Since the early 1960s, the Saudi state has paid for tens of thousands of young men from around the world to undertake fully-funded religious training in institutions like the Islamic University of Medina (IUM), which was founded specifically for this purpose. This provision is framed by its backers as an act of da’wa, or religious mission – the idea being that graduates will subsequently promote “correct” belief and practice in their home countries or in other far-flung locations. In the eyes of less sympathetic observers, such initiatives reflect a broader project of Saudi cultural imperialism. This paper explores the biographies and experiences of non-Saudis who have won scholarships to study at the IUM. I suggest that any effort to understand their cross-border trajectories and their diverse engagements with this missionary institution must indeed take seriously the question of their imbrication in “globe-spanning systems of power” (Glick Schiller 2005). However, if the notion of cultural imperialism provides a point of departure, it must be nuanced considerably in order to break with realist international relations theory and its privileging of the national state. In fact, the complexity and multivalence of the array of transnational flows of persons and ideas that both shaped and subsequently consolidated around institutions like the IUM belie methodologically nationalist imaginings of a one-way process by which a quintessentially Saudi Wahhabism has simply been packaged up and exported to the rest of the world. I argue that the concept of transnational religious economies might offer a more promising basis for making sense of the globe-spanning systems of power at work here. By drawing on Gramscian modes of analysis, it is possible to think about religious economies in ways that escape the liberal conceptions of the market and of the human subject that underlie much previous literature on this topic. This approach to understanding transnational systems of power can also make room for agency exercised by migrant students. Furthermore, it can elucidate ways in which questions of power in this context relate both to culture, meaning and lived experience, on the one hand, and also to the vast quantities of material capital invested in projects like the IUM, on the other. The paper draws on encounters with IUM students and graduates in London, Cairo and Riyadh, as well as Arabic-language primary sources including biographical materials, IUM syllabuses and the university journal going back to the 1960s.