonplace among other Gulf countries like Kuwait. So if you see Kuwait, the charities in place of Syria, they often combine with Salafi proselytization and that's a really distinctive kind of Saudi innovation. In terms of MBS and Shia, he has been pretty vocally anti-Shia in the past. He has made a lot of statements about Iran's leaders, called him worse than Hitler. He's said anti-Shia things in the past. But he's also made some interesting appointments I think to Aramco and to his future city of Neom. He's appointed some Shia leaders to some of these new positions. So I'm curious to see if he will moderate some of his early rhetoric. Because when he came to the public, when he arose to his position, he was originally quite stridently anti-Shia and seemed to continue one of this very typical and sad discourse. Which by the way, there are millions of Shia in Saudi Arabia too, especially in the Eastern province. So it's not just an outside dynamic but also a dynamic inside the country. Okay. We've also got a couple of questions here further on your field work. Someone is asking why you chose these three particular countries to explore. And secondly, how did you actually go about uncovering some of these networks, making these contacts, meeting with these people? How did you actually establish these networks? So Indonesia to me was the non-negotiable entry point. I'm really interested in the Islamic world I think I've said de-centering before but it really is so large. It's like 1.8 billion people. And I was very interested in if it's a global campaign to look at it in kind of wide in the lens, so to speak. So Indonesia is the demographic center of the, in Saudi Arabia is like one of the demographic centers in the Muslim world today. I think it's so important to think about what goes on there when we talk about the Islamic world. And the range of Saudi, the range of Saudi campaign there, it's unparalleled. It has everything from the religious attaché to this personal high leader, cooperations to really small grassroots networks. And you just have this whole, and the Saudi university, and it's just like really a lot of great stuff to report on which I hope you can read in the book as well. And then I really want to look in Africa. And I thought that here it would be interesting because it seemed to have some structural similarities to Indonesia and that it was a post-colonial country and Saudi-Dawah really helped Salafism find a place in a predominantly Sufi region in Northern Nigeria in record time. And I thought some of the soft power links were so interesting between the clerics of West Africa and Hijaz, they've had really long and deep links. The first president even of the Islamic University of Medina was a Nigerian. And I thought this kind of scholarships dimension, how scholars influence religious landscape and later how Salafism became so popular, so fast that it broke off and created this fringe of Boko Haram which is a very infamous jihadist group today. I thought that was all very interesting and subtle and interesting new dynamic with this non-Arab African, non-Arabic speaking African country. And then Kosovo, you know, I actually initially thought I was gonna write about Bosnia because there's a lot of literature about the Bosnian Mujahideen and the foreign fighters who came directly from Afghanistan to Bosnia. And you know, there's been a lot of media about like Salafi and Mojave in Ros and Bosnia. I spent like more than a month there and I didn't see evidence of that. So I scrapped that and I looked to Kosovo instead and there I actually found that Saudi charities had been super influential, really fast and in a compressed timeframe. So Kosovo is really interesting because it has the highest per capita, was the highest per capita contributor of ISIS fighters of any European country. And the fact that Salafism and even Salafi jihadism found a route in this very small country in record time within about 20 years was so interesting to me and I thought it would be a really interesting new case study and one where you can meet almost all of the key players because they're all still alive. So that was my goal but you could definitely add more countries to the analysis for sure. I was limited by being one person, I think. And making those connections and contacts, how did you go about that? Oh, yeah. So Indonesia, I mean, I worked there as a journalist so there was a lot of casual sort of things going on. Luckily I was working on my degree while I was researching this book so I did a lot of research, like maybe more than I would have otherwise because I'm a little bit of an ad hoc kind of person and my motto is usually just to show up and hope things go well. Which is nice if you're a journalist but it's not nice if you're spending a huge amount of money to go to Nigeria for two weeks at a time. So I did a lot of research in the Stas Library. I read everything I could about Salafism and Wahhabism in these places and the Saudi campaign and there's a lot of academic literature really about this so I identified people to talk to on the ground and once you get there and meet some of these people and get the ball rolling then it kind of opens up the whole world for you and the thing is because these are so based on dense personal networks like it really is like one thing leading to another but in terms of efficient reporting on the ground and identifying these people I would say I did a lot of library hours before I ever got on a plane. There's also a question here around the relationship and increasingly close relationship between Saudi Arabia and Israel and I was wondering or one of the participants was wondering if you could perhaps speak to that and if you think this is having any effect perhaps on Israel's position within the Middle East. Yeah I mean it's a very interesting relationship in my opinion and it's kind of like a high level relationship based on like security and things like that because you know anti-Semitism has been historically a big part of Saudi translated Korans and things like that is a lot of verses and commentary about like against Jews and it's been flagged often by reviews of Saudi textbooks so I do think it's a high level security relationship for the most part. And there's a question around Kosovo more if you could speak more to this in particular what you think the effect has been on this kind of socio-cultural identity in Kosovo. Yeah so Kosovo which is mostly ethnically Albanian has a really really strong unusually strong secular tradition so the ruling government administration and popular culture for the most part is very secular but I think that this kind of vocal, new, so I think minority and the fact that Salafism has colored the religious revival in Kosovo has led to some culture clashes. I think that the government finds it a little bit hard to handle some of the new developments. For example it's a 90% Muslim country but you cannot wear a hijab in schools if you're a girl and that led to some conflicts and things like that so and also I mean I think that the phenomenon of foreign fighters has really shocked and upset a lot of people especially in 2015, 2016 it was like a, it was really a devastating trauma especially because the places where young men most left from were really poor rural areas kind of near the Macedonian border and it was really devastating the whiplash of some of the international change where you have these like parents who are really committed Marxists or atheists and then their kids become like committed jihadists so the rapidness with which some of these things happened and also the fact that the Salafi revival in Kosovo has been aided by mass media internet has almost always been there that's been uniquely fast and Pristina, the capital Kosovo today is home to this Albanian language Salafi media outlet called Peace TV which runs like almost nonstop programming and it hopes to, there's a lot of Salafi book shops there and the fact that it's become this center like Albanian Salafism is really, is really astounding just again, it just can't underscore how fast all of this was. And did you explore at all the gender dimensions one person is asking here? Yeah, a little bit. I would definitely say that Salafism has been male dominated for most part in all the countries I went to. I met some interesting women figures. In Nigeria, I met a really cool woman, Halimashitu, a sheikh Halimashitu who studied in Mecca. She was a female Saudi alumnus and she became a very influential female Salafi preacher and I attended one of her sermons during Ramadan which she held at 11 a.m. so that women could come with their kids and go back home to cook dinner that day and she is one of the most influential sheikhs in Kano and Nigeria. Unfortunately, she recently died of coronavirus but I mean, it was really cool for me to see that it was unusual to see such an influential woman Salafi but I think she was the exception of the rule. For the most, unfortunately a lot of people who talk in my book are males because it is men who tend to carry out this project. We also have a question here. If you could talk perhaps further on the effect that this might be having on other Islamic communities globally and I guess relatedly, a question around Muhammad bin Salman and his supposed moderation, whether this has meant that the movements themselves, the Dawa networks have become perhaps somewhat more autonomous now and able to mobilize and set priorities outside of the sphere of Saudi Arabia. So in terms of like effects, I mean, I think one of the common themes in my book is this new democratic, often more conservative against traditional, slightly more hierarchical, dusty authority structures and Salafis worldwide have proven, or at least in all the countries I have looked at, have proven very adept at using mass media and that's been a big part of their appeal. Like in Nigeria, so many young people told me that like they didn't find the Sufi hierarchical structures very appealing because it was so like undemocratic and you had to, it was beautiful and full of meaning and tradition but they didn't feel like they could be active players. So they felt like with Salafism which privileges direct access to texts and some of the preachers were so charismatic and so on, that's why they wanted to join it. So I think that's one reason why Salafism has proved so appealing on the ground in a lot of these places. Another young imam I met in Kosovo said he was growing up, he grew up during the war. He had a lot of questions and Salafis had all the answers. So I think this is like kind of very rapid growth of Salafism in the late 20th century has led to clashes in Nigeria, Shia Salafi or Salafi Sufi. In Indonesia, it's led to Salafi jihadist movements including a paramilitary group called Laskar Jihad. In Kosovo, it's led to a very small but devastating number of foreign fighters. So I think these kinds of conflicts are in some ways, I don't wanna say inherent to Salafism but commonly a byproduct of a new Salafi community. And the second one in terms of, are they autonomous? Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the key themes of my book is that like the Dawa campaign has been successful in putting these seeds on the ground in a lot of places and Salafi communities really don't need too much extra help now, especially because so much is available online. Like you can find every pot of any shake you wish to look up online from binbaz or so on to the complete works of eventine meal. Like you don't, the Saudi printed books have much less importance in a relative scale now that we're awash in media. In Indonesia, many of the new Salafi media outlets and groups and so on are completely indigenous. They don't have any, not even a drop of outside funding. So I would say, yes, it's become, I mean Salafism is in the 20th century by being a transnational movement. I think this transnational effect helps preserve it now even when there's not like so much external funding. Like people can connect online so easily now. Great. Okay. Maybe there's two more questions that I'd like to throw at you and perhaps we'll wind it up there. And these questions are both to do with the future. So it's a good place to end. Firstly, someone is asking what you think is perhaps the future of this kind of soft power, the Saudi soft power. And then an even bigger question, someone would like you to weigh in on what you think the future of the house of Saud might be in the current moment. With regards to the house of Saud, I really, I cannot prognosticate one of the smartest people I know on this subject for not hate goals is scholar of Arabia. Does anyone who has strong opinions about the Saudi royal family doesn't know anything about them and everyone who does know anything wouldn't talk. So I would say that to beg off, I think especially during the pandemic, there's been so many upheavals in the house of Saud that even MBS's unprecedented consolidation of power looks in more jeopardy than it has in the recent past. I would also defer to London's own Madabi El Rashid who has written extensively about how instability is baked into succession in the house of Saud. There are so many Saudi royals. The internal power dynamics are always changing. So I don't know what's next. I think MBS is definitely testing the Wahhabi relationship more than it has been in the past. I think that pact will endure for a little while longer, certainly. I think there's popular support for among Saudi nationals for sure. I don't think it's gonna go away, but it might change to an unrecognizable degree. And what's next for Saudi Dawah? I mean, it's going down is the main takeaway. It's like decreasing by the day. 2014 oil crash was very significant in terms of decreasing the absolute resources available. I also analyzed Dawah ministry reports in my book and in absolute terms, all of the activities they list from missionaries to prison visits, to printing crons, all are down in almost every country in the world over the last five years. And since MBS came to power, Dawah ministry officials have indicated that there have been fewer resources allocated for their ministry just anecdotally. So it seems like it's going down. And I think a multi-polar Islamic world is already at the stage of affairs and it's gonna continue to be at the stage of affairs because the Balkans, Turkey is by far the most important player. Turkey oversees the DNA, oversees the Hajj for all Balkan Muslims now, which is a huge indicator, I think, of their clout there. And, you know, Qatar supports Islamist movements worldwide. That's kind of their flavor of Dawah. The UAE tends to support Sufi-oriented movements worldwide. It's just a crowded field now. So, and Iran, which I saw some questions popping up, you know, Iran was once such an important player and I really go into my book. The impact of the Iranian revolution was deeply felt and moving, it was moving to so many Muslims worldwide. It was seen at the time as a very, you know, as a win for the whole Islamic world. So like, I saw like books by Alishari Gatti translate into Hausa, Indonesian and so on and it was impactful at the time. But now Iranian cultural centers for the most part are not doing extensive Dawah this far out into the Muslim world. I would say Iran's commitments are more in their backyard and Iranian cultural centers today tend to be kind of like full of travel brochures and Persian poetry and things like that, like really like low stakes cultural activities and not like extensive proselytizing. So I think that's my answer. It's a crowded field and Saudi's clout in the Dawah sense is decreasing by the day. Thank you very much, Krithika, for a really insightful and rich presentation and a great book. Congratulations on having this book, your first book come out and hopefully the first of many. If people want to pick up a copy, they can do so, I believe, from the Columbia Global Reports site. And I'd also like to thank very much the participants. Some great questions coming through and to keep an eye out for future events, we will be holding as the Salisbury Middle East Institute other events of this type over the coming weeks and into the next academic year. So please stick with us even though we're under lockdown, we'll still be hopefully hosting these kinds of events. So thanks very much, Krithika, and congratulations again. Thank you so much. And everyone who's here, I know it's more questions than answers, but feel free to get in touch with me through my website or Twitter or whatever. I'm very open to talking about this more. Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Dawah. Great to be here virtually.