Saudi opposition to the religious conversion right framed it as empowering missionaries

Evidence

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. Such concerns resonated with Chang, who responded: ‘For the countries of the Far East, the nineteenth century, with its expansion of Western industrialism, had not always been very kind’, and missionaries had not always limited themselves to their religious missions. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 133

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the UDHR negotiating history debate and postcolonial critiques of human rights as instruments of Western commercial expansion. — connects to: Saudi opposition to religious-freedom rights was anti-missionary rather than Islamic — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 133
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s theme that Western moral/legal standards were used to open non-Western societies; here the same dynamic appears in human-rights law itself.
• SEED: Angle: the Saudi apostasy objection to Article 18 was not conservative Islam but anti-imperial scrutiny of missionaries as market-opening vanguards.