Saudi Arabia Funded Schools

Unquestionably, there has been a rise in the number of religious schools in the Islamic world, and particularly of schools dominated by the more fundamentalist Deobandi, Wahhabi, and Salafi strains of Islam. Pakistan reported that between Independence in 1947 and 2001, the number of religiously based madrassas increased from 245 to 6,870.

The schools are often funded by Saudi Arabia. A few schools have produced militants, especially in Pakistan, where the government in the 1980s actively supported the formation of Islamic militias to fight in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

While the Saudi state is careful not to directly fund terrorist groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS, it does directly support the madrassas (religious schools) and conservative clerics that espouse the puritanical interpretations of Islam that form the basis of belief for these terrorist groups. Also, individual members of the Saudi royal family have provided support to these groups, although not in an official state capacity.