New and Old Perspectives in the Study of Salafism

Review: New and Old Perspectives in the Study of Salafism Reviewed Work(s): The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century by Henri Lauzière Review by: Itzchak Weismann Source: Bustan: The Middle East Book Review, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2017), pp. 22-37 Published by: Penn State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/bustan.8.1.0022 Accessed: 03-08-2017 11:46 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/bustan.8.1.0022?seq=1&cid=pdfreference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Bustan: The Middle East Book Review This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms New and Old Perspectives in the Study of Salaism ITZCHAK WEISMANN University of Haifa | [email protected] Henri Lauzière The Making of Salaism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 328 pp. isbn: 978-0-23117-5-500 ABSTRACT : This review article attempts to assess the contribution of Henri Lauzière’s recently published The Making of Salaism to the ongoing scholarly debate in the light of the extant literature. It examines his treatment of the three major issues that at present preoccupy the students of Salaism. The most urgent issue touches on the sources of friction between the various contemporary trends within the overall Salai framework, and especially the causes of the drift of some Salais to violence. This is associated with the issue of the various components that combine to constitute today’s Salai “movement,” most notably the relationship between Salaism and Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism. Finally, and most pertinently to Lauzière’s book, is the issue of the Salaiyya’s modern trajectory, which is itself divided into two questions. One is the ainity of the modern Salaiyya to the medieval Hanbali heritage of Ibn Taymiyya and the historic Wahhabiyya; the other refers to the role of the late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century Islamic reformers in the formation of modern Salaism. KEYWORDS : Salaism – Ahl al-Hadith – Ibn Taymiyya – Wahhabism – the Islamic Awakening – Islamic Modernism Salaism has attracted a growing amount of scholarly as well as public attention in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 (“9/11”). Since then, this interest has been continuously fed by the proliferation of radical preachers and violent Islamic groups in the Middle East and in Western Europe; by the opening up of Saudi Arabia with its Wahhabi religious establishment; and by the unexpected success of the Salai al-Nour party in the parliamentary elections in Egypt in the course of the “Arab Spring.” Many scholarly books and articles, this review being no Bustan: The Middle East Book Review, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2017 Copyright © 2017 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Itzchak Weismann: New and Old Perspectives 23 exception, open with reference to the spectacular terror acts in the United States. In the case of the Salaiyya, this habit seems particularly warranted: al-Qaʿida and its horrendous successor, the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS, or ISIS), claim to be, and are commonly regarded, as part of this movement, or at least as a violent mutation of it, the Salaiyya-Jihadiyya. The Salai doctrine looks fairly simple in its basic tenets. The name derives from al-salaf al-salih—the pious ancestors, usually the irst three generations of Islam, whose exemplary method of understanding and implementing the Qurʾan and Sunna all Muslims are called to follow. The path of this “saved sect” (al-irqa al-najiyya) and “victorious group” (al-taʾifa al-mansura) is based on strict belief in the unity of God (tawhid), which excludes the association of any partners to God (shirk) and rejects unlawful innovations (sing. bidʿa) that have no root in the Prophet’s example. Yet, paradoxically, there is much confusion and disagreement concerning the actual meaning of these basic tenets, not only among scholars but even among the Salai adherents themselves. Crucial questions remain unresolved in respect to the identity, historical continuity, and variation among the diferent past and present groups who have subscribed to some extent or another to the Salai title. This review article attempts to assess the contribution of Henri Lauzière’s recently published The Making of Salaism to the ongoing scholarly debate in the light of the extant literature. More particularly, it examines his treatment of the three major issues that at present preoccupy the students of Salaism. The most urgent issue touches on the sources of friction between the various contemporary trends within the overall Salai framework, and especially the causes of the drift of some Salais to violence. This is associated with the issue of the various components that combine to constitute today’s Salai “movement.” Here the most intriguing question is the relationship between Salaism and Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism. Finally, and most pertinently to Lauzière’s book, is the issue of the Salaiyya’s modern trajectory, which is itself divided into two questions. One is the ainity of the modern Salaiyya to the medieval Hanbali heritage of Ibn Taymiyya and the historic Wahhabiyya; the other refers to the role of the late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century Islamic reformers in the formation of modern Salaism. This review may be read in conjunction with my recently published article, “A Perverted Balance: Modern Salaism between Reform and Jihad.”1 1. Itzchak Weismann, “A Perverted Balance: Modern Salaism between Reform and Jihad,” Die Welt des Islams 57, (2017), 33–66. This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 24 bustan: the middle east book review A number of landmarks may be noted in the constantly expanding research on Salaism in the past ifteen years since 9/11. Many would agree that the irst of them is Quintan Wiktorowicz’s seminal article “The Anatomy of the Salai Movement,” which appeared in 2006.2 Taking notice of the Salais during his ethnographic studies of Islamic activism in Jordan and of Islamic radicalism in the United Kingdom, Wiktorowicz was intrigued by the wide diversity within the Salai community. His explanation was that Salais were united by a common religious creed and method, but difered as to their application to contemporary problems, especially regarding politics, apostasy, and violence. According to him, “The splits [between the factions] are about contextual analysis, not belief.” Wiktorowicz distinguished between three major Salai factions: purists (or quietists), who are primarily concerned with maintaining the purity of Islam by way of apolitical religious propagation (daʿwa) and education (tarbiya); politicos, who under the inluence of the Muslim Brotherhood called to engage in the current afairs of state and society; and jihadis, who support the use of violence to establish the Islamic state and ight the inidel West. Concomitantly, he noted the antipathy of today’s Salais of all factions toward the earlier rationalist Salaiyya, or Islamic Modernism, of the Afghani-Abduh-Rida line. A second landmark was the 2009 collective volume Global Salaism edited by Roel Meijer.3 Generally following Wiktorowicz’s threefold scheme, the eighteen chapters included in the book serve to further demonstrate the complexity as well as ambiguities of the phenomenon, although the focus is self-admittedly on the Wahhabi form of Salaism. Thus, the irst part shows how the Salai creed was subject to major transformations over modern time and that it made room for divergence also in matters of belief, as between the Wahhabi Grand Mufti ʿAbd al-ʿAziz ibn Baz, the independent Ahl al-Hadith scholar Nasir al-Din al-Albani, and the radical jihadist Abu Muahammad al-Maqdisi. The second part of the book refers to the political dimension of Salaism, probing its manifestations in various countries, from Egypt to Indonesia, and its relation to political Islam (or Islamism), while the third part deals with Jihadi-Salais, again uncovering the stark debates, disagreements, and contradictions between the assortment of ideologues and groups 2. Quintan Wiktorowicz, “The Anatomy of the Salai Movement,” Studies in Conlict and Terrorism 29 (2006): 207–39. 3. Roel Meijer, ed., Global Salaism: Islam’s New Religious Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). A parallel, though less comprehensive, volume that appeared slightly earlier is Bernard Rougier, ed., Qu’est-ce que le Salaisme? (Paris: Presses Universitairs des France, 2008). This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Itzchak Weismann: New and Old Perspectives 25 that belong to this faction. The inal two parts turn the attention to the global dimension of Salaism indicated in the title of this volume by addressing respectively the questions of its transnational spread in general, and its attraction for Muslim youth in the West in particular. Bernard Haykel’s opening essay is apparently the most frequently cited chapter in Meijer’s volume.4 He emphasizes the close continuity between the contemporary Salais and the medieval theological school of Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), while noting the moderns’ division in the sphere of law between the adherents of the Hanbali school (the Wahhabis) and those who (following Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya) reject the schools altogether (Ahl al-Hadith). The principal development Haykel observes in today’s Salaism is the introduction of the concept of manhaj—the path or method by which Salais live and implement their beliefs. Similar to Wiktorowicz, Haykel warns us not to conlate or confuse the legacy of Ibn Taymiyya with the enlightened Salaism of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad ʿAbduh. A third landmark in the study of modern Salaism has been the proliferation of works on Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabi brand of Islam, which also gained momentum in the last ten years. Of these may be mentioned, without any pretension to be exhaustive, David Commins’ pioneering exploration of the evolution of the Wahhabi movement from its beginnings in the mid-eighteenth century to the present in relation to the Saudi state(s) and to other religious reform movements;5 Nabil Mouline’s study of the development and functioning of the Wahhabi oicial establishment across the same long-term period;6 Madawi al-Rasheed’s ethnography of the debates raging in contemporary Saudi Arabia concerning the relation between religion and politics;7 Stephane Lacroix’s exhaustive treatment of the origins, eruption, and demise of the Islamic awakening (al-sahwa al-islamiyya) of the 1990s;8 and 4. Bernard Haykel, “On the Nature of Salai Thought and Action,” in Global Salaism, ed. Meijer Roel (London: Hurst, 2009), 33–51. 5. David Commins, The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006). 6. Nabil Mouline, The Clerics of Islam: Religious Authority and Political Power in Saudi Arabia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), originally published in French as Les Clercs de l’Islam (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011). See also Guido Steinberg, Religion und Staat in Saudi-Arabien: Die wahhabitischen Gelehrten 1902– 1953 (Würzberg: Ergon Verlag, 2002). 7. Madawi Al-Rasheed, Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 8. Stéphane Lacroix, The Islamic Awakening: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2011). For an This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 26 bustan: the middle east book review Thomas Hegghammer’s treatment of the emergence and suppression of the Saudi jihad movement in the early 2000s.9 Facilitated by the opening up of Saudi Arabia to the outside world in the wake of the terror attacks of 9/11, this joint efort conirms and speciies in detail the central role Wahhabism has played in the constitution of modern Salaism. For earlier generations of scholars, however, the notion of Salaism was associated with the pre–World War I Arab-Islamic reformist trend, which subscribed to the legacy of the ancestors, through the teachings of Ibn Taymiyya and his school, as a way to overcome the “ossiied” religious tradition and thus pave the way for the accommodation of modern Western ideas and practices. The early igures of this line of research in the 1920s and 1930s, most prominently Henri Laoust with his comprehensive article on this “Orthodox reformist” trend10 and Hamilton Gibb with his inluential lectures on modern trends in Islam,11 established Egypt as the principal center of the Salaiyya and identiied the famous trio of Afghani, ʿAbduh, and Rashid Rida as its originators. Subsequent studies from the 1980s and 1990s, beginning with David Commins’ Islamic Reform12 and my Taste of Modernity,13 demonstrated the cardinal importance of reformist circles in the Ottoman cities of the Fertile Crescent to the emergence of Salaism. It is worth noting in this respect that the classical treatments of Afghani14 and ʿAbduh15 do not mention the concept of al-salaf or its derivatives at all. It seems rather that 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. earlier treatment of the subject see Mamoun Fandy, Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent (New York: Palgrave, 1999). Thomas Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Of note is also the article by Hegghammer and Lacroix on the messianic takeover of the Haram in Mecca in 1979; see their “Rejectionist Islamism in Saudi Arabia: The Story of Juhayman al-ʿUtaybi Revisited,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 39 (2007): 103–122. Henri Laoust, “Le Reformisme orthodoxe des ‘Salaiya’ et les caracteres generaux de son orientation actuelle,” Revue des Etudes Islamiques 6 (1932): 175–224. H.A.R. Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947). David Commins, Islamic Reform: Politics and Social Change in Late Ottoman Syria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Itzchak Weismann, Taste of Modernity: Suism, Salaism & Arabism in Late Ottoman Damascus (Leiden: Brill, 2001). Nikki R. Keddie, Sayyid Jamal al-Din “al-Afghani”: A Political Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). Charles C. Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt: A Study of the Modern Reform Movement Inaugurated by Muhammad ‘Abduh (New York: Russel & Russel, 1968, irst printed 1933). Also see Mark Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh (Oxford: Oneworld, 2010). This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Itzchak Weismann: New and Old Perspectives 27 modern Salaism began with the Islamic reformers of Baghdad and Damascus from where it was passed on to Egypt.16 Henri Lauzière’s The Making of Salaism makes an important contribution to the ongoing study of this religious trend. This is a sophisticated, meticulous, and intriguing endeavor to allay the ambiguities surrounding the modern Salai phenomena. The book is based on the author’s PhD dissertation completed in 2008, which examined the origins and evolution of the Salaiyya in the course of the twentieth century through the life and thought of the itinerant Moroccan Salai Taqi al-Din al-Hilali (1894–1987).17 Lauzière’s principal conclusions at that stage were that the current Salai movement is a modern construct with no precedent in history, that there is a clear ainity between the modernist and purist forms of the Salaiyya, and that the common denominator that linked the various stages of its incremental transformation from the modernist version of Salaism to its purist version was the Salais’ belief in and action for the unity of the umma, which favored religious cohesion, standardization, and conformism. In the present work, however, Lauzière makes an almost complete turnabout, as he calls into question the received genealogy of modern Salaism and revisits the evolution of Islamic reform in the course of the twentieth century more generally. Turning the attention to the challenges of deining its meaning and in tracing its origins, Lauzière declares that “instead of accepting Salaism as a historical given and using it as a heuristic device for making sense of the past, I do the opposite. I examine the historical process by which various intellectuals came to shape and defend the concept of Salaism in ways that we now take for granted.” The aim of this methodological shift from intellectual to conceptual history is, according to him, to “deconstruct” the “existing narratives of Salaism used by both historians of Salaism and Salai authors [which] are to varying degrees mythical” (3). Three “constructive” arguments are suggested in their stead: First, the concept of Salaism is a phenomenon of neither the medieval period nor even of the late nineteenth century, but of the twentieth century. Second, the 16. See Itzchak Weismann, “Genealogies of Fundamentalism: Salai Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Baghdad,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 36 (2009): 269– 82, and “Between Sui Reformism and Modernist Rationalism—A Reappraisal of the Origins of the Salaiyya from the Damascene Angle,” Die Welt des Islams 41 (2001): 206– 37. On the Baghdadi Salais, see also Basheer Nai, “Salaism Revived: Nuʿmān al-Ālūsī and the Trial of two Aḥmads,” Die Welt des Islams 49 (2009): 49–97. 17. Henri Lauzière, “The Evolution of the Salaiyya in the Twentieth Century through the Life and Thought of Taqi al-Din al-Hilali” (PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, 2008). This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 28 bustan: the middle east book review concept of purist Salaism did not entail a complete rejection of religious compromise because of the need for unity of the umma during the period of the anticolonial struggle (1920s–1950s). And, third, the purist conceptualization of Salaism became dominant during the postindependence era (following World War II) at a time when modernist Salaism lost its appeal (20–25). The irst fruits of this revisionist approach were presented in an article published in 2010 and later incorporated in the book, which focused on the formation of the concept of Salaism (the deconstructive part of the argument).18 Here Lauzière reiterates the important distinction between this modern concept and the medieval notion of madhhab al-salaf, particularly in reference to the Hanbali (and especially Ibn Taymiyya’s) theological creed that advocated abiding by the doctrines of the ancestors as against the speculative theological positions of the Muʿtazila and the Ashaʿri schools. Then he goes on to claim that late nineteenth-century Islamic Modernism was not Salai in the modern meaning of the term either—Afghani and ʿAbduh did not use it at all, while the Iraqi and Syrian scholars who used it profusely did not deviate from its medieval theological semantic ield. Rather, Lauzière attributes the construction of the modern concept of Salaism to an Orientalist error. According to him, this goes back to the establishment of the Salaiyya Bookstore in Cairo in 1909 by two of Rida’s associates, followed by the publication of the Salaiyya Review between 1917 and 1919. Although the epithet salaiyya was chosen for marketing reasons, relecting the growing popularity of the label, Lauzière argues that Louis Massignon and his colleagues in Paris and elsewhere mistook it to be a broad reformist movement inaugurated by Afghani and ʿAbduh. It was through them that from the 1920s on the concept of Salaism began to circulate in both the West and the Muslim world. The Making of Salaism’s point of departure is the existence of two diferent narratives, or conceptualizations, of Salaism that are largely incongruent and even contradictory: One is the late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century concept of modernist Salaism; the other is the purist version dominant today. The former, Lauzière explains, refers to Islamic reformers who “sought to reconcile Islam with the social, political, and intellectual ideals of the Enlightenment,” and “emphasized the use of reason to show that Islam was in tune with the requirements of the modern age.” It is habitually associated with the trio of Afghani, ʿAbduh, and Rida, although some historians highlight the contribution of Muslim scholars from Iraq and Syria to the shaping 18. Henri Lauzière, “The Construction of Salaiyya: Reconsidering Salaism from the Perspective of Conceptual History,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (2010): 369–89. This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Itzchak Weismann: New and Old Perspectives 29 of modernist Salaism. The latter conceptualization is that of purist Salaism, which points to those who are preoccupied with religious purity, claim to strictly follow the doctrine of the ancestors as the way to salvation, and reject speculative theology and the schools of law. Still, despite their denials, they usually adhere to the Hanbali school as articulated by Ibn Taymiyya and bear close ainity to Wahhabism (4–10). Lauzière’s solution to the conundrum, indicated already in his 2010 article, is that the narrative of modernist Salaism is invalid. He argues that until the early twentieth century, more speciically during the period stretching from 1880 to 1920, the term Salai was used in reference to the theological position of the medieval madhhab al-salaf, rather than to any “multifaceted, self-styled Salai movement” (31). Therefore he prefers to employ, interchangeably it seems, the labels of “Islamic modernists” or “balanced reformers” for those Muslim scholars who were committed to Islam and its formative texts on the one hand, and to renewal and reform along modern lines on the other. Lauzière further suggests that “those who embraced the Hanbali creed [and in this particular theological sense can be considered, and considered themselves as, Salais] seemed genuinely convinced by its tenets but also saw various other advantages to it” (46). These included bolstering the reformers’ authority as opponents of factionalism, providing a historically rooted ideist anchor in an otherwise rationalist program of reform, and ofering an “orthodox” way to counter beliefs and behaviors that balanced reformers considered wrong. Appealing as this may seem, this part of Lauzière’s thesis sufers from several serious laws. For one, he pushes at an open door, since few scholars today would maintain that modernist Salais of the turn of the twentieth century constituted any kind of a movement; as he himself points out, they were rather loosely ailiated groups of thinkers that developed a broad set of reformist ideas. These new religious intellectuals shared, to one extent or another, the call for a return to a freshly interpreted pristine past to liberate Muslims from the shackles of religious tradition and political despotism and thereby make room for the adoption of modern ideas and institutions; at the same time, they could substantially difer as to the lessons to be learned from the pristine past, the traditions to be disowned, and the modern Western innovations to be embraced. Second, despite his revisionist bent, Lauzière seems to accept the paradigmatic view that the Afghani-ʿAbduh line was the source and model of modernist reformism. Moreover, he downplays the differences between these Islamic modernists, who had never referred to themselves as Salais and criticized Wahhabism, and their comrades the Alusis of Baghdad and al-Qasimi and his friends in Syria, who were inspired by the This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 30 bustan: the middle east book review works of Ibn Taymiyya and were inclined to defend the Wahhabis. It was from among the reformers in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire that the modern concept of Salaism, and the trend itself, were to emerge. Third, one wonders what made the Salai label so attractive in the early years of the twentieth century that Rida’s associates chose it as the name of their publishing enterprise and journal. Still, the ultimate validity of Lauzière’s thesis is to be appreciated by engaging him on his own ground with “a closer look at primary sources.” Since it is not possible to examine within the limited space of this review the myriad of more or less conclusive cases he cites, I will focus on one example, albeit a very central one, that of ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi. Long neglected in the academic literature, my recent biography of him shows that he was not only an original thinker, but also a major inluence on Rida and other Islamic reformers at the beginning of the twentieth century.19 In a footnote in his 2010 article, Lauzière mentions “al-Kawakibi’s lone statement that religious reform should derive from ‘the moderate Salai wellspring’ (al-mashrab al-salafı al-muʿtadil)” as one of a few relatively ambiguous passages that may exceed the medieval semantic range of the concept (387 n. 35). Yet, this quote from Kawakibi’s Umm al-Qura (published in 1900) disappeared in Making of Salaism; here another passage from Kawakibi’s book is mentioned, in which one of the participants in the imaginary conference in Mecca claims that “the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula are all Salai Muslims in creed, and most of them are Hanbali or Zaydi in law” (33). This passage serves Lauzière in proving his general argument that the term salai was used during this period as a theological marker and did not designate a modern movement of Islamic reform. This reading, however, misses in my view the whole point of Kawakibi’s work. The term “moderate Salai orientation” (as I prefer to translate it) is indeed the key. This is the orientation that The Association for the Ediication of God’s Uniiers, created to implement the conference’s decisions, takes upon itself to follow.20 True, other references of the epithet “Salai” in Umm al-Qura indeed refer to its theological dimension, with the two Arabian groups speciied in Lauzière’s quote being, respectively, the Hanbali Wahhabis and the Zaydi adherents of the la-madhhabiyya doctrine (anti-school) of Ahl al-Hadith. It is, moreover, to the “Najdi scholar,” a clear allusion to the Wahhabis that Kawakibi assigns the central task of expounding the tenets of Islam in the Mecca conference. Yet, the two pillars on which he bases his lengthy 19. Itzchak Weismann, Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi: Islamic Reform and Arab Revival (London: Oneworld, 2015). 20. Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, Umm al-Qura (Beirut: Dar al-Raʼid al-ʽArabi, 1982; 1st ed. Port Said: al-Sayyid al-Furati, 1900), 199–200. This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Itzchak Weismann: New and Old Perspectives 31 exposition are not what one would expect from a Wahhabi. One tenet is the duty to follow the unequivocal precepts of the Quran and the Sunna of the Prophet while having free choice in all other matters. The other is the use of reason to prove the existence of God and the need for prophets to guide humanity. Both aspects, which are closer to the Ashʿari creed than to the traditional Salai school, are set against the ignorance and charlatanism of the Suis and the methodological rigidity of the jurists.21 There seems to be little doubt that the concept of moderate Salai orientation alludes to this dialectical combination between the scriptures and reason. Its embodiment in the igure of the Wahhabi scholar indicates that for Kawakibi, and his generation of modernist Salais, the medieval theological doctrine of the salaf moderated by Ashʿari-style rationalism was the remedy to the ills that alicted the Muslims and the path to integration into the modern world without losing their identity: It was therefore not merely a seemingly genuine conviction or some advantage or another that drove these reformers to adopt the way of the salaf; in a more profound manner, they conceived of a new Salai program that would balance between selective borrowing from the West and an emphatic Islamic authenticity. Rida’s allusions to the salai epithet in al-Manar after 1900 should be read in the light of this extended semantic range of Salaism. Lauzière is much stronger as he moves to the “constructive” part of his work. His is the irst serious academic treatment of the evolution of Salaism in the long period stretching from the decline of Islamic Modernism in the aftermath of the First World War to the rise of global jihad in the 1990s. This constitutes an essential corrective to the available literature on Arab Islamic reform in the twentieth century, which until now has focused almost exclusively on political Islam and the Society of the Muslim Brothers (or Muslim Brotherhood). Lauzière identiies ive moments in the complex and entangled process that ultimately led to the consolidation of the concept of (purist) Salaism. These are the drawing of Rida and his circle closer to Wahhabism in the mid-1920s; the purist Salais’ endeavor to promote a pan-Islamic identity in the face of colonial rule in the 1930s and 1940s; the parallel modernist Salai efort to create a territorial-statist-based Islamic identity; the growing gap between the purist and modernist versions of Salaism in the postindependence era in the 1950s and 1960s; and the inal recast of the triumphant purist Salaism as a total ideology during the Islamic resurgence of the 1970s and 1980s. The story of Rashid Rida and his disciples drawing closer to Wahhabism is one of the highlights of the book. Noting Rida’s discomfort at the rigidity 21. Ibid., 75f. This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 32 bustan: the middle east book review of the Wahhabi scholars of Najd, Lauzière contends that “his campaign of rehabilitation was twofold: it was as much an attempt to rid the Wahhabis of their counterproductive religious attitude as it was an efort to help them overcome their lack of popularity in the newly conquered Hijaz and abroad” (62). Rida’s considerations, according to Lauzière, were initially political rather than religious. It was his opposition to the self-proclaimed caliphate of Sharif Hussein, the British collaborator, that led him to support Hussein’s archrival in the Arabian Peninsula, Ibn Saud. This entailed backing the Wahhabi scholars, who provided the Saudi ruler with legitimacy, by publishing their texts, with or without commentary, in the pages of al-Manar. In the process, Rida adopted an increasingly conservative and less tolerant attitude, although he never relinquished his modernist belief in reason and science. This is less true with regard to those of his disciples whom he sent to the Hijaz to assist the nascent Saudi kingdom. Among them were Muhammad Bahjat al-Bitar, the future doyen of the Salai tendency in Syria, and Muhammad Hamid al-Fiqi and other leading members of Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya, the foremost Salai association in Egypt, as well as al-Hilali. These young scholars were appointed to key religious, educational, and publishing positions in the newly conquered Holy Cities, but remained subordinate to senior Wahhabi scholars. The nature of the conlict between the two worldviews was vividly illustrated by al-Hilali’s account of how the obscurantist Najdi savant Ibn Bulayhid was so infuriated at the idea that the earth was round that he proclaimed those professing it disbelievers. Even when shown that Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim themselves supported this view he refused to admit his error (81–82). Thus, while the attempts of Rida’s disciples to promote modernist thought often proved unsustainable, they themselves were often pushed to conform more strictly to the Salai theology. As Lauzière puts it, whether staying in Saudi Arabia, returning to their home countries, or traveling elsewhere, Rida’s disciples “came to disregard the modernist part of this [balanced reformist] equation and lost sight of their mentor’s higher objectives and broad reformist program” (88–89). One, however, should not overlook the fact that the rehabilitation of the Wahhabis had already begun in the previous generation of modernist Salais, or balanced reformers, as Lauzière prefers to call them, at the turn of the twentieth century. It was implied in the central role given to the Najdi scholar in Kawakibi’s Mecca conference referred to above, and became explicit in Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi’s collection of essays written around that time and published posthumously as The History of Najd.22 This is also the case with one 22. Maḥmud Shukri al-Alusi, Taʼrikh Najd (Cairo: al-Matbaʻa al-Salaiyya bi-Misr, 1924). This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Itzchak Weismann: New and Old Perspectives 33 of the two conceptual developments Lauzière traces to the post–World War I period—the growing tendency to use the label Salai in a legal sense, which the early Salais had conveyed through their adoption of rational deliberation in matters of law (ijtihad). The other development was the emergence of the abstract noun salaiyya in the modern sense of Salaism (95–96). Lauzière’s analysis of the subsequent evolution of Salaism (as a concept and as a trend) between the colonial and postindependence eras navigates in hitherto almost uncharted territory. He describes the emergence of the notion of salaiyya as a gradual and tentative process involving a struggle between diferent conceptualizations of the term. During the colonial period, these boiled down, he contends, to two main “families” of deinitions. The bigger one was that of the purists, most of whom, including al-Hilali, still held some balanced reformist ideals. The other consisted of a few modernist activists whose understanding of Salaism was partially derived, according to Lauzière, from the inluence of the Western Orientalists (132). The two groups, with various shades between and beyond them, were united in their desire to get rid of colonial rule, which “led many of them to adopt and adapt the universal discourse of nationalism—the ideology of unity par excellence.” They were divided, however, over the type of national unity they favored. The purist Salais, who built on pan-Islamic convictions and were supported by Rida’s close friend, the European-based Shakib Arslan, promoted Islamic nationalism aimed at the political liberation of the umma as a whole, and sometimes “cultural” uniformity as well. The modernist Salais, by contrast, favored territorial-statist nationalism and accepted the framework of the nation-state, which allowed for the elaboration of local forms of Islam (99–102). The purists’ inclination toward dogmatism and conformism, Lauzière maintains, was tempered so long as the anticolonial struggle went on. But they often openly claimed to be Salais. Their condescending attitude was captured by the prominent Indian scholar Abu al-Hasan ʿAli al-Nadwi, who during a visit to the Middle East in 1951 attended a lecture by al-Fiqi at Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya’s headquarters in Cairo. Al-Nadwi’s impression of the purist attitude, cited by Lauzière, is worth quoting in full: I did not like [al-Fiqi’s] triad about the followers of the [various] schools of Islamic law. It was an ofensive, contemptuous, and mocking speech. He referred to them as blind, deaf, and dumb in this world and in the next. Such a speech does not beit a sincere reformer; it is repulsive and does not serve the interests of [our] religion. I wish that [al-Fiqi] had displayed as much heart during his lecture as he displayed reason. (115) This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 34 bustan: the middle east book review By that time, Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya was generally identifying Salaism with neo-Hanbali theology and a non-madhhab approach in Islamic law. It was accordingly determined to excoriate the rival al-Jamʿiyya alSharʿiyya (Shariʿa Association), which, somewhat like the early modernist Salais, claimed to be Salai while holding Ashaʿri positions. Other Muslim and Arab writers used the label Salai in a more haphazard way; for one author it was the antonym of Suism, for another a pejorative term equivalent to conservatism. It is more diicult to recognize who were the modernist Salais of the colonial era. In fact, Lauzière’s characterization of this group is founded on the sole example of the Moroccan reformist movement under the leadership of Allal al-Fasi. One could argue, therefore, that this relected a Moroccan exceptionalism not to be matched elsewhere. In contrast, the case of the liberal Egyptian ʿalim ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq (1888–1966) marked a decline of modernist Salaism in the central Arab lands. Taking ʿAbduh’s and Kawakibi’s ideas a step further in the modernist direction, he claimed in his 1925 al-Islam wa-Usul al-Hukm (Islam and the Bases of Political Authority) that the Prophet’s mission was merely spiritual, that the caliphate was not necessary, and that the umma might choose the form of government that best meets the needs of the age—parliamentary government in the modern age. Hamid Enayat remarked that Rida’s idea of the Islamic state as a substitute for the fallen caliphate was not very far from that reached by ʿAbd al-Raziq, although the premises were diferent. Nevertheless, the “orthodox” and purist Salai reaction to ʿAbd al-Raziq was ierce: he was violently denounced and condemned, and never allowed to hold public oice again.23 It is also to be noted that, in Nadwi’s description, Fiqi’s triad was directed against the schools of law rather than at any modernist Salai trend. Decolonization, according to Lauzière, followed by the rise of military regimes—Nasser, the Baʿth Party, and their ilk—that promoted mass secular nationalism and ambitious plans of development, afected the two “families” of Salaism diferently. The nationalist modernists in Morocco were politically domesticated; they became state employees and government oicials, while the Palace co-opted key aspects of their discourse. Consequently, the notion of modernist Salaism and its main articulators became increasingly marginal (163–64). Quietist purists, by contrast, who generally harbored no political ambitions and attracted little attention from the new Arab elites, 23. Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 62–68, 76–78. This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Itzchak Weismann: New and Old Perspectives 35 “continued to work toward the puriication and standardization of Islam.” No longer restrained by the anticolonial struggle, Lauzière contends that during the 1950s and 1960s purist Salais intensiied their relentless assault on the three religious innovations they considered most dangerous: theological errors, legal partisanship, and Suism. Independence, in his words, “prompted purist Salais to rethink the relationship between religious unity and religious purity. In the process, they further narrowed the range of what was considered to be religiously acceptable” (163–65). Concomitantly, Lauzière shows that displeasure at postcolonial policies and marginalization, intra-Salai disputes and rivalries, and the prospect of living and working in a protective pious environment encouraged purist Salais to reinforce their ties with and often relocate to Saudi Arabia. Many of them were invited, along with persecuted Muslim Brotherhood activists, to join the rapidly expanding education system of the kingdom and participate in its ideological struggle against the secular nationalist and socialist trends emanating from Nasser’s Egypt and his Baʿthist allies.24 Al-Hilali moved to Saudi Arabia after being ofered a position at the international Islamic University of Medina (founded in 1961), one of the major avenues for the spread of the Wahhabi call.25 Other purists who would gain repute in the later Salai movement who joined him at that time were the Egyptian Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya leader ʿAbd al-Razzaq ʿAii, who would be nominated to the Saudi Board of Senior Scholars (Hayʾat Kibar al-Ulama); the Algerian Abu Bakr Jabir al-Jazaʾiri, who propagated Wahhabi Islam in North Africa; the Yemeni Muqbil al-Wadiʿi, who brought the Salai call to Yemen; the Ethiopian Muhammad Aman al-Jami, the implacable opponent of the Saudi Awakening (al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya) in the 1990s; and the prominent hadith scholar from Syria, Nasir al-Din al-Albani, one of the pillars of contemporary Salaism. The triumph of the purist conception of Salaism was sealed in the 1970s, when, according to Lauzière, it “came to overshadow the modernist version of the concept” (199). Henceforth, Salaism would be identiied with purist Muslims in the neo-Hanbali tradition, who were associated in the minds of many Muslims with the Wahhabi movement, and gained wide visibility in religious institutions and publications. At the same time, “a process of 24. For more on the Muslim Brotherhood activists, see Stéphane Lacroix, The Islamic Awakening: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2011). 25. Michael Farquhar, Circuits of Faith: Migration, Education, and the Wahhabi Mission (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 36 bustan: the middle east book review ideologization took place whereby Muslim scholars recast purist Salaism as a totalizing system.” This relected the rise of Islamism, most notably in the immensely inluential formulation of Sayyid Qutb, including even in the Arabian Peninsula (216–17). The distinction between Salaism and Islamism likewise crystallized only in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Lauzière maintains, a process that was encapsulated in the shift in the self-description of Salaism from doctrine (madhhab) to method (manhaj). Salaism had now developed into an all-encompassing religious worldview by the Egyptian professor of philosophy Mustafa Hilmi, a purist Salai who was inluenced by Islamist thinkers and spent long periods of time teaching in Saudi Arabia, and then elaborated by al-Albani on narrower purist lines that excluded the Islamists. During this period, Al-Hilali was engaged in translating the Quran and Bukhari’s canonical collection of hadiths into English in the service of the Wahhabi establishment and its worldwide campaign of Salai proselytism. Yet, the 1970s was also a period of incubation for political Salaism, followed in the 1980s by the emergence of global Jihadi-Salaism. Lauzière has practically nothing to say about these two factions, perhaps because both came to the open only in the 1990s—within the Saudi Islamic Awakening (al-sahwa al-Islamiyya) and in the al-Qaʿida organization, respectively—a few years after his protagonist, Taqi al-Din al-Hilali, passed away. Both were products of the interaction between the Muslim Brotherhood and Wahhabism. The Saudi sahwa was a politico-religious protest movement against the growing subservience of the religious establishment to the government. It was led by young Wahhabi ulama who imbibed their activism from the Muslim Brothers refugees in the kingdom. Al-Qaʿida was formed in the battleields of Afghanistan by Arab volunteers who appropriated Wahhabi xenophobia and Sayyid Qutb’s radicalism in their global jihadi project. Looking at the making of Salaism, as a concept and as a movement, from the 1970s on and throughout the twentieth century more generally from the perspective of this diversity within the Salai camp, brings to the fore three lacunas on the Wahhabi-Muslim Brotherhood-Salai nexus that need to be illed. First, for all his sensitivity to the conceptual aspect, and despite the repeated appearances of Saudi Arabia in his narrative, Lauzière fails to clarify if, when, and to what extent contemporary Wahhabism has become Salai in the modern sense of the term. Second, while noting the close relations between the Muslim Brotherhood and Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya in the luid intellectual scene of colonial Egypt, and in view of al-Banna’s self-deinition of his movement as irst of all a Salai call (daʿwa), nowhere in the book is it considered as such. Finally, although pointing to the dialectical This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Itzchak Weismann: New and Old Perspectives 37 relationship between Salaism and Islamism, in the radical formulation of Qutb, Lauzière’s discussion remains conined to purist-quietist Salais. It is my belief that incorporating the Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood into the analysis, while taking into consideration the Islamic Awakening in Saudi Arabia and global Jihadism, will further enhance our understanding of the Salai phenomena and its role in the evolution of modern Islam. This content downloaded from 132.66.162.78 on Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:46:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms