The Making of Salafism

Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century

Henri Lauzière

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231540179
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des Nahen Ostens

Some Islamic scholars hold that Salafism is an innovative and rationalist effort at Islamic reform that emerged in the late nineteenth century but gradually disappeared in the mid twentieth. Others argue Salafism is an anti-innovative and antirationalist movement of Islamic purism that dates back to the medieval period yet persists today. Though they contradict each other, both narratives are considered authoritative, making it hard for outsiders to grasp the history of the ideology and its core beliefs.

Introducing a third, empirically based genealogy, The Making of Salafism understands the concept as a recent phenomenon projected back onto the past, and it sees its purist evolution as a direct result of decolonization. Henri Lauzière builds his history on the transnational networks of Taqi al-Din al-Hilali (1894–1987), a Moroccan Salafi who, with his associates, participated in the development of Salafism as both a term and a movement. Traveling from Rabat to Mecca, from Calcutta to Berlin, al-Hilali interacted with high-profile Salafi scholars and activists who eventually abandoned Islamic modernism in favor of a more purist approach to Islam. Today, Salafis tend to claim a monopoly on religious truth and freely confront other Muslims on theological and legal issues. Lauzière's pathbreaking history recognizes the social forces behind this purist turn, uncovering the popular origins of what has become a global phenomenon.

1

Being Salafi in the Early Twentieth Century

Anyone familiar with the work of Jacques Derrida understands that ascribing meanings to terms is a delicate process. His critique of logocentrism was an attempt to show, among other things, that texts offer no guarantee of linguistic stability and that words are not inherently univocal. However, although we should remain aware that interpretation always depends on a hermeneutical process, an overly narrow Derridean approach to language would not do justice to the consistency with which generations of Muslim scholars have used some of the linguistic tools at their disposal. After all, Derrida himself recognizes that the words and concepts of scholarly discourses stem from historically constituted semantic fields and, therefore, have traditional meanings. One may choose to question, criticize, and “deconstitute” these words and concepts, but they are nonetheless embedded in a system of conventions—Derrida refers to them as parts (pièces) of a machine.¹ Without pushing this metaphor too far, we must acknowledge that Muslim scholars have made efforts to use certain technical terms in a regular fashion and for particular purposes, at least during specific periods of time. In that sense, there is a reasonable possibility of understanding what the word Salafi meant to learned Muslims from the medieval period until the early twentieth century.

One preliminary point worth making is that by the medieval period it was already common for Muslim scholars to declare their adherence to a given school of law (a legal madhhab) and a given theological doctrine (a creedal madhhab) separately. These were distinct aspects of one’s religious identity, even though historical connections existed between some of these schools and doctrines. Most Malikis and Shafiʿis were Ashʿari in creed, for instance, just as most followers of Hanbali law were also Hanbali in creed. But these affiliations were not inevitable. The story of Abu al-Fadl Muhammad ibn Nasir (d. 1155), as related in the Hanbali biographical dictionary of Ibn Rajab (d. 1393), is a good reminder that other combinations were always possible. Ibn Nasir, a Shafiʿi of Baghdad, is said to have professed Ashʿari theology until his beliefs were shaken as a result of a dream in which the Prophet told him to follow the doctrine of Abu Mansur al-Khayyat (d. 1106), a local senior Hanbali. When Ibn Nasir woke up, he sought out Abu Mansur at the mosque and explained the dream to him. Abu Mansur suggested to the young man that he remain Shafiʿi in law (fī-lfurūʿ) but adopt the madhhab of Ahmad ibn Hanbal in creed (fī-l-uṣūl). Yet Ibn Nasir replied that he preferred to become a Hanbali in both creed and law because he did “not want to be of two colors [mā urīdu akūnu lawnayn].”²

At a conceptual level, Muslim scholars did not hesitate to draw a clear line between theological and legal doctrines. However, the labels by which they identified these different facets of their religious identity could vary. The exponents of Hanbali theology, in particular, were in the habit of using various labels to signify their adherence to the creed of Ahmad ibn Hanbal. According to Safi al-Din al-Hanafi al-Bukhari (d. 1786), a scholar from Nablus and a staunch defender of Ibn Taymiyya, these changes in terminology were ways to claim greater religious legitimacy and to distinguish individuals who were “truly” Hanbali in creed from individuals who may have been Hanbali in law but held beliefs that came to be regarded as contrary to the creed of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, such as anthropomorphism.³ Thus, exponents of Hanbali theology often introduced themselves collectively by labels such as ahl al-athar and ahl al-sunna, which can be loosely translated as “people of tradition.” Likewise, they increasingly referred to their own theological position as the doctrine of the forefathers (madhhab al-salaf, from which the label salafī is derived), as opposed to the doctrine of Ahmad ibn Hanbal per se, though they maintained that the two were effective synonyms.⁴ In scholarly parlance, therefore, a Salafi was an adherent to Hanbali theology who could follow any school of Islamic law or none in particular. The term did not have a legal connotation.

This specific nomenclature does not seem to have emerged until the tenth century A.D. at the earliest, and thereafter it never supplanted the other labels in use among Hanbalis.⁵ Even by the time of Ibn Taymiyya in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the notion of madhhab al-salaf was still more commonplace than the word salafī, which did not yet occur frequently as a way to categorize individuals. Nevertheless, whenever Hanbali scholars chose to use these technical terms, they systematically assigned them a narrow and specialized theological sense. As much as one might be tempted to believe that a Salafi was a Muslim who adopted an overall methodology based on the recognition of the authority and guidance of the salaf in all things religious, pre-twentieth-century texts provide ample evidence that the term played a much more circumscribed semantic role. On closer examination, passages that seem to have a vast scope turn out to be strictly theological in nature. Such is the case with Ibn Taymiyya’s oft-quoted declaration: “There is no shame on whoever expounds the doctrine of the forefathers [madhhab al-salaf], ascribes himself to it, and refers to it; this must be accepted by agreement, for the doctrine of the forefathers is nothing but the truth.”⁶ In this statement, Ibn Taymiyya does indeed invite Muslims to refer to themselves as Salafis. Yet this comes from a discussion of the proper interpretation of God’s attributes, which limits the possible ways in which the sentence can be construed. Moreover, Ibn Taymiyya clearly explains that the doctrine of the forefathers refers to the pristine beliefs of the salaf concerning God, which are based on scriptural evidence and uncontaminated by speculative theology (kalām).

That the terms madhhab al-salaf and salafī belonged to a theological vocabulary is undeniable. But whether they always denoted the same theological doctrine and whether that doctrine was indeed the pure creed of the pious ancestors—as the Hanbalis claimed—are different and more complicated matters. On the one hand, there is continuity within the guiding principles of Hanbali theology over time, especially with respect to the interpretation of God’s names and attributes. From the medieval period onward, Muslim scholars who adhered to the Hanbali creed were fideists.⁷ They generally distrusted any form of rationalist engagement with the scriptures that aimed at delving into the meaning of divine nature, for fear that this could lead to the negation (taʿṭīl), distortion (taḥrīf), or diminishment (tamthīl, literally “likening”) of God’s uniqueness and transcendence. In the words of Nader El-Bizri, the exponents of Hanbali theology believed that “the ontological status of the attributes will remain concealed, and the most that one can affirm about them is their existence, on the grounds that they are mentioned in the Qur’an”⁸ and also in the hadith literature. The Hanbalis thus favored a combination of ithbāt (“affirmation” of the divine attributes in their literal sense) and tafwīḍ (“relegation” of inscrutable theological matters to God), and they made that combination the cornerstone of the doctrine of the forefathers, though there are and have been disagreements about the extent to which tafwīḍ is acceptable.⁹ Hence, the expression madhhab al-salaf was always a token of theological fideism among Hanbalis and non-Hanbalis alike, just as its counterpart, madhhab al-khalaf (the doctrine of the successors), was a blanket term for theological rationalism. Muslim scholars, including Ashʿaris, who used kalām methods or allowed allegorical interpretation (taʾwīl) to explain God’s attributes were sometimes said to follow the latter doctrine.¹⁰

On the other hand, given that the elaboration of Islamic theology was a gradual process, Hanbalis have had to delineate and adjust the contours of the doctrine of the forefathers according to circumstances. The belief that the Qurʾan is the uncreated word of God is a case in point. Ibn Taymiyya, among others, is categorical in affirming that this belief is central to the doctrine of the forefathers because no salaf ever said that the Qurʾan was created.¹¹ This claim, however, involves some retroactive speculation.¹² There is no doubt that the question of the createdness of the Qurʾan is an innovation in the sense that it was first raised by rationalist theologians in the eighth century. Yet the fact that none of the early believers ever stated that the Qurʾan was created does not imply that they tacitly considered it uncreated, as Ibn Taymiyya suggests. Prior to the inquisition (miḥna) that began under the ʿAbbasid caliph al-Maʾmun (r. 813–833), most Muslim scholars ignored the issue of the createdness of the Qurʾan and were content to say that the book was the speech of God, without further specification. It was only after the empowerment of the speculative theologians and their attempt to impose their views via the caliphate that the issue became central and forced the traditionists, including Ahmad ibn Hanbal, to systematically assert that the Qurʾan was uncreated (ghayr makhlūq).¹³

For Hanbalis as well as for other Muslims, then, the parameters of creedal purity were to some extent dependent on context. As discussions of Islamic theology became more elaborate and more sophisticated during the medieval period, the potential for dispute continued to increase. The (often idealized) reconstruction of the pious ancestors’ creed—and, by the same token, that of Ahmad ibn Hanbal—sometimes varied from one religious authority to another, thereby giving rise to tensions even among Hanbalis.¹⁴ It is telling that Ibn Taymiyya, whose seminal work has been an inspiration to many in the modern period, was himself the object of criticism by some Hanbali scholars who disapproved of his polemical and rationalist defense of Hanbali fideism.¹⁵ That his theological views have since become the norm among Salafis serves as a reminder that various political, social, and intellectual forces influence the process by which Muslims reconstitute the putative creed of the pious ancestors.

From this perspective, it is undeniable that the expression madhhab al-salaf and, by extension, the term salafī were, and still are, contestable. Although modern Salafis’ understanding of the doctrine of the forefathers has been, in large measure, a Taymiyyan one, rival Muslim scholars have argued that Ibn Taymiyya’s neo-Hanbali theology is too peculiar to be treated as a reflection of the genuine madhhab al-salaf.¹⁶ Others have gone even further and have questioned the very existence of a doctrine of the forefathers. One Ashʿari scholar, for example, has claimed that because the pious ancestors disagreed on so many theological issues—ranging from the createdness of the Qurʾan to the vision of God on the Day of Judgment—the notion of madhhab al-salaf is, by and large, a historical myth.¹⁷

These debates need not detain us, but they deserve mention because they illustrate the fluidity and historicity of doctrinal systems. The point is that until the early twentieth century the terms madhhab al-salaf and salafī served specific lexical functions in the religious literature, regardless of the changing conceptions of Salafi theology. From the medieval period onward, Sunni scholars rather consistently applied the label Salafi to Muslims who professed, or were thought to profess, some form of Hanbali fideism. This trend was still perceptible in the late nineteenth century. Despite claims to the contrary, pivotal works of that period indicat...