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

IN THE SHADE OF THE SUNNA

IN THE SHADE OF THE SUNNA

SALAFI PIETY IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY MIDDLE EAST

Aaron Rock-Singer

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2022 by Aaron Rock-Singer

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rock-Singer, Aaron, author.

Title: In the shade of the Sunna : Salafi piety in the twentieth-entury Middle East / Aaron Rock-Singer.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021049403 (print) | LCCN 2021049404 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520382565 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520382572 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520382589 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Salafīyah—History—20th century. | Salafīyah—History—21st century. | Salafīyah—Social aspects—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC BP195.S18 R63 2022 (print) | LCC BP195.S18 (ebook) | DDC 297.8/3—dc23/eng/20220202

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049403

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049404

Manufactured in the United States of America

28  27  26  25  24  23  22

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Mom and Dad: This book would have been impossible without your love and support.

Cara: How did I get so lucky?

Liora: I know that you have already written 50 books this year, but this is mine, OK?

Eli: May you one day be as passionate about your job as you currently are about monkeys and the color yellow.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

The Ethics of an Orphan Image

A Note on Transliteration and Spelling

Introduction

1. The Roots of Salafism: Strands of an Unorthodox Past,

1926–1970

2. Conquering Custom in the Name of Tawhid: The Salafi Expansion of Worship

3. Praying in Shoes: How to Sideline a Practice of the Prophet

4. The Salafi Mystique: From Fitna to Gender Segregation

5. Leading With a Fist: The Genesis and Consolidation of a Salafi Beard

6. Between Pants and the Jallabiyya: The Adoption of Isbal and the Battle for Authenticity

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The seeds of this book project were planted during my time as a graduate student in Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. When I arrived at Princeton, I planned to study lay religious authority in the twentieth-century Middle East and considered myself unqualified to engage with questions of Islamic theology or law. I had never opened a fiqh text or biographical dictionary and knew little of the vast universe of digital Islamic texts, whether Waqfeya or Shamela. My first thanks go to my advisor, Muhammad Qasim Zaman, who guided me through the study of modern Islam and helped me develop my first book on the Islamic Revival in 1970s Egypt. His deep commitment to both scholarship and mentorship have been formative. In tandem, Michael Cook’s legendary Introduction to the Islamic Scholarly Tradition—if ever a class title understated its depth and rigor!—was both the most challenging and exhilarating class that I have ever taken. Yet, while Michael exudes a commitment to intellectual rigor, he also models a deep form of human decency in academia that is as rare as it is impactful. In a classic case of the rich getting richer, I was also fortunate enough to study with both Bernard Haykel and Hossein Modarressi.

As a graduate student at Princeton, I first delved into Salafism while trying to understand the origins of calls to gender segregation in 1970s Egypt. Muhammad Qasim Zaman offered me deft feedback at the time and support as I worked to place the article in an appropriate journal. Publishing in Islamic Law & Society vaulted this project forward as David Powers offered multiple rounds of line-edits to the article before sending it out for review. This was my first experience of David’s commitment to mentorship and clear writing. As I worked to bring this article to its final form, I was also fortunate to receive generous comments from Daniel Lav, Cyrus Schayegh, and Suzie Ferguson.

My early research for this project occurred during my year as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House and as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Cornell. At Penn, I wish to thank Bill Burke-White and Mike Horowitz for their support (and ample writing time!), as well as for their willingness to provide extra money to allow me to purchase Salafi periodicals. During the year in Philadelphia, I benefited greatly from an academic and social community around me, particularly Julia McDonald and two graduate school friends, Sam Helfont and Megan Robb, who fortuitously had also ended up at Penn. Finally, I was able to reunite with Heather Sharkey, the mentor who introduced me to the study of the Middle East as an undergraduate back in the fall of 2004 and supported may first research experience by advising my undergraduate thesis on Amr Khaled.

It was at Cornell, however, that research kicked into high gear and my writing really began. I presented an early version of chapter 1 to participants in the Brett de Bary Interdisciplinary Writing Group and wish to thank David Powers, Ben Anderson, Jeff Eden, Raashid Goyal, and Patrick Naeve for their comments. I then presented my research on the Salafi beard as part of a workshop on Islam and Politics co-organized with David (again!), who agreed to publish the proceedings as a theme issue in Islamic Law & Society. I am also grateful to the other contributors to this theme issue (Joel Blecher, Amira Mittermaier, and Lev Weitz), as well as to participants in the workshop. Furthermore, I have had the pleasure of discussing this project at length with Ibrahim Gemeah, who generously shared his experience with Salafis in Egypt and is well on his way to becoming a successful scholar in his own right. At Cornell, I would also like to thank Chiara Formichi, Deborah Starr, Suman Seth, Eric Tagliacozzo, and Seçil Yılmaz, who collectively made me feel like a part of an intellectual community during a challenging professional period.

The History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been the perfect place to finish this book and to chart the next stage of my career. To begin with, I am fortunate to have an extraordinary set of colleagues. Though much of my first two years have been defined by the Covid-19 pandemic and remote work, I never cease to be impressed by their collective combination of kindness and intellectual intensity. I’m particularly grateful to Mou Banerjee for her wry sense of humor; Marla Ramírez for her thoughtfulness and easy laugh; Tony Michels for his unselfish commitment to scholarly community (and expertise in Madison’s lunch dining scene); Fran Hirsch for her unceasing support of junior faculty; Sarah Thal for her understated excellence and kindness; and Leonora Neville, who has guided the department through a challenging time with grace and wisdom. I also wish to thank Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen and Lee Wandel for providing generous comments on grant proposals related to this book. This book has also benefited from my participation in the Middle East Studies program at UW directed by Nevine el-Nossery. I am particularly grateful to have Steven Brooke, Marwa Shalaby, Dan Stolz, and Daniel Williford as colleagues.

I also owe a great debt to fellow scholars of Islamic and Middle East History. In particular, I wish to thank Walter Armbrust (whose fault it is that I am fascinated by social practice), Samy Ayoub, Nathan Brown, Cole Bunzel, Suzie Ferguson, Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, Richard Gauvain, Emad Hamdeh, Meir Hatina (who hosted me at Hebrew University during the 2013–14 academic year), Hilary Kalmbach, Yasmin Moll, Jacob Olidort, Christian Sahner, and Arthur Zárate. I benefitted from the feedback of fellow panelists, workshop participants, and audiences at Tel Aviv University (2014 and 2017), Harvard University (2015, organized by Ari Schriber), Columbia University (2016), multiple meetings of the Middle East Studies Association (2016, 2019), Cornell (2017) and finally, a conference at Oxford University co-organized by Masooda Bano and Saud al-Sarhan (2018), entitled The Future of Salafism. I am also very grateful for the help of Mike Farquhar and Ahmed Said Diop in obtaining the full run of al-Hadi al-Nabawi and to Umar Ryad and Maxim Abdulatif for their assistance in accessing al-Tamaddun al-Islami. I am also very fortunate that many of the individuals whom I acknowledge here as colleagues are also dear friends.

This book benefited from the keen eye of (at least) half a dozen readers. Omar Anchassi, Alex Thurston, and Simon Wolfgang Fuchs all read the entirety of a first draft of this book in the midst of the early months of the pandemic, challenging me to conceive of the project more broadly and to deepen my analysis. Whether Omar’s incredible recall of secondary and primary sources of relevance, Simon’s continued push to consider Salafism beyond the Arab world, or Alex’s attention to the ways in which my analytical assumptions about Salafism carried traces of this movement’s self-perception, all three of these readers drove me to produce a better book. Thanks to the generosity of the UW-Madison History department, particularly Leonora Neville, I was then able to convene a virtual workshop during which I spent the day with Joel Blecher, Henri Lauzière, and Emilio Spadola working through the weakest parts of my argument and pushing my analysis further. This experience would have been intellectual nirvana in normal times, but was all the more so in the midst of a pandemic that has rendered normal scholarly interaction difficult if not impossible. I am particularly grateful to Emilio for pushing me to think more expansively about visibility and ethics.

At the University of California, Eric Schmidt saw potential for this book to be a broadly relevant story of religion in modernity. I am grateful for his belief in the project, support, and ability to somehow conjure extraordinary reviewers not once but twice! I also wish to thank LeKeisha Hughes for all she has done to shepherd this book to publication, Catherine Osborne for her attention to detail and precise editorial suggestions, and Cindy Fulton for making the proof stage straightforward and low-stress. Chapters four and five of this book were published, in revised version, in Islamic Law and Society. I would like to thank David Powers for permission to reprint these articles.

Friends who know nothing about Salafism have also played a huge role in the journey that has been this book. First, a shout out to Pete Silberman (and his better half, Sylvia!), who has been my closest friend since we were in elementary school fighting over ownership of whatever piece of junk we had found in either of our backyards. When I married Cara, I also gained her two best friends, Lilly Hubschmann-Shahar and Lisa Rosenfeld, as lifelong friends, as well as their respective husbands, Yoni Shahar and Bryan Beaudreault. We have also been fortunate to build a community of wonderful friends here in Madison, particularly Josh Garoon and Michal Engelman, Judy Greenberg (along with Dan Stolz, already mentioned!), Kirsten Kiphardt and Sean Ronnekleiv-Kelly, Keesia and Tom Hyzer, Brian Schneirow and Kelly Eagen, Jason and Colleen Deal, and so many other folks, especially at Beth Israel Center.

Finally, as I worked on this book, my family supported me every step of the way. I wish to thank my in-laws Craig Singer, Judy Singer, Ellen Singer Coleman, and Michael Coleman, as well as my siblings Patrick and Miriam and Patrick’s wife, Rachel. I am also grateful for the support and love of my extended family (Baron, Levy, Wohl, Rock, Busman, and Rosen), as well as the love and care that my children have received from a succession of nannies: Abby Anello (New York), Heidi Neuhauser (Ithaca), and Anna Volkman (Madison).

It is my parents, Cara, and my children who will see their fingerprints—real and literal—all over this book. My parents, Ed and Andrea Rock, now know more about praying in shoes and Salafi beards than they ever might have imagined, and have given me their full love and support for every personal and professional adventure. One of the defining memories of my childhood is their embrace of my learning style, which can accurately be summed up by the title of the classic children’s book Leo the Late Bloomer. Another defining memory, however, is my father’s comment to the ten-year-old version of me that if I ever found a professional passion that I enjoyed half as much as following baseball and basketball then I’d have a successful career. Though I suspect that he made this claim out of exasperation at having to listen to me drone on about sports statistics rather than as a prediction of the future, I believe that my discovery of a passion for Salafi social practice has proved him right.

The person who has listened to me drone on most, however, has been my wife Cara, who has filled the past eleven years of my life with love, laughter, and joy. As we progressed from graduate students living in a tiny New York apartment to multiple moves in the midst of unclear career prospects to settling in Madison, she has been my ultimate supporter. In the midst of all of this, she brought our two kids, Liora and Eli, into the world, while balancing an ambitious professional path with deep devotion to our family. I thus dedicate this book to my parents, Cara, and our kids who, in ways big and small, both made it possible and life meaningful.

Aaron Rock-Singer

Madison, Wisconsin

November 2021

THE ETHICS OF AN ORPHAN IMAGE

As I searched for an appropriate image for this book’s cover, I alternated between recent photographs of Salafi men taken by the photographers of Western media agencies and images of key Salafi texts, particularly periodicals. Neither perspective was satisfactory: while photographs of Salafi men showed them from an angle chosen by the photographer (and did not compensate those depicted), a reproduction of the cover or contents of a Salafi periodical would have risked replicating the faulty assumption that Salafism must be understood as emerging directly from canonical texts.

Having exhausted both of these options, I returned to the cover of a 1980 pamphlet that figures prominently in chapter 4 of this book. Entitled Flaunting and the Danger of Women Joining Men in Their Workplace, this text first appeared as a series of articles in Salafi and Islamist periodicals in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and is the work of a leading Saudi Salafi scholar, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz b. Baz (d. 1999). This particular pamphlet, produced by the now-defunct Egyptian publishing house Maktabat al-Salam, is unusual among editions of this text, as it is the only version that I found that contained a cover image. Even more significant, it is an exception among Salafi print media more broadly, which generally eschews the depiction of men (let alone women). Specifically, the cover depicts a faceless yet alluring brunette clad in a cloak in the background, and a glass and wine bottle and deck of cards in the foreground. In doing so, the cover offers a vivid depiction of Salafism’s concern with visibility and its focus on regulating public behavior, and summons affective responses that range from enthusiastic agreement (the presumed intended reaction) to anger (among those who oppose the Salafi social project). If a picture is worth a thousand words, this illustration reveals how Salafi scholars came to articulate a public vision of piety premised on a linkage between ethics and visible practice.

This image, however, is of unknown origin. The text itself contains no indication of the illustrator. This could not have been Ibn Baz himself, since he lost his sight as a young man. I searched for other editions of this title, yet could find none that contained this illustration (or any illustration at all). I then went looking for Maktabat al-Salam—which according to this pamphlet was based in Cairo—and contacted a Salafi-leaning Egyptian publishing house with a similar name, Maktabar Dar al-Salam. The latter, however, stated that it had no relationship to Maktabat al-Salam, which it believed to be defunct. Indeed, the address listed on the pamphlet for this publisher now houses a medical diagnostic imaging center. Furthermore, a search of the WorldCat database found fifteen texts published between 1980 and 1985, but none after this date. Finally, Egypt’s current copyright law (Law 82 of 2002) does not address the status of such orphan works.

While this searching solved a legal question, it did not exhaust the broader ethical question of using such an orphan work. An easy answer would have to find an alternative image with a clear copyright holder yet, after nearly a decade of working with Salafi print media, I could think of no comparable image. Thus, in line with recent work by librarians and archivists to balance between the educational and potential economic value of orphan works,¹ I use this pamphlet’s cover in a transformative fashion; far from competing with the original (which was published only once by Maktabat al-Salam over four decades ago), In the Shade of the Sunna casts light on how and why the original work emerged. Put differently, even if this book were still in print, its audience and that of my book differ completely, while the use of this image carries educational value for an academic audience.

More broadly, the use of this image reflects the methodological and ethical mission of this book: to depict Salafis as three-dimensional human beings rather than as direct descendants of the seventh century’s models, as both their members and critics often depict them. The goal of this book, in short, is to ask the same questions about Salafis as one would about any other movement, religious or otherwise, and in doing so, to cast light on their origins, development, and impact on the world around them. I thus hope that this book’s cover image will bring readers to the text and illustrate this work’s central argument.

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION, SPELLING, AND DATING

Transliteration of Arabic terms follows a modified version of the style of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. I employ full diacritical marks for technical terms, and, for non-technical terms, indicate the ʿayn and hamza alone. Accordingly, I will render the robe worn by Egyptian men as jallābiyya when citing an Arabic-language reference to this form of dress but as jallabiyya when it appears more generally. In the case of personal names, I also follow this system. Furthermore, when referring to individuals by their patronym, I write out Ibn (for example, Ibn Baz) while elsewhere, in other contexts, I render the patronymic link with a b. (for example, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz b. Baz). Finally, when I provide two dates (e.g., 1400/1980), it refers to the Hijri and Gregorian years, respectively.

Introduction

In the Spring of 1978, a leading Saudi Salafi scholar by the name of ʿAbd al-ʿAziz b. Baz (d. 1999) staked a claim to the necessity of gender segregation in the Islamic University of Medina’s official journal (Majallat al-Jamiʿa al-Islamiyya).¹ In the article, entitled The Danger of Women Joining Men in Their Workplace, Ibn Baz argued that individual modest behavior by women could not safeguard public morality and that both domestic seclusion and gender segregation were necessary. A few months later, Ibn Baz turned to al-Tawhid, the flagship publication of Egypt’s leading Salafi organization, Proponents of the Muhammadan Model (Anṣār al-Sunna al-Muḥammadiyya, henceforth Ansar al-Sunna). In this journal, Ibn Baz published a revised version of the original article, serialized in three installments, that made the same case for domestic seclusion and gender segregation.² The appearance of this argument in publications on either side of the Red Sea reflected the centrality of Saudi Arabia and Egypt to Salafism’s development, while Ibn Baz’s concern with gender mixing indexed a key concern of this global Islamic movement.

The Salafi claim to the necessity of separating men and women is often understood by both academics and Salafis themselves to derive directly from this movement’s literalist approach to the Quran and the authoritative account of the Prophet Muhammad’s life (known as the Sunna). In this book, by contrast, I show that Ibn Baz’s call to gender segregation does not hearken back to a traditional model of Islam (whether that of the seventh century or later), nor does it reflect the logical endpoint of a particular interpretative method. Instead, the Salafi position on this question—which is central, though not unique, to this movement³—emerged in the 1970s out of a transnational debate between Egyptian and Saudi scholars as they sought to respond to Islamist and Secular Nationalist challengers alike. As Salafi elites worked to meet this challenge and to navigate social and economic pressures, they cited not only the Prophetic model but also sources as varied as the writings of nineteenth-century German philosophers and early-twentieth-century American suffrage activists.

This story of gender segregation was striking not merely because of its unorthodox intellectual genealogy, but also because of the considerations about female sexuality that animated it. Among scholars of Islamic law (fiqh), the concern that women’s sexuality poses a threat of strife (fitna) goes back at least to the ninth century, yet the focus was on preventing sexual relations outside of marriage.⁴ Put differently, the longstanding commitment to preventing illicit sexual relations depended on and sought to protect the existence of marriage as a social structure. By contrast, the notion that women mixing with men could corrupt society more broadly simply through their physical presence primarily reflects a modernist view of society in which each person is responsible for him or herself and is equally capable of transmitting virtue or vice.

It is the latter view that would define Salafism’s development. Most fundamentally, such an approach assumes a broad, anonymous, and homogenous space bereft of stabilizing social structures, yet filled with individuals tasked with regulating themselves as they communicate ethical positions and political allegiances alike. This approach to the social world, an outgrowth of the claims that modern states make to regulate their citizens, explains not merely efforts by Middle Eastern states to regulate bodily comportment and social space alike, but also why varied social movements embraced such models of individual and collective regulation. Accordingly, Salafi calls for gender segregation did not reflect a historically-continuous Islamic social order, whether that of the seventh century or subsequent to it. Rather, leading lights of this movement sought to solve a distinctly modern challenge—that of society—by physically separating men from women’s allegedly irresistible sexual powers and by asking men and women to comport themselves in a manner that served this broader goal.

In this book, I move beyond the discrete question of gender segregation to chart the origins and consolidation of self-consciously Salafi social practices in the twentieth-century Middle East with a focus on Egypt. I tell the story of Salafi movement and its often-ahistorical efforts to replicate the golden model of the early Islamic community in seventh century Arabia. Just as importantly, I argue that the development of Salafism is a lens to the broader transformation of the Islamic thought and practice in modernity. In particular, I emphasize how communication becomes an ethical project and a key consequence of this shift: the increasing centrality of visible practices to understandings of piety.

THE RISE AND CONSOLIDATION OF SALAFISM

In the modern Middle East, the question of who has the rightful claim to the normative authority of the Prophetic model is inescapable. Over the course of the twentieth century, movements as varied as the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwān al-Muslimūn, e. 1928), Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya (e. 1926), and the Secular-Nationalist Baʿth party (e. 1947) sought both inspiration and legitimacy for their endeavors by citing the Prophet Muhammad and the first three generations of the Islamic community, known as the pious ancestors (al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ).

This book is focused on a subset of these movements, such as Ansar al-Sunna, who adopted the term Salafism (al-Salafiyya) and today can be found from the Middle East to South Asia to Western Europe and the United States. Members of this movement, in turn, distinguish themselves by articulating an interpretative commitment not only to neo-Hanbali theology (known as Madhhab al-Salaf)⁵ and to deriving law from the Quran and Sunna, but also through distinct social practices.⁶ While this movement is not limited to the Arab world, this region’s most populous country, Egypt, was a dynamic space of religious contestation in which it emerged. Specifically, it was during the 1920s that Egypt saw a cacophony of religious appeals, ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Young Men’s Muslim Association (al-Shubbān al-Muslimūn) to the Lawful Society For Those Who Work According to the Quran and Sunna (al-Jamʿiyya al-Sharʿiyya li-Taʿāwun al-ʿAmilin bi-l-Kitāb waʾl-Sunna, henceforth the Jamʿiyya Sharʿiyya). In the midst of this vibrant religious competition, al-Fiqi, a graduate of Egypt’s leading religious institution, al-Azhar University, and former student of the noted Islamic reformer Muhammad Rashid Rida (d. 1935), founded Ansar al-Sunna.⁷

Scholarship on Salafism in Egypt and beyond has tackled questions of theology, legal method,⁸ ritual practice,⁹ political participation,¹⁰ and military conflict.¹¹ Salafism’s broader impact, however, lies in its emergence as a social movement that has reshaped Islamic thought and practice in Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority settings alike. This book, accordingly, explores an ostensibly secondary question that cuts to the heart of Salafism’s development: the history of the daily practices through which Salafis have sought to emulate the Prophet Muhammad.¹² In the following six chapters, I trace the emergence of distinctly Salafi social practices between 1936 and 1995 and argue that, far from seamlessly replicating either the model of early Islamic Arabia or established models of Islamic piety, these embodied routines emerged out of the assumed communicative power of the body that is characteristic of modernity. It is certainly the case that Salafis competed with and were shaped by their ideological rivals, whether secular nationalists, Islamists, or traditionalist scholars committed to a legal approach based on existing schools of law (s. Madhhab, pl. Madhāhib). What is crucial, however, is that they have done so not because of their fundamental differences, but rather because they share the same field of competition: a commitment to shaping the ideas and practices of a communal body known as society.

Most fundamental to the development of Salafi practice would be the relationship between ethics and communication that secular nationalist visions, too, had absorbed from the operating logic of modern states. In this formulation, bodily practice came to be both a tool of regulating the self and an incontrovertible symbol of allegiance to or rejection of particular political projects. By carefully tracing the genesis and consolidation of four practices—praying in shoes, gender segregation, a distinctly Salafi beard, and shortened pants or robes—I show the centrality of the assumptions and demands of communication in the emergence and consolidation of Salafism and, more broadly, in the transformation of the Islamic tradition in the twentieth century.

The challenge in writing a history of the emergence of distinctly Salafi practices is that both Salafi elites and rank-and-file members are deeply committed to the proposition that such embodied acts represent a precise reproduction of the model of Islam bequeathed by Muhammad and his Companions in seventh-century Arabia. Salafis insist that their interpretation of early Islamic history is superior to that of other Muslims because it is based exclusively on the Quran and Sunna, and they castigate Islamic modernists and Islamists alike for their adoption of self-consciously modern questions and concerns. By contrast, Salafis proceed on the epistemological premise that they have succeeded in inoculating themselves not merely from non-Islamic influences but also from what they understand to be the faulty interpretations of the madhhab tradition.

A focus on a set of practices which Salafi elites claim emerge directly from the Quran and Sunna requires an ambitious approach to sources. In line with recent scholarship that emphasizes the role of transnational linkages in the movement’s development,¹³ I draw on leading Salafi periodicals published across the Middle East, including in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Yemen as well as pamphlets, some digitized and others culled from archives in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. When it is relevant, I also use mosque lessons and sermons recorded on audiocassette and digitized as audio files. Collectively, these sources reflect and reveal an interconnected transnational arena of Salafi debate in which it is not uncommon to see the same writer appear in multiple publications, for one magazine to quote or excerpt another, or for a print debate to be echoed in audiocassette sermons and vice versa.

The choice to rely primarily on print media reflects not only the available source base, but also the suitability and centrality of this medium to the promotion of strict models of embodied practice. The ease of reproducing printed material in the modern period facilitated a call to standardized religious practice,¹⁴ while magazines and pamphlets constitute what Wilson Chacko Jacob terms a performative cultural space in which the making and potential unmaking of subjects was accorded an iterative structure. . . .¹⁵ Furthermore, as Benedict Anderson argues, print created an imagining of simultaneous readings that allows it to be both a structure for otherwise-unstructured social space, and to reflect particular dynamics of authority.¹⁶ Print media thus served as a site not merely for the transmission of particular models of piety, but also as a space for those outside the Salafi scholarly elite to understand themselves as Muslims committed to replicating the model of the first three generations of the Muslim community. As these readers read about the ostensibly unchanging and timeless model of this golden period, they worked to translate a theoretical commitment into an ethical project of embodied self-regulation. Finally, the medium of print reflected and reinforced broader dynamics of authority within the Salafi movement by enabling editors –who were also elites within the movement more broadly –to police the boundaries of acceptable discourse and practice not only by selecting articles but also by accepting or rejecting fatwa requests and letters to the editor.¹⁷

In this book, I draw on the insights of historians of nationalism, on the one hand, and gender, on the other, to offer an alternative approach to the history of Islamic reformism and reformist movements. Historians of Islamic reformism tend to focus disproportionately on the development of abstract concepts over time,¹⁸ while those who study the Muslim Brotherhood emphasize the political and intellectual dimensions of this movement’s development.¹⁹ Scholars of nationalism and gender, by contrast, highlights the centrality of social practice and embodied performance to social movements that span the ideological spectrum, including nationalist movements that subsequently rise to power and use state institutions to further regulate such practice.²⁰ As such, this history of Salafi piety brings the history of Islamic reform into broader historiographical debates over the relationship between ideological change and bodily practice.

This history of the rise of distinctively Salafi practices also seeks to reorient the study of Salafism towards the social. Rather than approaching this trend’s history primarily as a story of scholarly engagement with past authorities, a focus on religious