Description
ABSTRACT
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia created a number of institutions that would serve as means of propagating the Saudi-Salafi (a.k.a., Wahhabi) vision of Sunni Islam around the world and advancing Saudi international influence. Most prominent among these were the Islamic University of Medina and a number of other foreign-student serving religious universities. Through Saudi government funding, Salafi-sympathetic students could come and study – all expenses paid – in their universities, receive basic religious preacher and pedagogical training, and then become Salafi shaykhs and missionaries (duʿāt – proclaimers) back in their home countries.
This Saudi religious, soft-power policy intermingled with a change in domestic immigration policy in the United States that, after 1965, opened the U.S. up to an unprecedented influx of non-European immigrant communities, including many Muslims from abroad. Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, dozens of African American and first- and second-generation immigrant American Muslims would join the international corps of Saudi students of knowledge going to learn authentic Islam at the heart of Islamic spiritual geography. Then, almost entirely unrelatedly, the 9/11 attacks occurred, perpetrated by al-Qaeda, an international Salafi-jihadi network, and, nearly immediately, “Salafi” and “Wahhabi” became bad labels to have draped around your neck in America.
This paper follows a set of these American Saudi university graduates as they sought to navigate the complicated post-9/11 American security state and anti-Salafi sentiment in the American Muslim community. It specifically centers on a unique post-Salafi institution that was built by a clique of these Saudi-trained preachers, namely, AlMaghrib Institute, which is today one of the most popular and successful Muslim educational organizations in the United States. Founded in 2002, AlMaghrib is a technologically savvy, slickly marketed, entrepreneurial religious institute that has educated tens of thousands of American Muslims about Islam. It has served to weave a – tacitly but not explicitly – Salafi thread into the American religious tapestry and become a major player in the easy-access religious and scriptural education field in American Islam.
Yet in the process of building AlMaghrib, the Saudi-educated shaykhs have encountered many moments where their loyalties and inclinations have been torn between their own education and training and the demands of the American, post-9/11 religious marketplace. For instance, in determining to not overtly call themselves or AlMaghrib “Salafi,” they have incurred the censure of many other American and international Salafis who see AlMaghrib as watering down or bastardizing real Salafism. Similarly, the AlMaghrib shaykhs frequently and logically trade upon their Saudi religious education credentials, while simultaneously departing from Saudi-Salafi norms and from the advice of their Saudi teachers when it suits their purposes.
Forged at the intersection of American immigration law, post-9/11 security policy, and a decades-long Saudi international influence campaign, AlMaghrib and its shaykhs defy stereotypes of Salafism as a maladaptive, culturally predatory Saudi export. Instead they demonstrate the range of possibilities that emerge when Salafism encounters different cross-pressures, national contexts, and exploratory environments.
