The Call
Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project
Journalist Krithika Varagur's Da'wa chronicles the House of Saud as it systematically transforms the Muslim world in its own image, in one of the major imperial projects in today's world, on par with China's economic diplomacy. Since 1979, Saudi Arabia has spent $1.8 billion per year, by one estimate, to propagate its puritanical brand of Islam, called Salafism or Wahhabism. It has kept scrupulous records of its religious activity in 27 countries, with over 4,000 Salafi preachers on its payroll worldwide. This is the cumulative scope of the Saudi campaign on three separate continents, told through the trial of a Christian governor in Indonesia; the emergence of Wahhabi influence in the Republic of Kosovo; and the death sentence of a Sufi priest in Nigeria.
Krithika Varagur is an award-winning journalist who covers Indonesia for The Guardian and has reported widely from Southeast and South Asia for publications including The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Financial Times, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, and The New York Times. She regularly corresponds for outlets like NPR, the BBC, Democracy Now!, and Deutsche Welle and her work has been supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the International Women's Media Foundation, the Overseas Press Club Foundation, the Rory Peck Trust, and more. She is a National Geographic explorer and a former Amtrak writer-in-residence. Varagur graduated from Harvard University and was a Fulbright scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
