In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East

In the past half-century, the assurgent salafi movement has visibly changed the face of large swathes of the Sunni Muslim world. Academic study of the phenomenon has been relatively slow to engage with the phenomenon, and at first was skewed heavily toward salafism’s more radical manifestations in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks and the wars that followed thereon. It is only in the past fifteen years or so that salafism has truly come into focus as a proper object of study in the academic community, and this in a wide range of fields, from Middle East and Islamic Studies to political science and anthropology.The vast majority of contemporary salafis adhere to the tendency known as scholastic, purist, or quietist salafism, and it is they who are the focus of Rock-Singer’s book. Unlike their radical counterparts, these salafis live openly in multifaceted societies and seek to negotiate their place within them. It is here more than elsewhere that it behooves us to employ a distinction between salafism qua school of Islam, wherein study of doctrine generally leads to questions of continuity with premodern precedents, and salafism qua movement, wherein a focus on doctrine in the abstract is liable to shield from view important features of the phenomenon and its modern-day development in concrete sociopolitical contexts.Aaron Rock-Singer’s In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East is a signal contribution to the study of modern salafism qua movement as embedded in larger societies, with special reference to twentieth-century Egypt and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia. The book comprises six chapters, the first two of which treat the general nature of modern salafism, followed by four case studies on praying in shoes, gender segregation, the beard, and the length of one’s robe.The very choice of these topics is significant, highlighting as it does the importance of everyday practice to the salafi way of being in the world: each topic is skillfully analyzed at the intersection of, one the one hand, the classic concern for adherence to the sunna as construed in the salafi worldview, and, on the other hand, additional meanings and constraints stemming from the wider non-salafi sociopolitical environment. The author focuses on source materials well-suited to his aim, in particular the periodical literature of organizations such as Anṣār al-Sunna al-Muḥammadiyya, al-Jamʿiyya al-Sharʿiyya, and others. It is true that salafism on the whole is a bookish, learned subculture, and Rock-Singer does address scholarly treatises where relevant, for example, al-Albānī’s influential Ṣifat ṣalāt al-nabī (“The Manner of the Prophet’s Prayer”) and Ḥijāb al-marʾa al-muslima (“The Muslim Woman’s Head-Covering”). Yet the aforementioned periodical literature affords us insight into the real-world existence of these organizations and movements, which include an important lay component (visible, for example, in the questions submitted to fatwa sections of the journals), as interlocutors and actors in the larger social context. In addition to the book’s contribution to the study of salafism in general, it should be noted that to the best of my knowledge Rock-Singer offers his readership the most detailed study to date of the Anṣar al-Sunna al-Muḥammadiyya in the academic literature, which is quite valuable in its own right. The author likewise demonstrates an impressive command of the relevant secondary literature, on topics as varied as the emergence of modern Egypt to intra-salafi disputes in Saudi Arabia.While the angles and disciplinary approaches to the study of salafism are many and diverse, and the number of puzzles the topic presents seemingly endless, there is one nagging question that surfaces time and again. Is salafism new or is it old—a phenomenon best understood as stemming from the disruptions of modernity or the renaissance of a minoritarian worldview within premodern Sunnism—or perhaps some answer in between? Rock-Singer addresses the issue as follows:The degree to which this conclusion holds depends primarily on how one evaluates the evidence adduced in the four latter chapters of the book. Before addressing some of these matters, it is worth surveying the first two chapters, which lay out the theoretical basis for this perspective.Chapter 1, titled “The Roots of Salafism: Strands of an Unorthodox Past, 1926–1970,” interprets the emergence of the Anṣār al-Sunna al-Muḥammadiyya in the context of modern Egypt. Specifically, it seeks to show that the organization’s focus on visual communication of its vision of social piety responds to wider modern developments, conditioning thereby its reading of the premodern tradition. These wider developments include emphasis on regulation of the body inspired by the British colonial project of discipline and subject formation, as contrasted with a classical Islamic model wherein (as per Zahra Ayubi) virtue is construed as “the performance of particular affective practices of love, compassion, and forgiveness” and adherence to personal modesty rather than self-regulation (32, 34); the decoupling of textual authority from human chains of transmission with the spread of print, which tended to erode the interpretive monopoly of traditional madhhab-bound ʿulamāʾ; urbanization and increased connectivity via railroad, with the attendant erosion of local identities in favor of an emergent national one; and increased state involvement in and regulation of religious life and education.Chapter 2 argues that the Anṣār al-Sunna al-Muḥammadiyya adopted a defining feature of Taymiyyan theology, the foregrounding of tawḥīd al-ulūhiyya (also known as tawḥīd al-ʿibāda), so as to expand the realm defined as worship at the expense of the category of custom (ʿāda, ʿurf)—this with the aim of promoting their “global universalizing project” vis-à-vis both secular nationalism and Islamism (67). In so doing, the salafis “integrated communication into the heart of worship” (68). Thus, on the one hand, Rock-Singer recognizes that this emphasis on religious praxis, as well as the capacious definition of what constitutes worship (73), are features that modern salafis inherited from the Taymiyyan-Wahhābī legacy; on the other hand, he investigates how this legacy informed modern competition with both European-oriented effendi identity and the Muslim Brotherhood in the realms of social communication and visibility. Much of this dynamic can be captured under the rubric of the concept developed between the 1940s and 1960s of a distinct and comprehensive salafī manhaj (85–86 inter alia)—a term that remains current to this day and denoting something like the manner of application of tawḥīd in the sociopolitical sphere. Rock-Singer is right to note that premodern usage does not really account for this term’s latter-day salience, and I agree with the author that its prevalence is likely in part a response to the meaning it is given in the writings of (the non-salafi) Sayyid Quṭb (90, 95).While the situation of the writings covered in this chapter in their proper historical and sociopolitical context is entirely appropriate, it is not always clear that the concern for social communication and visibility is as novel or differentiated from the premodern salafī tradition as portrayed. For example, Muḥammad Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī’s concern for Muslims’ sartorial distinction from others (83) does betray what one could call “anxieties about social identity”; but this particular commentary invokes a traditional, ḥadīth-based principle “differentiate yourselves from the mushrikīn (polytheists)” (regarding the mustache and beard) and likewise notes a practical judicial problem that arises from similitude of dress: a Muslim will not know to whom he may address the greeting al-salām ʿalaykum.1 Without denying the capital differences that exist between the modern and premodern periods, which I as well believe account for some unique features of contemporary salafism, the Muslims of the Middle East have historically lived in societies that were both multiconfessional and contested by different visions and practices of Islam, thereby arousing concerns not dissimilar to the ones outlined in this chapter. As one can see from such a classic ‘salafī’ text as Ibn Taymiyya’s Iqtiḍāʾ al-ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm (“The Requirements of the Straight Path”), social concerns and religious/sharʿī ones have never been easy to disentangle.The scope of this review does not allow for a full assessment of the wealth of issues treated in the book’s last four chapters, so we will restrict ourselves to consideration of Chapter 3 on the practice of praying in the mosque while wearing shoes (102–36). This chapter is an excellent case study on the intersection between the characteristic salafi concern for reviving the Prophet’s sunna and considerations of real-world context. Alone among the legal schools, the Ḥanbalīs had historically considered the practice of praying in shoes praiseworthy, with the ratio legis mentioned in the sources being differentiation from the Jews, who prayed barefoot. While this raises the possibility that the ratio legis may no longer apply, since Jews in recent memory have in fact prayed while wearing shoes, this legal twist played only an ancillary role in the debates traced throughout the chapter. The main tension, skillfully drawn out by Rock-Singer, lay in the conflict between relatively consistent support for the practice in principle and the pressure exerted by state-led mosque hygiene campaigns in both Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and a certain resulting conflation between ritual purity as defined in the sharīʿa and typically modern conceptions of cleanliness.The chapter is rich in sources that engaged in this debate, among them the Egyptian salafi periodical literature, fatāwā issued by official Saudi bodies such as al-Lajna al-Dāʾima liʾl-Buḥūth al-ʿIlmiyya waʾl-Iftāʾ (The Permanent Committee for Scientific Research and Legal Opinions), and treatises authored by leading quietist salafi authorities such as al-Albānī and the Yemeni Muqbil al-Wādiʿī. No less thorough is the treatment of the countervailing state cleanliness and hygiene campaigns, explained in both national and transnational contexts. The author argues that over the grand sweep of these debates, the latter considerations tended to lead quietist salafis to downplay the importance of praying in shoes, notwithstanding a general adherence to the principled position that doing so is permissible and even praiseworthy (mustaḥabb).Rock-Singer’s conclusion that salafis, “far from inexorably anchored in an epistemological commitment to the seventh century, sought to balance a Prophetic model against the threat of both state repression and popular opprobrium” appears to be borne out by the preceding analysis. Yet to this reviewer’s mind, the chapter’s granular study is of more value than this summation. That quietist salafis in particular range in approach between intransigence and accommodation is not an especially controversial assertion, nor does it necessarily call into question their basic orientation toward the Prophetic model as the salafis construe it—especially given that the practice debated is generally considered only praiseworthy and not obligatory.This consideration leads us back to the author’s argument, cited above, regarding the modern nature of contemporary salafism and the alleged selectivity of the salafi approach to the premodern sources. It should be said that the approach considering present-day salafism a modern movement can find many points in its favor. The widespread use of the term salafi as an emic identifier is one (see p. 3 n. 5, following Henri Lauzière). While we might dispute what weight to assign this fact, per the dictum lā mashāḥḥa fīʾl-iṣṭilāḥ (“terminology is not a matter for dispute”), it is certainly significant that this global movement has a name for itself under which it contests for primacy in the Sunni world against rival movements. And more than anything we should perhaps trust the intuition that modern sociopolitical context is not a matter one can simply opt out of.Yet at times emphasis on modern aspects of the salafi movement can tend to obscure clear doctrinal continuities with their premodern forebears. The most important of these is the theology of Ibn Taymiyya, without which one cannot grasp the meaning or significance of present-day salafi doctrine or its Arabian Wahhabi antecedent (and to be fair, Rock-Singer does address this influence in Chapter 2). That a single figure looms so large over a religious movement for so many centuries is unusual in historical terms, in the Abrahamic traditions paralleled perhaps only by the importance of Augustine to the Reformation.2 Yet it is not just Ibn Taymiyya and his immediate circle who inform present-day salafism; and especially when we turn our attention from theology to legal doctrine and hermeneutics, we note the relevance of the early ahl al-ḥadīth movement and their latter-day champions, from reformist Mālikīs such as Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr (d. 463/1701) to the Yemenī Muḥammad al-Shawkānī (d. 1250/1834), the Indian Ahl-i Ḥadīth, and others. The authors discussed in In the Shade of the Sunna probably did not draw their issues of concern directly from the vast corpus of ḥadīth material but rather from this particular premodern tradition. For example, al-Albānī, while certainly of a more independent disposition than most, cites in his treatise al-Ḥadīth ḥujja bi-nafsihi fīʾl-ʿaqāʾid waʾl-aḥkām (“The Ḥadīth In Itself Is a Proof in Matters of Belief and Law”) the issue of ritual purification of shoes before prayer (al-masḥ ʿalā al-jawrabayn) from a passage in Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s (d. 751/1350) Iʿlam al-muwaqqiʿīn ʿan rabb al-ʿālamīn (“Informing Those Who Make Legal Decisions on the Authority of the Lord of All Being”) listing Prophetic sunnas that have been abandoned due to errant jurisprudential methodologies.3Another occasion where the weight of the specifically salafī legacy may not be given its full due is in the discussion of a 1954 fatwa by Abū al-Wafāʾ Muḥammad Darwīsh of the Anṣār al-Sunna on the topic of use of Egyptian nationalist symbols and the erecting of statues (61–62). Rock-Singer rightly states that what is notable about this fatwa is less the prohibition of visual or statuary depiction of humans and more the latitude it allows for depiction of monuments (including pre-Islamic ones) on currency and the like. This is provided as an example of the quietist attitude adopted by the Anṣar al-Sunna in the immediate post-revolutionary period, in contrast with the crisis in relations that erupted between the new regime and the Muslim Brotherhood. This analysis appears well-grounded, and in fact offers a fine example of the value of Rock-Singer’s richly context-dependent readings. Yet an opportunity was missed to explain the salience in salafism of the cautionary precedent adduced by Darwīsh (and mentioned by Rock-Singer) regarding the prohibition of physical monuments if they are liable to lead to veneration of them, namely the episode of the dhāt anwāṭ. This was a ritually significant tree on which the Arabs of the jāhiliyya used to hang their swords, a practice that the Prophet then forbade to the Companions. This episode was probably not culled directly from the early traditions but rather from the patrimony of late premodern salafism: it is mentioned in a number of central texts authored by Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, including Kashf al-shubuhāt (“Refutation of the Spurious Arguments”), al-Qawāʿid al-arbaʿ (“The Four Principles”), and Chapter 8 of the Kitāb al-tawḥīd (“The Book of God’s Unicity”).Thus, this reviewer does harbor some reservations with regard to the more categorical statements in the book asserting the modernity of contemporary salafism. This should not be taken to detract from the exceptional merits of In the Shade of the Sunna as detailed above, and the book should be considered required reading for any student or scholar of modern-day salafism. It is natural that different scholars of differing interests will approach the topic from varying perspectives. In the course of time, it is to be hoped that these will prove complementary and lead to a fuller appreciation of salafism as both a school of Sunni Islam and as a modern-day movement.