What Do We Mean by Salafi

186 Griffel

Die Welt des Islams 55 (2015) 186-220

What Do We Mean By Salaf? Connecting Muammad Abduh with Egypts Nr Party in Islams Contemporary Intellectual History

Frank GriffelYale University

[email protected]

Abstract

In contemporary academic literature, the word Salaf has a variety of meanings. Most importantly, Western academic literature of the 20th and 21st centuries applies the word to (1) an Islamic reform movement founded by Jaml al-Dn al-Afghn (d. 1897) and Muammad Abduh (18491905) in the last decades of the 19th century and (2) to contemporary Sunni reform movements that criticize manifestations of Sunni Islam which are based on Sufism, Asharism, and traditional madhhab-affiliations to the Shfi, anaf, and Mlik schools. In a 2010-article Henri Lauzire argued that the use of the word Salaf to describe these two movements is an equivocation based on a mistake. While the movement of contemporary Salafs may be rightfully called by that name, al-Afghn and Abduh never used the term. Only Western scholars of the 1920s and 30s, most importantly Louis Massignon (18831962), called this latter movement salaf. This paper reevaluates the evidence presented by Lauzire and argues that Massignon did not make a mistake. The paper describes analytically both reform move-ments and draws the conclusion that there is a historic continuity that justifies calling them both salaf. The paper draws an analogy from the use of the word socialist in European political history, which first applied to a wider movement of the late 19th century before its use was contested and narrowed down in the course of the 20th.

Keywords

salafiyya Islamic reform movements Nr Party Anr al-Sunna al-Muammadiyya Wahhabism l madhhabiyya tawd ahra Muammad Rashd Ri (1865

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ISSN 0043-2539 (print version) ISSN 1570-0607 (online version) WDI 1

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187What Do We Mean By salaf?


1935) Muammad mid al-Fiq (18921959) Muammad Nir al-Dn al-Albn (191499)

When after the revolution of February 2011 Egypt held its first democratic elec-tion of a parliament later in that year, there was an element of surprise. The success of a political party associated with the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwn al-Muslimn) was widely anticipated. The coalition led by the Freedom and Justice Party (izb al-urriya wa-l-Adla), the party representing the Muslim Brotherhood, indeed gained 46% of seats in the Peoples Assembly (Majlis al-shaab), Egypts lower house of parliament.1 Few political observers, however, had expected a second coalition of Islamic parties, the so-called Islamic Block (al-Kutla al-Islmiyya) to win an additional 24% of parliamentary seats. The Islamic Block, which got 123 seats in the assembly, was a coalition of three parties that, although themselves committed to Islamic values, were opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood. The biggest of these three parties was izb al-Nr, The Party of Light, taking 107 of the 123 seats and leaving the Building and Development Party (al-Bin wa-l-Tanmiya), a political offshoot of the militant al-Jama al-Islmiyya (The Islamic Group) of the 1980s and 1990s, a distant second.

The success of the Nr Party, which by itself gained about 25% of the popu-lar vote, was unexpected. About a month after the elections for the Peoples Assembly had ended, the Islamic Block could topple its earlier success during the election of the Shura Council (Majlis al-shra), the upper house of parlia-ment. In February 2012 it won more than 28% of the popular vote and gained 45 out of 180 elected seats. One year after the revolution of February 2011, Nr was Egypts second most popular party, far outperforming any of the secular groups, which all gained less than 10%, and surpassed only by the Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Observers pointed out that unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, which was an active force in Egyptian politics since its foundation in 1928, the Nr Party had just been formed in the summer of 2011, after the revolution of that year, and that the parliamentary elections held from November 2011 to January 2012 were the first it had ever run for. The Nr Party was founded in Alexandria as the political wing of the informal religious organization Salaf Mission (al-Dawa

1 The coalition Democratic Alliance for Egypt (al-Taluf al-dmuqr min ajl Mir) consisted of eleven political parties, including socialist ones and even a left-leaning Nasserist. Seven parties of this coalition gained seats in the parliament; 213 of its 235 seats went to the Freedom and Justice Party.

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al-Salafiyya), which is one of two major Salaf organizations in Egypt.2 The other, more significant group is the Jamat Anr al-Sunna al-Muammadiyya (Organization of the Supporters of Muammads Sunna), which has its main base in Cairo. The latter was founded in 1926, even before the Muslim Brother-hood, and it has a long history as a religious movement.3 Initially a scholarly organization of conservative teachers at al-Azhar,4 Anr al-Sunna al-Muammadiyya developed in the 1970s into a wider religious organization strongly opposed to the official Asharite discourse of that leading Islamic sem-inary. Although present as a religious and social phenomenon since at least the 1970s, before the revolution of 2011 the Egyptian Salafiyya movement has not been the subject of significant critical research.5

Contemporary Salafists Main Concerns: tawd and ahra

Al-Dawa al-Salafiyya, the mother organization of the Nr Party, was founded in the 1970s by students at the faculty of medicine at Alexandria University. It broke away from the then dominant kind of Islamic student groups that were either associated with the Muslim Brotherhood or with one of the militant jihd-organizations of the time. Al-Dawa al-Salafiyya took a stance against vi-olence and refused to engage in formal politics.6 Its quietist, or rather obedient position towards governing authorities, made the organization acceptable to the Mubarak regime, which often tried to use it to undermine the influence of the Brotherhood. In the early years of the new millennium, the Mubarak

2 Stphane Lacroix, Sheikhs and Politicians: Inside The New Egyptian Salafism, Brookings Doha Center. Policy Briefing. 11 June 2012, http://www.brookings.edu (last accessed 22 January 2015).

3 Amad Zaghll Shala, al-la al-salafiyya al-muira f Mir (Cairo: Maktabat Madbl, 2011), 20860.

4 It was founded by Muammad mid al-Fiq (18921959), a prominent conservative scholar and student of Muammad Rashd Ri who continued writing Tafsr al-manr after Ris death. See Shala, al-la al-salafiyya al-muira f Mir, 20912.

5 Since 2011 it has drawn much more attention, both in scholarly literature as well as the news media. On the political strategies of the Salaf parties in Egypt and the break-away of izb al-Waan (Nation Party) from the Nr Party in January 2013 see Jacob Higilt and Fida Nome, Egyptian Salafism in Revolution, Journal of Islamic Studies 25 (2014): 3454. The article covers events up to June 2013. In July 2013, the izb al-Nr supported the military coup against the presidency of Muammad Murs (1951). Like other Islamic movements, it has since suffered severely from the political repercussions of that event.

6 Lacroix, Sheikhs and Politicians.



regime allowed several Salaf preachers to launch TV channels that would be broadcasted on state-controlled Egyptian satellites making some of its clerics household names among ordinary Egyptians.7

Although some Salaf activists had a history of open opposition to the Mubarak regime and were keen to endorse and participate in the revolution of January 2011, the Salaf movement as a whole stood aside when Mubarak fell.8 Overall, the movement is described as apolitical, an impression that results from its goals and priorities. In an insightful article, Noah Salomon explains the differences between the political engagement of parties associated with the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism and of salafiyya activists.9 Salomon did anthropological fieldwork in the Sudan, which is an interesting case be-cause since 1989 it is ruled by a military dictatorship that is committed to the political program of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the course of this article I will refer to the political and religious positions of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots as Islamic fundamentalism.10 It is characterized by the attempt to create a truly Islamic society through the coercive power of the nation state. Muslim fundamentalists aim at controlling the authority that a modern nation state concentrates and use it to turn the semi-secular societies of the Muslim world in ones that reflect truly Islamic values. The most important political

7 Ibid. and Higilt and Nome, Egyptian Salafism in Revolution, 39. The satellite TV channel al-Ns, founded in 2006 and active until the military coup in July 2013, was considered a mouthpiece of Salaf thinking. The Salaf sheikhs Muammad Abd al-Maqd (1947) and Muammad usayn Yaqb (1956) were some of its prominent TV personalities. Other prominent Salaf TV-sheikhs in Egypt are Ysir Burhm (1958), leading member of al-Dawa al-Salafiyya and co-founder of the Nr Party, or Muammad assn (1962) of al-Rama-Channel.

8 On the dispute between so-called Qubis (oppositional activists) and Madkhals (accom-modationialists) within the contemporary Egyptian salafiyya before 2011 see Richard Gauvain, Salafi Ritual Purity: In the Presence of God (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 3747. See also idem, Salafism in Modern Egypt: Panacea or Pest?, Political Theol-ogy (Sheffield, UK) 11 (2010): 80225.

9 Noah Salomon, The Salafi Critique of Islamism: Doctrine, Difference and the Problem of Islamic Political Action in Contemporary Sudan, in: Global Salafism: Islams New Religious Movement, ed. R. Meijer (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2009), 14368.

10 This choice of language follows a by now established practice in English literature on political Islam and should not be understood as a statement that these group are more committed to Islams fundamentals than others. Here, the term Islamic fundamental-ism does not claim to convey analytic content. The reader should take it merely as refer-ence to a clearly identifiable political and religious movement that in Sunni Islam is represented by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Jamat-i Islm in Pakistan and their offshoots.

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tool of Islamic fundamentalism is shara, though others such as compulsive education or social engineering are not rejected either.11 Sudan saw the imple-mentation of some of these policies after the coup of General Umar asan al-Bashr (1944) in 1989.

The Salaf groups in Sudan oppose the Muslim fundamentalist government because they are skeptical that politics could be a means toward creating an Islamic society.12 While Salafists have the same ultimate political goal as the Muslim fundamentalists, namely the establishment of both an Islamic state and a truly Islamic society, the two groups have diametrically opposed politi-cal strategies as to how to reach this goal. An impious society, according to the Salaf position, will not achieve the creation of an Islamic state. While funda-mentalists first aim at establishing an Islamic state that would then, in a sec-ond step, lead to an Islamic society, Salafists reverse that relationship and argue that creating an Islamic society is the precondition for any Islamic state. A truly Islamic society, in turn, relies on the prior purification of the doctrinal commitments and practices of the individual.13 This causal chain from doctri-nal and ritual purification of the individual to the formation of Islamic collec-tives and from there to an Islamic society leads only in its last step to the Islamic state. It requires that any political action aimed at establishing the Is-lamic state must start with doctrinal and ritual reform on the level of the indi-vidual and his or her collective. Aqda, religious doctrine, and ahra, ritual purity, are the two pillars on which the political philosophy of the Salaf move-ment in the Sudan rests. Dawa, mission or proselytizing is the principal vehicle to establish what for Salafists counts as correct aqda and the right practice of ahra. This is why Salaf movements often appear to be apolitical and quietist. In reality, however they turn the private into the political. Aqda and ahra can also be translated as ideology and political action. Like radi-cal leftist groups of the mid-20th century, contemporary Salafs argue that there can be no lasting reform of the society unless the individual reforms first. Unlike those leftist groups, however, Salafs tend to reject coercive power to achieve the reform of the individual. Every Muslim is required to make a delib-erate and conscious decision to change.

11 Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 23445.

12 Salomon, The Salafi Critique of Islamism, 148. See also Noah Salomon, In the Shadow of Salvation: Sufis, Salafis and the Project of Late Islamism in Contemporary Sudan (Ph.D. dis-sertation, The University of Chicago, Divinity School, 2010). Salomon did his fieldwork in Sudan 200507 among followers of the Sudanese branch of Anr al-Sunna al-Muam-madiyya.

13 Salomon, The Salafi Critique of Islamism, 150.



Muslim fundamentalist groups are often willing to compromise on what they regard is true Islam in an attempt to unite different Muslim groups and integrate them into their project. This is not equally true for Salaf groups, who often insist on the right kind of theology. They tend to reject, for instance, the pre-modern notion of tolerating a wide range of Muslim doctrinal positions within a Muslim society14 and are openly intolerant to almost all non-Salaf Muslims, particularly Shiites, Sufis, and the Asharite religious leadership at in-stitutions such as madrasas, universities, or state-run religious associations. Muslim unity is important for Salafs in Sudan, writes Salomon, but unity only around a singular truth, for all Muslim sects are damned to hellfire, the Proph-et says in a famous adth, except for one.15 In fact, contemporary Salafs are often willing to excommunicate (takfr) Muslims on the basis of doctrinal de-viation.16

A recent anthropological study among followers of Anr al-Sunna al-Muammadiyya in Cairo reiterates the conclusions reached in Sudan and shows that many also hold true for Egypt. Richard Gauvain did most of his fieldwork in the years directly before the revolution of 2011. Under the authori-tarian Mubarak regime, any kind of open political activity was suspicious and often led to sanctions. Egyptian Salafs adapted to this by focusing on ritual purity (ahra) on which they produce a staggering amount of literature. The concerns for ritual cleanliness are, Gauvain concludes, a reaction to the Salafs, general frustrations at the degree of corruption in Cairene society.17 The ritu-als of purity create boundary lines between insiders and outsiders of the Salaf groups and they emphasize the authority of its leader, who is usually a charis-matic male sheikh. Outsiders are attracted to these groups and may be com-

14 On the practice and legal justification of doctrinal tolerance in pre-modern Islam see Frank Griffel, Apostasie und Toleranz im Islam: Die Entwicklung zu al-azls Urteil gegen die Philosophie und die Reaktionen der Philosophen (Leiden: Brill, 2000).

15 Salomon, The Salafi Critique of Islamism, 152f. Two of the six canonical collection of adth among them, however, neither al-Bukhr nor Muslim b. al-ajjj report that the Prophet has said, [] and my community (ummat) will split into 73 sects, only one of them will be saved. When asked which is the saved sect (al-firqa al-njiyya), the Prophet answered: Those who believe what I and my companions believe in (m ana alayhi wa-ab), or, in another version, The broad mass of the people (al-sawd al-aam), or, in a third, the community (al-jama). See Josef van Ess, Der Eine und das Andere: Beobachtungen an islamischen hresiographischen Texten, 2 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 1:743.

16 Bernard Haykel, On the Nature of Salafi Thought and Action, in Global Salafism: Islams New Religious Movement, ed. R. Meijer (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2009), 3357, 40.

17 Gauvain, Salafi Ritual Purity, 260.

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pelled to vote for them because these sheikhs are perceived as liminal figures who appear to stand outside the margins of Egyptian political life yet reach into it by eloquently speaking the truth about their society.18 Gauvain ex-plains that Salafs are perceived as, defending quintessentially Egyptian val-ues, such as religiosity, honesty, moral integrity, strict segregation between men and women and between Muslims and Christians, and so forth. For many Egyptians, they are highly, even uniquely qualified to speak for them.19 An-other prominent French observer, Olivier Roy, presents Salaf Islam which he calls Islamic Neofundamentalism as a product and at the same time an agent of globalization and explains its success with its rejection of a cultural notion of Islam in favor of Islam as a religion. For Salafs, religion is above all a strict code of explicit and objective norms of conduct []. The Salaf focus on ritual rejects other conceptions of Islam as a culture or civilization and thus re-sponds to a crisis of identity that, Roy feels, is being experienced by Muslims all over the world.20

Salaf political action responds directly to the religious imperative of earn-ing reward in the afterlife. The concern with religious salvation produces the focus on ritual purity which often translates into religious ethics and on religious doctrine (aqda). In Salaf Islam, there is a close connection between ritual purity and holding correct religious conviction. Consider this passage from Ibn Abd al-Wahhbs (d. 1206/1792) al-Qawid al-arbaa (The Four Prin-ciples of shirk), a foundational text of Salaf instruction:

So when you know that God created you to worship Him, then know that worship (ibda) is not considered worship except with tawd, like the prayer is not acceptable prayer except with purity (ahra). So, if shirk

18 Ibid., 265.19 Ibid., 263.20 Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Umma (London: Hurst & Co., 2004),

25772; quote from p. 265. Roys Neofundamentalism, however, is not the same as Salaf Islam, as he regards the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan as part of Islamic Neofunda-mentalism. As an offshoot of the Deobandi reform movement in 19th and early 20th cen-turies North-India, the Taliban do not conform to the Salaf pattern of reform but promote the revival of a distinctly non-Salaf notion of shara that combines a conservative under-standing of anafite fiqh with tribal laws. Others too make the mistake of counting the Deobandi reform movement in North-India as well as the Taliban among Salaf Islam, see, e. g., Roel Meijer in his introduction to Global Salafism: Islams New Religious Move-ment, ed. R. Meijer (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2009), 132; 2, 5f.



enters into worship, it is not accepted, just as impurity destroys purity if it enters into it.21

Having the right kind of religious doctrine (aqda) here expressed by the no-tion of tawd and having observed the rules of ritual purity are both precon-ditions for valid worship; and only valid worship offers some hope of salvation. Since reaching salvation is the goal of all human life, and also of political life, performing rituals that are welcome by God is of utmost importance. The term tawd, i.e. believe in Gods singularity and His unity, describes the corner-stone of Salaf religious doctrine. A proper understanding of Gods singularity means that no other being other than Him shall be worshipped, no other hu-man, not material wealth, not worldly power or institutional authorities, and particularly not the graves of bygone humans. In their aqda, Salaf groups follow the doctrinal works of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) and his student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350). Ibn Taymiyya is considered to have established correct positions on all disputed questions of Muslim theological debate, be it the divine attributes, the dual character of human actions as chosen by humans and created by God, on divine predestination, or on recon-ciling reason with the literal wording of revelation.22 He left an extremely large corpus of writings, often characterized by a polemical attitude towards all other theological positions, most importantly against Asharite theology, which was the most widespread and influential in his environment.23 Many

21 Ibn Abd al-Wahhb, al-Qawid al-arbaa, in: idem, Kitb al-Tawd, ed. A. M. Shkir (Cairo: Dr al-Marif, 1974), 24349; 243. Engl. trans. in idem, An Explanation of Muham-mad Ibn Abd al-Wahhabs Four Principles of Shirk, trans. A. A. Y. Qadhi (Birmingham: Al-Hidaaya Publishing, 2002), 23.

22 The critical study of Ibn Taymiyyas theological work has only just begun and has not yet produced any comprehensive monograph. The closest to that are the two collective vol-umes Ibn Taymiyya and His Times, ed. Y. Rapoport and S. Ahmed (Karachi: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2010) and Islamic Theology, Philosophy and Law: Debating Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, ed. B. Krawietz and G. Tamer (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2013). Other valu-able studies are Jon Hoover, Ibn Taymiyyas Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism (Leiden: Brill, 2007) and Henri Laoust, Essai sur les doctrines sociales et politiques de Ta-d-dn Amad b. Taimya (Cairo: Institut Franais dArchologie Orientale, 1939). For an interesting selec-tion of translated English texts by Ibn Taymiyya see, Against Extremism, texts translated, annotated and introduced by Y. Michot, foreword by B. Lawrence (Beirut/Paris: Albouraq Editions, 2012).

23 In his writings, Ibn Taymiyya refers to Asharites and Asharism as jahmiyya, a pejorative label that initially referred to the followers of the heterodox theologian Jahm b. afwn (d. 128/74546), who was not an Asharite and whose ideas on the divine attributes and on determinism were rejected by almost all other Muslim groups. This deliberate equation

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contemporary Salafs do not consider it necessary to engage in detailed theo-logical debates given their conviction that Ibn Taymiyya has already won these fights.24 Based on the preeminence of Ibn Taymiyyas theology, Bernard Haykel rightfully stresses a remarkable continuity and consistency in Salaf doctrine. This leads him to argue that the contemporary salafiyya movement is not as others have described it a mere phenomenon of the modern period of Islam but rather a continuation of Ibn Taymiyyas reform theology from the 8th/14th century. Haykel points out that the phrase the method of the salaf, or the way of the salaf (al-arqa al-salafiyya) has been used by biographers of Ibn Taymiyya to describe his reformist attitude.25 There is a consistent use of al-salaf al-li as well as al-salafiyya by students and followers of Ibn Taymiyya.

In this article, I argue in favor of the view that the contemporary salafiyya movement is indeed a modern phenomenon and that it cannot be solely de-scribed as a continuation of a movement that began in the 8th/14th century with the activity of Ibn Taymiyya. Before I present my arguments, however, I need to address an ambiguity about the use of the term salafiyya in Western scholarship that goes back to competing claims of Muslim scholars about the salafiyya at the beginning of the 20th century.

Reinhard Schulze on salafiyya and neo-salafiyya

Reinhard Schulzes Geschichte der islamischen Welt im 20. Jahrhundert is an im-pressive attempt to combine the social, political, and intellectual history of modern Islam. First published in 1994, it appeared 2000 in an English transla-tion under the title A Modern History of the Muslim World. Schulzes work was novel in its attempt to combine economic developments, politics, as well as theology and religious thinking in the Islamic world during what is sometimes called the long 20th century, a period that begins with the consolidation of Western colonial domination in the later decades of the the 19th century. In

between Asharism and jahmiyya in Ibn Taymiyyas work has led to significant confusion among his readers and followers as to who the jahmiyya are.

24 Haykel, On the Nature of Salafi Thought and Action, 40. 25 Ibid., 43. Haykel points to the historian al-Dhahab (d. 748/1348), a contemporary of Ibn

Taymiyya, who thus describes his attitude in a brief biography of him. See Caterina Bori, A New Source for the Biography of Ibn Taymiyya, BSOAS 67 (2004): 32148; 333. A maybe even earlier use of al-arqa al-salafiyya in connection with Ibn Taymiyyas method is in a letter of Ibn Murr, one of his disciples. See Caterina Bori, The Collection and Edition of Ibn Taymyahs Works: Concerns of a Disciple, Mamluk Studies Review 13 (2009): 4767; 62.



that regard the book is still unsurpassed by any other work in German, French, or in English. The book, however, introduces its readers to an odd choice of terminology that ultimately limits its success.26 In the chapter on the early part of the 20th century, Schulze describes two sets of Muslim thinkers and activ-ists, first, the members of a movement called salafiyya, who became active in the last two decades of the 19th century, and about two generations later, be-ginning with the mid-1920s, a second group of, what Schulze calls, neo-sala-fiyya intellectuals. Schulzes thinkers and activists of the neo-salafiyya are what I in this paper call Muslim fundamentalists. In 1994, when Schulzes book first appeared, the terminology of fundamentalism was still new and contested. There were and there still are now scholars both in the West and in Muslim countries who reject the label of fundamentalism due to its origin in literature on Protestant Christians in America.27

Schulze translates salafiyya as classicism and describes its goal as a return to the pure Islam of the founding fathers (al-salaf al-li). Like the classicism in 19th century European literature and art, salafiyya, so Schulze, sought a timeless aesthetic and intellectual ideal, derived from an origin that was pure of all temporal circumstances. In the Islamic context this could only be the early Islamic period.28 Schulze further describes the salafiyya as a movement of Muslim ulam, set out to work out a new Islamic theory of modernism.29 Their goal was to reconcile modernity with Islamic theology and provide an access to the modern world by way of Islamic culture. The salafiyya of the late 19th century was an elitist movement created by a group of modernist Muslim scholars who tried to integrate themselves into the colonial state and use its structures and educational institutions to reform Islam from within the state.30 The key figure of this movement was Muammad Abduh (18491905), who in his ideas about the role of reason and religion in society was heavily influenced by European Enlightenment.31 According to Schulze, however, nationalism,

26 Schulze had used this terminology before in Islamischer Internationalismus im 20. Jahr-hundert (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 90 and index, where it is introduced in greater detail.

27 See e. g. the beginning pages in Sadik J. al-Azm, Islamic Fundamentalism Reconsidered: A Critical Outline of Problems, Ideas and Approaches, South Asia Bulletin 13 (1993): 93121 and 14 (1994): 7398. Reprinted in idem, On Fundamentalism: Collected Essays on Islam and Politics (Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2014), 33156.

28 Reinhard Schulze, A Modern History of the Muslim World (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 18.

29 Ibid.30 Ibid., 90. 31 Anke von Kgelgen, art. Abduh, Muammad. EI3, brillonline.com (last accessed 29 April

2014). See also eadem, Averroes und die arabische Moderne: Anstze zu einer Neubegrn-dung des Rationalismus im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 72ff. Muammad Abduh reconciled

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liberalism, and socialism created stronger discourses than the salafiyya and contributed to its political demise.

Following the failure of the salafiyya, a younger generation of Muslim activ-ists created a new momentum when they rejected the colonial state as the ve-hicle for reform. This new generation of Muslims, whose archetype was asan al-Bann (190649), positioned themselves outside of the colonial state and aimed at taking it over and transforming it into an Islamic one.32 Indepen-dence after the Second World War led to a split in the movement of neo-sala-fiyya. While some, such as Alll al-Fs (191074) in Morocco gave up their opposition to the state and tried to work from within the newly independent republics, others, such as Sayyid Qub (190666) held the same attitude to the semi-secular nation state that asan al-Bann held towards the colonial one, and again others, such as Ab l-Al Mawdd (190379) developed a mixed attitude.

Schulzes analysis is intriguing since he was the first who adequately and correctly, I think, captures the principal difference between the political atti-tudes of the generations of thinkers surrounding Muammad Abduh, who died 1905, and that of asan al-Bann, who was born shortly after Abduh died. What I would like to focus on here are the names Schulze has chosen for these two different attitudes. The word neo-salafiyya is Schulzes creation,33 trying to express the great similarity of asan al-Banns or Alll al-Fss thinking with that of Muammad Abduh, yet also expressing the one key difference in the formers new attitude of rejecting the colonial state and its institutions.

In portraying the triad of Jaml al-Dn al-Afghn (d. 1897), Muammad Abduh, and Muammad Rashd Ri (18651935) as the intellectual backbone of the modernist Muslim reform movement in Egypt, Schulze followed earlier

his strong admiration for the European Enlightenment with his Islamic identity by claim-ing that Protestant Christianity which he believed carried the Enlightenment was, with the exception of belief in Muhammads prophecy and its rites of worship (ibda), different from Islam in name, but not in meaning. See Muammad Abduh, Risl al-Tawd, in al-Aml al-kmila li-l-Imm Muammad Abduh, ed. M. Amra, 6 vols. (Bei-rut: al-Muassasa al-Arabiyyah li-l-Dirst wa-l-Nashr, 197274), 3:351475; 464; Engl. trans. The Theology of Unity, trans. I. Musaad and K. Cragg (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966), 150.

32 Schulze, A Modern History of the Muslim World, 95.33 More recently, the label neo-Salaf has been used to describe the new kind of Salafiyya

activism in Egypt and other places that engages in satellite TV channels and party politics. See Higilt and Nome, Egyptian Salafism in Revolution, 37f. Basheer M. Nafi, Salafism Revived: Numn al-Als and the Trial of Two Amads, WI 49 (2009): 4997, 94, uses neo-Salafiyya as a general reference to the rise of Salaf Islam in the 20th century. Both these uses are unrelated to that of Schulzes.



predecessors, most influential among them Albert Houranis (191593) Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age of 1962. Houranis liberal age begins 1798 with the creation of the first colonial state in the Arab world and ends in 1939, when the generation of asan al-Bann, the first to reject the legitimacy of that state, comes of age. In Schulzes parlance the liberal age of Hourani can also be described as the age of the salafiyya attitude of reforming Islam and Islamic societies from within the colonial or quasi-colonial state. Although Hourani never uses the word salafiyya in his book, he characterizes Muammad Abduhs goal of political reform as re-creating the society that existed among the salaf al-li. Hourani writes about Abduhs ideal society:

His imagination is fixed on the golden age of Islam, the first generation of obedience and the rewards of obedience political success and an intel-lectual development almost without a parallel in the speed and manner of its flowering. The early umma, the community of the elders, the salaf, was what the umma ought to be. It remained so throughout the first cen-turies, for when Abduh talks of the salaf, he does not use the term in a technical sense to mean the first generation of friends and disciples of the Prophet; he uses it more generally to refer to the central tradition in Sunni Islam in its period of development: the great theologians of the third and the fourth Islamic centuries, Ashari, Baqillani, Maturidi, are also salaf.34 If this perfect society in the end decayed, it was for two rea-sons. First there came into Islam elements alien to it: the philosophers and extreme Shiis brought in the spirit of excess, and a certain type of mysticism obscured the essential nature of Islam. [] There was another way in which the umma declined. Even those who preserved the essen-tials of the faith began to loose their sense of proportion and forget the difference between what was essential and what was not.35

Later on in his book, when Hourani writes about Abduhs student Rashd Ri, he clarifies the formers notion of the salaf. For Abduh, the salaf were, in a

34 Hourani points to a passage in one of the last works of Muammad Abduh, al-Islm wa-l-Narriyya maa l-ilm wa-l-madaniyya (Beirut: Dr al-adtha, 1988), 181, who bemoans the Muslimss, neglect [] of the religious sciences and the critical reading (naar) of the sayings of their salaf. Abduh continuous that nobody is reading or even critically editing the books of these three scholars, who lived between the late 4th/10th and early 5th/11th century, as well as those of Ab Isq al-Isfarn (d. 418/1027). The passage continuous by discussing more broadly the merits of classical Islamic literature.

35 Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 17981939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 149f.

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general way the creators of the central tradition of Muslim thought and devo-tion, from the Prophet to al-Ghazali [].36 Rashd Ri who according to Hourani, was more rigid in stressing the Sunni element in his thinking de-scribed his ideal of Islam as what,

was taught by the Prophet and the Elders (salaf): a comparatively sim-ple, easily intelligible system of doctrines and practices of which the knowledge is contained in the Quran and the traditions of what the Prophet and his companions said and how they lived.37

For Rashd Ri the salaf were only the first generation of Muslims who had known Muammad.

But Rashd Ri is not at the center of this controversy. After the First World War his positions turned more and more conservative and given that he is of-ten seen as the teacher of Muammad mid al-Fiq (18921959), the principal founder of Anr al-Sunna al-Muammadiyya in the 1920s, his credentials as a member of or at least a sympathizer with the salafiyya are not seriously disputed. The case is quite different with Muammad Abduh. Contemporary Salafists reject that he has any connection with their movement. They rather regard him as a stern defender or even one of the principal inspirations of all of the different groups that make up their doctrinal enemies, namely the tradi-tionalist Asharites, the Muslim modernists, as well as secularist political ac-tors. This may indeed be true and yet there is, as Hourani has already explained, still a strong sense of Salafism in Abduhs thinking. Consider the following pas-sage from one of his autobiographic texts, where he combines an almost Kan-tian definition of Enlightenment38 with the notion of Salafism:

I spoke out on behalf of two great causes. The first was the liberation of thought (tarr al-fikr) from the shackles of blind emulation (qayd al-taqld), the understanding of religion according to the way of the salaf of the umma before the appearance of dissention, the return of religious learning to its original sources, and the consideration of religion from the vantage point of the scales of human reason that God has given [us] so that we may repel the excesses of religion, diminish its confusions and stumbling, and complete Gods wisdom in preserving the order of the

36 Ibid., 230.37 Ibid., 230.38 Immanuel Kant (17241804) defined Enlightenment in 1784 as follows: Enlightenment is

mans emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use ones understanding without guidance from another.



human world. [] The second cause I spoke out for was the reform of the style of Arabic language [].39

Both Abduhs and Ris declared goal was the recreation of the Islam of the salaf in their respective meanings. Referring to their movement as salafiyya is, therefore, not all too farfetched despite the fact that neither Hourani nor Charles Adams in his earlier study of Abduh ever do so.40 That, however, was done thirty years before Houranis book by the young Henri Laoust (190583) in his programmatic article The Orthodox Reform of the Salafiya and the General Characteristics of Its Recent Orientation of 1932. In this article, Laoust offers a staggering amount of largely undigested information about networks of reformist thinkers who published in the major Arabic journals of the 1920s and early 1930s. The principal focus of his article is on the journal al-Manr, which was founded in 1898 by Abduh and Rashd Ri.41 Laoust gives his read-ers the impression that all the Arab intellectuals that he introduces are in one way or another disciples of Muammad Abduh and Jaml al-Dn al-Afghn. He claims mistakenly that already in their own journal al-Urw al-wuthq (The Strongest Bond), published around 1883, Abduh and al-Afghn had used the label of salafiyya.42

While the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, published between 191336 has no article on salafiyya,43 the second edition, has a substantial one

39 Muammad Abduh, Tarjamat nafsihi, in: Muammad Rashd Ri, Tarkh al-ustdh al-Imm al-Shaykh Muammad Abdh, 3 vols. (Cairo: Mabaat al-Manr, 132450 [190631]), 1:919; 11. Reading l-naradda, wa-l-naqallala, and wa-l-natamma. English translation in Malcolm H. Herr, Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal Theories of Muammad Abduh and Rashd Ri (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1966), 108.

40 Charles C. Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt: A Study of the Modern Reform Movement Inaugurated by Muammad Abduh (London, Oxford Univ. Press, 1933). Throughout his book Adams translates the term salaf into English so that the importance of that concept does not become clear to his readers. Adams stresses, however, that for Abduh, [] the beliefs and practices of the early Muslims are once more to be adopted, without admis-sions or omissions, and that, returning to the simplest and most essential form of Islam, would be a basis upon which all Muslims could and should unite (ibid., 174f.).

41 On the foundation of al-Manr see Umar Ryad, A Printed Muslim Lighthouse in Cairo: Al-Manrs Early Years, Religious Aspiration and Reception (18981903), Arabica 56 (2009): 2760; 28, 43.

42 le titre de Salafiya. Henri Laoust, Le rformisme orthodoxe des Salafiya et les char-actres gnraux de son orientation actuelle, REI 2 (1932): 175224; 175.

43 Encyclopaedia of Islam: A Dictionary of the Geography, Ethnography and Biography of the Muhammadan Peoples, ed. M. Th. Houtsma et alii, 4 vols. (London/Leiden: Luzaq & Co. / E. J. Brill, 191336).

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by Pessah Shinar and Werner Ende that covers reform movements in North Africa as well as Syria and Egypt. It was published in 1995 and defines salafiyya as, a neo-orthodox brand of Islamic reformism, originating in the late 19th century and centred on Egypt, aiming to regenerate Islam by a return to the tradition represented by the pious forefathers [].44 Pessah and Ende iden-tify Muammad Abduh and Muammad Rashd Ri as the principal leaders of this movement. There is, therefore, a strong tradition in Western academic literature to call the reform movement of Muammad Abduh and his disciples salafiyya, a tradition that goes back to at least the early 1930s.

Massignon and a Misunderstanding?

Yet this is not the salafiyya movement of the Nr Party or of Anr al-Sunna al-Muammadiyya. Muammad Abduh was a modernist thinker, influenced by the European Enlightenment and committed to liberal reform. Nothing of that can be said about the salafiyya activists who gained 21% of the seats in Egypts first democratically elected parliament. From the outset it appears that in Western literature the word salafiyya is, today at least, an equivocal term or a homonym, a word that has two or more meanings, like the English word bank which can mean a place to sit on or an institution that lends money. This ambiguity in the meaning of salafiyya led Henri Lauzire to argue that Western academics made a crucial mistake and mis-identified the salafiyya among various Islamic movements of the early 20th century. According to Lauzire, this mistake occurred first in 1919 when the French scholar Louis Massignon (18831962) identified Jaml al-Dn al-Afghn and Muammad Abduh as leaders of the salafiyya.45 Later, in 1925, Massignon added Rashd Ri to this group.46 Lauzire calls this faulty scholarship and flawed47 and he claims that Massignons mistake stems from his attempt to make sense of

44 Pessah Shinar and Werner Ende, art. Salafiyya, in: EI2 8:90009; 900. On p. 907, Ende introduces Schulzes concept of the Neo-Salafiyya as a characterization of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its history is accordingly part of the history of Salafiyya in Egypt.

45 Louis Massignon, Questions actuelles: Les vraies origines dogmatiques du Wahhbisme, RMM 36 (191819): 32026; 325.

46 Louis Massignon, Notes documentaires et references bibliographiques sur la souver-ainit et le caliphate en Islam: 9. Opinion des rformistes modrs (salafiya): Chekh Rchid Rid, RMM 59 (1925): 312f. Henri Lauzire, The Construction of Salafiyya: Recon-sidering Salafism From the Perspective of Conceptual History, IJMES 42 (2010): 36989; 374.

47 Ibid., 369, 374.



the literary output of a particular printing press in Cairo, al-Maktaba al-Salafi-yya. The Salafiyya Bookstore was active between 1909 and the mid-1930s and it was committed to publishing books on religion, science, literature, history, and society. Its program included conservative Muslim authors such as al-Suy (d. 911/1505) just as much as rationalists such as al-Frb (d. 339/95051) or Ibn Sn (Avicenna, d. 428/1037), whom they all counted, implicitly at least, among the salaf. Its program of salafiyya is, therefore, closely connected to Muammad Abduhs understanding of who al-salaf al-li were. The two owners of the press can be described as belonging to the wider circle of Abduhs followers. At the same time, they also had connections to the more conservative, Ibn Tay-miyya-inspired circles of reform in Damascus. In fact, they adopted the name al-Maktaba al-Salafiyya from a more conservative exponent of the Muslim reform movement, hir al-Jazir (18511920), the founder of the hiriyya Library in Damascus, who had suggested it to them.48

According to Lauzire, the bookstore and press marks, the first time sala-fiyya was ever used as a slogan for commercial purposes.49 It was clear to Mas-signon that the Salafiyya Bookstore was committed to the same intellectual project as that of Muammad Abduh, namely resurrecting Islams past gran-deur and showing that true Islam is on par with Western thinking. It promoted the label salafiyya first in Egypt, then in the Arab world, and finally overseas, where Massignon interpreted the activity of this press. Lauzire considers it a mistake that Massignon understood an element in the name of that press, salafiyya, as a label for the whole intellectual current it was a part of. This was the reform movement of Muammad Abduh and his students.50 From Massi-gnons mistake, so Lauzire, is it only a short step to Henri Laousts landmark article of 1932, which according to Lauzire spreads a mistaken idea about the identity and affiliations of leading scholars of the salafiyya among European researchers.51

I must admit that I cannot see where Massignons mistake lies. He observed that followers of Muammad Abduh claimed the label salafiyya for his movement by adopting it for the publishing company that promoted Abduhs ideas. This together with the fact that Abduh does indeed speak about a

48 On his role in the emerging salafiyya movement at the turn of the 19th century see Itzchak Weismann, Between f Reformism and Modernist Rationalism: A Reappraisal of the Origins of the Salafiyya from the Damascene Angle, WI 41 (2001): 20637, and Joseph H. Escovitz, He was the Muhammad Abduh of Syria: A Study of Tahir al-Jazair and His Influence, IJMES 18 (1986): 297301.

49 Lauzire, The Construction of Salafiyya, 378.50 Ibid., 380.51 Ibid., 383.

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revival of the salaf al-li led Massignon to adapt the word salafiyya as a meaningful analytical category. His initial article of 1919 describes a certain pattern of reform that he sees being supported by a number of Muslim move-ments of the 19th century, among them the Wahhb movement, the ahl-i ads in India and that of al-Afghn and Abduh.52 Massignon was, of course, wrong when in a brief sentence at the beginning of a 1925 article he described the salafiyya as being founded by Sheikh Abduh.53 But his earlier article of 1919 made it clear that al-Afghn and Abduh were not the originators and Massi-gnon in no way claimed that they or Rashd Ri owned this label exclusively. Quite the opposite, Massignon always presents them as examples of a wider and broader movement of Salafist reform.

Lauzire is right when he points out that, primary sources do not corrobo-rate the claim that they (scil. Muammad Abduh and his associates) either coined the term [salafiyya] or used it to identify themselves in the late 19th century.54 Yet at the same time Lauzire concedes that Muammad Abduh occasionally used the term salafiyya with positive connotations.55 This hap-pened late in his life, in the first decade of the 20th century, when the term slowly comes into use. In fact, it appears that none of the reform movements of the 1870s and 1880s claimed the word salafiyya for themselves and that the term is not frequently used among intellectuals in Cairo, Damascus and other

52 In Questions actuelles: Les vraies origines dogmatiques du Wahhbisme, 325, Massignon says, le grand movement intellectual musulman modern de Salafiyah, partisans de lIslam primitive [] est n dans lInde. According to Massignon, the movement devel-oped with Sayyid Amad Barelv (d. 1831) and Shh Isml (d. 1831), two early forerunners of the ahl-i ads in North-India as well as iddq asan Khn (183290), the leader of the ahl-i ads. Al-Afghn and Abduh adapted the movement and it spread from India to Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and even the Maghrib and Java. Earlier, the Earl of Cromer, the British consul general in Egypt 18831907, had in his memoirs already compared Abduhs reform movement with another Indian movement, namely the Islamic modern-ism of Sayyid Amad Khn (181798). For him Abduh was the founder of a school of thought that was, similar to that established in India by Syed Ahmed, the creator of the Alighur College. The Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1908), 2:180.

53 Le parti des salafiya, fond par Chekh Abdoh []. Massignon, Notes documentaires et references bibliographiques sur la souverainit et le caliphate en Islam. 9. Opinion des rformistes modrs (salafiya): Chekh Rchid Rid, 312. Cf. Lauzire, The Construction of Salafiyya, 374.

54 Lauzire, The Construction of Salafiyya, 374: [] the amount of time and energy required to find any Salafi epithet in the writings of al-Afghani and Abduh is inversely proportional to their alleged status as proponents and even founders of Salafism.

55 Lauzire, The Construction of Salafiyya, 374.



metropolises of the Arab world before the second and third decade of the 20th century.

Contemporary salafiyya as the Combination of Two Intellectual Traditions

For Lauzire the fact that Abduh invoked the pious ancestors (salaf) does not constitute a sufficient justification for calling him part of the salafiyya. Many Muslim reformers before and after him did that. It is rather a red herring, Lauz-ire argues, and distracts from the main issue that al-Afghn and Abduh were both modernist thinkers.56 There were, however, within the wider reform cir-cles of the early 1900s intellectuals who referred to the doctrine of the salaf (madhhab al-salaf) as an ideal and who used the word salaf to describe them-selves and their associates. These were scholars and activists such as Abd al-Razzq al-Br (18371917), Jaml al-Dn al-Qsim (18661914), and hir al-Jazir, all of Damascus, or Mamd Shukr al-ls (18571924) of Baghdad. These scholars were significantly more conservative than Abduh and al-Af-ghn and directly inspired by the writings of Ibn Taymiyya. Jaml al-Dn al-Qsim had a strong influence on Rashd Ris more literal understanding of the salaf as the first generation of Islam.57 Lauzire points out that unlike al-Afghn or Abduh, Rashd Ri used the noun al-salafiyya as a plural or a col-lective that refers to a theological group, a group that according to Ri stands in marked opposition to Asharism.58

Whether or not Abduh and al-Afghn could or should be labeled as salafi-yya, it seems quite clear that they are not part of the kind of salafiyya that the Nr Party in Egypt represents. What then is the intellectual pedigree of the contemporary salafiyya movement in Egypt and in the Sudan? Rashd Ris positioning of salafiyya against Asharism offers an important clue. When Is-lam moved out of its post-classical period into the transition to modernity, both Asharism and Mturdism were the ruling Sunni intellectual currents.59

56 Ibid.57 On Jaml al-Dn al-Qsim see David Commins, Islamic Reform: Politics of Social Change in

Late Ottoman Syria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 6588.58 Lauzire, The Construction of Salafiyya, 375.59 While Mturdism was prevalent in Turkey most importantly in its intellectual capital

Istanbul and in some parts of Central Asia, Asharism was dominant in all other Sunni parts of the Muslim world. The theological differences of these two theological traditions are subtle and hardly relevant in the context of this article. Turkey and Central Asia are not centers of contemporary Salafist activism, which is why Salaf polemics are first and

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Asharite theology, which was founded in the 4th/10th century in opposition to Mutazilism, began its slow but steady rise towards becoming the dominant theology within Sunnism during the mid-5th/11th century. Students in madra-sas and seminaries from Morocco to India studied the standard textbooks of Asharite as well as Mturd theology written mostly during the Il-Khnid pe-riod in the 7th/13th and 8th/14th centuries. These works, such as al-Bayws (d. c. 716/1316) awli al-anwr and Aud al-Dn al-js (d. 756/1355) Kitb al-Mawqif f ilm al-kalm, and al-Taftazns (d. 793/1390) Kitb al-Maqid be-came centrepieces of kalm instruction. Together with the commentaries and the super-commentaries on these works, they were part of almost all educa-tion in Muslim madrasas up to the mid-20th century.60 In Egypt, al-Azhar was and still is the beacon of that tradition, maintaining an Asharite curriculum in theology up to this day.

Hand in hand with Asharism comes a commitment to one of the four schools of law. After the early 7th/13th century, almost all of those who were Shfiites and Mlikites in fiqh were also Asharites in theology. Even among the anafite fuqah, there were many Asharites. anbalism was the only school of Islamic law that was and is almost entirely opposed to Asharite theology. Shortly before a number of Muslim countries experienced violent confronta-tions with European colonialism, two developments challenged the domina-tion of Asharite theology among the intellectuals of Islam. The first was the emergence of the Wahhb movement in central Arabia after 1157/1744. It strengthened anbalism in many ways. First, as a religious movement by fo-cusing on the prevention and prohibition of certain religious practices, par-ticularly the visitation of tombs that had been legitimized and often promoted in Asharite theology. Secondly, politically through the creation of Saudi Ara-bia, a principality that would, over time, become a powerful nation state pro-moting anbalism. And thirdly, intellectually through the foundation of numerous universities in Saudi Arabia devoted to the study and diffusion of anbalism and its intellectual history, most importantly the works of Ibn Taymiyya and his students.

The second important development was the emergence of a new kind of theology during the period that precedes colonial domination. In the early de-cades of the 19th century, Muammad al-Shawkn (d. 1834) argued that all four existing schools of Sunni jurisprudence had deviated from the teachings

foremost directed against Asharism without paying much attention to the differences between Mturdism and the latter. This article equally focuses on Asharism, although much of what is said about it is also true for Mturdism.

60 Francis Robinson, Ottomans-Safavids-Mughals: Shared Knowledge and Connective Sys-tems, Journal of Islamic Studies 8 (1997): 15184.



of the Prophet Muammad. Although initially directed against the moderate Shiite tradition of Zaydism in Yemen, al-Shawkns teaching provided potent arguments against the established union between Asharism and one of the three schools traditions of Shfiism, Mlikism, and anafism.61 Followers of al-Shawkn first became numerous in India, where they founded the move-ment of the ahl-i ads.62 Like al-Shawkn they argued that Muslims should cease to practice taqld, i. e. follow uncritically the teachings of an earlier schol-arly authority or an established school of jurisprudence. Rather, they should read and study the adth corpus themselves and see how it responds to their concerns and questions. Al-Shawkns teachings encouraged a much greater number of Muslims to act as mujtahids and establish their Muslim practice in conformity with what they perceived as Muammads teachings in the adth corpus. Like the Christian Protestants of the 16th century, the proponents of this new Muslim theology today known as l madhhabiyya, the non-schoolists try to cut out the theological middleman who determined the terms on which ordinary believers could relate to the divine.63 Whereas in Christianity this middleman was the Catholic Church, in the Islam of the 19th century it was the combination of Asharite theology together with the school traditions of Shfiism, Mlikism, or anafism. From its emergence in Yemen and its organization as a sectarian Muslim group in India, the l madhhabiyya spread in the mid-19th century to a small circle of intellectuals in Baghdad and Damascus. An important moment came in 1881 when Khayr al-Dn Numn al-ls (183699) published his influential book Jal al-aynayn f mukamat al-Amadayn.64 Although published in Cairo, Numn al-ls wrote this book in his hometown Baghdad. There he had gotten in contact with leaders of the

61 On al-Shawkns theology see Bernard Haykel, Revival and Reform in Islam: The Legacy of Muammad al-Shawkn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 76108.

62 Martin Riexinger, Sanullh Amritsar (18681948) und die Ahl-i ads im Punjab unter britischer Herrschaft (Wrzburg: Ergon, 2004), 10334.

63 The term l madhhabiyya seems to be coined long after the emergence of the movement by its doctrinal enemies. Stefan Wild, Muslim und Madhab: Ein Brief von Tokio nach Mekka und seine Folgen in Damaskus, in: Die islamische Welt zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit: Festschrift fr Hans Robert Roemer zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. U. Haarmann and P. Bachmann (Beirut/Wiesbaden: In Kommission bei F. Steiner, 1979), 67489; 683, 685, assumes the term was initially pejorative (ein Schmhwort) and notes that one of its first appearance is in a work by the Turkish-Egyptian Mturd scholar Muammad Zhid Kawthar (18791952). For Kawthar, the l madhhabiyya was, the bridge toward irreli-gion (qanarat al-l dniyya).

64 Numan b. Mamd al-ls, Jal al-aynayn f mukamat al-Amadayn (Cairo: al-Ma-ba al-Miriyya, 1298 [1881]). Nafi, Salafism Revived: Numn al-Als and the Trial of Two Amads.

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ahl-i ads movement in India and with the principal ideas of l madhhabiyya theology. Al-ls sent his son Al al-Dn Al (18611921) to study with iddq asan Khn (183290), the most important figure of the ahl-i ads in Bhopal, India.65 Following the tradition of early Arabic printing al-lss book is, in fact, one of the first contemporary works in Muslim theology that appeared in print the book has other works printed in its margins. The second of these is the Arabic translation of a doctrinal work by iddq asan Khn.66 It comes as no surprise that al-lss book carries the endorsement (ijza) of a contempo-rary ahl-i ads scholar in Bhopal, India, who can trace his intellectual lineage to the teachings of al-Shawkn.67

The two Amads in the title of al-lss book point toward another chan-nel of influence on him. They are Amad Ibn Taymiyya and Amad b. ajar al-Haytam (d. 975/1567), a fierce Asharite critic of Ibn Taymiyya, active in Egypt in the 10th/16th century.68 Al-lss book is an apology of Ibn Taymiyya against the criticism of later, mostly Asharite theologians. There was much Asharite criticism of Ibn Taymiyya during his lifetime and as the example of al-Haytam shows even in the following centuries. Although Western schol-arship often gave a wrong impression and assumed that there was an ongoing and lasting success of Ibn Taymiyya in post-classical and pre-modern Muslim theology the situation was most probably quite the opposite. Ibn Taymiyya was a maverick at his time, and there are few defenses of him in the period be-tween the late 7th/14th century and the mid-18th century.69 In a study devoted to Ibn Taymiyyas intellectual influence on non-anbalites in the centuries af-ter his death in 728/1328, Khaled El Rouayheb says that there is no sign of a

65 Riexinger, Sanullh Amritsar, 538. On the ahl-i ads in India see Barbara D. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband 18601900 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), 26996, on iddq asan Khn see Saeedullah, The Life and Works of Muhammad Siddiq Hasan Khan, Nawwab of Bhopal, 12481307 (18321890) (Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1973).

66 Muammad iddq asan Khn, al-Intiqd al-raj f shar al-itiqd al-a printed in the margins of al-ls, Jal al-aynayn, 141360. The book is a commentary on a creedal work by the influential Indian reformer Shh Wal Allh Dihlw (d. 1176/1762).

67 Al-ls, Jal al-aynayn, 5f. (pagination of the forewords); Nafi, Salafism Revived, 62.68 On Ibn ajar al-Haytams critique of Ibn Taymiyya see Khaled El Rouayheb, From Ibn

ajar al-Haytam (d. 1566) to Khayr al-Dn al-ls: Changing Views of Ibn Taymiyya among Non-anbal Sunni Scholars, in: Ibn Taymiyya and His Times, ed. Y. Rapoport and S. Ahmed (Karatchi: Oxford University Press, 2010), 269318; 27195 and Nafi, Salafism Revived, 6572.

69 One such defense was written by Mar Ysuf al-Karm (d. 1033/1624) in Egypt, see Nafi, Salafism Revived, 64.



widespread influence of Ibn Taymiyyas thought between the late 7th/14th cen-tury and 1881: During the intervening five centuries, El Rouayheb writes, Ibn Taymiyyas views had found little resonance amongst mainstream Sunni scholars.70 Mainstream here means Shfiite, anafite, and Mlikite scholars and El Rouayheb makes it clear that Ibn Taymiyya had an ongoing influence on anbalites. The first text printed in the margins of al-ls, Jal al-aynayn, for instance, is a defense of Ibn Taymiyya by af al-Dn al-Bukhr (d. 1200/1786), a anbal scholar active in the anbalite stronghold Nabulus.71

Al-lss combination of l madhhabiyya and Taymiyyan theology is illus-trated by the fact that he lists al-Shawkn among those Muslim scholars whom he claims to be influenced by Ibn Taymiyya.72 Similar to al-Shawkn, al-ls argues that every faqh should act as a mujtahid and try to establish rulings on the basis of his own examination of the sources of law.73 The merging of l madhhabiyya attitudes and anbalite theology particularly that of Ibn Taymiyya is a typical feature of the movement and it will be repeated over and over again in the writings of authors committed to the tradition of the contemporary salafiyya. L madhhabiyya and anbalism come together for two reasons: First these two decidedly non-Asharite systems of thought are joined together by the dominance of Asharite theology in the 19th and the early 20th century. Both depict Asharism as an intellectual force of the past, the kind of attitude that led to the demise of Islam in its post-classical and pre-modern period. L madhhabiyya theology even manages to present itself as a decidedly modern alternative to Asharism and the traditional practice of Mus-

70 El Rouayheb, From Ibn ajar al-Haytam (d. 1566) to Khayr al-Dn al-ls, 311. Even after al-lss book the original works of Ibn Taymiyya remained hard to come by. They were and are abundant as manuscripts at the hiriyya Library (now collection) in Damas-cus. Outside of that city, however, they were hardly any. Rashd Ri admits that his early knowledge of Ibn Taymiyya before he himself edited some of Ibn Taymiyyas texts from manuscripts at the hiriyya came from Ibn Taymiyyas opponents. See Nafi, Salafism Revived, 50.

71 af al-Dn al-Bukhr, al-Qawl al-jal f tarjamat al-Shaykh Taq l-Dn Ibn Taymiyya al-anbal, printed in the margins of al-ls, Jal al-aynayn, 2140. On the author see Nafi, Salafism Revived, 62f.

72 Al-ls, Jal al-aynayn, 29; Nafi, Salafism Revived, 73.73 Al-ls, Jal al-aynayn, 1103; Nafi, Salafism Revived, 76. Al-ls does not use, as far as

I can see, the word salafiyya. In the theological debate on the divine attributes, however, he associates the true position with the salaf (Jal al-aynayn, 225) and in the one of whether Gods actions are caused (muallal), al-ls describes Ibn Taymiyyas position in his Shar al-Aqda al-Ifahniyya as, the teachings of the salaf of the umma (madhhab salaf al-umma) (ibid., 157).

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lim jurisprudence. Its vehement rejection of emulating earlier religious au-thorities (with the exception of the Prophet) is a liberating force from the shackles of tradition. The second reason why l madhhabiyya and anbalism come together is a similar religious epistemology that stresses the authority of the adth corpus over all other sources of knowledge with the exception of the Quran. Both l madhhabiyya and anbalism are scriptualist religious ide-ologies that promise its followers immediate rewards from studying the adth corpus. Followers of the contemporary salafiyya do not need to go through a decade-long curricular of studying authoritative texts in order to offer inter-pretations of revelation or make legal decisions. Haykel rightfully stresses the sense of openness and democracy that this practice creates even though empowerment of the individual might be a better choice of words.74 The common characterization of the contemporary salafiyya as a conservative or even reactionary movement should always be confronted with this caveat.

Apart from those two elements in their thought, however, there are also sig-nificant differences between l madhhabiyya and anbalite theology, most importantly their diametrically opposed position toward emulating a religious authority (who is not a prophet) or a chain of authorities, as in legal madhhabs. The anbal and even more so the Wahhb scholarly establishment is highly hierarchical and it practices the kind of taqld that the l madhhabiyya so vig-orously denounces. Followers of the contemporary salafiyya who wish to rec-oncile anbalite scholarship with the l madhhabiyyas opposition to taqld often point to Ibn Taymiyyas and Ibn Qayyims teachings that a well-educated Muslim should not practice taqld.75 It is true that both these scholars cultivate a strong rhetoric against taqld.76 The devil, however, is as often in theological debates in the detail and it depends on how phrases like well-educated and taqld should be understood.77 Opposition to taqld is a very common feature among Muslim reform movements, even among those that have nothing in common with the salafiyya method. How else would a reformer find follow-ers if he does not encourage them to move away from the already established authorities? Once a reform movement becomes established and part of the Muslim mainstream, however, it often moderates its opposition to taqld or

74 Salafis are, in contrast of other Muslim traditions of learning, relatively open, even dem-ocratic, Haykel, On the Nature of Salafi Thought and Action, 36.

75 Ibid., 43f.76 Wild, Muslim und Madhab, 680.77 For a critical assessment of Ibn Taymiyyas and Ibn Qayyims methodology in fiqh see

Birgit Krawietz, Transgressive Creativity in the Making: Ibn Qayyim al-awziyyahs Reframing Within anbal Legal Methodology, OM 90 (2010): 4362 and Abdul Hakim I. Al-Matroudi, The anbal School of Law and Ibn Taymiyyah: Conflict or Conciliation (Lon-don and New York: Routledge, 2006).



redirects its criticism of it to particular kinds of it, namely the taqld practiced by its adversaries.

Salafiyya as it is manifest today in the Nr Party or the Anr al-Sunna al-Muammadiyya of Egypt and Sudan is the combination of these two intellec-tual traditions in Islam, the conservative anbalite movement and the l madhhabiyya tradition first established by al-Shawkn and then further devel-oped in the 19th and the 20th centuries. The latter tradition found its strongest expression in the writings and teaching of Muammad Nir al-Dn al-Albn (191499), a self-educated Syrian adth scholar, who taught some time at the Islamic University (al-Jmia al-Islmiyya) at Medina in Saudi Arabia, tradi-tionally a beacon of Wahhb theology. Al-Albns rulings on shara are based on his independent study of the adth corpus. He developed his own criteria of adth critcism and he rejected many adth as weak and normatively irrelevant that had long been accepted among the community of adth schol-ars. This led him to pass numerous unconventional legal judgments which by now have reached canonical status among the followers of the contempo-rary salafiyya. This illustrates the point I made earlier about the practice of taqld among members of a movement who themselves criticize it. Al-Albns po sition within the contemporary salafiyya movement is so strong and his decisions so reveered that the l madhhabiyya attitude which he initially rep-resented almost turned into a fifth legal madhhab in Sunni Islam. It has been noted that this new legal madhhab employs similar epistemologic strategies as an earlier fifth legal tradition in Sunni Islam, the madhhab of the hiriyya, which disappeared after the 5th/11th century.78

Severel conflicts in al-Albns life illustrate that the union of l madhha-biyya and conservative anbalism is not always an easy one. Al-Albns schol-arship represents the autonomy of the original l madhhabiyya attitude and its strong polemic against any kind of taqld. It stresses the independent judg-ments of the believers, who are empowered to study the religious sources themselves and come up with decisions based on their readings. It has already been said that this attitude accounts for the sense of empowerment and the modernizing aspect of the contemporary salafiyya and it also accounts for much of its appeal. While teaching in Saudi Arabia, al-Albn several times faced opposition when his decisions clashed with longtime established anbalite positions. Twice he had to leave the country, in 1963 and 1978, and he spent his last days in exile in Jordan.79 When al-Albn was still a young scholar

78 Gauvain, Salafi Ritual Purity, 262f.79 On al-Albns life and scholarship see Jonathan Brown, Hadith: Muhammads Legacy in

the Medieval and Modern World (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), 25661, Stephane Lacroix, Between Revolution and Apolitism: Nasir al-Din al-Albani, in: Global Salafism: Islams

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in Damascus he was in contact with Ibn Ab Abdallh al-Mam (d. c. 1960), a faqh from Bukhara who had left the Soviet Union in 1938 and settled in Mecca. A vocal member of the l madhhabiyya movement, al-Mam pub-lished a fatw in 1938 where he engages in strong polemics against the Wahhb movement. The fatw was reprinted 1949 in Cairo and 1970 in Damascus, doc-umenting the sometimes uneasy relationship between l madhhabiyya and Wahhbism.80 Yet overall, these two have created a remarkable union so that Salafism today can be one of three attitudes: It can be (1) the strict application of l madhhabiyya theology, such as in the work of al-Albn or al-Mam, it can be (2) the equally strict following of the anbalite school tradition, such as in the case of many Wahhb scholars in Saudi Arabia, who make no conces-sions to l madhhabiyya attitudes, or it can be (3) a combination of these two as we see it manifest in the contemporary salafiyya movement of Egypt and Sudan, as well as many other places.

The Gap between Two Kinds of salafiyya and the Benefit of Hindsight

Which one is the original salafiyya? Is it the anti-Asharite movement of l madhhabiyya and/or anbalism or the modernist movement of Muammad Abduh and his followers? Intellectual historians are always keen to create sharp distinctions and categorize movements in ways that make them easily recognizable. In his article of 2010, Henri Lauzire, for instance, repeatedly characterizes Abduh as a modernist and someone whose thinking seems un-reconcilable with what Lauzire calls purist Salafism.81 His article also shows that in the early decades of the 20th century, borders were not as sharply drawn as today. The Salafiyya Bookstore in Cairo, for instance, was committed to Abduhs liberal agenda and also had close connections to thinkers such as hir al-Jazir, who were heavily engaged in reviving the thought of Ibn Taymiyya and in continuing Numn al-lss project. In fact, this might even be true for Muammad Abduh himself. Consider this brief passage from Joseph Schachts article on Abduh in the first edition of The Encyclopaedia of Islam, published in 1934:

New Religious Movement, ed. R. Meijer (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2009), 5880, and idem, Lapport de Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani au salafisme contemporain, in: Quest-ce que le salafisme?, ed. B. Rougier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008), 4564.

80 Wild, Muslim und Madhab, 679ff.81 Lauzire, The Construction of Salafiyya, 370.



Muammad Abduhs programme according to his own statement was: I. the reform of the Muslim religion by bringing it back to its original condi-tion. [] However great a stimulus he may have received from progres-sive western thought, the actual foundation of his teaching came primarily from the school of Ibn Taimya and Ibn aiyim al-Djawzya, who favored reform on conservative lines, and from al-Ghazzls ethical conception of religion.82

Abduhs opposition to the religious establishment of al-Azhar is well-known, and although he himself never leaves the theological ground of Asha rism,83 he takes and defends numerous positions that run against Asharite theology and established rulings of the four schools of Islamic law. In a book first published in 1970, Sad Raman al-B (19292013) one of the leading Asharites of the late 20th and early 21st centuries heavily criticized Abduh for his numerous deviations from the madhhab on such issues as permitting fixed interest rates or women to give up the veil. Al-B associated all this with a l madh-habiyya attitude on Abduhs side. For al-B, who was a lifelong critic of the l madhhabiyya in Syria, Abduhs reform and the idea that any educated Muslim could be a mujtahid was triggered by the Earl of Cromer, the British consul-general in Egypt 18821907 and de facto the colonial ruler of the country in those years.84

Schacht was not the only Western observer who got the impression that Abduh was rather close to Ibn Taymiyya and his school. Ignaz Goldziher, who had met Abduh in person, characterized the movement that he led in similar terms as Schacht. Abduhs reformist teachings, so Goldziher, were initiated by contacts with European thought yet unlike the modernism of Sayyid Amad

82 Joseph Schacht, art. Muammad Abduh in: EI1, 3:679.83 Kerr, Islamic Reform, 106.84 Muammad Sad Raman al-B, al-L madhhabiyya akhar bida tuhaddidu l-shara

al-Islmiyya, 2nd ed. (Damascus: Maktabat al-Frb, w. d. [c. 1972]). This second edition includes an appendix where al-B responds to al-Albns refutation (with the title al-Madhhabiyya al-mutaaiba hiya al-bida) of the first edition of al-Bs book. See Wild, Muslim und Madhab, 683ff. Famously, the Earl of Cromer, on his side, wrote in his mem-oirs Modern Egypt, 2:179f., that an upper-class Muslim must be either a fanatic or a con-cealed infidel and assumed in Abduhs case the latter: I suspect that my friend Abdu, although he would have resented the appellation being applied to him, was in reality an Agnostic. The evidence for this judgment has been discussed in detail by Elie Kedourie, Afghani and Abduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Acticism in Modern Islam (London: Frank Cass, 1966) and Werner Ende, Waren amladdn al-Afn und Muammad Abduh Agnostiker? in: ZDMG Supplement 1 (1969): 650659 (Vortrge des 17. Deutschen Orientalistentags 1968 in Wrzburg).

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Khn (181798) in India it was no theology of mediation (Vermittlungsthe-ologie). Writing in 1920, Goldziher characterizes Abduhs and al-Afghns thought as cultural Wahhbism.85 Louis Massignons description of the salafi-yya is not far from this. When he first mentions the word salafiyya in 1919 and connects it to al-Afghn and Abduh as well as to the ahl-i ads in India he does so in an article on the intellectual origins of the Wahhb movement.86 Later in 1925, he introduces Muammad Rashd Ri to his readers as, disciple dIbn Taymiya, comme les Wahhabites, R. Rid assiste aujourdhui leur triom-phe, quil avait galement prvu.87 This, of course, is not at all a wrong descrip-tion of Rashd Ris attitude to Wahhbism after the mid-1920s. For Massignon it also characterizes the thinking of his teacher Muammad Abduh, who is mentioned prominently in this context. In his influential doctoral thesis on the life and thought of Ibn Taymiyya, published in 1939, Henri Laoust follows Mas-signons lead. At the end of that book he includes a chapter on Ibn Taymiyyas influence on modernisme musulman (Muslim modernism) discussing in two sub-chapters Muammad Abduh and M. Rashd Ri. Laoust notes that,

il semblerait paradoxal, a priori, que des doctrines aussi conservatrices que celle dibn Taimya aient pu tre reprises et renouveles par cet ensemble de tendances que lon dsigne sous lappellation de moder-nisme musulman et qui caractrisent, depuis la seconde moit du sicle dernier, un impotant aspect de lopinion musulmane.88

85 Kulturwahhbismus; Ignaz Goldziher, Die Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslegung (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1920), 321. Goldziher contrast the movement of al-Afghn and Abduh with that of Muslim modernism, founded by Sayyid Amad Khn in India (to which he also counts irgh Al and Amr Khn). Unlike the Earl of Cromer (see fn. 52), however, he sees no influence of Sayyid Amad Khns movement which he famously compared to Mutazilism with that al-Afghn and Abduh. For an analysis of Goldzihers position see Thomas Hildebrandt, Neo-Mutazilismus? Intention and Kontext im modernen ara-bischen Umgang mit dem rationalistischen Erbe des Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 14ff.

86 Massignon, Questions actuelles: Les vraies origines dogmatiques du Wahhbisme, 325.87 a student of Ibn Taymiyya, just like the Wahhbs, whom Ri supports in their triumph,

which he had foreseen. Massignon, Notes documentaires et references bibliographiques sur la souverainit et le caliphate en Islam: 9. Opinion des rformistes modrs (sala-fiya): Chekh Rchid Rid, 312.

88 it seems at a first glance paradoxical that teachings which are as conservative as those of Ibn Taymiyya could be repeated and revived by the set of allegiances that fall under the name of Muslim modernism and that since the second half of the last century make up such an important part of Muslim opinion. Laoust, Essai sur les doctrines sociales et poli-tiques, 54175, esp. 541.



In both Abduh as well as Rashd Ria, Laoust sees a significant influence of Ibn Taymiyya and his students, even if in the case of Abduh that influence is indi-rect and, as Laoust puts it, fort dilue.89

Judging from the position of an intellectual historian in the early 21st cen-tury, a whole generation of Western scholars of Islam, here represented by Schacht, Goldziher, as well as Massignon, seem to have lacked the ability to discern what Henri Lauzire in his recent article called the gap between mod-ernist and purist Salafism.90 The same seems true for Henri Laousts program-matic article of 1932, where he introduces the word salafiyya to a wider readership. It deals with the students and followers of al-Afghn and Abduh in Cairo as well as with those of Numn al-ls and Ibn Taymiyya in Damas-cus and Baghdad as members of a single movement of salafiyya.91

But was there such a gap and if so, how deep was it? What appears to Henri Lauzire as a confusion among Western observers of Islam in the 1920s and 1930s who seem unable to distinguish modernists from purist Salafs was, I ar-gue, a real similarity of approaches to Muslim reform in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Only with the benefit of hindsight after a period of drastic po-larization between the 1930s and the 1970s after the end of Houranis liberal age become the fault lines that did exist before visible. Neither the Muslim protagonists of this era nor contemporary observers from the West could per-ceive these lines of division as clearly as we see them today.

Salafism As the Most Influential Pattern of Late-19th Century Islamic Reform

Pre-modern reform movements in Islam have taken on various shapes and forms. Al-Ashar (d. 324/93536), for instance, aimed at reforming Mutazilite Islam, the predominant direction of thought in Iraq in the late 3rd/9th century, through rational arguments that would show the Mutazilites inability to ac-curately explain Gods justice or the meaning of controversial passages in rev-elation. Al-Ghazl (d. 505/1111), the self-declared renewer of the 6th Muslim

89 most diluted, ibid., 541. The concept of Salafya appears rarely in his chapter and when it does, it describes the attitude of al-Afghn and Abduh more than that of Rashd Ri. On p. 562, for instance, Laoust characterizes Rashd Ris position after the mid-1920s as a, collusion [] entre le Wahhbisme et le modernisme des Salafya (a collusion be -tween Wahhbism and the modernism of the salafiyya).

90 Lauzire, The Construction of Salafiyya, 370.91 Laoust, Le rformisme orthodoxe des Salafiya et les charactres gnraux de son orien-

tation actuelle.

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century (12th century CE), had a project of revival (iy) that combined tradi-tional Asharism with elements taken from falsafa and from Sufism. The next Muslim century saw the reform attempts of Ibn Arab (d. 638/1240) another reviver of religion (muy l-dn) who would push al-Ghazls agenda even further. After the success of Ibn Arabs renewal and the adaptation of his mo-nist ontology of wadat al-wujd among numerous directions of thought in Islam, the beginning new millennium of the Muslim calendar (1591 CE) wit-nessed the reform of Amad Sirhind (d. 1034/1624) and his reinterpretation of wadat al-wujd as a mere appearance of an ontological unity between God and His creatures, a mere wadat al-shuhd. This list could be continued with other examples illustrating that there is not one predominant pattern of reform in Islam.

There were numerous reform movements in early modern Islam that also followed quite different approaches. In 1993 Ahmad Dallal looked at four dif-ferent Islamic reform movements from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century that of Ibn Abd al-Wahhb (d. 1206/1792) in the Najd, Shh Wal Allh (d. 1176/1762) in North India, Uthmn dan Fodio (d. 1817) in Westafrica, and Al al-Sans (d. 1859) in North Africa and concluded that these four have very little in common and are not part of an over-arching pattern of Islamic reform in this period.92 If one extends this period to the end of the 19th century, one could add other reform movements whose investigation would broaden as well as strengthen Dallals conclusion. After the 1857 uprising in India there was a host of different revival movements, many of them proposing a reform of Islam. The four most important are the ahl-i ads movement, the Deobandi school, Sayyid Amad Khn and the Aligarh movement, as well as the Barelvi movement.93 All these four were committed to different principles of reform even if their agendas sometimes overlapped. In Africa there was the Sufi in-spired and Fulbe-based movement of El-jj Umar Tall (d. 1864) in what is now Mali, Guinea, and the Senegal and there was the movement of the self-declared mahd Muammad Amad (d. 1885) also Sufi-inspired in the Sudan.

Among all these competing movements of the period before the 20th cen-tury, one particular pattern of reform turned out to be stronger than all the others and would dominate the discourse of Islamic revival from the end of the 19th century to today. This pattern of reform was a direct reaction to the wide-spread experience of military defeat that almost all Muslim countries made in

92 Ahmad Dallal, The Origins of Objectives of Islamic Revivalist Thought, 17501850, Jour-nal of the American Oriental Society 113 (1993): 34159.

93 Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India, 87335.



the period between 1798 and 1920. This narrative equally responded to the ex-perience of political and cultural decline and to the successful establishment of colonial rule in almost all parts of the Muslim world. Stefan Wild observes that, das Eindringen Europas in fast alle islamischen Gebiete zwischen Nor-dafrika und Indonesien war eine der strksten Triebfedern fr die mannigfalti-gen Reformbewegungen, die unter Muslimen in dieser Zeit entstanden.94 Being colonized by Europeans drastically illustrated the inadequacy of the kind of Islam that was regarded as mainstream the moment when the Europe-ans overwhelmed Muslims. Revival, according to the reformers, must come from another kind of Islam that represents an earlier stage of Islamic history, a stage when the balance of power between European and Muslim countries was reverse or at least not tipped to the disadvantage of the latter. This pattern of reform would aim at the return to and the revival of earlier expressions of Islam or, in fact, assumed earlier expressions of Islam , and it can be broad-ly characterized as the pattern of Salafism. Those Muslim intellectual move-ments that adopted it during the 19th century turned out to be the strongest and the most enduring ones.

The three reform movements of al-Afghn and Abduh as well as that of Wahhbism and the l madhhabiyya initiated by al-Shawkn express the pat-tern just described. They all identified the reigning theology of the madrasa education as being responsible for the widely perceived decline of Islamic cul-ture and power and contrasted it with an ideal of the salaf. Who those salaf were and what they stood for was, however, contested. For Abduh the salaf were as we had seen earlier the major theologians of Islam up to al-Ghazl and Ibn Taymiyya. For others they were limited to the companions of the Prophet, who recorded adth from him. Again others followed Ibn Taymiyyas earlier reform project and his understanding of the salaf. For Ibn Taymiyya, salaf meant the collectors and early interpreters of adth up to the generation of Amad b. anbal (d. 241/855).

The impression we take from Henri Lauzires article is that none of the movements of the late 19th century in the big cities of the Muslim world that were committed to the pattern of Salafism openly claimed to be al-salafiyya. Those who use the word salaf positively and extensively and among them was Muammad Abduh did not claim to represent al-salafiyya until the early decades of the 20th century. This, I think, is simply a development of the Arabic language, where isms (or rather iyyas) were introduced much later

94 Europes intrusion into almost all Islamic regions between North-Africa and Indonesia provided one of the strongest motivations for the diverse movements of reform that emerged among Muslims of this period. Wild, Muslim und Madhab, 674.

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than the ideologies they describe. Once the term salafiyya as an independent singular noun (and not as a plural) existed, however, it became competed ter-ritory among the different movements that claimed a revival of the religious attitudes and the teachings of the salaf.

It has already been stressed that different protagonists of Salafist reform around the turn of the 20th century, whom we today count among different interpretations of what salaf means, may themselves not have perceived these differences or may have downplayed their significance. Many of them were part of one and the same network. Jaml al-Dn al-Qsim as well as Mamd Shukr al-ls, for instance, contributed to Rashd Ris journal al-Manr.95 Rashd Ri himself was influenced by l madhhabiyya thinking and explicitly condemned the adherence to one of the four schools of law. Stefan Wild as-sumes that both al-Afghn and Muammad Abduh may have shared that very same attitude.96 One should not forget that even the Muslim Brotherhood aimed to go beyond the division of Muslims that was crated through the four schools of laws. The Muslim Brotherhoods ideal of shara particular in its earlier period before 1970 is one that rejects the school tradition of the madhhib and claims to follow the original shara of Muammad before the field of fiqh divided into different schools.97 L madhhabiyya thinking, for in-stance, as well as admiration for Ibn Taymiyya was not only popular in the cir-cle of Numn al-ls and his followers in Damascus and Baghdad but in Cairo as well.

From this perspective Henri Laousts 1932 article on the salafiyya should simply be regarded as a document for the overlapping and often confusing re-lationships that members of the so-called modernist and purist salafiyya had with one another. Itzchak Weismann, whose work on late-Ottoman Damascus stresses the difference of Salaf-thinking in Syria from the sense of Salafism that was dominant in late 19th century Cairo, a

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What Do We Mean by Salafi