Saudi and Qatari states fund unofficial fatwa platforms that dominate global online influence.

Evidence

The most high-profile platform for militant Wahhabism, IslamQA.info (Islam Question and Answer), is the project of Saudi-based Shaykh Muh˙ ammad S˙a¯lih˙ al-Munajjid, a former prote´ge´ of Ibn Ba¯z. … The Saudi government does not allow Munajjid to promote his site within Saudi Arabia, because he is not part of the official Saudi commission on fatwas, but it has given him a powerful base from which to project his rulings abroad and, although he does not label them as fatwas, they take the exact form of official fatwa reports. Another high-profile platform is IslamWeb, the official site of Qatar’s Ministry of Religious Endowments. It offers the same rulings on images and grave destruction as IslamQA, and, like IslamQA, it makes its rulings available in both Arabic and English. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 1941

Categorization

• QUESTION: The state denies Munajjid a domestic platform yet props him up abroad - this is the textbook plausible-deniability structure. Is the online reach empirically larger than official religious institutions’ worldwide?
• XREF: connects to: Saudi petrodollars funded Islamist networks globally through Islamic banks — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 240

Broader Connections

• Saudi petrodollars funded Islamist networks globally through Islamic banks #expands (0.75) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 240