The Making of Salafism by Henri Lauzière (review)

There are a lot of ambiguities in the burgeoning scholarly literature about the genealogy of Salafism. Since when can we talk about it as a religious movement of its own right? How should we deal with the fact that academic studies label with the term two seemingly very different intellectual streams? Both a modernist current that intends to reconcile Islamic belief with Western style of progress, and a puritan, literalist school of thought that focuses on purifying minute details of religious practices are called Salafism. Henri Lauzière offers answers to these very important, but unanswered and largely neglected questions by tracing the historical evolution of the concept of Salafism.

One of the most important contributions of Lauzière’s book is to lay the myth to rest that Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abduh were Salafis and founded an intellectually coherent trend in the late 19^th and early 20^th century Egypt. Lauzière shows that Salafism as an abstract term that refers to a movement was constructed much later. Originally the adjective Salafi referred to neo-Hanbali theology. At the beginning of the 20^th century the term Salafi and Salafiyya (its abstract form) were popularized by Islamic thinkers such as Muhammad Rashid Rida or by the Cairene al-Majalla al-Salafiyya journal, without the intention of referring to a specific intellectual trend. The French orientalist Louis Massignon mistakenly thought that the popularity of the usage of Salafi and Salafiyya implies the existence of an intellectually coherent reform movement. Nevertheless, Massignon’s mistake proved to be “too convenient to ignore” (p. 42) by Western scholars, and was also adopted by Muslim thinkers.

Towards the end of 1920s, the term Salafi started to refer to those who dealt with legal matters unencumbered by the constraints of the four Muslim legal schools. By the 1950s, Muslim reformist literature referred to two main categories of reformers as adherents of Salafiyya. Purists could be “characterized by an adherence to neo-Hanbali theology, and abhorrence of innovation, a strong commitment to the use of scriptures as proof texts, and a desire to recapture … the purported orthodoxy and orthopraxy of the pristine Muslim community” (p. 99). These purists envisaged the unification of the umma on the basis of uniformity in religious belief and practices. However, as Lauzière emphasizes, being purist in the colonial era did not yet mean the abandonment of balanced reform.

Simultaneous with the appearance of purist Salafism, a modernist trend emerged in Morocco and was hallmarked by such figures as ‘Allal al-Fasi (1910–1974). It had no relation to the neo-Hanbali creed, promoted reason (‘aql), and instead of pan-Islamism, believed in territorial nationalism. As Lauzière points out, the reformists drew the inspiration to call themselves Salafis from the same Western orientalists who earlier misinterpreted the term.

Why purist Salafism survived and supplanted the modernist one lies in the latter’s loss of raison d’être. After decolonization modernist Salafis became employees of the Moroccan state, while the Palace adopted some of the key elements of their discourses. With the rise of secular nationalist ideologies their voice faded away. The relevance of purist Salafism did not only lie in its ability to welcome socio-political change. In the post-independence era purists identified new targets, such as the perceived Westernization of their societies, and religious innovations such as “theological errors, legal partisanship, and Sufism” (p. 165).

The final momentum of the development of Salafism happened in the 1970s, when purist Salafism went through a process of ideologization (recasting Salafism as a totalizing system) as a result of the activities of such scholars as Nasir al-Din al-Albani. As Lauzière puts it “Salafism became a worldview that encompassed the whole of existence, from knowledge to practice, from morality to etiquette, and even from religion to politics” (p. 201).

Lauzière explains each stage of the development of Salafism by providing a fascinating account of the life trajectory of the Moroccan...