Since its founding in 1961 as a project backed by the Saudi state, the Islamic University of Medina (IUM) has offered fully funded, residential religious training to mostly non-Saudi male students in order that they might then return to their countries of origin or travel on elsewhere as missionaries. Their task has been to preach to non-Muslims, but also (and especially) to preach to Muslim communities around the world that are seen as having strayed from the true creed. For many decades after it was established, a large proportion of the IUM's staff also hailed from outside Saudi Arabia, including from the wider Middle East and beyond. The IUM thus represents one key node in a lattice of global connections and processes that have intertwined with efforts by Saudi political and religious actors to extend their influence far beyond the kingdom's borders. Yet despite its importance as a centre of migration and as a hub of global Salafi proselytising, the IUM has to date been almost entirely neglected in the literature on modern Islamic education.

Given the dearth of research on the history of this influential university, the first part of this chapter aims to sketch key aspects of the IUM's genesis and evolution over half a century, and maps this institutional history onto developments in the realms of national, regional and global politics over the same period. Through an overview of such basic issues as staffing, student recruitment and budgets, I seek to show how the IUM and its missionary project were imbricated in far-reaching dynamics of religious revival and reform, political economy, domestic manoeuvring and geopolitical rivalry.

The remainder of the chapter shifts away from this macro-level concern with overarching institutional frameworks to offer a more microscopic analysis of some aspects of teaching. Against a common tendency to view Wahhabism as a hermetically sealed and rigid tradition, I argue that the pedagogy that came together at this university was in fact partly shaped by a dynamic of unequal reciprocity between the Wahhabi institution, on the one hand, and the staff and students from all over the world, on the other. This was a process of give and take which saw staff and students influencing the university at the same time as they were influenced by it.