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This book offers a unique comparative exploration of the role of tradition in Islam and Christianity. The idea of ‘tradition’ has enjoyed a variety of senses and definitions in Islam and Christianity, but both have cleaved at certain times to a supposedly ‘golden age’ of tradition from the past. In comparing the role of tradition in Islam and Christianity, this book explores the following key themes: the roles of authority, fundamentalism, the use of reason and ijtihad (independent thinking). It suggests that there has been a chain of thinkers from classical Islam to the twentieth century who share a common interest in ijtihad. Drawing on past and present evidence, and using Christian tradition as a focus for contrast and comparison, the book highlights the seemingly paradoxical harmony between tradition and ijtihad in Islam. It draws on a variety of primary and secondary sources including contemporary newspaper and journal articles, documents and letters, adding immediacy to the text, which proposes a new vocabulary for the articulation of Islam, offers original comparisons between Salafism and Lefebvrism, and articulates the yearning amongst today's Muslim and Christian traditionalists for a revival of a ‘golden age’ from whence, they believe, all good traditions derive.

This book considers efforts undertaken by the Saudi political and religious establishments to widen the sphere of Wahhabi influence beyond the kingdom’s borders from the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on the history of the Islamic University of Medina (IUM), founded in 1961 to offer fully-funded religious instruction to mostly non-Saudi students. It demonstrates that this Saudi state-backed missionary initiative built on political, cultural, and social transformations tracing back to the late Ottoman period. It goes on to show that, just as the IUM sought to extend the authority and influence of the Wahhabi religious establishment into distant Muslim communities, its own operation was both enabled and influenced by migrants from across the Islamic world who came to work and study on its campus. Moreover, the university’s missionary project was further complicated insofar as it was refracted through the agency of the itinerant students who were expected to convey its Wahhabi-inflected message. The book argues that the complex history of such projects of Wahhabi “religious expansion” is best understood as involving a series of unequal transactions within the terms of a transnational religious economy, comprising flows of spiritual capital, material capital, religious migrants and social technologies. This analytical framework suggests new ways of thinking about the evolution of Wahhabism, the rise of Salafism in locations around the world, and the forms of power and agency at stake in border-spanning struggles to steer the future course of the Islamic tradition.

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.

Based on twelve case studies (Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zanzibar and the Comoros), this books provides the first comprehensive analysis of Muslim movements of reform in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. It looks at patterns and peculiarities of different traditions of Islamic reform, considering both Sufi- and Salafi-oriented movements of reform in their respective historical and regional contexts. It stresses the importance of the local context to explain the different trajectories of development. The books studies the social, religious, and political impact of these reform movements in both historical and contemporary times and asks why some movements of reform have become successful as popular mass movements, gaining influence among African middle class groups, while others failed to attract substantial audiences. It considers jihad-minded movements in contemporary Mali, northern Nigeria and Somalia and looks at modes of transnational entanglement of movements of reform. Equally, the book discusses the biographies of major reformist scholars and addresses the importance of generational dynamics in the development of movements of reform. Against the background of a general inquiry into what constitutes “reform”, the text responds to the question of what “reform” actually means for Muslims in contemporary Africa.

Salafism has emerged as one of the most visible and questioned faces in contemporary Islam. In many countries, from the East to the West, this fundamentalist vision seeking to restore a version of Islam that is supposed to be pure and unchanged is increasingly successful. This is the case in France, where thousands of Muslims are now dedicated to living this puritanical and fundamentalist religiosity. In connection with some Islamic countries, starting with Saudi Arabia, they appeal to a transnational narrative through which they promote a new face of globalization. Reacting to both political Islam and jihadism, they prefer to become entrepreneurs in order to seek economic success. Splitting from the rest of society, they are building a counternarrative in which they represent the purest form of the Islamic identity. Using research from a prolonged immersion in French Salafist communities, this book sheds light on the lifestyle, representations, profiles, and trajectories of these communities. By focusing on quietist Salafism and its formative ties with several Gulf countries, especially with Saudi Arabia, this book is also an attempt to understand contemporary religious globalizations. It also sheds light on a dynamic that is less centered on formal political entities and primarily refers to a globalization taking place in the margins that have been little studied for too long.

This volume explores the growth and transformation of a particular variant of Islamism—Salafism—in the Maghreb region. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and from previous scholarship on Salafi typologies—specifically, quietist, political, and jihadist variants—it seeks to understand the socioeconomic and political drivers between the growth or diminishing of each trend. The volume pays particular attention to exploring how state-sponsored Salafists compete with more informal, nonstate, and transnational variants, particularly jihadists. It analyses how local political contexts determine the calculations and trajectories of Salafist factions that appear to share a certain doctrinal uniformity but whose actual practice on the ground, in the sphere of Arab politics, varies significantly. Specifically, it assesses state capacities and policies toward Salafis as a crucial variable that has shaped the transformation of Salafism across the Maghreb’s different countries. A key feature of the book is its attention to the blurring of the boundaries between Salafi quietism, political activism, and the imperative, in some countries, for Salafis to modulate aspects of their doctrine to gain public support. It concludes with the observation that Salafism’s growth is the product of a growing and youthful disenchantment with the existing order and especially authoritarianism, corruption, and dislocation. At a time of heightened polarization in the region and unfortunate American misapprehensions of Islamism—at both public and official levels—the book’s granular insights provide correctives for understanding a diverse religious current that has too often been synonymous with extremism.

The book analyzes in detail the ideological and organizational changes that occurred within the broader Salafi movement after the Arab uprisings. While scholarship had long recognized the divisions within Salafism, this volume looks at the ways in which the extraordinary events of the Arab uprisings have led to a profound rethink of such divisions. Focusing on the developments that have characterized Salafi movements across a number of Arab countries, the contributors to this volume underline changes and continuities in both ideology and political praxis. Popular participation in the uprisings forced Salafism to contend with the rise of people’s power and different movements chose different paths to respond to such challenges. In particular, the volume focuses on what can be termed increased politicization on the part of Salafis across the region as a response to the uprisings. While traditional Salafism shied away from institutional politics and organized forms of social and political participation, the uprisings saw the emergence of parties and movements willing to “sacrifice” tradition and engage with and through political institutions.

Salafism has attracted a lot of attention lately. This is because it appeals to Muslims who believe that through Salafism they gain direct access to the truth. In contrast to the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafism concentrates on theology and the purification of doctrine. It takes its name from the first three generations of Muslims after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the pious forefathers, al-salaf al-salih. These first generations, as the closest companions to Muhammad, are considered to be the fountain of pure knowledge of Islam. Salafism is perhaps the most rapidly expanding current within Islam, both in the Muslim world and in Europe and the United States, where it appeals to young people who find a deterritorialized and deculturalized Islam more attractive than the traditional Islam of their parents, which tends to be influenced by non-Islamic local customs. In this anthology the three forms of Salafism are extensively analyzed. These are: apolitical, quietist Salafism, whose adherents focus on the purification of Islam and live strictly according to Hadith and the Qur’an; political Salafism, which mixes the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood with Salafism; and Jihadi Salafism, which focuses on jihad. Salafism has been promoted especially by Saudi Arabia and is also called Wahhabism.

Jihadi-Salafi narratives of martyrdom-seeking operations are filled with praise for what they label the exemplary self-renunciative acts of their martyrs performed as a model of the earliest traditions of Islam. While many studies evaluate the biographies of these would-be martyrs for evidence of social, psychological, political, or economic strain in an effort to rationalize what are often labeled “suicide bombings,” this book argues that through their legal arguments debating martyrdom-seeking operations, Jihadi-Salafis, including those fighting for al-Qaʿida, ISIS, and their affiliates, craft a theodicy meant to address the suffering and oppression faced by the global Muslim community. Taking as its source material legal arguments (fatwas), texts, pamphlets, magazines, forum posts, videos, and audio files from authors sympathetic to both al-Qaʿida and ISIS on the subjects of martyrdom operations, jurisprudence, and political philosophies, this book reveals that the Jihadi-Salafi legal debates on martyrdom-seeking rearrange the basic objectives (maqāṣid) of the Shariʿa around the principles of maximizing the general welfare (maṣlaḥa) and promoting religion (dīn) above all other concerns—including the preservation of life. This utilitarian turn opens the possibility for formulating a meaningful engagement and critique of Jihadi-Salafi legal interpretation and theories of warfare within a broader, just-war framework. However, as the jurists and propagandists of ISIS demonstrate, this turn also opens the possibility for the utilization of self-renunciative violence as engendering modes of state formation.

Across the Muslim world, from Iraq and Yemen, to Egypt and the Sahel, new alliances have been forged between the latest wave of violent Islamist groups –– including Islamic State and Boko Haram –– and local tribes. But can one now speak of a direct link between tribalism and jihadism, and how analytically useful might it be? Tribes are traditionally thought to resist all encroachments upon their sovereignty, whether by the state or other local actors, from below yet by joining global organizations such as Islamic State, are they not rejecting the idea of the state from above? This triangular relationship is key to understanding instances of mass ‘radicalization’, when entire communities forge alliances with jihadi groups, for reasons of self-interest, self-preservation or religious fervor. If Algeria’s FIS or Turkey’s AKP once represented the ‘Islamisation of nationalism’, have we now entered a new era, that of the ‘tribalization of globalization’?

How should we understand religion in Saudi Arabia? To what extent does religion control the various aspects of Saudi life? Why are more and more Saudis and generally Muslims leaning toward heresy? Why are many others exhibiting an indifference toward religion? And how does our understanding of the state of religion in Saudi Arabia inform us about the state of religion in other Islamic communities? This book explores the emergence of nonbelief and the response to it from the Salafi-Wahhabi religious institutions of Saudi Arabia. While previous studies have focused on particular institutions and their role in religious change, this study focuses on individuals that have criticized religion by taking advantage of the virtual space of social media. In doing so, they have questioned the most fundamental aspects of Saudi society: politics, religion, social justice, gender, sexuality, and the future of the country. Just as importantly, these individuals, who emerged first on the Internet, have mounted a frontal challenge to religious orthodoxy, whether through calls for religious reform or, even more provocatively, through debates over concepts of deity, duty to Allah, and morality.

The spread of Salafism—often called ‘Wahhabism’—in the West has intrigued and alarmed observers since 9/11. Many see it as a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that subjugates women and fuels Jihadist extremism. According to this view, Salafi women—many of whom wear the niqab—are the unwilling victims of a patriarchal, fanatical version of Islam. Yet, in Britain, growing numbers of educated women—often converts or from less conservative Muslim backgrounds—are actively choosing to embrace Salafism’s literalist beliefs and strict guidelines. These prescribe, for example, full veiling, wifely obedience, and seclusion from nonrelated men.So how do young British women reconcile such demands with their desire for fulfilling careers, university degrees, and suitable husbands? How do their beliefs affect their love lives and other relationships? And why do they become Salafis in the first place?Anabel Inge has gained unprecedented access to Salafi women’s groups in the United Kingdom to provide the first in-depth and vivid account of their lives. Drawing on more than two years of fieldwork and interviews in London, she probes the reasons for Salafism’s appeal among young Somalis, Afro-Caribbean converts, and women from other backgrounds.She explains how Salafism offers much-needed, textually anchored guidelines for women concerned by the religious and moral uncertainties of life in a liberal, multifaith society. And she reveals how the women’s lives are fraught with personal dilemmas. This is a ground-breaking and lucid account, rich in ethnographic detail. It will be of interest to policy-makers, journalists, scholars, and general readers.