This report is the inaugural publication from a larger project on “The Geopolitics of Religious Soft Power” that Brookings is undertaking in partnership with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs at Georgetown University. This initiative will focus on the various ways governments incorporate religion and religious outreach into their broader foreign policy conduct. Over the coming months, the project will publish a range of short articles, essays, and papers that analyze and assess the use of religious soft power by countries such as Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, as well as its impact in settings from West Africa to South and Southeast Asia.

Executive summary

The discussion of Islam in world politics in recent years has tended to focus on how religion inspires or is used by a wide range of social movements, political parties, and militant groups. Less attention has been paid, however, to the question of how governments—particularly those in the Middle East—have incorporated Islam into their broader foreign policy conduct. Whether it is state support for transnational religious propagation, the promotion of religious interpretations that ensure regime survival, or competing visions of global religious leadership; these all embody what we term in this new report the “geopolitics of religious soft power.”

The paper explores the religious dimensions of the Saudi-Iranian rivalry, looking at how the Islamic outreach strategies of the two governments have evolved in response to changing regional and global environments. We assess the much-discussed phenomenon of Saudi Arabia’s export of Wahhabism, arguing that the nature and effects of Saudi religious influence around the world are more complicated than we ordinarily think.

Meanwhile, since 9/11 and the rise of ISIS, the governments of several prominent Muslim-majority countries, among them Jordan, Morocco, and Egypt, have positioned themselves as the purveyors of a “moderate Islam” capable of blunting the narrative of extremist groups. We also look at Turkey and Indonesia as examples of emerging powers that, with somewhat less fanfare, have integrated elements of religious outreach into their broader soft power strategies across Asia and Africa.

Across these wide-ranging cases, the ways that states use Islam in their conduct abroad is often shaped by domestic considerations and, by the same token, the impact it has in target countries is frequently something other than intended due to the mediating effect of local actors and contexts.