Starting in the mid-1970s and 1980s, the international propagation of Salafism and Wahhabism within Sunni Islam and throughout the Muslim world, favored by the conservative oil-exporting Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies, achieved a "preeminent position of strength in the global expression of Islam". The Saudi interpretation of Islam not only includes Salafism and Wahhabism but also Islamist and revivalist interpretations of Islam, and a "hybrid" of the two interpretations (until the 1990s). During the Cold War, the United States and the United Kingdom, launched covert and overt campaigns to encourage and strengthen Islamists in the Middle East, North Africa, Central and Southern Asia. These Islamists were seen as a hedge against potential expansion by the Soviet Union, and as a counterweight against nationalist and socialist movements that were seen as a threat to the interests of the Western nations. In 1957, in a meeting with the CIA’s Frank Wisner and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President Eisenhower gave approval to a policy that included doing "everything possible to stress the 'holy war' aspect”, and sending weapons to the Saudi-led conservative monarchies to counteract socialist Arab nationalists. In a 2018 interview with The Washington Post, Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, said that "investments in mosques and madrassas overseas were rooted in the Cold War, when allies asked Saudi Arabia to use its resources to prevent inroads in Muslim countries by the Soviet Union." The impetus for the international propagation of Salafism and Wahhabism was, according to political scientist Alex Alexiev, "the largest worldwide propaganda campaign ever mounted", David A. Kaplan described it as "dwarfing the Soviets' propaganda efforts at the height of the Cold War" funded by petroleum exports. Others such as Peter Mandaville, former advisor in the Secretary of State's Office of Religion & Global Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, have cautioned against such hyperbolic assertions, pointing out the unreliability of inconsistent data estimates based on "non-specific hearsay". From 1982 to 2005 the Saudi government, in an effort to spread the Salafi-Wahhabi brand of Islam across the world (da'wah Salafiyya), spent over $75 billion via international organizations affiliated with the House of Saud and religious attaches at dozens of Saudi embassies, to establish/build 200 Islamic colleges, 210 Islamic centers, 1,500 mosques, and 2,000 schools for Muslim children in Muslim-majority countries and elsewhere. Mosque funding was combined with persuasion to propagate the dawah Salafiyya; schools were "fundamentalist" in outlook and formed a network "from Sudan to northern Pakistan". Supporting proselytizing or preaching of Islam has been called "a religious requirement" for Saudi rulers that cannot [or could not] be abandoned "without losing their domestic legitimacy" as protectors and propagators of Islam. Other strict and conservative interpretations of Sunni Islam assisted by funding from the Gulf monarchies include the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami (until the break between the Muslim Brotherhood and Gulf monarchies in the 1990s). While their alliances were not always permanent, they were said to have formed a "joint venture", sharing a strong "revulsion" against Western influences, a belief in strict implementation of Islamic law (sharīʿa), an opposition to both Shia Muslims and popular Islamic religious practices (the veneration of Muslim saints and visitations of their tombs), and a belief in the importance of armed jihad. A "fusion", or "hybrid", of the two movements came out of the Afghan jihad, where thousands of Muslims were trained and equipped to fight against Soviets and their Afghan allies in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The funding has been criticized for promoting an intolerant, fanatical form of Islam that several political scientists and scholars of international relations consider to be the core cause of Islamic extremism and religiously-motivated terrorism worldwide, along with the Islamist ideology and practice of excommunication (takfīr). In 2013, the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism. Critics argue that volunteers mobilized to fight in Afghanistan (such as Osama bin Laden) went on to wage jihad against Muslim governments and civilians in other countries, and that conservative Sunni groups such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan are attacking and killing not only non-Muslims (Kūffar) but also fellow Muslims they consider to be apostates, such as Shia Muslims and Sufi ascetics. As of 2017, changes to Saudi religious policy have led some to suggest that "Islamists throughout the world will have to follow suit or risk winding up on the wrong side of orthodoxy". == Background == Religion in Saudi Arabia is dominated and heavily influenced by the Salafi brand of Sunni Islam and its Wahhabi ideology, a political and religious ideology named after Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th-century Sunni Muslim preacher, scholar, and theologian from the Najd region in central Arabia, founder of the Islamic revivalist and reformist movement known as Wahhabism. Despite being opposed and rejected by some of his contemporary critics amongst the religious clergy, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab charted a religio-political pact with Muhammad bin Saud to help him to establish the Emirate of Diriyah, the first Saudi state, and began a dynastic alliance and power-sharing arrangement between their families which continues to the present day in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Al ash-Sheikh, Saudi Arabia's leading religious family, are the descendants of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, and have historically led the ulama in the Saudi state, dominating the state's clerical institutions. Although Saudi Arabia had been an oil exporter since 1939, and active leading the conservative opposition among Arab states to Gamal Abdel Nasser's progressive and secularist Arab nationalism since the beginning of the Arab Cold War in the 1960s, it was the October 1973 War that greatly enhanced its wealth and stature, and ability to advocate Salafi missionary activities. According to political scientist Gilles Kepel, prior to the 1973 oil embargo, religion throughout the Muslim world was "dominated by national or local traditions rooted in the piety of the common people", and mystical Sufi brotherhoods (Tariqa) were the primary social bonds for both urban and rural populations across the Muslim world. The majority of the Muslim population consisted of illiterate farmers. These Sufi orders served as a bridge, reconciling the local traditional beliefs, some of them pre-Islamic, of the uneducated masses, with the bookish culture of Islam. Muslim clerics looked to their different schools of Islamic jurisprudence (the four legal schools in Sunni Islam, plus the Ja'fari school in Shia Islam): Hanafi in the Turkic lands, the Middle East, and South Asia; Maliki in the Sahara; Shafi'i in Southeast Asia and the Horn of Africa; Hanbali in parts of the Arabian Peninsula. The first three schools "held Saudi inspired puritanism" (the Hanbali school) in "great suspicion on account of its sectarian character," according to French political scientist Gilles Kepel. But the legitimacy of this class of traditional Islamic jurists had become undermined in the 1950s and 60s by the power of post-colonial nationalist governments. In "the vast majority" of Muslim countries, the private religious endowments (awqaf) that had supported the independence of the Islamic scholars/jurists for centuries were taken over by the state and the jurists were made salaried employees. The nationalist rulers naturally encouraged their employees (and their employees interpretations of Islam) to serve their employer/rulers' interests, and inevitably the jurists came to be seen by the Muslim public as doing so. In Egypt's "shattering" 1967 defeat, Land, Sea and Air had been the military slogan; in the perceived victory of the October 1973 war, it was replaced with the Islamic battle cry of Allahu Akbar. While the Yom Kippur War was started by Egypt and Syria to take back the land conquered in 1967 by Israel, according to Kepel the "real victors" of the war were the Arab "oil-exporting countries", whose embargo against Israel's Western allies stopped Israel's counter-offensive. The embargo's political success enhanced the prestige of the embargo-ers and the reduction in the global supply of oil sent oil prices soaring (from US$3 per barrel to nearly $12) and with them, oil exporter revenues. This put Arab oil-exporting states in a "clear position of dominance within the Muslim world." The most dominant was Saudi Arabia, the largest exporter by far (see bar chart below). Saudi Arabians viewed their oil wealth not as an accident of geology or history, but directly connected to their practice of religion—a blessing given them by God, "vindicate them in their separateness from other cultures and religions," but also something to "be solemnly acknowledged and lived up to" with pious behavior, and so "legitimize" its prosperity and buttressing and "otherwise fragile" dynasty. With its new wealth the rulers of Saudi Arabia sought to replace nationalist movements in the Muslim world with Islam, to bring Islam "to the forefront of the international scene", and to unify Islam worldwide under the a single Salafi creed, paying particular attention to Muslims who had immigrated to the West (a "special target"). In the words of journalist Scott Shane, "when Saudi imams arrived in Muslim countries in Asia or Africa, or in Muslim communities in Europe or the Americas, wearing traditional Arabian robes, speaking the language of the Quran — and carrying a generous checkbook — they had automatic credibility." === Non-Salafi Muslim influence === For Salafists, working with grassroots non-Salafi Islamist groups and individuals