Is Islam Easy To Understand or Not Salaf PDF

Published online 10 December 2014
Journal of Islamic Studies 26:2 (2015) pp. 117–144 doi:10.1093/jis/etu081
IS ISLAM EASY TO UNDERSTAND OR NOT?:

SALAFIS, THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF
INTERPRETATION AND THE NEED
FOR THE ULEMA
J O N AT H A N A . C . B R O W N
University of Johannesburg
Downloaded from http://jis.oxfordjournals.org/ at Georgetown University on June 20, 2015

INTRODUCTION
Addressing its audience in the north Indian lingua franca of Urdu, the
eighteenth-century Ahl-e Hadis manifesto Taqwiyat al-;m:n explains
that, ‘to comprehend the Quran and Hadith does not require much
learning, for the Prophet was sent to show the straight path to the
unwise’.1 In India and Pakistan, this short treatise has been widely read
in a variety of circles since it was penned almost two hundred years ago.
First distributed in cheap printings and now available online, it remains
one of the most accessible religious texts to lay Muslims in South Asia.2
Written by the famous Indian Muslim scholar Sh:h Ism:6;l al-Shah;d
(d. 1831), it condemns as heretical activities such as the visitation of
saints’ graves. It also challenges directly the station of the ulema, the
majority of whom had long defended such practices.
Today, in response to controversial fatwas or the misguided actions
of extremist groups, Muslim ulema and laity alike often blame
insufficiently educated pseudo-scholars for twisting the true teachings
of the Qur8:n and the Prophet. Violence and backwardness, it is held, are
the predictable results of calls like that of Sh:h Ism:6;l, which declare that
the interpretive tradition of the ulema can be dispensed with and Islam’s
scriptures interpreted directly. Mainstream Sunni ulema often level this
1
Sh:h Ism:6;l al-Shah;d, Taqwiyat al-;m:n (Riyadh: Daftar bar:-yi dav6at va
tav6iyat, 2006), 37.
2
Barbara D. Metcalf, ‘The Taqwiyyat al-iman (Support of the Faith) by Shah
Isma6il al-Shahid’ in (Metcalf (ed.) Islam in South Asia: In Practice (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009), 202–3.
ß The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic
Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
118 j o na t h a n a . c . b ro w n
accusation at the various stripes of the Salafi3 movement, which Sh:h
Ism:6;l’s Taqwiyat al-;m:n has done so much to bolster in South Asia.
Yet Sh:h Ism:6;l al-Shah;d hailed from the most illustrious family of
Delhi ulema; he was the grandson of no less a figure than the great Sh:h
Wal; All:h (d. 1762). Though his writings are remarkably streamlined
manifestos, they still often pause to explain ‘the intended meaning
(maqB<d)’ of Aad;ths or to correct how the ‘masses of rabble’ have
misunderstood Qur8:nic verses that seem to justify the intercession of
saints.4 We are thus presented with a paradox: by punctuating his
writings with the interpretive guidance required to make his points, Sh:h
Ism:6;l was affirming the very need for scholarly mediation that he

insisted Muslims did not require.
As we shall see, Sh:h Ism:6;l’s evident empowerment of the masses
despite the ulema is but a sample of similar declarations made by other
ulema closely associated with the Salafi school of thought. In order to
understand such statements, we must explore how they have been but
salvos in a longstanding debate over the proper architecture of Islamic
3
Salafism and the moniker ‘Salafi’ are controversial and problematic but also
unavoidable. As Henri Lauzière has demonstrated, they are often used
anachronistically, eliding individuals and movements from the fourteenth century
to the present with gross inaccuracy. An actual coherent, self-identifying Salafi
movement did not emerge until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The very stubborn ubiquity of the terms, however, recognizes crucial
commonalities and continuities. The prominent themes associated with
Salafism—rejection of rigid adherence to a madhhab, rejection of popular and/
or theosophical Sufism, and rejection of speculative theology—each have ancient
roots in Islamic thought. The earliest instance of these streams combining,
however, comes with the Damascus circle of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), Shams
al-D;n al-Dhahab; (d. 1348) and others (and perhaps since the career of 6Izz
al-D;n Ibn 6Abd al-Sal:m [d. 1262]). Since the fourteenth century, the iconoclastic
strain they inaugurated has been a powerful engine in Islamic discourse,
expressing strong criticism either of the stagnation of scholarly institutions and
religious practices postdating the early Muslim generations or of those
institutions and practices themselves. This iconoclastic strain characterized the
revival and reform movements of the eighteenth century and has crystallized in
the modern Salafi movement. In an attempt to balance these important
intellectual continuities with the duty to avoid anachronism, this article will
use the term ‘proto-Salafi’ to refer to elements or representatives of the
iconoclastic strain before the twentieth century; Henri Lauzière, ‘The
Construction of Salafiyya: Reconsidering Salafism from the Perspective of
Conceptual History’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 42 (2010):
369–89.
4
See, for example, Ris:lat al-tawA;d (ed. Ab< al-Easan 6Al; al-Nadw;;
Lucknow: Mu’assasat al-4aA:fa, 2010), 75, 77–78, 146–7.
IS ISLAM EASY TO UNDERSTAND OR NOT? 119
interpretive authority and education. On one side of the debate stands
the historical mainstream of Sunni thought, which has claimed that legal
and theological interpretation must be channelled within and controlled
by institutions of regimented scholarship. On the other side stands the
influential, if minority, strain of Salafism within the Sunni camp, which
argues against the empowerment of institutions and traditions not
directly rooted in the Qur8:n and the Prophet’s precedent.
The juxtaposition of the empowerment of the Muslim laity with the
interpretive monopoly of the ulema forms part of the perennial tension
between the iconoclastic egalitarianism of Islam on the one hand and the
realistic need for expertise in religious affairs and some constraint on

their interpretation on the other. As we shall see, challenges mounted
by Salafi ulema to the interpretive monopoly of their own class have not
been substantively consistent. Nor could they ever be, as they represent
an irresolvable tension between scriptural egalitarianism and the
assertion of interpretive control. This tension has long characterized
the Islamic discourse tradition, but it has risen to particular salience
in debates between Salafis and mainstream Sunni scholarship.
Democratizing calls like that of Sh:h Ism:6;l have served as an important
rhetorical tool in these debates, employed by Salafis in their efforts to
challenge established ritual and legal practices by pushing back against
the scholarly authority structure that underpins them.
MODERN ANTICLERICALISM IN ISLAM

AND ULEMA RESPONSES
Descriptions of Islam often note the lack of a formal Muslim clergy. They
distinguish the egalitarian ethos of Islam, in which each believer stands
equal before God, from other faith traditions in which a clergy serves as
an official intermediary between man and God. Even the most cursory
works on Islam, however, duly note the importance of the ulema.
Although not ordained in any systematically official capacity, the ulema
have served crucial roles as the guardians of the scriptural sources of the
Qur8:n and Aad;th, the mandarins of their interpretation, and the
definers of Islamic law and dogma.
The pre-modern ulema were certainly not monolithic, either across
geographical and temporal expanses or even in any one locale at any one
time. Yet the total dominance of Arabic/Islamic religious education, with
its ubiquitous madrasas, mosques, Sufi lodges and waqf endowments,
provided an infrastructure that created and maintained a coherent
ulema class. Jurists might suffer or express angst over the influence of
popular preachers in twelfth-century Baghdad or antinomian dervishes
in fifteenth-century Cairo, but the construct of the ulema was a stable
one, and the class’s right and responsibility to interpret Islam for the
umma undisputed until the modern period.5
Since the turn of the nineteenth century, the establishment of secular
school systems in the Muslim world, modelled along novel European
lines, created a parallel and ultimately hegemonic mould of education.
New universities or the reformed curricula of older ones turned out a
new person: the lay Muslim intellectual. This figure occupied a space
outside of the ranks of the traditionally trained ulema. When lay Muslim
intellectuals began addressing topics of religion and law at both the

normative and historical level, they often consciously positioned them-
selves against the clerical class.
In an important sense, the engagement of lay Muslim intellectuals with
Islamic issues posed an inherent challenge to the ulema. It hinged on the
claim that Islam’s true message is accessible to Muslims who have not
passed through the ulema’s reverend process of religious education. Lay
intellectuals could still hold deeply committed and conservative visions
of Islam and Muslim society, as in the cases of Sayyid Qu3b and the
Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt in the mid to late twentieth century. But
often even such conservative and activist graduates of the country’s
medical or technical faculties had no patience for the establishment
ulema, whom they viewed (when charitable) as too scholastic or (when
less charitable) as minions of a decadent state. For Islamists of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Islam was blessedly simple,
common sense and ripe for personal and social implementation with
no need for the ulema.6 These critiques can be found in prescient form
in the scathing essays of the Syrian scholar and political activist 6Abd
al-RaAm:n al-Kaw:kib; (d. 1902). For him the ‘establishment ulema
(al-6ulam:8 al-rasmiyy;n)’ were a prime cause of the umma’s modern
weakness, both because of their complicity in a failed socio-political
system and because of the priest-like barrier they had placed between
Muslims and the guidance of the Qur8:n and Sunna, ‘just like Catholics
prohibited consulting the Gospel and Jews the Torah’.7
5
See Jonathan A. C. Brown, ‘Scholars and Charlatans on the Baghdad-
Khurasan Circuit from the Ninth to the Eleventh Centuries’ in Paul M. Cobb
(ed.), The Lineaments of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 85–96.
6
See Abdullah Al-Arian, Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in
Sadat’s Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
7
From al-Kaw:kib;’s Umm al-qur: and Fab:8i6 al-istibd:d respectively;
MuAammad 6Am:ra, ed., 6Abd al-RaAm:n al-Kaw:kib;: al-A6m:l al-k:mila
(Cairo: D:r al-Shur<q, 2nd edn., 2009), 206, 347.
In recent decades, however, the ire of many Muslim lay intellectuals
has fallen on the ulema more for their perceived backwardness and
obscurantism than their political position. Lay thinkers often offer
themselves as the alternative voices of a novel, more liberal interpret-
ation of Islam. Muqtedar Khan, an American Muslim and professor
at the University of Delaware, has advocated this ‘democratization of
interpretation’ as superior to the traditional approach taken by classic-
ally trained ulema. Liberal Muslim lay intellectuals have received
accolades in the Western press, as their interpretations of Islamic law
on issues ranging from the Aij:b to jih:d tend to concur with Western
gender and political norms. The role of information technology in

disrupting the traditional ulema hierarchy is similarly greeted as a
positive development.8
In response to the rise of the lay Muslim intellectual, the ulema have
emphasized their own indispensability.9 They have received support
from more traditionally-minded lay intellectuals like Tariq Ramadan and
popular preachers like Moez Masoud and Mustafa Hosni in Egypt. The
latter two stress their role as preachers, not scholars, and all of them
emphasize that what knowledge they possess was acquired ‘at the feet
of shaykhs’. They very explicitly cede primacy in interpreting Islam’s
8
See, for example, Emily Wax, ‘The Mufti In the Chat Room: Islamic Legal
Advisers Are Just a Click Away from Ancient Customs’, The Washington Post,
31 July 1999 (C01); Asra Nomani, ‘Wafa Sultan’, Time Magazine World, 30
April 2006, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1187385,00.
html (last accessed 10 October 2011); ‘Distinctions’ tab at https://www.
irshadmanji.com/About-Irshad (last accessed 5 July 2012); ‘The Online
Ummah’, Economist, 18 August 2012 (http://www.economist.com/node/
21560541 (last accessed 24 August 2012); Tarek El-Ariss, ‘The Making of an
Expert: The Case of Irshad Manji’, Muslim World, 97/1 (2007): 93–110.
Interestingly, the late Syrian 6:lim MuAammad Sa6;d Rama@:n al-B<3; argues that
the British colonial administration had promoted liberal, pro-ijtih:d Muslim
scholars (presumably he means MuAammad 6Abduh) to leadership positions in
Egypt, and these scholars subsequently issued rulings allowing bank interest and
de-emphasizing the importance of the Aij:b: al-B<3;, al-L:madhhabiyya: akh3ar
bid6a tuhaddidu al-shar;6a al-isl:miyya (Damascus: D:r al-F:r:b; and Cairo: D:r
al-BaB:8ir, new edn., 1431/2010), 112.
9
See, for example, 6Al; Jum6a, ‘Marja6iyyat al-Azhar’, al-MiBr; al-Yawm,
28 July 2011, http://m.almasryalyoum.com/node/481048 (last accessed 17
August 2012); AAmad al-Fayyib, ‘Al-Azhar tarfu@u tajr;dih: 6an mak:natih:
al-marja6iyya wa-lan yataAawwala il: madrasa ta6l;miyya’, al-MiBr; al-Yawm, 10
May 2012, http://today.almasryalyoum.com/article2.aspx?ArticleID=338157
(last accessed 17 August 2012).
teachings to those whom they and their audiences consider true
scholars.10
The ulema’s most compelling argument for their continued indispens-
ability, however, has been the need for guardians to propagate Islam’s
true teachings and to prevent those vilest of sins in the liberal mind,
namely barbaric benightedness and religious extremism. Mainstream
ulema have found no better proof of this need than that school of
thought that has been the bête noire of traditionalist Sunni ulema and lay
intellectuals alike in recent decades, namely the Salafi movement.

SALAFISM AS THE FRUITS OF
ANTICLERICALISM
In Egypt in 2007, 6Izzat 6A3iyya, the head of the Department of Aad;th

studies at Cairo’s vaunted al-Azhar University, issued a response to a
layman’s question concerning how a man and woman who share a
workplace might do so comfortably and in such a way that the woman
did not have to wear her headscarf. 6A3iyya’s fatw: proposed that the
man drink the woman’s breast milk and thus become her milk-child,
a relationship that in Islam is tantamount to a blood relationship. The
woman would no longer have to wear her headscarf, as the two could no
longer potentially marry. On its face, 6A3iyya’s scriptural evidence was
strong. He had drawn on a Aad;th, found in some of the most respected
Aad;th collections of Sunni Islam, in which the Prophet allowed a grown
man to suckle from a grown woman so that he might become part of her
family.11 Not surprisingly, outrage in Egypt and many Western countries
came quickly and furiously. 6A3iyya tried to explain the evidence for and
reasoning in his fatw:, then withdrew it, but he was quickly sacked.12
10
See Ramadan’s ‘Biography’, http://www.tariqramadan.com/spip.php?
article11 (last accessed 22 July 2012); Yasmin Moll, ‘Sincerity, Storytelling and
Islamic Televangelism in Egypt’ in Pradip Ninan Thomas and Philip Lee (eds.)
Global and Local Televangelism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 23.
Moez Masoud explained (interview, Cairo, July 2011) that he prefers the
characterization of d:6iya (one who calls to Islam) to televangelist, the media
component being incidental.
11
4aA;A Muslim: Kit:b al-Ri@:6, b:b ri@:6 al-kab;r. Zaynab bt. Ab; Salama’s
Aad;th in Muslim’s subchapter notes that 628isha explained that this was a one-
time license for the household involved.
12
A prominent Saudi cleric, 6Abd al-MuAsin al-6Ubayk:n, later issued the same
fatw:, although he explained that this would be done by drinking it from a cup,
not directly from her breast; posted on al-Qa@:y: al-Su6<diyya, 24 May 2010,
Many Egyptian ulema honed in immediately on the cause of such an
outrageous ruling: the Salafi strain in Sunni Islam, to which they claimed
6A3iyya subscribed, and which they explained encouraged direct inter-
pretation of Islam’s revealed sources and rejected the obligation of
Muslim scholars to adhere firmly to one of the four madhhabs. Salafi
scholars, critics accused, based their rulings on literal and uncontextua-
lized readings of Aad;ths, the absurd meanings of which would never
have been recognized as legitimate by properly trained Sunni scholars.13
In the eyes of critics of Salafism, the suckling fatw: was merely the latest
example of the Salafi corruption of Islamic teachings, a corruption that
had yielded the extremist violence of the Wahhabi movement and later

Jihadis such as Osama bin Laden on the one hand and medieval stupidity
like the breast feeding fatw: on the other.14 Opponents of Salafism
argued that this is what happens when Muslims venture outside the
ulema and the scholarly traditions of the established schools of law.
Certainly, 6A3iyya had relied on an authenticated Aad;th in his ruling, but
ulema in Egypt and worldwide responded that the interpretive training
embedded in the madhhabs would have identified such misleading
evidence as an exception that the Prophet had made for one man, one
time. Mainstream Sunni ulema pointed to 6A3iyya’s fatw: as an example
of a Muslim consulting the Qur8:n and Aad;th directly without proper
http://www.news-sa.com/snews/1518------------------qq-----.html (last accessed

14 September 2011). See this same site for a lecture given by a prominent
Egyptian Salafi Aad;th scholar Ab< IsA:q al-Euwayn; in which he argues that the
Aad;th in question must be interpreted as meaning that the suckling must consist
of the man actually sucking the woman’s breast.
13
Although he does not describe 6A3iyya as Salaf;, Y<suf al-Qara@:w;
criticizes him for issuing a grossly inappropriate fatw: due to his lack of
understanding how Aad;ths fit into the greater scheme of Shar;6a interpretation;
Y<suf al-Qara@:w;, al-Fat:w: al-sh:dhdha: ma6:y;ruh: wa-ta3b;q:tuh: wa-
asb:buh: wa-kayfa nu6:lijuh: wa-natawaqq:h: (Cairo: D:r al-Shur<q, 2010),
53–5. For an example of an adamant proponent of madhhabs drawing on the
long tradition of mocking the Ahl al-Aad;th/Salafis, see MuAammad Z:hid
al-Kawthar;, Ta8n;b al-Kha3;b 6al: m: s:qahu f; tarjamat Ab; Ean;fa min
al-ak:dh;b (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Azhariyya, 1419/1998), 15.
14
Blaming the violent acts of the Wahhabi movements on the lack of qualified
scholars in the movement goes back to MuAammad Ibn 6Abd al-Wahh:b’s own
brother, and earliest critic: see Sulaym:n Ibn 6Abd al-Wahh:b, al-Saw:6iq
al-il:hiyya f; l-radd 6al: al-Wahh:biyya (Cairo: Maktabat al-Tahadhdhub, n.d.),
3. For more general criticisms of errant Salafism, see AAmad MaAm<d Kar;ma,
al-Salafiyya bayn al-aB;l wa-l-dakh;l (Cairo: D:r al-Kutub al-4<fiyya, 1433/
2012); also, Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the
Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 24.
training and thus reaching an erroneous conclusion. Just as those not
trained in medicine should not conduct surgery, so not every Muslim can
or should derive legal or theological rulings. This was the task of a
qualified scholarly class alone.15
To substantiate their accusations, ulema critics of Salafism could point
to the writings of Salafi scholars themselves. They often echo Sh:h Ism:6;l
al-Shah;d’s claim that ‘to comprehend the Qur8:n and Aad;ths does not
require much learning, for the Prophet was sent to show the straight path
to the unwise’.

IJTIH2D AND TAQLĪD:
PRIMORDIAL SIMPLICITY VERSUS
INSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINT
The tension between the drive to institutionalize an interpretive class

and the primordial simplicity of Islam is ancient. Historically, it seems
tied closely to the recurring debate between the formation of scholarly
institutions such as the madhhab and Sufi brotherhoods on the one hand
and the iconoclastic, proto-Salafi opposition to elaborating institutional
authority apart from the Qur8:n and Sunna on the other. Its most clear
manifestation has been the enduring debate amongst Muslim scholars
over who can or must engage in taql;d (literally ‘imitation’, defined as
‘taking the opinion of another without knowing his proof’ but, in effect,
the adherence to one of the four established Sunni schools of law
[madhhabs]), and whether or who can engage in ijtih:d (the derivation
of legal or theological rulings directly from the Qur8:n and Sunna).
Already in late Umayyad and early 6Abbasid times Muslim scholars
were describing themselves as the ‘elect (kh:BBa)’ whose duty it was to
guide the Muslim ‘masses (6:mma)’, often defined as those who ‘do not
practice 6ilm’.16 The great Sunni Aad;th compilations of the ninth century
regularly included a Aad;th warning that God’s manner of depriving
communities of 6ilm would be to deprive them of ulema, leaving them to
15
Y<suf al-Dijw;, Maq:l:t wa-fat:w: al-shaykh Y<suf al-Dijw; (ed. 6Abd
al-R:fi6 al-Dijw;; Cairo: D:r al-BaB:8ir, 4 vols., 2006), iv. 1446–8 (originally
published in Majallat al-Azhar, 5/10, 1353/1935); al-B<3;, al-L:madhhabiyya 105.
16
Jonathan A. C. Brown, ‘The Last Days of al-Ghazz:l; and the Tripartitie
Division of the Sufi World’, Muslim World, 96/1. (2006): 89–113, at 97 ff.; 6Abd
al-Ghan; al-N:bulus;, al-Ead;qa al-nadiyya sharA al-Far;qa al-muAammadiyya
([Cairo]: D:r al-Ead;qa, 2 vols., 1860), ii. 179.
follow the ignorant.17 Early leading Sunni scholars interpreted the Aad;th
‘Seeking knowledge is a requirement for every Muslim’ as meaning that
no one could undertake an action without seeking out a scholar to
determine its ruling under the Shar;6a.18
The specialization and technicalization of the ulema increased with the
Sunni embrace of speculative theology (kal:m) and gnostic Sufism
(ma6rifa or 6irf:n) in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Proposing his own
map of Islam’s intellectual history, the influential tenth-century Sufi Ab<
F:lib al-Makk; (d. 996) explains how following one madhhab, and
madhhabs in general, emerged as both symptoms of and solutions to the
dilution of Islam’s early spiritual dynamism and purity. Much like the

setting down of sacred knowledge in books, this began after the second
and third generation of Muslims. The earliest jurists (fuqah:8) would not
engage in taql;d of any of their teachers but rather would become
independent scholarly pillars in their own right. Increasingly, however,
those who did not reach this level chose to do taql;d of the madhhab of a
more senior figure. This fractioning of authority fit within al-Makk;’s
Sufi perspective on the hierarchy of Islamic sciences, in which the true
‘science of the heart’ ranked supreme: the layperson (6:mm;) followed the
jurist/scholar (6:lim), and the exoteric jurist (6:lim 6um<m) followed the
Sufi elite (6:lim khuB<B).19
Theology and mysticism both required an intensive education and
developed highly particular jargons that set their practitioners apart.
Speculative theology was justified primarily as a duty required of the
ulema for the protection of the masses. Al-Ghaz:l; (d. 1111)
characterized kal:m scholars as guardians of the masses, shielding
them from heresy.20 A leading Sunni scholar like the Makkan Ibn Eajar
al-Haytam; (d. 1566) thus insisted that qualified scholars provide
figurative interpretations for Qur8:nic verses that described God in
17
4aA;A al-Bukh:r;: kit:b al-6ilm, b:b kayfa yuqba@u al-6ilm.
18
Ab< F:lib al-Makk; attributes this opinion to 6Abdall:h Ibn al-Mub:rak
(d. 797) and other aBA:b al-Aad;th from Khurasan; Ab< F:lib MuAammad b. 6Al;
al-Makk;, K. Q<t al-qul<b f; mu6:malat al-maAb<b wa-waBf 3ar;q al-mur;d il:
maq:m al-tawA;d (Cairo: Ma3ba6at al-Anw:r al-MuAammadiyya, 2 vols. in 1,
[1985]), i. 130.
19
al-Makk;, Q<t al-qul<b, 1: 159–60.
20
W. Montgomery Watt (transl.), The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazálı́
(Oxford: Oneworld, 1994), 27–8. See also the excellent translation of
al-Ghaz:l;’s Ilj:m al-6aw:mm 6an 6ilm al-kal:m, published as A Return to
Purity in Creed (transl. Abdullah bin Hamid Ali; Philadelphia: Lamppost,
2008), 35.
anthropomorphic terms. Not to do so would be to allow the gullible and
unskilled masses to fall into heretical conceptions of God.21
Not only could these sciences only be studied and properly understood
by those able to devote themselves fully to the task, they also presented
risks to the Muslim laity if not mediated properly. One of al-Ghaz:l;’s
last works was a treatise on the importance of preventing the masses
from exposure to the actual mechanisms and processes of speculative
theology.22 It was more dangerous for an unlearned Muslim to speculate
errantly on God’s nature than to commit a major sin, so the laity should
‘submit, and worship, and occupy themselves with their worship and
livelihood, leaving 6ilm to the ulema’.23 Similarly, the mystical ideas of

Ibn 6Arab; (d. 1240), which have proven so popular amongst Sunni
scholars from the thirteenth century until today, should not be allowed to
seep down to the masses unmediated. The Makkan Sufi scholar AAmad
al-Qush:sh; (d. 1661) thus did not allow his scholarly associates
to discuss difficult passages from Ibn 6Arab;’s controversial Sufi text The
Makkan Illuminations (al-Fut<A:t al-makkiyya) when uneducated
people were present. He would do so only behind locked doors.24 The
Egyptian Sufi 6Al; al-MarBaf; (d. 1524) similarly said that it was the Sufi
way never to hold lectures on mysticism in mosques but only in the
homes of teachers so that the masses would not misunderstand their
teachings.25
The medieval ulema found means to distinguish themselves as a class
apart from the masses. In the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods (twelfth-
sixteenth centuries), the ulema of Syria and Egypt developed distinctive
dress, such as robes with particularly wide sleeves and the 3aylas:n
(a cloth draped over the turban). Some scholars applauded this
habit even though it was an innovation unknown to the pious early
21
Shih:b al-D;n AAmad Ibn Eajar al-Haytam;, al-Fat:w: al-Aad;thiyya, ed.
MuAammad 6Abd al-RaAm:n al-Mar6ashl; (Beirut: D:r IAy:’ al-Tur:th al-6Arab;,
1419/1998), 151.
22
Brown, 106; al-Ghaz:l;, A Return to Purity in Creed, 40. Attempts to distill
the conclusions of speculative theology for the masses include MuAammad b.
Sh:fi6; al-Fa@:l;’s (d. 1820) Kif:yat al-6aw:mm f;-m: yajibu 6alayhim min 6ilm
al-kal:m.
23
6Abd al-Ghan; al-N:bulus;, al-Ead;qa al-nadiyya, ii. 179; cf. Ibn Eajar
al-Haytam;, al-Fat:w:, 272.
24
Azyumardi Azra, The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia:
Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern 6Ulama8 in the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 43.
25
Najm al-D;n al-Ghazz;, al-Kaw:kib al-s:8ira bi-a6y:n al-mi8a al-6:shira (ed.
Jibr:8;l Sulaym:n Jabb<r; Beirut: D:r al-2faq al-Jad;da, 2nd edn., 3 vols., 1979),
i. 269.
Muslim generations. The famous thirteenth-century ‘Sultan of Ulema’,
6Izz al-D;n Ibn 6Abd al-Sal:m al-Sulam; (d. 1262), approved of wearing
such a recognizable uniform after fellow pilgrims on Aajj with him
had ignored his instructions while he was wearing his ordinary pilgrim’s
garb. When he donned the ‘robes of the jurists’, he recalled, suddenly
‘they listened and they obeyed’.26 He explained that this uniform helped
set scholars apart and encouraged people to heed their instruction and
fatw:s.27
The formation of an institutionalized scholarly hierarchy was most
pronounced in the area of law. By the late thirteenth century, Sunni
orthodoxy had coalesced firmly around four schools of law (madhhab).

Sunni jurists often voiced the requirement that all Muslims, scholars
and laity alike, follow, or ‘imitate (taql;d)’, one of these schools. As one
scholar in twelfth-century Baghdad claimed in a poem, the four
eponymous founders of the madhhabs ‘are our proof signs, and whoever
is guided by other than them will go astray’.28 To claim to innovate a
new school or to derive legal rulings outside the bodies of law formed by
these guild-like institutions was highly controversial. Ibn 6Abd al-Sal:m
even received a rebuke from the Ayyubid Sultan of Cairo after he was
accused (falsely) of trying to found a new madhhab.29
The four-madhhab system created a rigid hierarchy for both scholars
and the masses. As the influential Makkan scholar and fervent defender
of the Eanaf; school of law, Mull: 6Al; al-Q:ri8 (d. 1606), explained, any
Muslim who has not reached the level of complete expertise in legal
interpretation (mujtahid) must follow one of the four madhhabs. Doing
so protects all from incurring sin, al-Q:ri8 notes, citing a scholarly saying
that ‘Whoever follows a scholar meets God safely (man tabi6a 6:liman
laqiya All:h s:liman)’.30
For Sunni jurists, this institutional rigidity and constraint functioned
to control legal interpretation amongst the ranks of the ulema. It ensured
that jurists did not stray into anomalous or bizarre rulings, like Ibn
26
6Izz al-D;n Ibn 6Abd al-Sal:m, Kit:b al-Fat:w:, ed. 6Abd al-RaAm:n 6Abd
al-Fatt:A (Beirut: D:r al-Ma6rifa, n.d.), 69.
27
This opinion also came from the Egyptian scholar AAmad b. 6Īs: al-Qaly<b;
(d. 1290); T:j al-D;n al-Subk;, Fabaq:t al-sh:fi6iyya al-kubr: (ed. 6Abd al-Fatt:A
MuAammad al-Ealw and MaAm<d MuAammad al-Fan:A;; Cairo: Hajar, 2nd
edn., 11 vols., 1413/1992), viii. 24.
28
‘Fa-humu adillatun: wa-man yuhd: bi-ghayrihimi yu@all’; Ibn al-Jawz;, al-
MuntaCam f; t:r;kh al-mul<k wa-l-umam (eds. MuAammad 6Abd al-Q:dir 6A3:
and MuB3af: 6Abd al-Q:dir 6A3:; Beirut: D:r al-Kutub al-6Ilmiyya, 1992), xviii. 32.
29
al-Subk;, Fabaq:t, viii. 231.
30
4:liA al-Full:n;, Īq:C himam <l; al-abB:r li-l-iqtid:8 bi-sayyid al-muh:jir;n
wa-l-anB:r (Beirut: D:r al-Ma6rifa, 1978), 54.
6Abb:s’ ruling that temporary (mut6a) marriage was permitted.31
Certainly, the bodies of Islamic law developed by the four madhhabs
had originally been derived from the Qur8:n, the precedent of the
Prophet and the legal practice of the early Muslim community, but this
did not entail that any scholar could simply repeat this interpretive
process in later ages. The scholarly interpretive traditions of the
madhhabs acted to review, refine and check the legal interpretation of
individual scholars. This prevented their ijtih:d from straying from
the orthodox body of Muslim scholarly consensus, explained the
fourteenth-century Damascene scholar Ibn Rajab (d. 1393) in his treatise
‘A Rebuttal Against Those Who Follow Other than the Four Schools’.32

The fifteenth-century legalist Sufi AAmad Zarr<q (d. 1493) summarized
this line of thought succinctly: abiding by anything other than the four
madhhabs would mean following some extinct or amorphous tradition
that was not ‘set down in writing (mudawwan)’ and refined.33 Other
scholars like Ibn al-4al:A (d. 1245) had not fetishized so much the four
madhhabs per se, instead stressing those features that made them reliable
bodies of law to draw from and imitate in the first place. In a manual
written to aid scholars in issuing fatw:s, Ibn al-4al:A explained that
latter day ulema could not draw on any early scholar whose legal
methodology (madhhab) had not been set down, recorded and studied by
followers. This included the Companions and Successors. One cannot
take their rulings as precedent (taql;d) because one cannot know the true
31
MuAammad b. 6Al; al-Shawk:n;, Nayl al-aw3:r sharA Muntaq: al-akhb:r,
ed. MuAammad 6Abd al-RaAm:n al-Mar6ashl; (Beirut: D:r IAy:’ al-Tur:th
al-6Arab;, 8 vols., 1422/2001), vi. 149.
32
Ibn Rajab al-Eanbal;, ‘al-Radd 6al: man ittaba6a ghayr al-madh:hib
al-arba6a’, in Majm<6 ras:8il al-A:fiC Ibn Rajab al-Eanbal; (ed. Fal6at Fu8:d
al-Eulw:n;; Cairo: al-F:r<q al-Ead;tha, 2 vols., 1423/2002), ii. 626.
33
AAmad Zarr<q, Qaw:6id al-taBawwuf (ed. 6Uthm:n al-Euwaymid;; Tunis:
al-Ma3:bi6 al-MuwaAAada, 1987), 30. See also 6Abd al-Ghan; al-N:bulus;, al-
Ead;qa al-nadiyya, ii. 475. The esteem in which the ‘service (khidma)’ rendered a
madhhab is held in Muslim scholarly discourse seems counterintuitive to those
who assume that the ‘correct’ or ‘true’ way of understanding a religious message
should require little or no human maintenance. From the Sunni madhhab-ist
perspective, however, the integrity of a madhhab comes from the cumulative
efforts and contributions of generations of scholars, not just the effusive
brilliance of its founder. As one Sh:fi6; law scholar in al-Azhar University noted,
‘No madhhab has been served as the Sh:fi6; madhhab has’; Shaykh Sayyid
Shalt<t, comments during a class on uB<l al-fiqh, personal communication,
April, 2006.
nature and method of their approach (Aaq;qat madhhabihim), or why
and how they came to that ruling.34
As far as Sunni ulema in the medieval and early modern periods
understood their relationship with the Muslim laity, this institutional
rigidity meant the unquestioned monopoly of the ulema over religious
interpretation. Their role as guardians of the masses was so cemented
that the obeisance of the Muslim laity was not even a point of discussion.
In fact, the entire discourse on madhhabs was beyond the masses. They
were not even qualified to choose or even to comprehend a particular
school of law. ‘There has been no disagreement among the ulema that the
masses are obliged to do taql;d of their scholars’, explained the great

legal exegete al-Qur3ub; (d. 1273), drawing an analogy between the
blind needing a guide and the laity needing scholars in matters
of religion.35 The regnant principle amongst the ulema was that ‘the
layperson (6:mm;) has no madhhab’ or ‘the madhhab of the 6:mm; is the
madhhab of his muft;’. In other words, he follows whatever madhhab
his local scholar or muft; follows.36 Scholars who differed with this
dictum, like Ibn al-4al:A, disagreed only in as much as they believed that
34
MuAammad b. Bah:dur al-Zarkash;, al-BaAr al-muA;3 f; uB<l al-fiqh (ed.
MuAammad MuAammad T:mir; Beirut: D:r al-Kutub al-6Ilmiyya, 4 vols., [2000]
2007), iv. 571.
35
MuAammad b. AAmad al-Qur3ub;, al-J:mi6 li-aAk:m al-Qur8:n (eds.
MuAammad Ibr:h;m al-Eifn:w; and MaAm<d E:mid 6Uthm:n; Cairo: D:r
al-Ead;th, 12 vols., 1423/2002), vi. 248 (re: Q. 21. 8–10).
36
This position was stated with marked frequency in Eanaf; and Sh:fi6; legal
texts. For example, see MuAy; al-D;n al-Nawaw; (d. 1277), Raw@at al-3:lib;n
wa-6umdat al-muftiy;n (Beirut: al-Maktab al-Isl:m;, 1405/1985), xi. 101;
al-Zarkash; (d. 1394), al-BaAr al-muA;3, iv. 597; Ab< l-Ikhl:B Easan
al-Shurunbul:l; (d. 1658), ‘al-6Iqd al-far;d f; bay:n al-r:jiA min al-khil:f f;
jaw:z al-taql;d’ in Majallat J:mi6at Umm al-Qur:, 17/32 (1425/[2005]; ed.
Kh:lid b. MuAammad al-6Ar<s;): 673–768, at 701; Ibn 62bid;n (d. 1836),
E:shiyat Radd al-muAt:r 6al: al-Durr al-mukht:r (Beirut: D:r al-Fikr, 8 vols.,
2000), ii. 411; Sayyid 6Alaw; b. AAmad al-Saqq:f (d. 1916), ‘MukhtaBar
al-faw:8id al-makkiyya’ in Majm<6at sab6a kutub muf;da (Cairo: MuB3af: al-B:b;
al-Ealab;, 2nd edn., 1940), 91; al-B<3;, al-L:madhhabiyya, 73–4. The Sh:fi6;
scholar of Central Asia Ab< l-FatA al-Haraw; (d. 1117) stated that ‘al-6:mm; l:
madhhab lahu’ is the position of the generality of Sh:fi6; scholars (al-Zarkash;, al-
BaAr al-muA;3). It is also upheld by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350) despite his
rejection of a requirement to follow one of the four maddhabs blindly to the
exclusion of other schools or opinions: I6l:m al-muwaqqi6;n 6an rabb al-6:lam;n
(ed. MuAammad 6Izz al-D;n al-Kha3;b; Beirut: D:r IAy:’ al-Tur:th al-6Arab;, 4
vols., 1422/2001), iv. 220–21. AAmad Zarr<q, who came to Egypt from the
Maghreb, noted that the dictum of ‘al-6:mm; l: madhhab lahu’ was particularly
widespread in Egypt, where there was a plurality of madhhabs. This would have
a layperson was actually capable of choosing which madhhab to
follow—but only under the guidance of a scholar.37 Asked if a somewhat
learned lay Muslim (6:mm;) could respond to a question posed to him by
another layperson, Ibn 6Abd al-Sal:m allowed it only if the answer was
completely obvious. In any other case, however, it was best to ask a
muft;.38 Some late medieval legal manuals even expanded the definition
of layperson (6:mm;) to include the lower rungs of the ulema, with 6:mm;
meaning anyone not able to derive Shar;6a rulings from the sources
himself.39
In the wake of this scholarly buildup, by the early fourteenth century
a strong iconoclastic resistance had emerged stressing the egalitarian

simplicity of pure Islam. Pious critics of ulema culture in medieval Cairo
and Damascus accused the scholarly class of arrogance for its distinctive
attire.40 The scholars whose thought would form the pillars of the later
Salafi movement collectively rejected the institution of taql;d to the four
schools as well as speculative theology and gnostic Sufism.
The Damascus scholar Ibn Taymiyya, the veritable epicenter of proto-
Salafi thought, consistently impugned the elitism inherent in theosophical
Sufism and widespread in the Sunni scholarly class. He rejected the
notion that Islam possessed an inner meaning accessible only to the
mystical elite, invoking as evidence the Qur8:n’s statement that it is easily
accessible to man, ‘Indeed we have made the Qur8:n easy to remember,
so is there anyone who will heed?’ (Q. 54. 17).41 He also rejected the
idea proposed by Muslim philosophers like Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) that the
Prophet shared certain kinds of knowledge with the elect of his audience
but not with the masses.42 A later devotee of Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn Ab;
al-6Izz al-Eanaf; (d. 1390), rejected an elaborate hierarchical distinction
contrasted with the Maghreb, where all scholars and laity would have been
M:lik; by default due to the school’s monopoly there; Zarr<q, Qaw:6id, 30.
37
al-Nawaw;, 2d:b al-fatw: wa-l-muft; wa-l-mustaft; (ed. Bass:m 6Abd
al-Wahh:b al-J:b;; Damascus: D:r al-Fikr, 1988), 77.
38
Ibn 6Abd al-Sal:m, Fat:w:, 170.
39
al-Saqq:f, ‘MukhtaBar al-faw:8id al-makkiyya’, 91.
40
Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval
Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 104–
5. See also MuAammad b. 6Al; al-Shawk:n;, ‘al-Qawl al-muf;d f; adillat al-ijtih:d
wa’l-taql;d’ in al-Ras:8il al-fiqhiyya (ed. AAmad Far;d al-Maz;d;; Beirut: D:r
al-Kutub al-6Ilmiyya, 2005), 46.
41
Ibn Taymiyya, ‘Ris:la f; 6ilm al-b:3in wa-l-C:hir’ in Majm<6at al-ras:8il
al-mun;riyya (Beirut: n.p., 4 vols. in 2, n.d.), iii. 249; idem, Majm<6at al-fat:w:
(eds. Sayyid Eusayn al-6Af:n; and Khayr; Sa6;d; Cairo: al-Maktaba
al-Tawf;qiyya, 35 vols., n.d.), xiii. 132 ff.
42
Ibn Taymiyya, ‘Ris:la’, 246.
that had become common amongst Sunni scholars: the three-fold
division of the Muslim community into the ‘Masses’, the ulema ‘Elect’
and the Gnostic ‘Elect of the Elect’. Muslims all belonged to one
egalitarian class before God, distinguished only by individual piety.43
Ibn Taymiyya and his iconoclastic cohort also advocated a decidedly
egalitarian approach to theology. Of course, the early Sunni theology
had rejected rational speculation (it was to this theological camp that the
actual pre-modern usage of the term ‘Salafi’ referred) long before Ibn
Taymiyya, with its most articulate advocate being the earlier Damascene
Eanbal; scholar Ibn Qud:ma (d. 1223). While many Sunni theologians,
following the Ash6ar; school of theology, claimed that Muslim scholars

must employ complex figurative interpretations to explain anthropo-
morphic Qur8:nic verses and protect the masses from misunderstanding,
opponents like Ibn Qud:ma countered that God did not require Muslims
to possess any profound understanding of these ambiguous verses. Their
intended meaning (mur:d) was obvious to the hearer, and any deeper
understanding was not essential to the message of Islam.44
The fourteenth-century proto-Salafi impetus also included a strong
reaction to the requirement of taql;d and adhering to one of the four
schools of law. Although he generally followed the Eanbal; school, Ibn
Taymiyya pronounced legal rulings that broke not only with his own
school but occasionally with all four schools of law (for example, his
ruling that pronouncing three divorce declarations in one sitting was not
sufficient for a man to repudiate irrevocably his wife).45 Arguably more
critical of taql;d than Ibn Taymiyya, his friend and fellow Damascus
traditionalist Shams al-D;n al-Dhahab; (d. 1348) proclaimed that ‘Only
one unable to achieve knowledge, like most of the scholars of our age, or
a madhhab chauvinist (muta6aBBib) constrains himself to one madh-
hab’.46 Adherents of this proto-Salafi camp, like Ibn Taymiyya’s acolyte
Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350), asked how Muslims could plausibly
argue that only scholars belonging to one of the four Sunni schools
could properly understand or interpret Islamic law. They reminded their
43
Ibn Ab; al-6Izz al-Eanaf;, SharA al-6Aq;da al-FaA:wiyya, ed. MuAammad
N:Bir al-D;n al-Alb:n; (Amman: al-D:r al-Isl:m;, 1998), 96.
44
Ibn Qud:ma al-Maqdis;, ‘Dhamm al-ta8w;l’, in Ras:8il d;niyya salafiyya (ed.
Zakariyy: 6Al; Y<suf; Cairo: Ma3ba6at al-Im:m, n.d.), 87; idem, TaAr;m al-naCar
f; kutub ahl al-kal:m (ed. and transl. George Makdisi: Centre of Speculative
Theology; London: Luzac, 1962), 32.
45
Ibn Taymiyya, Majm<6at al-fat:w:, xxxii. 205–6, 212.
46
Shams al-D;n al-Dhahab;, Siyar a6l:m al-nubal:8 (eds. Shu6ayb al-Arn:8<3
et al.; Beirut: Mu8assasat al-Ris:la, 11th edn., 25 vols., 1416–19/1996–8),
xiv. 491.
pro-taql;d opponents that the madhhabs had not existed during the
heyday of early Muslim glory.47
The tension between the requirement to follow one of the four
madhhabs and the right of a Muslim scholar to approach legal rulings
afresh entered a new and more intense phase with the unprecedented
movements of revival and reform in the eighteenth century. Movements
like that started by MuAammad Ibn 6Abd al-Wahh:b (d. 1792) in Arabia,
the scholarship of MuAammad b. Ism:6;l al-Am;r al-4an6:n; (d. 1768) in
Yemen and that of Sh:h Wal; All:h al-Dihlaw; (d. 1762) in India were,
in part, reactions to the excessive institutional control of the madhhabs
in the late medieval period.48

Reacting against this, many revivalist ulema argued that scholars
should never allow any attachment to a school of law to take precedence
over a direct connection to the Qur8:n and Aad;ths, to which they urged
Muslims to return and study as the early Muslims had studied them.
These reformists rejected taql;d as it was defined in the late medieval
period (‘taking the ruling of another without knowing his evidence’) and
as it had mutated in late medieval scholarly culture (the stubborn
adherence to the position of the madhhab even if compelling evidence
from the Qur8:n or Aad;ths existed to the contrary). Doing so, these
revivalists argued, was to fall into the same error for which the Qur8:n
had so vehemently criticized Christians and Jews: ‘They took their rabbis
and monks as lords apart from God . . .’ (Q. 9. 31).49
PROTO-SALAFI ANTICLERICALISM AND

EMPOWERMENT OF THE MASSES IN THE
EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES
The mainstream of Sunni ulema opposed the revivalists and countered

their arguments by emphasizing the danger presented by freeing Muslims
47
See Ibn al-Qayyim, I6l:m al-muwaqqi6;n, iv. 220–1.
48
For the two most important perspectives on the eighteenth-century ‘revival
and reform’ phenomenon, see John O. Voll, ‘Foundations for Renewal and
Reform: Islamic Movements in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’ in John
Esposito (ed.) The Oxford History of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), 509–47; Ahmad Dallal, ‘The Origins and Objectives of Islamic Revivalist
Thought: 1750–1850’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 113/3 (1993):
341–59.
49
AAmad b. al-4idd;q al-Ghum:r;, al-Mathn<n; wa-l-batt:r f; naAr al-6an;d
al-mi6th:r al-3:6in f;-m: BaAAa min al-sunan wa-l-:th:r (Cairo: al-Ma3ba6a
al-Isl:miyya, 1352/[1933]), 126–7.
from the constraint of taql;d. If Muslims studied the Qur8:n and Aad;ths
directly without the intermediary of the madhhab interpretive traditions
they would certainly fall into error, just as 6Izzat 6A3iyya did with his
breast feeding fatw:. Madhhab proponents cited sayings attributed
to early Muslim scholars like the eighth century Egyptian 6Abdull:h
Ibn Wahb (d. 812) that ‘Aad;ths are misguidance except to the ulema
(al-Aad;th mu@ill ill: li-l-6ulam:’)’.50 A Muslim cannot simply come
across Aad;ths or Qur8:nic verses and act on them. One must know all
the Aad;ths associated with a certain legal issue, know all the Qur8:nic
verses, and understand how the principles of legal theory place these
pieces of evidence in the proper relationship with one another. Only a

jurist fully trained according to the methodology of a madhhab possessed
this expertise.
It was at this point, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that
empowering the Muslim laity entered into the taql;d/ijtih:d debate.
Proto-Salafi revivalists responded to their opponents’ insistence that only
those trained within the madhhabs could understand Islamic law by
pointing out that the early Muslim community had lacked formal
scholarly training and had no madhhabs at all. And yet these pious
forebears had achieved an unsurpassed understanding of Islam. The
revivalists rejected the claim that Muslims should never act on Aad;ths
without first fitting them into the framework of Islamic legal derivation,
including ascertaining whether the Aad;th had been abrogated by a later
ruling from the Prophet and whether or not it was a general command
that had been later specified. The proto-Salafi scholar of Madina Ab<
l-Easan al-Sind; (d. 1773) argued that, just as the first generation of
Muslims acted on Aad;ths they heard from the Prophet without
possessing some formal legal education, so the Muslim masses could
act according to Aad;ths that they read or came across. If it turned out
that a particular Aad;th had in fact been abrogated or further specified,
then the Muslim who acted on it would be excused by God for his or her
mistake.51 It was preposterous to say that only ulema trained within the
madhhabs can understand Islamic law, continued al-Sind;. God and His
Prophet had tailored the message of Islam to illiterate, pagan Arabs—
unbelievers far less knowledgeable and pious than most Muslims of
50
MuAammad 6Aww:ma, Athar al-Aad;th al-shar;f f; ikhtil:f al-a8imma
al-fuqah:8 (Cairo: D:r al-Sal:m, 2nd edn., 1987), 44.
51
Ab< l-Easan al-Sind;’s E:shiya 6al: FatA al-qad;r, apud al-Full:n;, 58–9. For
a biography praising al-Sind;’s willingness to break with his Eanaf; madhhab
when it differed with strong evidence from the Aad;th, see 6Abd al-Kh:liq
al-Mizj:j;, Nuzhat riy:@ al-ij:za al-musta3:ba (ed. MuB3af: 6Abd al-Kar;m
Kha3;b; Beirut: D:r al-Fikr, 1997), 260–1.
al-Sind;’s day. If those early audiences could understand how to be
Muslims then surely the Muslim masses of later times could too,
illuminated as they were by the ‘light of faith’.52
Proto-Salafi revivalists also argued against the Sunni scholarly major-
ity’s claim that Muslims had to engage in taql;d because they no longer
possessed the faculties to engage in ijtih:d. The Yemeni proto-Salafi
al-4an6:n; devoted an entire book to rebutting this claim, titling it Irsh:d
al-nuqq:d il: tays;r al-ijtih:d (‘Guiding Critics to the Ease of Ijtih:d)’.
Following a lengthy excursus on how the skills required to engage in
ijtih:d are not nearly as difficult to acquire as some claim, consisting of a
grasp of Arabic, the Qur8:n and Aad;ths, and the basics of legal theory,

al-4an6:n; responds to the argument that anyone who cannot attain to
ijtih:d must content themselves with following a madhhab blindly. If the
masses are so thickheaded, he asks, then why do they so frequently cry at
the reading of the Qur8:n and during the sermons preached on Friday?
He suggests that it may be that they understand the message of Islam
better than some scholars. Many of the laity, he continues, actually read
and comprehend books of law such as the Minh:j, a manageable legal
code from the Sh:fi6; school, or the MukhtaBar Khal;l for the M:lik;s.
Why then, he asks, can they not understand and act on the Qur8:n and
Aad;ths, and why have partisans of the madhhabs declared that resorting
to the Qur8:n and Aad;ths directly is forbidden?53
Other revivalists who were engaged in more grassroots activism found
affirming the judgment of the masses a useful counter to what they
considered the perversions of mainstream Sunni practice. Here we see the
context of Sh:h Ism:6;l al-Shah;d’s Taqwiyat al-;m:n. The grandson of
the most famous Indian divine of the era and a politically active scholar
who died in an anti-Sikh jih:d in northwest India, Sh:h Ism:6;l penned
the Taqwiyat al-;m:n as an accessible pamphlet condemning grave
visitation and the intercession of saints (which he considered to be
violations of God’s unshared power to respond to prayers). In this text,
which the newly embraced technology of the printing press made cheaply
and widely accessible, Sh:h Ism:6;l saw himself as combating the
established, elite Sunni ulema of South Asia, who had long defended the
visitation of graves and the ability of living and dead saints to intercede
with God on the believer’s behalf.54 His anti-elitist work thus
52
al-Full:n;, Īq:C, 61.
53
MuAammad b. Ism:6;l al-Am;r al-4an6:n;, Irsh:d al-nuqq:d il: tays;r
al-ijtih:d (Beirut: Mu8assasat al-Ris:la, 1992), 85.
54
See Francis Robinson, ‘Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the
Impact of Print’, Modern Asian Studies, 27/1 (1993): 229–51, at 240;
Muhammad Qasim Zaman, ‘Commentaries, Print and Patronage: Ead;th and
foregrounds the basic Qur8:nic condemnations of seeking assistance
from entities other than God. Affirming the masses’ ability to grasp this
basic message above and beyond the ulema’s misguidance, he states:
It has become well known among the common people that ‘It is difficult to
comprehend the Qur8:n and Aad;th, and understanding them requires much
learning. How can we ignorant folk undertake this and act according to them
when this can only be done by the great and pious? Their words are enough
for us’. This is baseless error, because God most high says that the contents of the
Qur8:n are very clear and accessible for us . . . .55
The intent of eighteenth and nineteenth-century proto-Salafi reformists

like al-Sind;, al-4an6:n; and Sh:h Ism:6;l seems quite clear: the body of
the scholarly elite, with its institutions of the madhhabs, is not necessary
for the Muslim masses. Moreover, the ulema have led the masses astray
with their support for heretical practices that even the laity can sense
contradict Islam’s basic teachings.
THE SALAFI STANCE: RHETORICAL

OR SUBSTANTIVE?
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anticlericalism and confidence in the

masses, however, must be understood primarily as rhetorical devices in
proto-Salafi arguments against the mainstream Sunni ulema. They were
a forceful push back against the edifice of a scholarly establishment and
its ‘misguided’ teachings. But they could never be substantive policies,
since that very scholarly establishment offered the only bulwark against
paralysing hermeneutic chaos. The campaign against taql;d carried
out by revivalists like Ab< l-Easan al-Sind; was thus neither a call to
abandon madhhabs nor an open door to unrestricted interpretation of
scripture. Neither al-Sind; nor any of his like-minded, proto-Salafi
comrades would advocate acting reflexively on Aad;ths without the
hermeneutic framework of legal theory (uB<l al-fiqh). Their opposition
to taql;d was really a rejection of treating the four madhhabs as either
unquestionable authorities or as the boundaries outside which no
Muslim could venture even in the face of superceding evidence from the
Qur8:n or Sunna.
the Madrasas in Modern South Asia’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies, 62/1 (1999): 60–81.
55
Sh:h Ism:6;l al-Shah;d, Taqwiyat al-;m:n, 36–7. (Emphasis added.)
Al-Sind; was a scholar and follower of the Eanaf; school, but he broke
with specific rulings of the madhhab when he concluded that it had not
interpreted the sources of Islamic law properly. The best-known case
was the Eanaf; school’s rejection of raising one’s hands before and
after bowing in prayer, which contradicted numerous sound Aad;ths.56
Al-Sind;’s approach explains why he made the argument that Muslims
could stand once again in the place of the Companions, in an era before
madhhabs, and act on the Aad;ths they found. Put simply, it was the only
way to surmount his opponents’ argument for exclusive loyalty to a
madhhab. Staunch Eanaf;s, as well as advocates of other madhhabs,
argued that their school’s founding generations had already digested and

analysed all the relevant scriptural evidence on issues like raising one’s
hands in prayer, including what seemed to be contradictory evidence.57
It was now incumbent upon Muslims to follow in these well-laid paths
instead of chaotically reengaging with the texts of the Qur8:n and
Sunna. Only by demoting the authority of the madhhab’s bearers and
reinvigorating the engagement with the Qur8:n and Sunna that
characterized the pre-madhhab era could revivalists like al-Sind; and
his contemporary Sh:h Wal; All:h justify reconsidering a madhhab’s
position on the basis of direct readings of scripture.
That the proto-Salafi argument for empowering the lay Muslim
against the authority of madhhabs was meant as a polemical parry and
not a coherent prescription is clear in the writings of Sh:h Wal; All:h,
who was the progenitor of proto-Salafi thought in South Asia. He
fervently called upon Muslim scholars to return to the Qur8:n and
Aad;ths instead of blindly following the locally dominant Eanaf;
madhhab. Yet he warned other Indian scholars who, like himself, had
realized that Aad;ths disproved some Eanaf; positions not to roil public
opinion by raising their hands in public prayer. This would only cause
public strife (fitna) for the masses (6aw:mm) in the region.58 When it
came to the masses of Indian Muslims, in fact, Sh:h Wal; All:h urged
56
al-Mizj:j;, Nuzhat riy:@ al-ij:za 260–1. A counterpart example from the
Sh:fi6; school was YaAy: b. 6Umar Maqb<l al-Ahdal (d. 1734) of Zab;d; 6Abd
al-RaAm:n b. Sulaym:n al-Ahdal, al-Nafas al-Yam:n; (Sanaa: Markaz al-Dir:s:t
wa-l-AbA:th al-Isl:miyya, 1979), 60.
57
For an early articulation of this principle, see Ab< l-Easan 6Ubaydall:h
al-Karkh; (d. 952): 6Abdull:h b. 6Umar Ab< Zayd al-Dab<s; K. Ta8s;s al-naCar
wa-yal;hi ris:lat Ab; l-Easan al-KarkA; f; al-Us<l allat; 6alayh: mad:r fur<6
al-Aanafiyya ma6a shaw:hidih: wa-naC:8irih: li-Ab; EafB 6Umar al-Nasaf; (Cairo:
al-Ma3ba6a al-Adabiyya, 1320/1902–3), 84–5.
58
Sh:h Wal; All:h al-Dihlaw;, Eujjat All:h al-b:ligha (ed. Sa6;d AAmad
al-B:lanb<r;; Deoband: Maktabat Eij:z, 2 vols., 1431/2010), ii. 55.
them to follow the Eanaf; madhhab without question. He actually
forbade the 6aw:mm from departing from that school due to his fear that
they would find no other qualified scholars to guide them in South
Asia.59 Echoing the Sunni mainstream, he insisted that, ‘the madhhab
of the layperson (6:mm;) is the madhhab of his muft;’.60
Some early modern revivalists did seem to reject taql;d altogether for
the scholars and masses alike, as is the case with al-4an6:n;. His call
resonates less stridently, however, when one realizes that his attacks on
taql;d often specify its technical sense of ‘taking the opinion of another
without knowing their evidence’ as opposed to its broader association
with the monopoly of the four schools. What al-4an6:n; objects to

primarily is not following a school of law or scholar. Rather, he decries
anyone undertaking religious observances or obeying sacred law without
asking for evidence, an objection that in no ways undermines hierarchies
of interpretive authority.61
The rhetorical nature of the proto-Salafi empowerment of the masses is
even more explicitly clear in the work of the most radical critic of taql;d
in the nineteenth-century, the Yemeni MuAammad al-Shawk:n;
(d. 1834). In an irate treatise against taql;d, he prohibited the practice
absolutely, a position that seems to empower the masses radically as
individual interpreters of the religion. Yet the nuances of al-Shawk:n;’s
argument reveal that he was only addressing the ulema and students
aspiring to their ranks. His was a discourse for and amongst scholarly
circles. He explicitly states that his prohibition on taql;d does not mean
that the masses (6:mma) are all qualified legal interpreters. Rather, they
must simply be like the Muslims of the Prophet’s generation, amongst
whom ‘a person who did not know would ask one who did’.62
Al-Shawk:n; acknowledges that the vast preponderance of the Muslim
laity are not even at issue in the debate over taql;d. They would not even
know what the word taql;d means. They simply follow the customs of
their region or city.63 This distinction is repeated in yet another scathing
treatise against taql;d by N<r Easan Kh:n (d. 1917), the son of 4idd;q
59
‘Wajaba 6alayhi an yuqallida madhhab Ab; Ean;fa wa yaArumu 6alayhi an
yakhruja min madhhabihi li-annahu A;na8idhin yakhla6u ribqat al-shar;6a wa-
yabq: sudan muhmalan’; Sh:h Wal; All:h, al-InB:f f; bay:n asb:b al-ikhtil:f (ed.
6Abd al-Fatt:A Ab< Ghudda; Beirut: D:r al-Naf:8is, 1983), 79.
60
Ibid, 107.
61
al-4an6:n;, Irsh:d, 72, 81; idem, Subul al-sal:m sharA Bul<gh al-mar:m min
jam6 adillat al-aAk:m (ed. MuAammad 6Abd a-RaAm:n al-Mar6ashl;; Beirut: D:r
IAy:8 al-Tur:th al-6Arab;, 4 vols., [1997] 1426/2005), iv. 158.
62
al-Shawk:n;, ‘al-Qawl al-muf;d’, 42.
63
Ibid, 48.
Easan Kh:n (d. 1890), who had championed al-Shawk:n;’s and Ibn
Taymiyya’s works in India. He explains that the masses occupy a space
between taql;d and ijtih:d, namely asking a qualified scholar what the
ruling on a subject was and insisting that he provide evidence for that
stance.64
Such nuanced and qualified attitudes towards taql;d are often omitted
in later Salafi polemics that draw on authorities like al-Sind; and
al-Shawk:n;. Citations of Ab< l-Easan al-Sind;’s argument for acting on
Aad;ths without advanced training in a madhhab, which appear
frequently in later Salafi tracts against taql;d, leave out his qualification
that this applies only to those who have ‘some sort of suitability

(ahliyya)’ for this task. Anyone else, al-Sind; affirms, must obey the
Qur8:nic command traditionally understood to legitimize the ulema:
‘Ask the people of heedfulness if you do not know’ (Q. 16. 43).65
Indeed, even at the epicentre of the iconoclastic, proto-Salafi trend
in the fourteenth century, the egalitarian perspective on species of
knowledge and the challenge to the institutional rigidity of madhhabs
was never a call to erase hierarchies of learning. Ibn Taymiyya rejected
the notion of restricting taql;d only to the four established schools of law,
not the idea of following a scholar or madhhab in general.66 It was
proper for a Muslim to look to more than one scholar or school for
guidance, but those who refused to follow any of the four schools had
gone astray. ‘The truth’, he explained, ‘does not fall outside of those
four for the generality of the Shar;6a’.67 Although al-Dhahab; did allow
‘limited ijtih:d (ijtih:d muqayyad)’ (i.e., choosing which position of the
early great im:ms best conformed with revealed evidence) to those who
had studied fiqh and uB<l thoroughly, he allowed no ijtih:d to minor,
everyday scholars.68 He understood well that an interpretive hierarchy
was needed. In his biography of a famous scholar of Seville named Ibn
al-Kamm:d (d. 1235–6), al-Dhahab; praised him as a scholar in the path
64
N<r Easan Kh:n, al-Far;qa al-muthl: f; l-irsh:d il: tark al-taql;d wa-ittib:6
m: huwa awl: (ed. Ab< 6Abd al-RaAm:n Sa6;d Mi6sh:sha; Beirut: D:r Ibn Eazm,
1421/2000), 66.
65
al-Full:n;, Īq:C; AAmad Sh:kir, Jamharat maq:l:t al-6all:ma al-shaykh
AAmad MuAammad Sh:kir, ed. 6Abd al-RaAm:n bin 6Abd al-6Az;z bin Eamm:d
al-6Aql; Giza: D:r al-Riy:@, 2 vols., 1426/2005), ii. 255–6 (originally published
in al-Man:r, 31/3 [1930]). See also Basheer M. Nafi, ‘The Teacher of Ibn 6Abd
al-Wahh:b: MuAammad Eay:t al-Sind; and the Revival of the ABA:b al-Aad;th’s
Methodology’, Islamic Law and Society, 13/2 (2006): 208–41, at 225–6.
66
Ibn Taymiyya, Majm<6at al-fat:w:, xi. 151.
67
Badr al-D;n al-Ba6l;, MukhtaBar al-Fat:w: al-miBriyya (ed. 6Abd al-Maj;d
Sal;m; Beirut: D:r al-Kutub al-6Ilmiyya, n.d.), 61.
68
al-Dhahab;, Siyar, xviii. 191.
of the Salaf who would recite Aad;ths to vast audiences in the mosque.
But in unpacking the legal and theological implications of the Aad;ths
before the assembled masses, Ibn al-Kamm:d erred. He would ‘bring up
scholarly disagreements that were not suitable for the setting’.69
Similarly, the traditionalist theology advocated by Ibn Qud:ma,
Ibn Taymiyya and Salafis since them might seem to obviate a class
of scholarly interpreters. Ibn Qud:ma had prohibited scholastic,
figurative interpretation of Qur8:nic verses or Aad;ths concerning
God’s attributes. But this did not mean that the ulema were unnecessary.
Ibn Qud:ma explained that the layperson (6:mm;), if he had any
confusion about the meaning of these texts, should follow (taql;d) the

ulema’s understanding.70
In the twentieth century, we again see that the substance of Salafi
arguments against taql;d belie any rhetoric of empowering the masses.
Leading twentieth-century Salafis make it clear that even the Salafi
school of thought acknowledges that there is and should be a body
of expert scholars who understand the sources of Islamic law and its
derivation. Interestingly, perhaps to distinguish themselves from the
preponderance of Sunni scholars and the madhhab traditions, Salafis
tend to employ terms like ‘the People of Knowledge (ahl al-6ilm)’ instead
of the usual moniker of ‘ulema’ when referring to qualified scholars.
The most influential Salafi scholar of the late twentieth century, the
Syrian/Albanian MuAammad N:Bir al-D;n al-Alb:n; (d. 1999), was
frequently lambasted by the mainstream Sunni ulema for his derivations
of rulings from Aad;ths without an understanding of legal theory—hence,
they claimed, his anomalous legal rulings like prohibiting women from
wearing gold jewelry.71 But al-Alb:n; himself urged ‘the masses of the
Muslims’ to seek out the ‘People of Knowledge’ on issues such as
authenticating Aad;ths.72 He explained that the first step a person
ignorant of the Aad;th sciences should take to tell authentic Aad;ths from
69
al-Dhahab;, Tadhkirat al-Auff:C (ed. Zakariyy: 6Umayr:t; Beirut: D:r
al-Kutub al-6Ilmiyya, 1419/1998), iv. 168.
70
Ibn Qud:ma, ‘Dhamm al-ta8w;l’, 88.
71
al-Alb:n;, 2d:b al-zif:f f; al-sunna al-mu3ahhara (Beirut: al-Maktab
al-Isl:m;, revised edn., 1409/1989), 150 ff. For such criticisms of al-Alb:n;, see
6Abdall:h b. al-4idd;q al-Ghum:r;, Itq:n al-Ban6a f; taAq;q ma6n: al-bid6a (Cairo:
Maktabat al-Q:hira, 1426/2005), 55; al-Qara@:w;, al-Fat:w: al-sh:dhdha,
62–3. Al-Qara@:w; praises al-Alb:n; as a Aad;th scholar but says that in his fiqh
he has a c:hir; inclination, since he acts more on particular (juz8;) texts and does
not heed the general objectives of the Shar;6a (al-maq:Bid al-kulliyya).
72
MuAammad N:Bir al-D;n al-Alb:n;, ‘al-Tafs;r II’, lecture from www.
islamway.com/?iw_s=Scholar&iw_a=lessons&scholar_id=47 (last accessed
28 May 2004).
inauthentic was to ask a scholar, ‘for indeed this matter is like one who
does not know fiqh rulings: if he is one of the People of Knowledge of the
Qur8:n and the Sunna he refers to those two sources, and otherwise he
asks the ulema’.73 In another fatw:, al-Alb:n; criticizes those madhhab
loyalists who ‘forbid following the Qur8:n and the Prophet’s precedent
on the basis that the masses (6:mma) cannot understand them, and they
require them to do taql;d’.74 Yet al-Alb:n; says just a few pages later
that, in terms of knowledge, Muslims are divided into two parts, the
expert (qism 6:lim) and non-expert (qism ghayr 6:lim). He affirms that
those who are not experts must consult and defer to ‘the People of
Knowledge’.75 In another lesson given by al-Alb:n;, he condemns those

who are not among the ‘People of Knowledge’ giving fatw:s and
commands students evaluating the authenticity of Aad;ths not to
announce their conclusions publicly until they have practised and had
their results approved by members of the ulema.76
One of al-Alb:n;’s most famous and influential students, the Yemeni
Salafi Muqbil bin H:d; al-W:di6; (d. 2001) was once asked how to seek
6ilm by American Muslims, who were particularly eager to know what
tapes and books the shaykh would suggest. Al-W:di6; skipped the
questions and advised the young Americans to travel to study with ulema
like al-Alb:n; and the Saudi muft; 6Abd al-6Az;z Bin B:z (d. 1999) or,
if this was not possible, to correspond with them by letter or telephone.
If this was also impossible, these Muslims should seek out qualified
local ulema rather than lapsing into autodidactism.77
The Salafi scene in Egypt traces its intellectual roots to Saudi Arabia in
the 1970s and 80s and to international scholars like al-Alb:n;. Although
they certainly emphasize the central importance of ijtih:d, call for
abandoning any legal or doctrinal position that does not rest on evidence
from the Qur8:n or Sunna, and reject taql;d, Egypt’s Salafi scholars also
uphold a firm hierarchy of knowledge. MuAammad Ism:6;l Muqaddam,
an Egyptian who studied in Saudi Arabia before becoming the most
senior Salafi shaykh in the movement’s stronghold of Alexandria, devotes
a long discussion to the importance of aspiring scholars studying at the
73
al-Alb:n;, al-Radd 6al: 6Izz al-D;n Bulayq, i. 240 (cited from 6IB:m M<s:
H:w;, ed., al-Raw@ al-d:n; f; al-faw:’id al-Aad;thiyya (Amman: al-Maktaba
al-Isl:miyya, 1422/[2001]), 166.
74
al-Alb:n;, Fat:w: al-Shaykh al-Alb:n; (ed. 6Uk:sha 6Abd al-Mann:n
al-Fayyib;; Cairo: Maktabat al-Tur:th al-Isl:m;, 1994), 432.
75
Ibid, 439.
76
Ibid, 170.
77
Muqbil b. H:d; al-W:di6;, TuAfat al-muj;b 6al: as8ilat al-A:@;r wa-l-ghar;b
(Sanaa: D:r al-2th:r, 2000), 139–40.
hands of qualified ulema. Contrary to the accusation of autodidactism
frequently leveled at Salafis, Muqaddam explains that the process
of reading books directly with a teacher (talaqq;) is essential not only for
acquiring the proper understanding of classical legal texts but also for
absorbing the piety and etiquette of a scholar. He warns against amateurs
thinking that they can achieve any accurate understanding of the Islamic
sciences through listening to recorded lectures or reading texts on their
own.78 The centrality of studying at the hands of capable ulema is
reiterated by Muqaddam’s student, the influential Egyptian Salafi scholar
Y:sir Burh:m;.79
The Alexandrian school of Egyptian Salafism is characterized by a

three-tiered model of interpretive authority reminiscent of N<r Easan
Kh:n’s, with mujtahids engaging the sources directly, qualified ‘students
of knowledge’ weighing and choosing between the opinions of these
ulema, and the masses relying exclusively on the guidance of a trusted
scholar.80 AAmad Far;d, another scholar in the Alexandrian Da6wa
al-Salafiyya movement, writes that one of the principles of Salafism is
‘following (ittib:6)’. He defines this both as a commitment to making the
Qur8:n and Sunna the only sources of reference but also that there be an
‘intermediate tier between ijtih:d and taql;d’. This would cover anyone
who lacks the high scholarly qualifications needed to engage in ijtih:d
and should therefore ‘follow a scholar according to his evidence from
the Qur8:n and the Sunna’. Far;d actually allows pure taql;d with no
demands for evidence in the case of either the ‘purely ignorant’ or on
issues of great scholarly disagreement that lack clear evidence from
scripture and depend on more complicated scholarly derivation.81
MuAammad Yusr; Ibr:h;m, a Cairo-based Salafi scholar who represents
a competing, Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Salafi trend in Egypt, even
permits lay people to engage in the taql;d of a low level scholar who
himself relies on the taql;d of a particular scholar or madhhab, since
there are so few qualified mujtahids at hand.82
78
MuAammad Ism:6;l Muqaddam, Eurmat ahl al-6ilm (Alexandria: D:r
al-Khulaf:8 al-R:shid;n, 1430/2009), 336–45.
79
Y:sir Burh:m;, al-Minna sharA i6tiq:d ahl al-sunna (Alexandria: D:r
al-Khulaf:’ al-R:shid;n, 2nd edn., 1426/2006), 467–8.
80
See, for example, ShiA:ta 4aqr, Qaw:6id siy:siyya f; l-sunan wa-l-bida6
yanbagh; ma6rifatuh: (Alexandria: D:r al-Khulaf:8 al-R:shid;n, 1432/2011), 48.
81
AAmad Far;d, al-Salafiyya: qaw:6id wa-uB<l (Alexandria: D:r al-Khulaf:8
al-R:shid;n, 1432/2011), 33–5.
82
MuAammad Yusr; Ibr:h;m, M;th:q al-ift:8 al-mu6:Bir (Cairo: D:r al-Yusr,
7th edn., 2011), 67.
Interestingly, we find that even the staunchest Salafi scholars of Saudi
Arabia today also affirm that the madhhab of the layperson (6:mm;) is
the madhhab of whichever scholar he consults. For example, it is stated
as a principle by the Salafi scholar MuAammad 4:liA al-Munajjid (Syrian
but resident in Saudi Arabia) in his response on what is required for
someone to be considered one of ‘the People of Knowledge’ and issue
fatw:s.83 According to the late Saudi scholar Ibn 6Uthaym;n (d. 2001),
even the student pursuing religious knowledge has no choice but to
engage in the taql;d of a qualified scholar, whether dead or living.
A layperson must ask whichever scholar he or she feels is best guided in
their judgment.84 Salm:n al-6Awda explains that students of the Islamic

sciences must study with scholars known for their knowledge and
piety. This not only ensures that they gain the accurate understanding
of Islamic law and theology (impossible to achieve with books alone),
but it also provides examples of how those sciences are applied.
In addition, students benefit from the blessing (baraka) and pious
example of the ulema.85
The most notorious (ostensible) Salafi subversion of learned hier-
archies comes in one of the most aggressive modern anti-taql;d tracts,
written by the Central Asian immigrant to Makka, MuAammad Sul3:n
al-Ma6B<m; al-Khujand; (d. 1961). Written as a response to Muslims
in Japan asking if they had to follow any of the four madhhabs in
particular, the work received marked attention as fodder for one of the
most influential anti-Salafi polemics in recent decades, the book ‘Anti-
Madhhabism: The Most Dangerous Heresy Threatening the Shariah’, of
the late Syrian scholar MuAammad Sa6;d Rama@:n al-B<3; (d. 2013).
This Sh:fi6; scholar excoriates al-Khujand; for what seems to be a
ridiculous claim, namely that it is forbidden for a Muslim to follow any
of the four madhhabs. In this al-B<3; accuses al-Khujand; of ignoring a
basic fact known to Muslims since time immemorial: there are scholars
who are qualified to look directly into the derivation of Islamic law and
83
http://www.ahlalhdeeth.com/vb/showthread.php?t=179324 (last accessed
5 October 2010). Al-Munajjid ran the fatw: website www.islamqa.com.
I thank my friend Yasir Qazi for help on this.
84
MuAammad 4:liA Ibn 6Uthaym;n, Kit:b al-6Ilm (ed. Fahd bin N:Bir bin
Ibr:h;m al-Sulaym:n; Riyadh: D:r al-Thurayy:, 2002), 115, 205. Interestingly,
Ibn 6Uthaym;n looks much more charitably on learning through books alone.
Learning with scholars is useful, avoids misunderstanding and makes under-
standing books easier, but not doing it is not illegitimate or dangerous. It is much
better to get 6ilm via ulema but if necessary one can just read books, especially
reliable and well regarded ones: ibid, 150, 240–1.
85
Salm:n b. Fahd al-6Awda, Daw:bi3 li-l-dir:s:t al-fiqhiyya (Riyadh:
Maktabat al-Rushd, 1424/2004), 42. (This book was originally written in 1983.)
theology from the Qur8:n and Sunna, and there are the masses who
are not.86 Indeed, as quoted here by al-B<3;, al-Khujand;’s words seem
quite extreme:
Whoever clings chauvinistically to any one [source] other than the Messenger
of God (may God’s peace and blessings be upon him), and believes that this
person’s word is the correct stance that must be followed apart from all other
im:ms, he is ignorant and astray, nay perhaps even an unbeliever (k:fir) . . . .87
Al-Khujand;’s words, however, must be read in their immediate
context. He is not condemning following one who is more knowledge-
able or even following a madhhab. Rather, he is condemning the

elevation of any person or school to a position above correction even
if there appears clear evidence from the Prophet’s Sunna (clearly a
subjective matter) that demonstrates error—hence al-Khujand; referring
to the guilty party as placing a scholar or madhhab above the Prophet
himself. More importantly, al-Khujand;’s above invocation of unbelief
(kufr) is immediately followed with a crucial explanation: ‘The most that
can be said [in support of taql;d] is that it is permissible or required for
a layperson (6:mm;) to follow (yuqallida) one of the im:ms’.88
Again, we see that the taql;d problematic only applies to the scholarly
elite, not the masses of Muslims. Al-Khujand;’s treatise is eminently
Salafi and a clear denunciation of taql;d, but its target is the same as that
of al-Sind;, al-Shawk:n; and others: an excessive madhhab chauvinism
that refuses to consider that evidence from the Aad;th corpus might
demonstrate that a madhhab’s position should be adjusted on some issue.
It is not a substantive or even a clear call for the democratization of
interpretation. Al-Khujand; even provides a two-page quotation from
Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s work affirming that the layperson has no
madhhab.89
86
al-B<3;, al-L:madhhabiyya, 57.
87
Ibid, 28. Cf. MuAammad Sul3:n al-Ma6B<m; al-Khujand;, Hal al-muslim
mulzam bi-ittib:6 madhhab mu6ayyan min al-madh:hib al-arba6a8 (ed. Sal;m
al-Hil:l;; Giza: Maktabat al-Tar6iya al-Isl:miyya; Amman: al-Maktaba
al-Isl:miyya, 1405/1995), 54.
88
al-Khujand;, Hal al-muslim mulzam, 54. For additional information on
al-Khujand;, see MuAammad Khayr Rama@:n Y<suf, Mustadrak 6al: tatimmat
al-a6l:m li-l-zirikl; (Beirut: D:r Ibn Eazm, vol. 3, 1422/2002), 248.
89
al-Khujand;, Hal al-muslim mulzam, 102–3.
CONCLUSION
The ulema’s monopoly over interpreting Islamic law and dogma has been
threatened in the modern period. In great part this has come at the hands
of lay Muslim intellectuals, who have both pointed out the political and
scholarly failings of the ulema class and offered themselves as alternative
voices of authority. The traditional ulema have responded to these
overwhelmingly liberal and often secularizing intellectual reformers by
invoking the example of Salafi barbarism, which is reviled by both lay
intellectuals and mainstream ulema alike. Citing the supposed anticler-
icalism endemic in Salafism, mainstream ulema point to the dangers of

leaving Islam’s scriptures unguarded and unmediated. Indeed, Sh:h
Ism:6il al-Shah;d, al-Sind;, al-Khujand;, al-Alb:n; and others, have all
stated very explicitly that Islam is not difficult to understand and that
everyday Muslims can absorb its teachings with the immediacy of the
early Muslim forefathers. But is this really a call for the democratization
of interpretation, regardless of the deluge of interpretive chaos that
would follow? Do these scholars really hold that Islam needs no
guardian class?
What I hope this article has demonstrated is that this egalitarian strain
in Salafism is not a clear and consistent position. Rather, it is the product
of a discourse tradition that holds claims of formalized hermeneutic
authority in great suspicion while simultaneously acknowledging the
need for the control it provides. All the above proto-Salafi and Salafi
scholars have consistently maintained that the masses of the Muslims are
unqualified to approach the scriptural sources of Islam in any authori-
tative way. Moreover, like their mainstream Sunni opponents, Salafis
have affirmed that ‘the layperson has no legal school’. His school is
whatever a qualified local scholar says it is.
To understand statements like that of Sh:h Ism:6;l al-Shah;d, that ‘to
comprehend the Quran and Aad;ths does not require much learning’, we
must remember that they arose as a rhetorical parry in the enduring
debate between the iconoclastic, proto-Salafi school of thought in Sunni
Islam and the Sunni mainstream. For proto-Salafi and Salafi polemicists,
arguing that ordinary Muslims stood directly before Islam’s scriptures
just as the Companions had was a move essential to undermining the
rigid authority of the madhhabs, which underpinned the ritual and legal
practices rejected by Salafis. Arguing that the Muslim masses were
innately competent and needed no guardian class to understand their
religion was the most effective means to neutralize the appeals to
authority made by mainstream Sunni scholars, even if all ulema, even
Salafi ones, knew this claim was false.

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Published online 10 December 2014

Journal of Islamic Studies 26:2 (2015) pp. 117–144 doi:10.1093/jis/etu081

IS ISLAM EASY TO UNDERSTAND OR NOT?:

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MODERN ANTICLERICALISM IN ISLAM

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In Egypt in 2007, 6Izzat 6A3iyya, the head of the Department of Aad;th

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http://www.news-sa.com/snews/1518------------------qq-----.html (last accessed

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The tension between the drive to institutionalize an interpretive class

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PROTO-SALAFI ANTICLERICALISM AND

The mainstream of Sunni ulema opposed the revivalists and countered

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THE SALAFI STANCE: RHETORICAL

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anticlericalism and confidence in the

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