Salafism against Hadith Literature: The Curious Beginnings of a New Category in 1920s Algeria.

• Author: Lauziere, Henri

Anyone who refers to Salafism today takes for granted that the word refers to a relatively distinct ideology, movement, or strain of thought. There would be no reason to think otherwise. This is not to imply that scholars see Salafism as uniform, unchanging, and uncomplicated. Rather, it is an ontological observation: although we may still have disagreements about what Salafism is in any given context, we are conditioned to accept that it is. Because it now occupies a firm place on our conceptual horizon, and because finding information about it in scholarly sources is easier than ever before, we have come to think of Salafism as a known or knowable quantity. With greater analytical confidence we have also come to infer that Salafism possesses certain core features--different authors speak alternatively of core "principles," "attitudes," and "characteristics"--among which the valorization of the Sunna figures prominently. (1) In fact, despite diverging views about the history and conceptual contours of Salafism, there appears to be a consensus that its purported exponents, in any time period and any locale, called for a return to the Sunna as one of the original sources of Islamic authority. This is, explicitly or implicitly, taken as a sine qua non. Could a Muslim intellectual who disparages hadith literature and blames it as a major cause of intra-Islamic disorder be plausibly considered an advocate of Salafism? It seems safe to assume that any association today between Salafism and the depreciation of hadith would, at a minimum, give pause to anyone familiar with Islamic thought.

Scholars who know about one gray area in the literature might nonetheless give this question further consideration. After all, historians have long noted that key Muslim reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Muhammad 'Abduh (d. 1905) and Rashid Rida (d. 1935), held ambivalent attitudes toward the Sunna. Their aversion to what they regarded as blind imitation and their desire to present Islam as conforming to certain norms of Western modernity led them not only to reexamine hadith critically, but also to doubt the reliability of many prophetic reports. (2) It is therefore somewhat ironic that past scholarship insists on identifying these reformers as exponents of Salafism--the very movement or strain of thought purported to advocate a return to the Sunna. Some historians have tried to smooth over this incongruity by affirming that 'Abduh and Rida still accepted the authority of the Sunna; they just happened to trust a much narrower understanding of it. (3) Therefore, scholars of Islam could keep referring to 'Abduh and Rida as proponents of Salafism without producing too much cognitive dissonance. By contrast, Rida's associates who voiced stronger anti-hadith ideas, such as the Egyptians Tawfiq Sidqi (d. 1920) and Mahmud Abu Rayya (d. 1970), have been considered by historians to be beyond the pale of Salafism and are generally excluded from this category. (4)

In sum, we live in an intellectual environment where various articulations of Salafism exist, but none leaves room for the blatant depreciation of hadith literature. This was not always so, however. There was a time when Salafism did not yet have any definition and did not automatically conjure up thoughts of a textualist approach to Islam that emphasizes the Sunna. In the mid-1920s Muslims had no readily available understanding of the new notion of salafiyya. To use Isaiah Berlin's phrase, there was a time when "no dictionaries, encyclopedias, compendia of knowledge, no experts, no orthodoxies [could] be referred to with confidence as possessing unquestionable authority or knowledge" in this matter. (5)

While scholars today work from the assumption that Salafism is a discernible and legible category, it thus does not hold true for all historical periods. An essential step toward the historicization of Salafism is to recognize that the category did not always exist, that it was once an inchoate idea, and that it was not necessarily identifiable by the core intellectual features we associate with it. To this end, the present article focuses on a transitory period from 1925 to 1927, when Algerian reformers first introduced the abstract noun salafiyya (Salafism), to date its earliest documented use in Arabic. (6) They began wielding the term in public debates, but were themselves still unsure about what exactly it was supposed to mean. These observations about uncertainty of meaning and chronology should serve as a reminder that attributing Salafism to Muslim scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, let alone previous ones, comes at a cost. It brushes aside the actual genesis of this category and creates imaginary narratives that privilege analytical convenience over historical rigor.

Among the Algerian reformers who grappled with the new notion of Salafism between 1925 and 1927, one deserves special mention. At the center of many controversies during this period stood Abu Ya'la al-Zawawi (d. 1952), a religious figure from Greater Kabylia who had previously spent several years in Paris and about a decade in Ottoman Syria and Egypt, where he gravitated toward Tahir al-Jaza'iri (d. 1920) and Rashid Rida. In the only academic study devoted to al-Zawawi in a European language, the late Pessah Shinar introduces him as an exponent of the Algerian salafiyya, though not a "straight" or "orthodox" one. (7) This characterization is partly misleading. It is true that al-Zawawi invoked the notion of salafiyya and that he was a maverick. But, as suggested above, it would be inaccurate to think of him as an eccentric or marginal exponent of Salafism for the simple reason that Salafism was not an established category when al-Zawawi laid claim to it in the mid-1920s. A fortiori, there existed no guidelines for determining what a "straight" or "orthodox" exponent of Salafism was. And, as it turned out, it was the controversies that al-Zawawi aroused that proved instrumental in delineating the meaning of salafiyya for the first time.

One such controversy, which Shinar's work does not address, pertained to the reliability of hadith literature. Surprisingly, al-Zawawi came out as a hardcore critic of the Sunna, all the while claiming to embrace Salafism. (8) Although this issue did not become a cause celebre--it flared up in 1926, only to be overshadowed by a bigger controversy about Sufism and al-Zawawi's relationship to the 'Aliwiyya order--al-Zawawi's attacks against hadith literature reveal much about the tentative beginnings of Salafism as a category.

1. THE LEXICAL EMERGENCE OF SALAFISM

   In November 1925 an anonymous author writing under the pseudonym Baydawi used a neologism in the pages of al-Shihab (The meteor), the reformist journal founded earlier that year by 'Abd al-Hamid ibn Badis (d. 1940). The word in question was the abstract noun salafiyya. (9) It appeared in an open letter that Baydawi wrote to confront Ibn Badis about allegations that he and a group of Muslims from Constantine had traveled to Algiers to seek blessings from the tomb of Sidi 'Abd al-Rahman (d. 1793). According to rumors, some pilgrims had even paid for Ibn Badis's travel expenses. Baydawi was therefore asking Ibn Badis whether these allegations were true. If so, Ibn Badis would need to provide evidence that his actions did not contradict the practice of the ancestors (salaf). If not, he would have to formally declare his innocence, so that no one could take advantage of "his standing as a scholar" ('alimiyyatihi) and benefit financially from "his Salafism" (salafiyyatihi). (10) Baydawi feared, among other things, that unscrupulous individuals were exploiting such visitations for material gain.

   We can only conjecture about what Baydawi meant by salafiyya in this context. And because there is no indication that the word had ever been used to mean Salafism before, it stands to reason that the readers of al-Shihab were left to their own surmises. Evidently Baydawi conceived of Salafism not as a movement or a pattern of Islamic reform but as something of a state of being: the condition of someone who follows the example of the salaf. But who could be said to possess such a virtue? Baydawi's open letter focuses solely on rejecting the visitation of saints' tombs. Was this a litmus test for Salafism? If so, readers might have been justified in concluding that both Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and the Sufi shaykh and religious scholar Ahmad al-Tijani (d. 1815)--two opponents of tomb visitation on whom Baydawi relies to buttress his point--were equal exemplars of Salafism. (11)

   Whatever his thinking, Baydawi's cursory affirmations about the tradition of the salaf proved easy to turn on their head because they left substantial room for interpretation. This is precisely what Ibn Badis argued in his own defense two months later. Although he conspicuously refrains from denying or confirming the rumors, Ibn Badis comes out supporting the practice of traveling to a saint's tomb for the purpose of seeking blessings (al-ziyara li-ajli al-tabarruk). On this issue, he distinguishes between two types of Muslims: those who adopt a narrow interpretation of the scriptures and consider the practice to be a blame-worthy innovation, among them al-Qadi 'Iyad (d. 1149) and Ibn Taymiyya, and those who adopt a broader interpretation of the scriptures and consider the practice permissible, as did al-Ghazali (d. 1111) and al-Subki (d. 1355). For good measure, Ibn Badis condemns other popular practices, such as asking the dead for favors or rubbing tombs for good luck (tamassuh). The salaf never did such things, he insists. But otherwise he sees no need for Muslims to be excessively stringent. In his opinion, traveling to a saint's tomb to seek blessings does not contravene the scriptures or the tradition of the pious ancestors. (12)

   None of what Ibn Badis wrote seems particularly...