Circuits of Faith

Migration, Education, and the Wahhabi Mission

Michael Farquhar

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780804798358
• eBook ISBN: 9781503600270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Islamic University of Medina was established by the Saudi state in 1961 to provide religious instruction primarily to foreign students. Students would come to Medina for religious education and were then expected to act as missionaries, promoting an understanding of Islam in line with the core tenets of Wahhabism. By the early 2000s, more than 11,000 young men from across the globe had graduated from the Islamic University.

Circuits of Faith offers the first examination of the Islamic University and considers the efforts undertaken by Saudi actors and institutions to exert religious influence far beyond the kingdom's borders. Michael Farquhar draws on Arabic sources, including biographical materials, memoirs, syllabi, and back issues of the Islamic University journal, as well as interviews with former staff and students, to explore the institution's history and faculty, the content and style of instruction, and the trajectories and experiences of its students. Countering typical assumptions, Farquhar argues that the project undertaken through the Islamic University amounts to something more complex than just the one-way "export" of Wahhabism. Through transnational networks of students and faculty, this Saudi state-funded religious mission also relies upon, and has in turn been influenced by, far-reaching circulations of persons and ideas.

1

TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE LATE OTTOMAN HIJAZ

LONG BEFORE the advent of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the twentieth century, the Hijaz was already well established as a destination for pilgrim scholars and students from across the Islamic world. The mosques, madrasas and Sufi lodges that hosted these migrant seekers of knowledge served as nodes in a cosmopolitan religious economy, encompassing circulations of knowledge, qualifications, funds, and pedagogical techniques from as far afield as West Africa and Southeast Asia. These transactions occurred against the backdrop of a shifting political landscape, as control of the region passed repeatedly among an array of powers. The Hijaz first came under Ottoman authority in 1517, when the Ottoman Empire, under Sultan Selim I, defeated the Mamluks in Egypt and secured suzerainty over their erstwhile dependents, the Sharifs of Mecca.¹ The Ottomans remained broadly in control through their Sharifian proxies until the early nineteenth century. At that point, their hold over the Hijaz was challenged by the first Saudi emirate, founded just a few decades earlier on the basis of a pact between the emir Muhammad ibn Sa‘ud and the religious reformer Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab. This agreement would set the basic template for the relationship between the Saudi political establishment and the Wahhabi scholarly community which has survived to this day. Having initially occupied Mecca in April 1803 and been driven back shortly afterwards, Saudi forces reentered that city and also took Medina in 1805, and annexed the Hijaz that same year.² In 1811, the ruler of Egypt, Muhammad ‘Ali, responded with a military campaign which, although ostensibly launched on the wishes of the Ottoman sultan, was in practice also intended to cement his own political standing and imperial ambitions. By 1813, his forces had taken Mecca and Medina, as well as Jidda and Ta’if. They subsequently forayed into Najd, capturing the Saudi capital al-Dir‘iyya in 1818 and razing it before withdrawing to the Hijaz. Authority over the Hijaz passed back to Istanbul only in the 1840s.³ The Ottomans continued to rule through their Sharifian proxies until the early twentieth century, their compact temporarily surviving the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and the drive for centralization that followed.⁴ However, at the height of the First World War and supported by the Entente Powers, the then Grand Sharif Husayn ibn ‘Ali threw off Ottoman control in the Arab Revolt starting in 1916. The region was then administered by an independent Sharifian state until the time of the next Saudi occupation in the 1920s, which would eventually lead to the incorporation of the Hijaz into what is now Saudi Arabia.

Historians have offered conflicting evaluations of the standing of Mecca and Medina as centers of religious learning throughout this period. Abdullatif Abdullah Dohaish has spoken of a “decay” in religious instruction in the Hijaz from the sixteenth century, in part due to “the discovery of the new sea route round Africa, leading to the dwindling of the age-old economic function of the Near East, as a zone of transit between the Indian Ocean and Europe.”⁵ Certain European travelers who passed through the region in the early nineteenth century—including the Spaniard Domingo Badia y Leblich, who visited under the pseudonym ‘Ali Bey al-‘Abbasi in 1807, and the Swiss Orientalist John Lewis Burckhardt, who visited in 1814—gave unflattering accounts of the scholarly scene at that time. Burckhardt commented: “I think I have sufficient reason for affirming that Mecca is at present much inferior even in Islamic learning to any town of equal population in Syria or Egypt.”⁶

In contrast, the historian Atallah S. Copty has celebrated an increase in the status of Mecca and Medina as centers of learning, which began in his estimation under the Mamluks and continued under the Ottomans. He puts this down to funding made available by both dynasties, along with improvements in shipping which allowed greater numbers of scholars to visit the Holy Cities.⁷ Contemporary accounts by the likes of Leblich and Burckhardt are also called into question by information offered by Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, a Dutch scholar-spy who at least nominally converted to Islam and spent a year in Jidda and Mecca from 1884. Differences between Hurgronje’s evaluation and those of earlier European visitors may have been due in part to changes occurring in the Hijaz in the intervening decades. However, it is more likely that his lengthy stay simply afforded him a better opportunity to observe and understand. Hurgronje himself made the point that someone like Burckhardt, visiting the Hijaz as a pilgrim during the period of massive disruption brought about by the hajj season, could never have hoped to see a fair representation of the scholarly activity that occurred in the Holy Cities throughout the course of the year.⁸ Hurgronje’s uniquely detailed account, when set alongside fragmentary information available from earlier periods, in fact indicates the existence of an often quite vibrant religious educational scene spread across a host of different institutions and sites.

The Haram Mosque in Mecca, also known as the Grand Mosque, served as the most prestigious setting for instruction in the region. In this, the holiest site in Islam and the focal point of the annual hajj pilgrimage, Islamic scholars disbursed knowledge and qualifications in study circles, or ḥalaqāt. Hurgronje tells us that at the time of his visit in the late nineteenth century, a total of perhaps fifty or sixty scholars were engaged in convening regular ḥalaqāt in the mosque’s courtyard and colonnades.⁹ The Prophet’s Mosque in Medina had also long been an important site of religious education. That said, at around the same time, the scale of teaching there appears to have been significantly more limited than in the Mecca mosque. According to Dohaish, Ottoman records for one point in the first half of the 1880s listed only eighteen teachers working in the Prophet’s Mosque at that time.¹⁰

A further arena of religious education was overseen by Sufi orders (ṭuruq, sing. ṭarīqa) and scholars. Sufis had for centuries been both numerous and influential in the Hijaz, and their activities may well have constituted an even more energetic religious educational sphere than that which existed in the major mosques. At least forty different ṭuruq were represented in Mecca and Medina in the seventeenth century.¹¹ As many as seventeen continued to operate in Mecca alone in the nineteenth century, maintaining a total of fifty-three lodges, known as zawāyā (sing. zāwiya).¹² Major orders with a presence in Mecca at that time included the Sanusiyya, the Naqshabandiyya, the Qadiriyya and the Shadhiliyya. Some zawāyā included residential quarters, while others were used only as meeting places. Sufi shaykhs and their followers also operated out of private residences, sometimes living together in the same building. These homes were used for “dhikr meetings [devotional gatherings], weekly meals, [and] money doles for poor brethren,” as well as monthly feasts to mark the death of an order’s founder. Ṭuruq which had no access to any such site of their own used mosque space for daily gatherings. While there were sometimes tensions between these Sufi circles and the ‘ulama’ establishment, there was also considerable overlap. Many prominent scholars had affiliations with particular Sufi orders, and Hurgronje reports that the Haram Mosque itself was used for instruction in Sufi “mysticism” on quiet days.¹³

Other important sites of instruction included dedicated religious schools, or madrasas. These institutions had initially developed elsewhere in the Islamic world starting in the eleventh century, teaching such subjects as fiqh (jurisprudence), tafsīr (Qur’anic exegesis), hadith and grammar, “alongside more secular disciplines such as history, literature, rhetoric, mathematics and astronomy.”¹⁴ They began appearing in the Hijaz in the twelfth century and were commonly located in the immediate proximity of the Haram Mosque.¹⁵ Richard Mortel has identified twenty-three madrasas in Mecca prior to the arrival of the Ottomans in 1517.¹⁶ Dohaish has identified at least a further five founded in the Ottoman period up to the eighteenth century.¹⁷ However, by the end of the nineteenth century this traditional madrasa system had collapsed.¹⁸ Hurgronje claimed that mismanagement had sent all such schools into decline, with administrators and officials then moving in or letting them out as lodgings.¹⁹ Dohaish confirms that none of the sources that survive from this period speak of the survival of any of these institutions.²⁰

The status of Mecca as the destination for the hajj ensured that educational settings in the region attracted religious migrants from across the Islamic world. A cohort of important ‘ulama’ who were based in the Holy Cities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included some, such as the hadith specialist ‘Abd Allah ibn Salim al-Basri (d. 1722), who had been born locally.²¹ However, many others had arrived there following long journeys. They included Ibrahim ibn Hasan al-Kurani (d. 1689), who was born in Shahrazur in the Kurdish region of what is now Iraq and whose son Abu Tahir Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Kurani (d. 1733) also became an influential figure in the Hijaz.²² They also included the prominent hadith scholar Muhammad Hayya al-Sindi (d. 1750), from the town of Adilpur in what is now Pakistan.²³ The Holy Cities continued to attract influential figures from afar well into the nineteenth century. Particularly notable examples included the Sufi figurehead Ahmad ibn Idris (d. 1837), who was born on the Atlantic coast of Morocco but settled for several decades in the Hijaz in the early part of the nineteenth century.²⁴

Indeed, this period saw a rapid improvement in transportation to the region, particularly with the growth of steamship routes from South Asia from the 1830s. Where performance of the hajj by Muslims from distant lands had previously been a privilege largely limited to elites, it increasingly became a mass phenomenon. The total numbers taking part in the pilgrimage each year rose from 112,000 in 1831 to 300,000 in 1910.²⁵ By the time Hurgronje arrived towards the end of the nineteenth century, those teaching in Mecca included ‘ulama’ who had either been born in or traced their family histories back to Egypt, Central Arabia, the Hadramawt, the Caucasus, India, Central and Southeast Asia, and no doubt many other locations besides.²⁶ Scholars in the region often maintained connections with communities far beyond the peninsula, receiving and responding to solicitations for advice. Hurgronje observed that during his visit, the most senior scholar in the Haram Mosque, who was affiliated with the Shafi‘i school of jurisprudence, received such correspondence from “the Shafi‘i parts of India, the East Indian Archipelago, or from Daghestan.”²⁷

These migratory circuits gave rise to cosmopolitan religious educational settings, characterized by interactions not only between scholars but also between students from diverse social and cultural backgrounds.²⁸ Those who studied in the Hijaz under figures like al-Basri, al-Sindi, and Ibrahim and Abu Tahir al-Kurani in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included migrant students from as far afield as West Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. Again, this eclectic mix of students remained a feature right up until the late nineteenth century. Describing those attending lessons in Shafi‘i jurisprudence in the Haram Mosque at that time, for example, Hurgronje noted that “the great majority . . . come from abroad,” including from “Shafi‘i parts of India (Malabar and Coromandel), from the East Indian Archipelago, and from Daghestan.”²⁹ Foreign students would often study for several years in Mecca with a scholar from their country of origin, frequently in private homes, until they acquired sufficient mastery of Arabic to join ḥalaqāt in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Transformations in the Late Ottoman Hijaz
• 2. Wahhabi Expansion in Saudi-Occupied Mecca
• 3. National Politics and Global Mission
• 4. Migration and the Forging of a Scholarly Community
• 5. Rethinking Religious Instruction
• 6. A Wahhabi Corpus in Motion
• 7. Leaving Medina
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List