chapter 24

The Battl e for

the Sou l of Isl a m

James M. Dorsey

Middle Eastern and Asian states have been locked into an escalating and
­ever-­expanding battle for the soul of Islam (Dorsey 2020a) that employs religion to
­garner favor, empathy, and goodwill, or what political scientists term “soft power”
(Nye 2005), among policymakers and decision-­makers in the United States, Europe, the
Islamic world, and elsewhere, as well as among influential Muslim, Jewish, and Christian
communities across the globe.
Some of the rivals do so by projecting themselves as protagonists of purportedly
moderate forms of Islam that are religiously tolerant and pluralistic and engage in inter-
faith dialogue, but often stop short of institutionally and legally reforming outdated and
discriminatory religious concepts. Other rivals promote more militant expressions of
the faith. As a result, the battle is a struggle to define what Islam represents and how
Muslims throughout the world will practice their faith. It is a battle that is being fought
at multiple levels and across numerous platforms, ranging from the world’s corridors of
powers to mosques and villages in Africa and Asia to mainstream and social media.
The significance of this battle lies in what is at stake. At stake is which Muslim-­
majority country or countries will be recognized as leaders of the Islamic world and the
degree to which moderate Islam incorporates principles of tolerance, pluralism, gender
equality, secularism, and human rights as defined in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. The major competitors—­Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates
(UAE), Turkey, Qatar, and Indonesia—­fall into two broad categories:

• proponents of a state-­controlled form of Islam, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE,

Turkey, Iran, and Qatar, whose principles are defined by the political needs of an
often authoritarian or autocratic state
• advocates of an interpretation of the faith, like Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama, that
is defined by civil society; embraces principles of humanitarianism, pluralism,
human rights, and secularism; and involves legal recontextualization and/or reform
of Islam to address problematic and discriminatory notions.
466   James M. Dorsey

It is a battle that pits rival Muslim-­majority powers against one another: Turkey, seat
of the Islamic world’s last true caliphate; Saudi Arabia, home to the faith’s two holiest
­cities; the UAE, propagator of a militantly statist interpretation of Islam; Qatar, with its
less strict version of Salafi Islam and penchant for political Islam; Indonesia, promoting
a humanitarian, pluralistic notion of Islam anchored in legal reform and recontextual-
ization of the faith; Morocco, which uses training of religious personnel as a way to posi-
tion itself as the face of moderate Islam; and Iran, with its embattled and derailed Islamic
revolution.
In the ultimate analysis, no clear winner may emerge. Yet, the course of the battle
could determine the degree to which Islam will be defined by either one or more com-
peting strands of ultraconservative and/or statist expressions of the faith that preach
absolute obedience to the ruler and reduce religious authorities to pawns of the state, or
by a truly more tolerant and pluralistic interpretation of one of the three most important
Abrahamic religions.
Implicit in this rivalry is a broader debate across the Muslim world that goes to the
heart of the relationship between the state and religion and what role, if any, the state
should play in the enforcement of religious morals, as well as the place of religion in
­education, judicial systems, and politics. Increasingly, lines that divide the state and
­religion become more blurred the more autocratic a political system is.

An Ever More Competitive Struggle

Little did President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and
Assistant Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher realize, as they winged their way in
February 1980 aboard a US Air Force Boeing 707 from Washington to Islamabad and
then past Iran to the Saudi capital of Riyadh, that the fallout of their trip would be felt
way into the 21st century. Along the way, they negotiated policies that would kick into
high gear already significant global Saudi support of ultraconservative, intolerant, and
discriminatory interpretations of Islam; contribute to the rise of violent and nonviolent
forms of Islamism; and focus the international community on Muslim ultraconservatism
as an alleged breeding ground for extremism. The policies would also frame a multistage
battle for Muslim religious soft power across the globe.
The trip by Brzezinski, widely viewed as the father of the anti-­Soviet jihad in
Afghanistan of the 1980s (Yetkin 2017), and Warren set the stage for countering the
Soviet invasion at a watershed moment in the history of the Middle East and South Asia.
The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Elsewhere, anti-­US mili-
tancy was rampant in the region. It was driven by revolutionary fervor that was often
cloaked in religious rhetoric inspired by the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, as well as
Sunni Islam militancy, fueled by criticism in Saudi Arabia of the religious establish-
ment’s endorsement of government policies that countered precepts of puritan Islam
and conservative social Bedouin traditions.
 The Battle for the Soul of Islam   467

Brzezinski and Warren flew home after a brief stop in Egypt with a sense of
­accomplishment.1 The two men had agreed with Pakistani President Zia ul-­Haq and
Saudi King Khaled on covert efforts that would turn Afghanistan into the equivalent
of the United States’ Vietnam and potentially weaken the Soviet Communist Party’s
grip on power. A US-­backed joint venture that also involved the Muslim Brotherhood
facilitated the recruitment for the anti-­Soviet jihad of up to 35,000 militants from 43
Muslim countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia (Roy 1995, 87). The militants
joined tens of thousands of others studying in often Saudi-­funded Pakistani madrassas
or religious seminaries.
The recruitment drive served as a Saudi vehicle to spread ultraconservatism, to
­prevent Iran from dominating the anti-­Soviet resistance, and to channel the frustrations
of radicalizing Saudi youth, often hailing from parts of the kingdom that had turned
increasingly conservative as the 1970s oil boom largely passed them by (Dorsey 2016a).
Support for the anti-­Soviet fighters took Saudi support for ultraconservatism as a tool
to achieve religious soft power and regional hegemony to new heights and helped clarify
the kingdom’s strategy. In contrast to the United States and Russia, which sought to
establish dominance on the back of their economic power, military strength, and size,
as well as ideology and culture, Saudi Arabia relied almost exclusively on its financial
muscle, religious puritanism, and position as the custodian of Islam’s two holiest cities,
Mecca and Medina. It allowed the kingdom to compensate for the fact that it was neither
the Muslim world’s largest economy, nor its strongest military force, nor the most popu-
lous Muslim nation. It also gave the kingdom a first-­starter advantage that ultimately
would turn out to be as much a liability as it was an asset.
A survey of the recent history of the quest for Muslim religious soft power tells the
story of an ever more competitive struggle with the staggered entry of multiple new
players. Initially, the Saudis, with Pakistani and a degree of West African input, had the
playing field more or less to themselves as they created in the 1960s the building blocks
of what would emerge as the world’s single most focused, state-­run, well-­funded public
diplomacy campaign. It far exceeded anything that the Soviets or the Americans under-
took. The Saudis, in contrast to the United States that could rely on its private-­sector
cultural attributes, was by necessity a top-­down, largely government-­financed initiative
that over time garnered public support (Dorsey 2016a).
The level of funding and the thrust of Saudi religious soft power diplomacy have
changed since the ascent to the Saudi throne in 2015 of King Salman and the rise of his
son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Ultraconservatism represented everything
the young prince no longer wished to project. Ultraconservative social restrictions
became a potential liability, inhibiting their effort to reform and diversify the Saudi
economy and cater to the aspirations of a population that is in majority below the age of
30. Bin Salman needed the kingdom and its religious culture to be perceived as tolerant
and forward-­looking, outward- rather than inward-­looking (Chulov 2017). He sought
to globally open doors for the kingdom through demonstrative acts like the visit to the
Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland by a delegation of 25 prominent Muslim
clergymen, led by Mohammed al-­Issa, the head of the Muslim World League, and the
468   James M. Dorsey

group’s forging of alliances with Jewish and evangelist communities (“Muslim World
League Chief ” 2020). Once a prime vehicle of Saudi global promotion of religious ultra-
conservatism, Bin Salman has turned the league into a propagator of his vaguely defined
notion of a “moderate” Islam.
Facts on the ground in the kingdom and beyond, nonetheless, tell at times a different
story. Schoolbooks are being cleansed of supremacist and racist references in a slow and
grinding process initiated after the 9/11 al-­Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (2020) reported in its 2020
report that “despite progress in recent years, Saudi textbooks have seen some backslid-
ing regarding language inciting hatred and violence toward non-­Muslims. While the
2019–2020 textbooks showed marginal improvements in the discussion of Christians,
textbooks still teach that Christians and Jews ‘are the enemy of Islam and its people,’ and
that members of the LGBTI community will ‘be struck in the same manner as those in
Sodom.’”
Bin Salman’s nominal embrace of religious tolerance and interfaith dialogue has pro-
duced far more public interactions with Jewish and Christian leaders, but has not led to
a lifting of the ban on public worship and the building of houses of worship in the king-
dom itself. Access to holy sites like Mecca and Medina remains banned for non-­
Muslims; often entry into mosques is barred.
While Saudi Arabia has implemented strict regulations on donations for charitable
purposes abroad, the source and the channeling of funding to militants who serve the
kingdom’s geopolitical purpose remain unclear at best. Militant Pakistani bagmen, in
interviews in 2017 and 2018, described the flow of large amounts to ultraconservative
madrassas that dot Pakistan’s borders with Iran and Afghanistan. They said the monies
were channeled through Saudi nationals of Baloch origin and often arrived in suitcases
in an operation that they believed had tacit Saudi government approval (Dorsey 2017).
The monies were being transferred at a time that US proponents, like John Bolton,
President Donald J. Trump’s former national security adviser, were pushing their agenda
of destabilizing Iran by supporting ethnic insurgencies (Bolton 2017) and Saudi Arabia
was publicly hinting that it may adopt a similar strategy (Dorsey 2017). Support for anti-­
Iranian Pakistani militants in the 21st century constituted a throwback to the Cold War,
when Saudi support of anti-­communist religious ultraconservatives constituted a pillar
of the US struggle against the atheist Soviet Union (Matthiesen 2018).

No Longer in a Class of Its Own

The Islamic revolution in Iran marked the moment that Saudi funding no longer was in
a class of its own. The revolution heralded a new phase in Saudi–Iranian rivalry that has
engulfed the Middle East, North Africa, and the non-­Arab Muslim world, as well as the
international community. Competition for religious soft power is a fixture of the rivalry.
So is the difference in Saudi and Iranian concepts of religious soft power, particularly
 The Battle for the Soul of Islam   469

when it comes to the Middle East. Both approaches have sectarian traits. Saudi Arabia’s
thrust, driven by geopolitics, was with few exceptions designed to garner religious influ-
ence. Iran, on the other hand, focused on hard power in various Arab countries in which
it supported religious militants (Parker and Noack 2020). In Africa and Asia, however,
Iran struck a different note by targeting religious communities and emphasizing spir­it­
ual and social issues (Wastnidge 2014).
The Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s, in which Gulf states funded Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein’s war machine, shifted Iran’s focus from export of its revolution to a greater
emphasis on Iranian nationalism and the nurturing of Shi‘a militias that would constitute
the country’s forward line of defense.
The shift was evident early in emotive debates in parliament in 1980 about the utility
of the occupation of the US embassy in Tehran at a time that Iran was at war with Iraq.
Men like Hojatoleslam Hashemi Rafsanjani, the speaker of the parliament who later
became president; Ayatollah Mohammed Beheshti, the number two in the Iranian polit-
ical hierarchy at the time; and chief jurist Ayatollah Sadegh Khalqali, who was known as
the hanging judge for his penchant for the death penalty, argued unsuccessfully in favor
of a quick resolution of the embassy crisis so that Iran could focus on the defense of its
territory and revolution. The debates signaled a shift from what was initially an ideolog-
ical rivalry to a geopolitical fight that continues today with a religious soft- and hard-­
power strategy driven by the perception that the United States and the Gulf states were
seeking to topple the Islamic regime.

An Ever More Complex Battle

Garnering religious soft power is a tough business. That is what UAE Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Zayed and prominent Muslim jurist Abdullah bin Bayyah discovered
when the UAE normalized relations with Israel in a bid to brandish the country’s religious
and moral standing.
Neither had reckoned with dissent among religious scholars, many funded by the
UAE to project the country as a beacon of religious tolerance, when Bin Bayyah posted a
statement on the website of the Abu Dhabi–based Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim
Societies. The statement praised “the wisdom of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin
Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the
Armed Forces” in reaching out to Israel (Emirates News Agency 2020). The forum is one
of several UAE-­backed groups created to counter similar Qatari institutions and give the
UAE effort religious legitimacy.
Within hours, two board members, a Kuwaiti government observer and a prominent
American Muslim activist, resigned, complaining that there had been no advance
discussion of the statement. Hamza Yusuf, the forum’s vice president and a popular
American Islamic scholar who heads Zaytuna College—­the United States’ first accredited
Muslim undergraduate college—­distanced himself from the statement, asserting that he
470   James M. Dorsey

did “not engage in or endorse geopolitical strategies or treaties.” Muhammad Hussein,

the grand mufti of Jerusalem, banned Muslims from the UAE from visiting and praying
at Jerusalem’s Al-­Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site (Dorsey 2020b).
The bad news did not stop there. Realizing that recognition of Israel was not going to
do away with criticism of the UAE’s troubled human rights record, creation of a surveil-
lance state, lagging controls on money laundering by corrupt and criminal operators,
and military interventions in countries like Yemen and Libya, Bin Zayed decided not to
attend a White House ceremony with US President Donald J. Trump and Israeli Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to cement their deal. He sent his foreign minister instead.
The setbacks put a dent in more than just Bin Zayed’s quest for religious power. They
threw a shadow over the effort by the UAE, a country that prides itself on being a cutting-­
edge home to people from some 190 countries, to project itself as an open and tolerant
society that is at the forefront of Islamic moderation and tolerance, respect for religious
diversity, and interfaith dialogue. The effort sought to counter the rise of political Islam,
particularly as a result of the 2011 popular Arab revolts that toppled leaders in Egypt,
Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen. It fueled the worst fears of men like Bin Zayed, Saudi Crown
Prince Mohammed, and Egyptian general-­turned-­president Abdel Fattah al-­Sisi.
It was not the first time that Bin Zayed’s own policies challenged the image he was
attempting to project. His willingness to fund and militarily support a rebel army in
Libya populated by Saudi-­style Salafis contradicted his carefully groomed image of a
proponent of a moderate, tolerant, and pluralistic Islam that took a dim view of ul­tra­
con­serv­a­tive interpretations of Islam like the Wahhabi strand of the faith prevalent in
Saudi Arabia (Kirkpatrick 2019). Bin Zayed has played a key role in shaping Bin Salman’s
policies to shave off the rougher edges of the Wahhabi strand of Islam and bring the UAE’s
and Saudi Arabia’s religious soft power endeavors closer together, centered on what
author Shadi Hamid (2020) calls nonpolitical politicized Islam, or a “third trend in
political Islam” that, in the words of scholar Gregory Gause (2017), “is tightly tied to
state authority and subservient to it.”
Bin Zayed’s efforts have paid off. Despite ruling at home with an iron fist, Bin Zayed
has been able to promote a state-­controlled Islam that styles itself as tolerant and apoliti-
cal and preaches absolute obedience without addressing outdated or intolerant concepts
embedded in the faith, such as the notions of kafirs (or infidels), slavery, and Muslim
supremacy, that remain reference points even if large numbers of Muslims do not heed
them. His success, backed by armies of paid Western lobbyists, is evidenced by the fact
that in contrast to Bin Salman and Saudi Arabia’s reputational problems as result of the
2018 killing in Istanbul of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the arrests and alleged torture
of dissidents as well as anyone deemed a potential threat, the UAE is widely perceived
as a religiously tolerant, pluralistic, enlightened society. The UAE has also successfully
projected itself as a secular state, even though its constitution requires legislation to be
compatible with Islamic law.
The UAE scored one of its most significant successes with the first ever papal visit,
by Pope Francis, during which he signed the Document on Human Fraternity with
Al-­Azhar’s El-­Tayeb. The pope acknowledged the UAE’s growing influence when in a
 The Battle for the Soul of Islam   471

public address he thanked Egyptian judge and his late adviser Mohamed Abdel Salam,
who was close to both the Emiratis and Egypt’s al-­Sisi, for drafting the declaration. Abdel
Salam ensured that the UAE and the Egyptian president, rather than Al-­Azhar, put their
stamp on the document (Dorsey 2019).
To bolster his version of Islam and to bcounter influential Qatari-­backed groups asso-
ciated with the Muslim Brotherhood as well as Turkey’s outreach, Bin Zayed launched a
multipronged offensive involving geopolitical as well as religious building blocks.
Bin Zayed drew a line in the sand when in 2013 he helped orchestrate a military
coup that toppled Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brother who won Egypt’s first and
only free and fair election (Steinberg 2020). His engineering of the 2017 debilitating
UAE–Saudi–Bahraini–Egyptian diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar, accused of
being a pillar of political Islam, strengthened Bin Zayed’s drawing of the religious
soft-­power battle lines (ibid.).
Bin Zayed signaled his ideational intentions with the creation of religious organizations
of his own, the launch of Emirati-­run training programs for non-­UAE imams in other
countries, and a visit a year after the coup in Egypt to the sprawling 1,000-­year-­old mosque
and university complex in Cairo of Al-­Azhar, the ancient citadel of Sunni Muslim
learning. The visit was designed to underline his determination to shape in his mold the
institution’s adoption of moderate language and to counter extremism and fanaticism.
The training programs put the UAE in direct competition with Saudi Arabia, Turkey,
and Morocco, major purveyors of Muslim clerical training.
The UAE’s hidden hand was further evident in the staging of a 2016 conference in the
Chechen capital of Grozny that effectively excommunicated the Wahhabi strand of
Islam. Participants in the gathering included the imam of the Al-­Azhar Grand Mosque,
Ahmed El-­Tayeb; Egyptian grand mufti Shawki Allam; former Egyptian grand mufti
and Sufi authority Ali Gomaa; Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-­Sisi’s religious affairs
adviser, Usama al-­Azhari; the mufti of Damascus, Abdul Fattah al-­Bizm, a close confi-
dant of Syrian President Bashar al-­Assad; influential Yemeni cleric Habib Ali Jifri, head
of the Abu Dhabi–based Islamic Tabah Foundation, who has close ties to Bin Zayed;
Indian grand mufti Shaykh Abubakr Ahmad; and his Jordanian counterpart, Shaykh
Abdul Karim Khasawneh (Dorsey 2016b).
The participation of El-­Tayeb, a political appointee and salaried Egyptian govern-
ment official, and other Egyptian religious luminaries who had supported Al-­Sisi’s mili-
tary coup, said much about the UAE’s inroads into Al-­Azhar, an institution that was for
decades a preserve of Saudi ultraconservatives. El-­Tayeb signaled the shift when in 2013
he accepted the Shaykh Zayed Book Award for Cultural Personality of the Year in recog-
nition of his “leadership in moderation and tolerance.” El-­Tayeb was lauded “for encour-
aging a culture of tolerance, dialogue and protection of civil society” at a moment that
Mohammed Morsi, the embattled post-­revolt Egyptian president, was fighting for his
political life, and Bin Zayed was cracking down on the Emirati branch of the Muslim
Brotherhood (Eissa 2013).
The Grozny conference was co-­organized by the Tabah Foundation, the sponsor of the
Muslim Council of Elders, a UAE-­based group founded in 2014 that aims to dominate
472   James M. Dorsey

Islamic discourse that many non-­Salafis assert has been hijacked by Saudi largesse. The
council, like the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, another UAE-­funded
organization, was created to counter the Doha-­based International Union of Muslim
Scholars headed by Yusuf Qaradawi, one of the world’s most prominent and controver-
sial Muslim theologians, who is widely viewed as a spiritual leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood. The foundation is headed by Saudi-­based Mauritanian politician and
Islamic scholar Abdullah Bin Bayyah as well as El-­Tayeb. Bin Bayyah was, until he estab-
lished the Emirati-­supported group, vice president of Qaradawi’s European Council for
Fatwa and Research, created to provide guidance to European Muslims through the dis-
semination of religious opinions (Al-­Azami 2019). He also heads the Emirates Fatwa
Council, which oversees the issuing of religious opinions and trains and licenses clerics
(UAE Council for Fatwa 2019).
Bin Bayyah as well as other prominent traditionalists with past ties to the Brotherhood
and/or political Islam, including Hamza Yusuf, an American convert to Islam, and Aref
Ali Nayed, a former Libyan ambassador to the UAE, found common ideological
ground in the assertion that the Brotherhood and jihadist ideology are offshoots of
ul­tra­con­serv­a­tive strands of Islam. They saw the UAE’s position as rooted in decades of
animosity between Al-­Azhar and the Brotherhood that Egyptian presidents Gamal
Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak exploited to counter the Brothers and
the Wahhabi strand of Islam. Born Mark Hanson, Yusuf, a disciple of Bin Bayyah, is
widely viewed as one of the most influential and charismatic Western Islamic preachers
(Quisay and Parker 2019).
Embracing Machiavelli’s notion of religion as a powerful tool in the hands of a prince,
members of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, including Bin Zayed and his foreign minister,
Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, began courting Bin Bayyah in early 2013. They invited
the cleric to the UAE the same month that Morsi was toppled ([Link] 2013). In a
letter three months later to Qaradawi’s International Union of Muslim Scholars, which
bitterly opposed the overthrow of Morsi and condemned the subsequent brutal repres-
sion of the Brotherhood, Bin Bayyah wrote that he was resigning from the group because
“the humble role I am attempting to undertake towards reform and reconciliation
[among Muslims] requires a discourse that does not sit well with my position at the
International Union of Muslim Scholars” (UAE Council for Fatwa 2019, n.p.).
The courting of Bin Bayyah emanated from Bin Zayed’s realization that he needed
religious soft power to justify the UAE’s wielding of hard power in countries like Yemen
and Libya. The timing of Bin Zayed’s positioning of Bin Bayyah as what Al-­Azami, the Islam
scholar, dubs “counter-­revolutionary Islam’s most important scholar” (Al-­Azami 2019)
was hardly coincidental. It coincided with the gradual withdrawal from public life of the
far more prolific and media-­savvy Qaradawi, who had become a nonagenarian.
In a comparative analysis of the thinking of Bin Bayyah and Qaradawi, Al-­Azami sug-
gests that it is Emirati financial and political clout, rather than intellectual output, that
will determine the degree to which the UAE acquires religious soft power:

The counter-­revolutionary Islamic political thought that is being developed

and promoted by Bin Bayyah and the UAE suffers from certain fundamental
 The Battle for the Soul of Islam   473

structural problems that means its very existence is precariously predicated on

the persistence of autocratic patronage. Its lack of independence means that it is
not the organic product of a relatively unencumbered engagement with political
modernity that might be possible in freer societies than counter-­revolutionary
Gulf autocracies. (ibid.)

Expressed more bluntly. Yahya Birt, a scholar of British Islam and a convert to the
faith, who has researched UAE-­backed clerics, argued that there is a discrepancy
between how they project their sponsors abroad and the reality on the ground.

The extracted price of government patronage is high for ulama in the Middle East.
Generally speaking, they have to openly support or maintain silence about autocracy
at home, while speaking of democracy, pluralism, and minority rights to Western
audiences. . . . What does this mean for the soft power dimension of the UAE with
projects such as the Forum for Promoting Peace? On the face of it the Forum seems
benign enough: promoting ideas of peace, minority rights and citizenship in the
Arab and Muslim world, but at what price? Any criticism of the UAE’s human rights
violations . . . seems impossible. (Birt 2017)

Longing for Past Imperial Glory

Many describe Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s foreign policy, inspired by the
thinking of Ahmet Davutoglu, a former academic and ex-­prime and foreign minister, as
“neo-­Ottoman.” That may be a misnomer, even if Turkish Islamists have a modicum of
nostalgia for the days of the Ottoman Empire. But far from harking back to the per-
ceived tolerant and pragmatic ways of the Ottomans, Erdoğan has pursued a policy from
the 2011 Arab upheavals onward that is best understood as both nationalist and pan-­
Islamist (Cagaptay 2019).
While Erdoğan’s campaign to project political, military, economic, cultural, and reli-
gious power has polarized elites throughout the Muslim word, it has fueled the Turkish
leader’s popularity among ordinary believers in Turkey and across the globe. He has
boosted that popularity by funding the building of mosques across Eurasia, as well as
in places as far-­flung as Cuba. In Africa, Turkey combines humanitarian and military
aid with religious funding, while in Europe, its Presidency of Religious Affairs, or
Diyanet, finances, guides, and controls significant segments of the continent’s large
Turkish diaspora.
Turkey has sought to curry favor with Muslim public sentiment by championing
­various causes, such as Muslim control of East Jerusalem, the plight of Myanmar’s
Rohingya, and the struggle in Kashmir. Turkey opposed the rapprochement between
Arab states and Israel; countered military intervention in Libya by the UAE, Egypt, and
Russia that supported anti-­Islamist rebels in Libya; propped up Azerbaijan in its 2020
Caucasus war against Armenia; and positioned itself as a leading campaigner against
Islamophobia and supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States.
474   James M. Dorsey

Erdoğan instructed Turkish diplomatic missions to encourage local Muslims to report

instances of Islamophobia, abuse, and discrimination (“Turkey’s Strongman” 2020).
The groundwork for Erdoğan’s targeting of the Sunni Muslim Turkish diaspora was
laid barely two years after his founding of the Development and Justice Party (AKP)
with the creation in 2003 of a parliamentary committee to address the political, social,
economic, and religious needs of some 5.5 million Turks in Europe. “It was designed to
enhance Turkey’s economic, geopolitical and soft power,” said a member of the commit-
tee. Diaspora Turks were encouraged not only to vote for the AKP in Turkish elections,
but to boost Turkey’s influence by participating in the politics of their host countries at a
time that German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Nikolas Sarkozy
­agitated against Turkish membership in the European Union. Outliving Kohl and
Sarkozy, anti-­Turkish sentiment in Europe fueled Erdoğan’s appeal. Turkey’s crackdown
on followers of Fethullah Gulen, many of whom sought refuge in Europe, sparked calls
in the German parliament to cancel the country’s application for EU membership
(Bruce 2019). Erdoğan holds Gulen, a Muslim preacher in exile in the United States,
whose notion of “moderate Islam” appealed to religiously conservative, upwardly
mobile urbanites, responsible for a 2016 failed coup designed to topple the president.
Erdoğan’s embrace of the diaspora responded to a feeling among ethnic Turks in
Europe that they were being marginalized as both Muslims and Turks and that
their voice was not heard as anti-­Muslim sentiment mounted in the years after the 2011
al-­Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington. In contrast to his Kemalist predeces-
sors, Erdoğan sought alliances with the religiously conservative. “Turkey empowers us.
It forces governments to take us seriously. Turkish officials give us the feeling that we
do not have to exclusively fend for ourselves,” said a religiously conservative German
Turkish activist.2
Erdoğan provocatively sought to sustain his grip on the diaspora by calling on it,
at a rally in the German city of Düsseldorf that gave him a rock star welcome, to
retain its religious and national identity. “Integrate into German society, but do not
assimilate. . . . Assimilation is a crime against humanity,” he said (Gezer and Reimann 2011).
Some 15,000 primarily religious German Turks, including many women donning
headscarves, waved Turkish flags and shouted, “Turkey is great” and “Turkey is proud of
you,” risking being drowned out by the chanting and the music in the city’s ISS Dome, a
huge sports and concert venue.
Erdoğan underlined the importance of religious soft power by granting Diyanet, one
of modern Turkey’s first institutions created by Ataturk under the same law that abol-
ished the caliphate and allowed for the closure of madrassas, a key role in foreign and aid
policy. The department runs some 90,000 mosques and 23 Qur’an schools in Turkey
and another 2,000 across the globe, with a heavy emphasis on Europe (Diyanet Isleri
Baskanligi 2020b). In 2019 alone it opened mosques in Japan, Tanzania, Djibouti, The
Netherlands, Cambridge, Cyprus, Albania, Macedonia, and Kosovo (Diyanet Isleri
Baskanligi 2020a).
Turkey’s religious soft power drive originated in an effort in the 1970s to cater to the
needs of a growing Turkish diaspora in Europe, largely made up of migrant workers, and
 The Battle for the Soul of Islam   475

to counter emerging Kurdish nationalist communities. It was encouraged by European

governments that saw Turkish imams as products of a secular government who would
serve as buffers against radicalism, including Turkish Muslim groups in Europe that
were considered radical by Turkey’s Kemalist political elite. European leaders believed
Turkish imams would shield their countries against the influence of clerics trained in
Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries that adhere to more rigid interpretations of
Islam. Turkish officials capitalized on European perceptions. “Asked what Islam and
Sharia means to him, a man from Saudi Arabia will repeat: having a thief ’s hand cut off.
Asked what Islam and Muslimdom represents for him, a Turk will answer: sincerity and
moral conduct,” noted former Diyanet president Ali Bardakoglu (Seufert 2006).
Diyanet’s international footprint expanded with the 1989 demise of the Soviet
Union and the independence of Turkic republics in central Asia and the Caucasus that
had been cut off from contact with the Muslim world for some 70 years. Underlining
Diyanet’s growing role, Erdoğan boosted the department’s status by ranking its head
in state protocol above that of many cabinet ministers (“Turkish PM Seeks Restitution”
2014). Meanwhile, Diyanet’s budget increased 20-­fold since Erdoğan became prime
minister in 2002 (Talan 2020), making it larger than that of eight of the government’s
16 ministries, including those responsible for home and foreign affairs, energy, agri-
culture, environment, and tourism (BirGun 2020). Following in the footsteps of Saudi
Arabia, the department has globally distributed to date some 8 million Qur’ans translated
in 23 languages (Cepni 2019). Like Saudi Arabia, where Crown Prince Mohammed
has reduced the religious establishment to parrots who endorse government policy,
Diyanet makes a point of issuing a supportive fatwa in response to Turkish govern-
ment decisions (“İhsan Eliaçık” 2020).
Turkish support of foreign mosques and state-­backed organizations like the Turkish-­
Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), which operates some 900 of the country’s
2,600 mosques, and the Diyanet Foundation of The Netherlands that controls 147
Muslim houses of worship has at times sparked controversy and investigations by
law enforcement and intelligence services. DITIB was founded in 1984, the same year
Diyanet created a foreign affairs department.
DITIB, whose imams are trained in Turkey, classified as Turkish civil servants, and
paid by Turkish consulates, admitted in 2018 that some of its clerics had spied on behalf
of the Turkish government (Winter 2017). France closed in 2020 the bank accounts of
Diyanet-­related groups as part of President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign against
political Islam (“France Shuts Diyanet’s Bank Accounts” 2020).
Much like the UAE’s blending of hard power with religious soft power in Libya, where
the Gulf state backs a rebel military force whose backbone are Salafist militants, Erdoğan
harnesses the Diyanet to legitimize his military escapades in Syria, Libya, and Iraq
(“‘Conquest’ Prayers Performed” 2018). DITIB mosques were instructed to pray for the
success of Turkey’s military intervention in Syria, prompting allegations that the group
had violated German law. The religious affairs presidency regularly orders imams to
recite a verse from the Qur’an, Sura Al-­Fath or the Verse of the Conquest, to legitimize
the Turkish president’s foreign adventures. The sura conveys a message of victory and
476   James M. Dorsey

conquest for Muslims and the favor God conferred upon the Prophet Muhammad and
his followers. It promises increased numbers of monotheists, as well as forgiveness of
mistakes by those who do jihad on the path of God.
Turkey’s quest for soft power kicked into high gear in the wake of the failed coup, with
Erdoğan repeatedly defining Turkish identity as essentially Ottoman. It is an identity
that obliged Turkey, in Erdoğan’s view, to come to the defense of Muslims, starting with
the 45 modern-­day states that once were Ottoman territory. It is because they are in the
majority Muslim that Erdoğan has supported Palestinian nationalist aspirations as well
as Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, as well as independence of
Kosovo. The faithful at the Al-­Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, Islam’s third most holy site,
frequently display portraits of Erdoğan as they perform Friday prayers under a gleam-
ing gold crescent on the Dome of the Rock, which was funded by Turkey.
In the Balkans, central Asia, and Europe, Turkey has a leg up on its competitors.
Centuries of Ottoman rule as well as voluntary and forced migration have spawned
close ethnic and family ties. Millions of Turks pride themselves on their Balkan roots.
The names of Istanbul neighborhoods, parks, and forests reflect the Balkans’ Ottoman
history. Central Asians identify themselves as Turkic, speak Turkic languages, and share
cultural attributes and similar culinary delights with Turks. In Europe, Turkish opera-
tives often enjoy the goodwill of large, well-­integrated diaspora communities, even if the
fault lines run deep between Turks and Kurds opposed to the Turkish government’s
repression of Kurdish political aspirations.
Turkey’s Achilles heel may be that the Ottoman-­style Islam it projects is based on a
misreading of the empire’s history. In a twist of irony, Erdoğan embraced a Kemalist
vision of the Ottomans as a religiously driven empire rather than one that perceived
itself as both Muslim and European and that was pragmatic and not averse to aspects of
secularism. It is that misreading that, in the words of Turkey scholar Soner Cagaptay
(2019), has produced “an ahistorical, political Islam-­oriented, and often patronizing
foreign policy concoction” and has informed Turkey’s religious soft power strategy.

The New Kid on the Block

Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim movement, was on alert when in 2007
some 100,000 people packed Jakarta’s Bung Karno Stadium to attend the International
Caliphate Conference. The event was organized by Hizbut Tahrir, or the Party of
Liberation, the Indonesian chapter of a global movement calling for the peaceful resto-
ration of a single Muslim government across the Islamic world. Participants, often
women and children who had come from across Indonesia, waved black flags as they
listened to celebrity preachers. “After the destruction of the Caliphate, tragedy after
tragedy has descended on the Muslim world. Our nation has been divided into 50 and
the infidel colonialists picked rulers in each of these countries,” the group’s leader,
Muhammad Ismail Yusanto, told the crowd. Islam’s golden age when different religions
 The Battle for the Soul of Islam   477

coexisted peacefully in Andalusia served as evidence that non-­Muslims had nothing to

fear from the resurrection of the caliphate, he noted (Nuraniyah 2020, 84).
The conference did not revive the transnational caliphate intended to replace a
­system of decaying and corrupt nation-­states that populate the Muslim world. On the
contrary, it sparked developments that would challenge Hizbut Tahrir’s goal and lead to
the banning in Indonesia of the group that since its founding in 1953 has been outlawed
in several Arab and central Asian countries. Hizbut Tahrir threw down a gauntlet for
Nahdlatul Ulama, founded in 1926 in opposition to the Wahhabi strand of Islam, the
puritan interpretation of Islam propagated by Saudi Arabia, by holding a series of rallies
in Java, the movement’s heartland in which, like at the caliphate conference, banners
proclaimed that Nahdlatul Ulama members longed for the restoration of the caliphate
(Rachel 2014). With Hizbut Tahrir making inroads into Nahdlatul Ulama territory
with the distribution of its literature and the takeover of mosques, a showdown had
become inevitable. Nahdlatul Ulama chair Haysim Muzadi warned at the time that
“transnational Islamic ideologies” threaten Indonesian unity and Pancasila, the coun-
try’s foundational ideology that propagates monotheism, civility, fairness, democracy,
and social justice.
Hizbut Tahrir’s inroads into traditional Nahdlatul Ulama territory spurred inevitable
violent clashes between Nahdlatul Ulama and Hizbut Tahrir, as well as other militant
Islamist groups. The first clashes occurred in 2008, at a moment that the government of
President Sunilo Bambang Yudhonyo, which included several ministers belonging to
the Muslim Brotherhood–aligned Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), accommodated
political Islam.
The confrontation with Hizbut Tahrir fueled an ongoing debate within Nahdlatul
Ulama that in 2015 produced the group’s concept of humanitarian Islam, the crowning
of a process within the movement that started in the early 1990s, as well an international
outreach campaign that gained entry into some of the world’s foremost corridors of
power. The only civil society grouping with the religious and popular heft to initiate
legal reform, Nahdlatul Ulama’s concept of a humanitarian Islam that embraces
­principles of tolerance and pluralism as well as the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights in its entirety, coupled with its demonstrated willingness to enact legal reform,
challenges state-­driven notions of “moderate” Islam propagated by Indonesia’s soft
power rivals. Nahdlatul Ulama’s charter of humanitarian or Nusantara (Archipelago)
Islam (Bayt ar-­Rahmah 2018a). shares much with a trend toward “Islamic modernism”
or “Islamic progressivism” articulated by Islam scholars such as Mustafa Akyol (2013),
Ebrahim Moosa (2014), Mohammed Arkoun (2007), Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (2006),
and Muhammad Shahrour and Makram Abbes (2019). In what historian Christopher
De Bellaigue (2017) described as the Islamic Enlightenment dating to the 19th century,
Islamic modernism seeks to reread Islam’s fundamental sources—­the Qur’an and the
Sunna, or the practice of the Prophet—­by placing them in their historical context, and
then to reinterpret them in a modern context.
Nahdlatul Ulama’s drive to take its concept of humanitarian Islam on the road not
only at home in Indonesia, but also in the world’s corridors of power in world capitals,
478   James M. Dorsey

including Washington, London, Berlin, Budapest, Brussels, the Vatican, and Delhi,
where it challenges the statist approaches of its religious soft power rivals, has turned it
into a powerful voice in the battle for the soul of Islam. Nahdlatul Ulama was instru-
mental in organizing a visit to Indonesia in 2020 by Pope Francis that had to be post-
poned because of the coronavirus pandemic (“September Papal Visit to Indonesia
Postponed” 2020). It, rather than the government, invited and arranged a trip to Jakarta
by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who made a speech to a Nahdlatul Ulama event
the centerpiece of his visit (Dorsey 2020c).
Nahdlatul Ulama’s evolution toward a process of recontextualization dates to a 1992
gathering of religious scholars chaired by Abdurrahman Wahid, the group’s leader at the
time and later president of Indonesia. The gathering noted that “the changing context of
reality necessitates the creation of new interpretations of Islamic law and orthodox
Islamic teaching” (Bayt Ar-­Rahmah 2018b).
Indonesian President Joko Widodo initially hoped that Nahdlatul Ulama’s manifesto
on humanitarian Islam would empower his government to lead efforts to position
Indonesia as the beacon of a moderate interpretation of the faith. Speaking in 2018 at the
laying of the ground stone of the International Islamic University in West Java, Widodo
laid down a gauntlet for his competitors in the Middle East by declaring that it was
“­natural and fitting that Indonesia should become the (authoritative) reference for the
progress of Islamic civilization” (Kuwado 2018).
Widodo saw the university as providing an alternative to the Islamic University of
Medina, which has played a key role in Saudi Arabia’s religious soft power campaign,
and Al-­Azhar in Cairo, an ancient citadel of Islamic learning, that is influenced by finan-
cially backed Saudi scholars and scholarship as well as Emirati funding. The university is
“a promising step to introduce Indonesia as the global epicenter for ‘moderate’ Islam,”
said Islamic philosophy scholar Amin Abdullah.3
Saudi and Emirati concerns were initially assuaged when Widodo’s aspirations were
thwarted by critics within his administration. A six-­page plan to enhance Indonesian
religious soft power globally put forward by Nahdlatul Ulama at the request of Pratikno,
Widodo’s minister responsible for providing administrative support for his initiatives,
was buried after the foreign ministry warned that its adoption would damage relations
with the Gulf states.4
That could have been the end of the story. But neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE
anticipated Nahdlatul Ulama’s determination to push its concept of humanitarian Islam
globally, including at the highest levels of government in Western capitals as well as in
countries like India. Nor did they anticipate Widodo’s willingness to play both ends against
the middle by supporting Nahdlatul Ulama’s campaign while engaging on religious
issues with both the Saudis and the Emiratis.
The degree to which Nahdlatul Ulama is perceived as a threat by the UAE and Saudi
Arabia is evident in battles in high-­level interfaith meetings convened by the Vatican, US
Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback, and others
over principles like endorsement of the United Nations human rights declaration.5
Nahdlatul Ulama’s rise to prominence was also what persuaded Mohammed Al-­Issa,
the head of the Muslim World League, the major vehicle used for decades by the Saudi
 The Battle for the Soul of Islam   479

government to globally fund Sunni Muslim ultraconservatism, to visit the Indonesian

group’s headquarters in Jakarta in early 2020. It was the first visit to one of the world’s
foremost Islamic organizations in the league’s almost 60-­year history (Dorsey 2020d).
Nahdlatul Ulama’s ability to compete is further evidenced by its increasingly influential
role in Centrist Democrat International (CDI), the world’s largest alliance of political
parties that grew out of European and Latin American Christian Democratic move-
ments. Membership in CDI of the National Awakening, the political party of Nahdlatul
Ulama, gives it a leg up on the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which ban parties, or Turkey,
whose ruling AKP would be viewed as problematic at best. CDI’s executive committee
met in the Javan city of Yogyakarta in January 2020. Participants included prominent
Latin American leaders and former heads of state, Hungarian Prime Minister Victor
Orban, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa, and Elmar Brock, a close associate of
German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Nahdlatul Ulama’s sway was apparent in CDI’s adoption of a resolution that called for
adherence to universal ethics and humanitarian values based on Western humanism,
Christian democracy, and humanitarian Islam. The resolution urged resistance to “the
emergence of authoritarian, civilizationalist states that do not accept the rules-­based
post-­WWII order, whether in terms of human rights, rule of law, democracy or respect
for international borders and the sovereignty of other nations” (IDC-­CDI 2020, n.p.).
Nahdlatul Ulama benefits from what journalist Muhammad Abu Fadil (2015) described
as rejection of an “Arab face of Islam” that in his words was “hopelessly contorted by
extremism” in Western perceptions. Abu Fadil suggested that “certain elements in the
West have become interested in ‘Asian Islam,’ which appears to be more moderate
than Arab Islam; more generous of a genuine and sincere tendency to act with
­tolerance” (ibid.).

Battling It Out

The battle for the soul of Islam is being fought at multiple levels and across numerous
platforms ranging from the world’s corridors of powers to mosques and villages in the
Indonesian countryside to efforts to win hearts and minds in countries with young pop-
ulations whose attitudes toward religion are changing as a result of mainstream and
social media. The UAE and Nahdlatul Ulama periodically duel in interfaith conferences
hosted by Pope Francis and the State Department, while Abu Dhabi seeks to steer
Indonesian President Joko Widodo away from Nahdlatul Ulama’s concept of humani-
tarian Islam and toward its state-­controlled version of the faith. At the same time, Saudi
Arabia continues to cooperate with Indonesia’s Muslim Brotherhood–aligned political
party, PKS, to challenge Nahdlatul Ulama by building mosques in the movement’s
Javanese strongholds.
Senior UAE officials walk a tightrope as they publicly project a united front with Saudi
Arabia and privately express disdain for the kingdom’s ultraconservative strand of Islam.
Rivals like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar have invested millions of dollars in US
480   James M. Dorsey

think tanks and lobbying and public relations firms to influence Congress and shape
coverage in mainstream and social media. All three of these Gulf nations have also
funded disinformation campaigns with massive armies of bots that are regularly taken
down by platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Turkey, meanwhile, benefits from a
large European diaspora that maintains close ties to the motherland and provides a base
for the creation of grassroots organizations in mosques and Muslim communities.

Notes
1. The author accompanied Brzezinski and Warren as a reporter for the Christian Science
Monitor.
2. Interview with the author, March 19, 2019.
3. Interview with the author, July 25, 2020.
4. Multiple interviews with Nahdlatul Ulama officials, July 2020.
5. Multiple interviews with US State Department and Nahdlatul Ulama officials, as well as
other participants in interfaith meetings at the Vatican, 2019 and 2020.

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