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The Wahhabi outreach goes beyond the Muslim world. In March 2002 Ain al-Yaqeen, an official Saudi magazine, wrote that the royal family wholly or partly funded some 210 Islamic centers, 1,500 mosques, 202 colleges and 2,000 schools in countries without Muslim majorities. Cambodia is one such place. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Cambodia's Muslims, who make up 5% of the population, turned to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to help rebuild their mosques and schools. Accompanying the aid were teachers from those countries, with the result that today 10% to 15% of Cambodian Muslims are Wahhabis. Many go to Saudi Arabia to study. "They come back and are filled with fire and want to change the way we do things," says Soi Ponyamin, a commune chief in the village of Svay Khleang.
Saudi proselytizers are also interested in Muslims in the U.S. and other Western countries. Says Antoine Sfeir, the Lebanese-born editor of the Parisian quarterly Notebooks of the East: "Their message to Muslims in Europe and America is so extreme and intolerant: 'Do not accept their ways, and do not consider yourself as one of them. You only exist as a Muslim, respecting Muslim values alone.'"
Abdulaziz Sachedina, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia who spent much of his career in Canada, says that most Sunni community centers in Canada receive Saudi funding. Carl Sharif El-Tobgui, a Ph.D. student at McGill University's Institute for Islamic Studies, which specializes in the worldwide spread of Islamic culture, estimates that 10% to 20% of Canada's 580,000 Muslims adhere to Wahhabism.
Saudi gifts to build or improve mosques and community centers in the U.S. generally come with strings attached, says a U.S. official. "It's conditioned on the preaching of Wahhabism." According to Washington-based Khalid Duran, president of the Ibn Khaldun Society, a Muslim cultural association, virtually every Muslim child in the U.S. receiving religious instruction in Arabic is using Saudi textbooks. "Students are being indoctrinated into this feeling that a Muslim is automatically a better human being," he says. A seventh-grade Saudi text in use in the U.S. and obtained by Rita Katz, executive director of an institute called the Search for International Terrorist Entities, explains a Koranic verse thusly: "We have to be careful of the infidels, and we can ask Allah to destroy them in our prayers."
Al-Matroudi, of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, is vehement that the government never attaches ideological strings to its overseas aid and does not promote Wahhabism abroad. "No, no, no," he says. "[We have] nothing to do with that at all. Our understanding is for our own country. These people who are asking for help, we never ask them to practice Islam according to our understanding." Foreign Minister Saud says it's possible there are individual Saudis who have contributed money to Wahhabi schools abroad. "But if there are," he says, "we want the information. The man will go to prison. These are the new regulations" He adds, "The next time somebody comes and asks us to finance anything in their country, we will obviously refuse."
THE OUTLOOK: HOW FAST CAN THE SAUDIS CHANGE?