Saudi Arabia is recognized as an important leader of the Islamic world. A sizeable literature has developed analyzing the evolution of its distinctive Salafi Unitarian creed, commonly known as Wahhabism, and the political use of state-supported clerics in both geostrategic competition and domestic legitimacy (Commins 2009, Hegghammer 2010,Lacroix 2011). Yet over the past decade, the smaller Gulf states of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have developed their own visions of political Islam and have similarly demonstrated considerable ambition to play an influential regional role. Lacking their own indigenous clerical establishment of the requisite heft, these states have instead played host to influential associations of Islamic scholars, the Doha-based International Union for Muslim Scholars (IUMS), and the Abu Dhabi-based Muslim Council of Elders (MCE) and associated peace-driven clerical initiatives. This paper will examine this novel injection of rentier wealth into the religious field by these two “extreme rentiers” and the challenge they pose to the more traditional state-based religious establishment of a “middling rentier” state, Saudi Arabia (Herb 2014). I will first examine the establishment of these two transnational associations of clerics, and characterize the role they have played in the complex arena of global Islamic thought and politics. I will argue that, although made up of non-state actors, these organizations have provided their host governments with important vehicles for influencing discourse and political positions of Islamic publics at a time of incredible political upheaval and political re-alignment: the IUMS championing the youth-driven political uprisings and injection of political Islam into post-revolution governments in Tunisia and Egypt, and the MCE backing the re-emergence of pro-state clerical positions in post-coup Egypt and countering political Salafism in its manifestations in jihadism and political sectarianism. At the same time, these two organizations have created difficulties for the loyalist clerics of Saudi Arabia, from two opposite orientations: the IUMS in injecting an independent political orientation at odds with Salafi quietism, and the MCE challenging some of the essential creedal tenets of Saudi Arabia’s Salafi Unitarianism. Theoretically, this study will highlight the difficulty of capturing today’s fluid, transnational Islamic politics in state-society based rentier models, as ideas, relationships, and rentier dollars reach beyond borders and challenge more ‘static’ rentier loyalty.