Saudi opposition to religious-freedom rights was anti-missionary rather than Islamic

Evidence

The strongest opposition to the right to change one’s religion came from Baroody, the delegate from Saudi Arabia. Baroody was representing a repressive, theocratic state, and scholars have been quick to identify his challenge to this right, and Saudi Arabia’s abstention from the final UDHR, as a product of the prohibition on apostasy in conservative Wahhabi interpretations of Islam. But the picture is more complicated than that. Baroody, like Malik, was a Lebanese Christian. In opposing the right to change one’s religion, he never referred to Islamic law, but instead framed this new right as a right for missionaries. Proselytising Christians had historically become the vanguards of political interventions, he argued, and ‘peoples had been drawn into murderous conflict by the missionaries’ efforts to convert them’. Baroody depicted Article 18 as a right to open up non-Western societies for trade and exploitation. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 133

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to anti-imperial critique of universal human rights as trade-opening instruments — ties to the reader’s work on human-rights discourse and markets. — connects to: Saudi opposition to the religious conversion right framed it as empowering missionaries — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 133; The UDHR religious-freedom clause was drafted to protect missionary proselytism — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 136
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the reader’s project on market ethics: frames a human-rights clause (religious conversion) as a license for commerce and exploitation, paralleling grafting/trade-as-infrastructure themes.

Broader Connections

• Saudi opposition to the religious conversion right framed it as empowering missionaries #expands (0.90) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 133