We have a segment of people who are literally professional Islamists. They are technically unemployed, and some are frankly unemployable. But they are paid to tweet, post on Facebook, set up panel discussions, and appear on Muslim satellite channels to talk about Jihad and Khilafah and the “Zionist-Crusader-Safavid project”, and so on.
And they are completely dependent on Gulf Arabs for their subsistence. If their sponsors didn’t give them cash (and it almost always cash), they wouldn’t even be able to pay their rent.
The point isn’t to criticise them for being essentially paid propagandists; the point is the impact this has on the genuine intellectual development of Political Islam. Some of these brothers may actually have ideas of their own; but the Saudis, Kuwaitis, and Qataris are not going to pay them for that. They have to be mouthpieces for the views of their sponsors.
The Gulf is dominating the discourse of Islamism, and this is severely warping the trajectory of the concept