David H. Warren, lecturer in the Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies department at Washington University in St. Louis, joins to discuss a new report: Tolerance, Religious Freedom, and Authoritarianism (USCIRF, 2022).

This report details how authoritarian states promote religious tolerance without necessarily ensuring freedom of religion or belief. It distinguishes between these two concepts and explains the origins of religious tolerance promotion as a tool of statecraft. The report then presents case studies of countries engaged in religious tolerance promotion, such as Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Qatar, Russia, and Uzbekistan.

David H. Warren is a scholar of contemporary Islam, politics, and media in the Middle East, with a particular focus on the understudied Arab Gulf states and Islamic soft power. His first book, Rivals in the Gulf: Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and the Qatar-UAE Contest Over the Arab Spring and the Gulf Crisis (Routledge 2021) investigated the political interventions of two of the most prominent figures among the Muslim scholarly-elite (the ulama) and their relationships with the Qatari and Emirati ruling families. The project included fieldwork in Doha and Abu Dhabi and qualitative analyses of media platforms ranging from satellite TV interviews, to YouTube sermons, to Twitter feeds.

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