Islam without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth-Century Islamic Thought.

• Author: El-Rouayheb, Khaled

Islam without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth-Century Islamic Thought. By AHMAD S. DALLAL. Chapel Hill: UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS, 2018. Pp. ix + 421. $100 (cloth); $34.95 (paper); $27.99 (ebook).

Writing in the 1960s and 70s, Fazlur Rahman proposed that a number of movements in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, independently of European influence, sought to revive and reform the Islamic tradition, criticized the established schools of scholastic jurisprudence and theology, and opposed the antinomianism of popular Sufism and the syncretism of popular religious practices. Ranging from the Wahhabis of central Arabia to various Sufi organizations in Africa and India, these movements were inspired by the ideas of the Hanbali purists Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350), and in some cases also by the Indian Naqshbandi Sufi Ahmad SirhindT (d. 1624).

Ahmed Dallal's Islam without Europe can be seen as a detailed working out of Rahman's fecund but undeveloped suggestion, and in some respects also as a qualification of it. Though the idea of an indigenous Islamic eighteenth-century "revival and reform" has gained some currency in recent decades, Dallal rightly states that the emphasis has tended to be on the sociopolitical movements and the personal networks rather than the ideas. His book aims to redress the balance and examine the thought of some of the leading eighteenth-century figures, especially the Indian Naqshbandi Shah WalT Allah DihlawT (d. 1762), and the Yemeni scholars Muhammad Ibn al-Amlr al-San (c)an! (d. 1768) and Muhammad al-ShawkanT (d. 1834), though there are also some discussions of (c)Uthman Dan Fodio (d. 1817), the well-known West African jihadist, and of Muhammad b. "All al-SanusT (d. 1859), founder of the Sanusiyya Sufi order in North Africa.

Dallal argues that, while each of these thinkers had distinct ideas and emphases, there were also commonalities: a stress on the permissibility and even duty of ijtihad; an opposition to the hegemony of the established schools of law; and a denunciation of antinomianism, arbitrary taxation, and political corruption. In Dallal's view, the Wahhabis did not share these features. Muhammad b. (c)Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792) neither invoked ijtihad nor did he criticize the schools of law. He was single-mindedly concerned with the issue of what he considered "polytheist" practices, such as the veneration of tombs, and was only interested in politics insofar as it furthered the goal of ending them. He was, in DallaPs opinion, "not a reformer" (p. 107). I suspect that this portrayal of the Wahhabis is too narrow. The writings of Ibn (c)Abd al-Wahhab's immediate followers, such as Ibn Mu'ammar al-TamlmT (d. 1811), show that they were concerned with moral laxity. non-Sharia taxes, and "commanding right and prohibiting wrong," that they--like Shah Wall Allah--argued for a kind of ijtihad that is compatible with belonging to a legal school, and that they used the ideas of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim to criticize conformity (taqlid) with established legal opinions when these underwrote practices that the Wahhabis condemned. (On the doctrines and early history of Wahhabism, see C. Bunzcl's masterful "Manifest Enmity: The Origins, Development and Persistence of Classical Wahhabism" [PhD diss. Princeton Univ., 2018].)

In chapter one Dallal discusses the extent to which the eighteenth-century reformers differed from the Wahhabis' narrow construal of the boundaries of faith. Though they shared the Wahhabis' hostility to the veneration of graves and saints, they were careful not to...