from David Warren's rejoinder:
In the case of the UAE, a key benefit these ʿulamāʾ organisations provide comes from their value for convincing foreign powers to maintain their interests in the country’s security. Despite the significance of Bin Bayyah’s articulate “regime Islam,” to use Brown’s parlance, his value internationally likely outweighs his value domestically. After all, the UAE has an extensive security apparatus that moves swiftly to extinguish local dissent and maintains lavish rentier payments to its citizens. Consequently, the ruling family’s need for a regime Islam to buttress its legitimacy domestically is likely somewhat limited. Moreover, as Walaa Quisay has noted here, and Muhammad Amasha has pointed out elsewhere, the UAE has sponsored a diverse array of ʿulamāʾ and Muslim thinkers, ranging from Bin Bayyah to Muhammad Shahrur (d.2019).
Thus, the greater benefit that Bin Bayyah and FPPMS provide for the UAE is at the level of state-branding, an important element of foreign security policy for the Sunni Gulf monarchies. Since the Gulf states are dependent upon outside powers to preserve their security, they must brand themselves in order maintain those powers’ interest in their independence. Since the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine, that outside power has been the United States, though the establishment of a Turkish base in Qatar, closer regional links with China, and normalization agreements between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain hint at a coming shift in the status quo.
For the UAE, this state-branding has not only involved developing itself into a global centre for commerce, transportation, and finance, it has also included building a particular brand of Islamic reform. This brand intersects with the US State Department’s long-running “efforts to reshape and transform ‘Islam from within’” as part of its post-9/11 policy. This points helps us further appreciate the significance of Bin Bayyah and FPPMS’s acceptance of the hegemonic discourse that “misleading fatwas” and “competing religious claims” are the root cause of regional violence and anti-US feeling. For Bin Bayyah, the solutions to such problems lie in alleviating the Chaos of the Fatwa, interfaith dialogue, and a particular form of religious freedom[3] in place of deeper reflection on, for example, the UAE’s and/or the US’s destabilising roles in the region. This helpful obfuscation strengthens the country’s state-brand as a centre of Islamic reform in American eyes, which in turn helps maintain US interest in the Al Nahyan’s security in the face of both external and internal challenges. The fact that the UAE has been praised by the US Ambassadors-at-Large for International Religious Freedom from both the Obama and Trump administrations (David Saperstein and Sam Brownback respectively) is testament to Bin Bayyah and the FPPMS’s success in this regard.
Looking forward to Warren's forthcoming book (should be out Jan 2021 iA), Rivals in the Gulf: Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and the Qatar-UAE Contest Over the Arab Spring and the Gulf Crisis.
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