Claims abound of Saudi oil money fuelling Salafi Islam across cultural and geographical terrains as far removed as the remote village hamlets of the Swat valley in Pakistan and sprawling megacities such as Jakarta. Assumptions that the Iranian state is fighting proxy wars with Sunni Arab states in foreign lands similarly tend to be promoted to the status of fact. In fact, however, there are few empirically grounded studies that explore how those with hegemonic aspirations embed their ideologies in locales to which that thought and its accompanying practices are very foreign. Questions about how ideas are transported from an assumed core to societies viewed to be on the periphery, and how these ideas are embedded, if at all, within the complex socio-economic and political milieus of their new host societies, are more often answered through the creation of hypothetical scenarios than by marshalling scholarly evidence. We still lack academically sound responses to certain critical questions, such as: what enables a particular brand of Islam to gain centrality among competing positions?; to what extent do national governments play an active part in promoting a global Islamic discourse?; and in what ways do the Islamic discourses that acquire global attention challenge local beliefs and practices? This volume is designed to address this gap. It represents a rare attempt to map the complex processes of engagement between an assumed core and the peripheries. The volume illustrates how this engagement at times dramatically transforms the host societies, while in other cases the absorption of new ideas remains partial – the success of foreign ideas in transforming local contexts remaining contingent on their suitability for the socio-economic and political realities of their host societies.

In order to unravel the complex processes that underpin the global transmission of Islamic discourses, this volume focuses on the working of the three most influential international centres of Islamic learning in contemporary times: al-Azhar University in Egypt; the Islamic University of Medina (IUM) in Saudi Arabia; and al-Mustafa International University in Iran. These three universities, located in the politically influential countries in the Middle East and Gulf region, attract students from across the globe. Their graduates carry the ideas acquired during their education back to their home communities, and some also bring with them a reformatory zeal.