Rebel Between Spirit and Law: Ahmad Zarruq, Sainthood, and Authority in Islam (review)

In Rebel between Spirit and Law, Scott Kugle provides an interesting analysis of the religious authority and lineage of saintly scholars in North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and South Asia. He focuses on the life and teachings of Ahmad Zarruq, a North African saint and critic of early modern Islamic sainthood, whose religious influence and scholarly authority affected disciples across the Maghrib and beyond. Throughout the book, Kugle uses Zarruq's writings and life story to show how present Muslim intellectual authorities, such as Hamza Yusuf, a Muslim scholar of Sufi background from California, reemploy Sufi legacies to engage controversial ethical and religious issues in the Muslim present.

What makes this book valuable and timely is that Kugle argues for a strong and relevant connection between the fifteenth-century Marinid religious turmoil that shaped Ahmad Zarruq's work and the political upheaval that resulted from the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Kugle ushers us into the post-9/11 global political world. The reader learns about Hamza Yusuf, who—in the company of the President of United States, George W. Bush—argued against the Islamic theological misinterpretations that give prominence to violent fundamentalism. We are introduced to Zarruq as a special character through the eyes of Hamza Yusuf, an American convert to Islam and an intellectual disciple of Zarruq Yusuf, and one of the first American scholars to teach at al-Qarawiyyin University, where Zarruq had been trained, five centuries earlier. Zarruq's story is part of the past–present debate about legal, scriptural, political, and saintly authority in Islam. Kugle, from the beginning of the book, covertly asserts that the Muslim community must learn from Zarruq's story to avoid "opportunistic rhetoric of jihad and prevent Muslims from making scapegoats of other communities in order to increase their own communal strength" (p. 8). In fact, the reader is left with the belief, to Kugle's credit, that Zarruq's influence is felt even as far California, where Hamza Yusuf directs the Zaytuna Institute.

Ahmad Zarruq rose to intellectual prominence in a period of political and religious turmoil, when other saintly and Sufi voices had political sway and popular appeal. In opposition to the overarching patronage of popular saintly figures, he advocated what Kugle terms juridical sainthood, lobbying for a model of political reform and scholarly criticism against the Sufi communities of Fez and their conception of political reform. Zarruq provides a premodern interpretation of Islamic tajdid (renewal) and islah (reform). Unlike Zarruq's religious reform, Kugle paints a picture of a dominant form of saintly Sufism founded on the "logic of fundamentalism," and distinguishes between Zarruq's legal scholarship and the opportunistic conception of jihad, which discourages Muslims from engaging in a positive interpretation of their past to build an Islamic model that responds to the challenges and opportunities of modernity.

Kugle, through the example of Ahmad Zarruq, provides a different definition of Sufis and their role in Muslim societies. Unlike the "laudable" Western picture of Sufis scholars as marginal mystics, Kugle claims that anthropologists and scholars of religion have failed to contextualize the stories of saints in the full complexity of their political and social backgrounds. As social actors, both scholarly saints and Sufi scholars competed for intellectual authority in their communities, and therefore, Kugle maintains, we must be aware of their political and social roles. Saints were social actors with political agendas. Ahmad Zarruq was not an exception.

After establishing the framework of his argument and critiquing the normative apolitical and marginal perception of Sufism that has characterized the field of anthropology, Kugle returns the story of Zarruq to its historical context. In the four major chapters of Rebel between Spirit and Saint, he articulates an ethnographic-like account of the social, political, and intellectual contexts in which Zarruq grew up, using a set of works written by or about Zarruq, all of which exist in Moroccan and Tunisian libraries in manuscript...