1
00:00:00,820 --> 00:00:04,480
I can.

2
00:00:08,790 --> 00:00:14,460
Thank you all for joining. Welcome to everyone for one of the Oxford Middle East Centre's Book Review Sessions.

3
00:00:14,520 --> 00:00:23,470
It's really a pleasure for me to welcome back one of our alumni and a colleague of mine from my doctoral days at Princeton.

4
00:00:23,490 --> 00:00:33,600
So Aaron Roxann, who is an Intel graduate from over a decade ago at this point at Oxford in the modern Middle Eastern studies program,

5
00:00:33,900 --> 00:00:43,800
and afterwards joined Princeton, which is where we met for the first time and completed his Ph.D. and his first book, Under Normal Zimmer.

6
00:00:44,490 --> 00:00:46,440
And we actually attended some of the same classes.

7
00:00:46,440 --> 00:00:52,950
There's really a wonderful opportunity to have you back, Aaron, and really would like to welcome you to talk about your second book.

8
00:00:53,550 --> 00:00:59,250
So Aaron has a young scholar who has been remarkably prolific at this point in his career,

9
00:00:59,670 --> 00:01:05,219
has published two books and I guess over a dozen articles at this point, perhaps only ten.

10
00:01:05,220 --> 00:01:09,540
But I understand that there's inflation these days, so I see how we get the 12th.

11
00:01:09,930 --> 00:01:18,300
Right? Right. And and so your work has been particularly focussed on Egypt's modern Egypt and the movement currently known as Salafism.

12
00:01:18,660 --> 00:01:21,479
In many respects, your interlocutors are people like only those yet.

13
00:01:21,480 --> 00:01:28,410
And I guess to a certain extent, someone like Walter Armbrust, who would have been one of the early introduces for you to Egypt, so to speak.

14
00:01:28,920 --> 00:01:33,750
And your first book was Practising Islam in Egypt, Print Media and the Islamic Revival.

15
00:01:33,840 --> 00:01:39,419
And I think it's a very significant contribution that complicates the sort of the generic picture of

16
00:01:39,420 --> 00:01:44,250
the Islamic revival that is seen as suddenly emerging out of out of the blue almost in the 1970s.

17
00:01:44,520 --> 00:01:51,120
And you really sort of do wonderful digging and looking at exactly sort of the context in which various

18
00:01:51,120 --> 00:01:56,849
actors are engaging that in that process and not just sort of it's not a uniform process by any means.

19
00:01:56,850 --> 00:02:01,680
So I think that that was a wonderful sort of contribution to the literature on contemporary Islam.

20
00:02:02,040 --> 00:02:08,910
And now you've given us another one within four years of your first book, as far as I can see, which is a really impressive achievement.

21
00:02:09,300 --> 00:02:15,000
And this one is once again, you had you had the screen just on the page a moment ago.

22
00:02:15,300 --> 00:02:18,209
So I unfortunately cannot recall the name off the top of my head.

23
00:02:18,210 --> 00:02:23,370
So in the shade of the sudden stylistic piety of the 20th century Middle East, I'll put it up.

24
00:02:23,820 --> 00:02:26,910
Thank you. Thank you. I was going to depend on that as a crutch.

25
00:02:27,300 --> 00:02:35,040
And I've started reading the text really sort of brilliantly written and always wonderful to see you engage the sort of

26
00:02:35,040 --> 00:02:41,699
literature so consequently and thoughtfully and really looking forward to your presentation for the next 40 or so minutes,

27
00:02:41,700 --> 00:02:49,200
and then we'll open the floor up for questions. I just want to remind participants that if you have any questions, you can put them in the chat.

28
00:02:49,530 --> 00:02:53,360
But if anyone wants to, since there's a relatively manageable number of participants,

29
00:02:53,910 --> 00:02:58,860
if you'd like to ask your question orally, Ayaan and I are happy to sort of welcome you to do that.

30
00:02:59,310 --> 00:03:03,629
So without further ado, I'd like to welcome you here and to go ahead and present.

31
00:03:03,630 --> 00:03:07,050
Thank you for Sam. It's wonderful to be here virtually.

32
00:03:07,140 --> 00:03:11,400
It'd be even more lovely to be in person, but that would be a very long journey.

33
00:03:12,030 --> 00:03:17,340
I obviously have very, very fond memories of my days at centre at this college.

34
00:03:17,970 --> 00:03:22,170
You noted that I had worked with Walter Armbrust when I was a grad student at Oxford,

35
00:03:22,530 --> 00:03:26,579
and in many respects working with Walter was really formative in terms of asking the

36
00:03:26,580 --> 00:03:32,880
kinds of questions of social practice and performance that lie at the heart of this book.

37
00:03:33,180 --> 00:03:37,530
I later went down the Islamic Studies rabbit hole, but this was really before.

38
00:03:37,530 --> 00:03:44,250
And I sometimes joke that insofar as I studied with Walter first, I wasn't socialised as a pharmacist,

39
00:03:44,490 --> 00:03:51,540
but I think that actually that different socialisation has real benefits in terms of thinking through some of the questions of Islamic studies.

40
00:03:52,080 --> 00:03:59,400
I want to thank also Michael Willis for inviting me and also to Caroline for taking care of all the details of this talk.

41
00:03:59,880 --> 00:04:04,620
And yes, I think back very fondly to our days as grad students at Princeton did at some two classes,

42
00:04:05,160 --> 00:04:10,870
and also to kind of see the work that you and other of our classmates have produced since that.

43
00:04:11,220 --> 00:04:18,299
So we give this talk by noting a moment about 12 years ago, in the early 20 tens,

44
00:04:18,300 --> 00:04:27,330
when I first came across the term gender mixing classes and same as I was doing my dissertation on the rise of the Islamic revival in 1970s Egypt.

45
00:04:27,870 --> 00:04:33,360
I assume that this came from social issues and in some sense as a caution,

46
00:04:33,840 --> 00:04:40,800
decided to verify that it actually came from Salafis and to establish when Salafis came to express this concern.

47
00:04:41,670 --> 00:04:49,290
What I just discovered in the process that the cell is to call for gender segregation as a non-negotiable principle, only emerged in the 1970s.

48
00:04:49,440 --> 00:04:56,490
It was ultimately to serve as the basis for this for not just an article that was published in Islamic law and society,

49
00:04:56,760 --> 00:05:03,510
but also for this book project more broadly on the emergence of distinctly Salafi social practices.

50
00:05:03,930 --> 00:05:08,160
Now on the screen you can see the cover of my book, which itself is based on.

51
00:05:08,260 --> 00:05:12,610
A 1980 pamphlet that features prominently in Chapter four of the book.

52
00:05:13,210 --> 00:05:18,100
This is a pamphlet entitled Floating and the Danger of Women Joining Men in the Workplace.

53
00:05:18,340 --> 00:05:23,409
It's published by a leading Salafi scholar from Saudi Arabia by the name of

54
00:05:23,410 --> 00:05:28,720
Abdulaziz if in bars or says for short and if in basketball re-occur in the story.

55
00:05:29,320 --> 00:05:33,910
Now that this particular pamphlet was published by a now defunct Egyptian publishing house,

56
00:05:33,910 --> 00:05:39,850
Max about the sultan and is unusual among depictions among editions excuse me of this text

57
00:05:40,060 --> 00:05:46,570
and so is the text more broadly in its very visceral depiction of the issue at hand.

58
00:05:46,900 --> 00:05:51,879
On the cover of this text, we have an image of an allegedly flaunting woman.

59
00:05:51,880 --> 00:05:56,560
We have her brown hair flowing out from under her blue cloak.

60
00:05:56,830 --> 00:06:01,960
Her blue cloak has a tear on the front bent to suggest a plunging neckline.

61
00:06:02,320 --> 00:06:08,590
And she has a bottle of wine, a glass of wine, and a deck of cards on the table.

62
00:06:09,070 --> 00:06:14,170
Now, this image offers a vivid depiction of Salafism concerned with visibility,

63
00:06:14,260 --> 00:06:19,360
which is a key theme of today's talk and its focus on regulating public behaviours.

64
00:06:19,690 --> 00:06:28,210
And it summons a variety of effective responses, enthusiastic agreement for people who are on board with the Salafi project and for those who are not.

65
00:06:28,420 --> 00:06:32,920
A range of others reactions. Now, if a picture is worth a thousand words,

66
00:06:32,920 --> 00:06:42,489
this illustration reflects how Salafis claim to articulate a vision of public piety premised on the linkage between ethics and visibility.

67
00:06:42,490 --> 00:06:46,690
And this is going to be a theme that I come back to frequently.

68
00:06:47,810 --> 00:06:54,710
Today, however, I'm going to be telling a story not of gender segregation, but of the emergence of a distinctly Salafi fear.

69
00:06:55,520 --> 00:06:57,440
I want to begin with the basics of our story.

70
00:06:57,680 --> 00:07:05,810
In the 1980s, Egyptian Salafi, at least in conversation with like minded scholars from across the Levant to the Persian Gulf,

71
00:07:06,140 --> 00:07:12,740
came to a consensus regarding a seemingly secondary question the required length of the beard.

72
00:07:13,460 --> 00:07:21,200
Now, in the process, as they cited the precedent of the first three generations of the Muslim community known as the pious ancestors.

73
00:07:22,760 --> 00:07:33,320
They agreed that the proper Islamic beard was a minimum of a fist of the cup, and it was to be paired with a trimmed moustache.

74
00:07:34,040 --> 00:07:39,070
The question is how we understand the emergence of the Salafi beard now.

75
00:07:39,390 --> 00:07:45,290
Well, understanding Salafism as a project is to understand it as a literalist interpretive project,

76
00:07:45,560 --> 00:07:48,530
and that in some respects is how Salafis portray themselves.

77
00:07:48,560 --> 00:07:55,250
The argument is that the meaning of the Koran and the Hadith corpus, the authenticated corpus, is self-explanatory.

78
00:07:55,790 --> 00:08:00,860
But the literalism explanation doesn't do much for us here because we have a time gap.

79
00:08:01,460 --> 00:08:11,750
Salafism in Egypt emerges in the 1920s and thirties, but the beard doesn't emerge as a consensus issue until the 1980s.

80
00:08:11,780 --> 00:08:18,990
So we essentially have a 50 year time gap. And so the explanation of literalism there doesn't make a ton of sense.

81
00:08:19,010 --> 00:08:25,819
Or if we are to take literalism as an explanation, we need to actually consider literalism as a highly complex,

82
00:08:25,820 --> 00:08:29,880
interpretive project that doesn't necessarily offer clear answers.

83
00:08:29,930 --> 00:08:35,460
From the get go. No. In talking about the minimum of the fist for the beard,

84
00:08:35,640 --> 00:08:40,610
we've also might reference the premodern fifth tradition in which this minimum appears quite regularly.

85
00:08:40,620 --> 00:08:43,649
This is an easily visible measurement.

86
00:08:43,650 --> 00:08:51,479
It's accessible to all men. You simply need to hold up your fist and to say that there is precedent for the minimum of the fist.

87
00:08:51,480 --> 00:08:57,969
In the pre-modern, stoic tradition, it's clear. But what's interesting here is not the fact that there's precedent,

88
00:08:57,970 --> 00:09:05,590
but how that precedent is utilised in a distinctly 20th century project of religio political mobilisation and change.

89
00:09:06,340 --> 00:09:11,499
And finally, we might come to the discursive Islamic ethical tradition approach,

90
00:09:11,500 --> 00:09:17,470
most popular in the works of Mahmud and Charles Hurston, inspired by Assads work,

91
00:09:17,950 --> 00:09:26,769
which sees Islamic piety in contemporary Egypt generally Salafi piety in particular as reflective of a

92
00:09:26,770 --> 00:09:33,460
longstanding ethical project in which visible signs are secondary and reflective of internal states,

93
00:09:33,760 --> 00:09:37,730
but they are not central to those internal state.

94
00:09:37,750 --> 00:09:47,080
And part of the argument for the linkage between ethics and visibility that I'm making today is for the centrality of visible performance to piety.

95
00:09:47,440 --> 00:09:56,140
And this brings me to a quote that I have at the bottom of the slide regarding the novel function of the beard in some circles in the 1980s.

96
00:09:56,410 --> 00:10:05,469
And this is from a an article published in 1988 by the leading Egyptian Salafi organisation Ansar Jihad.

97
00:10:05,470 --> 00:10:09,190
And this is the organisation that this project really centres on.

98
00:10:09,550 --> 00:10:15,879
It centres on its publication specifically, and it's by a leading preacher within the organisation during this period,

99
00:10:15,880 --> 00:10:26,500
a man named Ahmed Taha Nasser, and he declared in 1988, the beard serves as a noble announcement to introduce society to what it means to be Sunni.

100
00:10:26,980 --> 00:10:33,010
Now, we first might note that Sunni here is a claim by Salafis to the Salafi

101
00:10:33,010 --> 00:10:37,660
understanding of Islam being the what should be the Sunni understanding of Islam.

102
00:10:37,990 --> 00:10:45,670
But in some sense, I'm more interested in the first part of this quote, a noble announcement to introduce society.

103
00:10:46,750 --> 00:10:53,770
We have a concern with visibility here. We have a concern with a social body known as society here.

104
00:10:54,040 --> 00:11:01,060
The relationship implied here between one's visible practices and the broader social hall.

105
00:11:01,240 --> 00:11:04,600
And this is going to be something we get into in greater detail in the talk.

106
00:11:04,750 --> 00:11:14,650
So in some when we look at arm's time Masters invocation of the function of the beard in the 1980s, it raises as many questions as it answers.

107
00:11:15,220 --> 00:11:22,150
And I'm going to seek to provide some answers to the question of where this understanding of the beard comes from,

108
00:11:22,420 --> 00:11:28,210
how it links between ethics and visibility, and what that can tell us about some of Islam's development as a movement.

109
00:11:29,720 --> 00:11:30,080
Now.

110
00:11:30,200 --> 00:11:41,959
This project began out of a series of debates over the definition of solipsism that really were occurring in the early 2000 through the early 20 tens,

111
00:11:41,960 --> 00:11:47,240
and in some sense culminated in unrelated the 2016 book The Making of Salafism,

112
00:11:47,450 --> 00:11:50,270
which was a conceptual history of the terms of the CIA,

113
00:11:50,540 --> 00:11:59,120
and argued that it came by the 1920s and thirties to refer to a commitment, on the one hand to a neo theology.

114
00:11:59,300 --> 00:12:03,020
And on the other hand, to deriving all loss from the Koran and the sinner.

115
00:12:03,530 --> 00:12:08,899
And I really build off of those years, work here with a crucial addition,

116
00:12:08,900 --> 00:12:15,920
which is that if we want to understand the conceptual history of what it means to be Salafi, it's not enough to note, rightly,

117
00:12:15,920 --> 00:12:22,729
as Lozier does, that to be Salafi is to be defined by these two intellectual characteristics by one,

118
00:12:22,730 --> 00:12:28,670
a theological approach and the other a legal approach that these approaches actually are manifested in practice.

119
00:12:28,850 --> 00:12:35,030
And if we want to understand Salafi approaches to theology and law, we also have to understand Salafi practice,

120
00:12:35,210 --> 00:12:41,210
because it is precisely in the realm of practice that questions of theology and law often play out.

121
00:12:41,960 --> 00:12:49,490
Now, I've distinguished myself a little bit among folks who study Salafism as the guy who focuses on beards and pants.

122
00:12:50,480 --> 00:12:58,070
And I take this with sort of some amusement, because I actually think that understanding beards and pants,

123
00:12:58,220 --> 00:13:04,130
which is to say understanding Salafism as a social movement, is really crucial to understanding how this movement develops.

124
00:13:04,370 --> 00:13:11,060
It's not secondary or separate questions in theology of law or even politics, but intimately linked to that.

125
00:13:11,690 --> 00:13:18,839
You're also intervening in a broader conversation in which Salafis who engage in politics are sometimes known as Islamist,

126
00:13:18,840 --> 00:13:24,320
Salafi, sometimes known as political Salafis or Salafis who engage in political violence.

127
00:13:24,680 --> 00:13:31,970
Salafi jihadis or of utilities are disproportionately represented in the literature and in the news coverage of Salafism.

128
00:13:32,270 --> 00:13:38,630
Even though the vast majority of Salafis are actually quiet, they don't engage in political contestation.

129
00:13:39,200 --> 00:13:43,490
The extent that they engage in politics, we might say they engage in the politics of everyday life.

130
00:13:44,570 --> 00:13:51,770
I'm also very interested here to intervene in a conversation about the reproduction of the prophetic paradigm in the 20th century.

131
00:13:52,100 --> 00:13:56,120
And by that, I mean there's no question that throughout time and space,

132
00:13:56,120 --> 00:14:00,020
since the rise of Islam, Muslims have been seeking to emulate the Prophet Muhammad.

133
00:14:00,680 --> 00:14:09,620
And there we can absolutely identify a continuity. I'm not arguing that this impulse towards emulation is in any way unique to the 20th century,

134
00:14:09,950 --> 00:14:17,389
but what is distinct to the 20th century is this linkage between ethics and visibility in emulating the Prophet Muhammad.

135
00:14:17,390 --> 00:14:24,410
And I'm going to get into where I think that linkage comes from or what it can tell us about the development of Salafism as a movement.

136
00:14:25,250 --> 00:14:32,720
Finally, this book touches on a series of debates in the Anthropology of Islam about the nature and roots of Islamic piety,

137
00:14:33,230 --> 00:14:37,700
in particularly engages with the work, as I noted, of Muhammad and Charles Fishkin.

138
00:14:37,910 --> 00:14:43,600
And here I want to note something in particular about the work of some of us, which has in some sense been overlooked.

139
00:14:43,740 --> 00:14:46,160
And to be clear, I think this is a really important book.

140
00:14:46,760 --> 00:14:55,550
But Mahmood studies a series of four mosques, and she doesn't really identify who those mosques are affiliated with.

141
00:14:55,580 --> 00:14:59,030
Ideologically speaking, she identifies the groups that they're affiliated with.

142
00:14:59,720 --> 00:15:05,630
Now, one of those groups that they're affiliated with is the first mosque is Ansar Mohammed,

143
00:15:05,930 --> 00:15:11,470
Egypt's oldest Salafi organisation, and a second is affiliated with Jamaat Dallas.

144
00:15:11,480 --> 00:15:18,290
Ansar, another Salafi organisation and a third of these mosques is affiliated with the as Sharia,

145
00:15:18,290 --> 00:15:22,639
the lawful society for those who cooperate to work according to the Crown Centre,

146
00:15:22,640 --> 00:15:30,200
which, while not necessarily Salafi as an organisational philosophy, has significant Salafi influences within it.

147
00:15:30,380 --> 00:15:34,540
And this is actually a dynamic that is acknowledged by figures such as even vets

148
00:15:35,780 --> 00:15:40,549
that feel occasionally this is one of the rare groups that's not strictly Salafi,

149
00:15:40,550 --> 00:15:43,910
that gets a compliment from him that they get some of that right.

150
00:15:44,750 --> 00:15:53,780
So looking at Mahmud's story as a disproportionately Salafi story, I have a particular focus on how she understands piety and visibility,

151
00:15:54,140 --> 00:15:58,670
namely for Muhammad in the story that she tells and also the story that her skin tells.

152
00:15:59,180 --> 00:16:01,640
Piety is primarily the internal state.

153
00:16:01,940 --> 00:16:10,940
The visible is secondary, if not tertiary, whereas for Muhammad it is the Islamists who are concerned with visible performance.

154
00:16:11,300 --> 00:16:17,450
And what I argue in this book is that this is not representative of Salafism during this period.

155
00:16:17,930 --> 00:16:27,080
And more broadly, she argues that the regulative logic of the women's mass movement is derived from the pre-modern Islamic theological tradition.

156
00:16:27,380 --> 00:16:31,140
And I offer. Challenge to that approach as well.

157
00:16:31,800 --> 00:16:36,820
Now to tell the story, I had to go a bit far afield in terms of sources,

158
00:16:37,380 --> 00:16:42,180
a lot of scholarship and challenges and draws on these major theological legal compendia.

159
00:16:42,360 --> 00:16:44,340
These are obviously really important sources.

160
00:16:44,820 --> 00:16:51,840
But what I would say is equally important in the understanding of the development of ideas and practices over time.

161
00:16:52,020 --> 00:16:56,969
And here I make an argument not just for the consideration of these kinds of sources in social history,

162
00:16:56,970 --> 00:17:03,150
but also intellectual history is the form of periodicals, magazines, journals, pamphlets.

163
00:17:03,510 --> 00:17:10,650
Because these give us a sense of the granular process by which ideas and practices emerge over time.

164
00:17:10,890 --> 00:17:13,260
And indeed, looking at periodicals in particular,

165
00:17:13,320 --> 00:17:23,280
help us understand how it comes to be that certain positions are canonised or made orthodox in the form of pamphlets that we get to process.

166
00:17:23,400 --> 00:17:30,480
We also can trace when Salafis are not talking about these issues in the clear ways that they later discuss them.

167
00:17:31,140 --> 00:17:33,180
Now, to tell the story, I focus on Egypt.

168
00:17:33,450 --> 00:17:40,920
But this is a story that draws heavily on sources from elsewhere in the Middle East, particularly from Syria, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

169
00:17:41,190 --> 00:17:48,810
And in line with the fact that Solar Citizen is a transnational project defined not merely by what is going on locally,

170
00:17:48,990 --> 00:17:56,190
but also by a set of intellectual networks that are transnational networks of migration as well, particularly between Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

171
00:17:56,610 --> 00:17:59,640
So too does the book follow those paths of migration.

172
00:18:00,180 --> 00:18:08,550
And in the book, I make an argument about the origin of 40 Salafi practices one inches the second, the beard,

173
00:18:09,240 --> 00:18:15,630
the third gender segregation, and the fourth, the prohibition against letting one's robes hang down or expelled.

174
00:18:16,470 --> 00:18:27,480
And these four practices give us a story of the differing trajectories of production of prophetic practice and in the case of praying in shoes.

175
00:18:27,750 --> 00:18:31,860
In some respects is the most surprising trajectory we have,

176
00:18:31,860 --> 00:18:38,660
because this is a practice that in the forties and fifties is really valorised by leading members of Ansar Ahmadiyya.

177
00:18:38,940 --> 00:18:44,970
But in the face of political repression and social opprobrium, by the end of the 20th century,

178
00:18:45,390 --> 00:18:51,900
as soon as leaders are making arguments for why one should avoid engaging in this praiseworthy practice rather than performing it,

179
00:18:51,900 --> 00:18:58,950
which is not what one expects from Salafis. So the question then is how should we understand Salafism as a project?

180
00:18:58,980 --> 00:19:06,950
Where does it come from? Now, the Salafi self-understanding in this respect is that Salafism comes from the crown, but it directly derived from it.

181
00:19:07,350 --> 00:19:13,890
And we should take that self-understanding seriously. So we are deeply committed to these two textual purposes.

182
00:19:14,880 --> 00:19:16,080
But that's not enough.

183
00:19:16,620 --> 00:19:24,599
And in the book, I offer an argument that the linkage between ethics and visibility that I argue is at the centre of Salafi piety.

184
00:19:24,600 --> 00:19:34,170
In the 20th century, Middle East actually emerges from the 19th century modernising states and the role of uniforms and dress within that.

185
00:19:35,360 --> 00:19:45,920
And particularly here, I'm going to focus on Egypt and note the emergence in the 19th century of uniforms for both soldiers and students.

186
00:19:46,490 --> 00:19:50,690
And this is really indebted to the work of Khalid Fahmy in particular.

187
00:19:50,930 --> 00:19:55,610
And the point here is that in the mid-19th century, under the Ottoman and Egyptian state,

188
00:19:56,030 --> 00:20:01,460
it increasingly became the case that to participate in these state institutions when needed to dress in a certain way,

189
00:20:01,730 --> 00:20:08,840
and that dressing in that way was not merely a form of regulating individual practice.

190
00:20:09,050 --> 00:20:14,450
But it suggested you were on board with this project, that you were signalling with your clothing,

191
00:20:14,450 --> 00:20:17,660
your allegiance to a particular state, to a particular project.

192
00:20:18,410 --> 00:20:27,560
And this is something that we see persists under British colonial rule beginning in 1882 and then under colonial rule beginning in 1922.

193
00:20:27,920 --> 00:20:36,409
And here I just want to note a point that Tim Mitchell, it is classical colonising Egypt makes about the models of subject formation under

194
00:20:36,410 --> 00:20:40,330
colonial rule and specifically refers to something known as the politics of the self.

195
00:20:40,730 --> 00:20:48,320
So that this idea that Egyptians need to self-regulate in the service of a broader social whole about what they look like.

196
00:20:49,400 --> 00:20:54,740
Is it actually reflective or is assumed to be reflective of what they stand for?

197
00:20:55,040 --> 00:21:01,400
And part of what's so striking is that these understandings of the linkage between

198
00:21:01,640 --> 00:21:05,960
the allegiance or ethics and visibility carry over into the interwar period.

199
00:21:06,200 --> 00:21:08,180
And here I'll just give a very short example.

200
00:21:08,660 --> 00:21:17,780
In the 1930 in Egypt, we have a battle between various shirts movements, the blue shirts of the West, the green shirts of Young Egypt.

201
00:21:18,380 --> 00:21:26,030
We also have the broader emergence of India as a cultural category this middle class cultural, this middle cultural stratum.

202
00:21:26,720 --> 00:21:29,690
And to be an ascending is to wear a suit.

203
00:21:30,140 --> 00:21:38,810
And the Turkish and there's a great deal of discussion spilt over what it means to be an Efendi what it means to perform one's Efendi heard.

204
00:21:39,560 --> 00:21:43,220
Lucy Resolvers book is particularly fantastic in this regard.

205
00:21:44,330 --> 00:21:51,290
The point here is that we have this linkage between commitment to a particular cultural ideal and how one dresses,

206
00:21:51,590 --> 00:21:58,690
and indeed an assumption that how one dresses really brings home one's ideological commitment.

207
00:21:58,700 --> 00:22:03,320
So you're all note an episode from 1936 between young Egypt in the West.

208
00:22:03,440 --> 00:22:07,370
They were at this point had a pretty contentious relationship.

209
00:22:07,880 --> 00:22:11,840
The blue shirts and the green shirts were essentially their paramilitary organisations.

210
00:22:12,020 --> 00:22:19,310
And at some point in 1936, both was leadership says to its rank and file in the blue shirts, take off your shirts.

211
00:22:19,520 --> 00:22:25,069
We don't want to provoke Egypt at this point, which underscores the things,

212
00:22:25,070 --> 00:22:31,190
the symbolic centrality of wearing the blue shirts to ideological contestations during this period.

213
00:22:31,460 --> 00:22:38,990
It underscores this assumed linkage not only within the war, but between the West and Egypt of the linkage between ethics and visibility.

214
00:22:41,290 --> 00:22:44,919
So now we get to the topic that you actually were expecting to hear about.

215
00:22:44,920 --> 00:22:51,850
The Salafi fears, the origins of sort of the beginning of this talk are really, you know, walls around a fault.

216
00:22:52,690 --> 00:22:58,540
Now, part of what's interesting about the thirties and forties, this is a point that unrelated theory has made,

217
00:22:58,930 --> 00:23:05,410
is that under colonial rule, the dividing line is still between colonised and colonised,

218
00:23:05,440 --> 00:23:11,409
which overlaps but is not identical to a divide between Christians and Muslims because there are,

219
00:23:11,410 --> 00:23:14,140
of course, Coptic Christians in Egypt who are indigenous to Egypt.

220
00:23:14,410 --> 00:23:20,800
But in many ways this line between Muslim and Christian is a dividing line of the colonial project.

221
00:23:21,310 --> 00:23:26,490
And that's what's so interesting about the thirties and forties among Salafis is

222
00:23:26,500 --> 00:23:30,580
that there's very little discussion of what a distinctly Salafi period looks like.

223
00:23:30,790 --> 00:23:34,180
Instead, there's simply a discussion of the importance of growing a beard.

224
00:23:34,510 --> 00:23:38,380
And in 1948, the founder of On Social Media, Mohammad Hamida,

225
00:23:38,750 --> 00:23:44,470
is asked this question and essentially responds, You should grow the beer and let it become legible.

226
00:23:45,160 --> 00:23:49,690
That's his advice on what a proper Islamic period looks like growing.

227
00:23:49,860 --> 00:23:56,919
Let it become plentiful. You then expand on the fact that it serves not merely to distinguish Muslim men from Muslim women,

228
00:23:56,920 --> 00:24:01,120
but to distinguish Muslim men from their non-Muslim counterparts.

229
00:24:02,150 --> 00:24:06,260
So on the one hand, he's conscious of visible distinction,

230
00:24:06,770 --> 00:24:12,320
but he isn't yet concerned with making a linkage between necessarily between ethics and visibility.

231
00:24:12,530 --> 00:24:16,839
And he certainly hasn't specified the required length. Now,

232
00:24:16,840 --> 00:24:23,499
part of what makes this lack of specificity so interesting during this period is

233
00:24:23,500 --> 00:24:27,370
that the Muslim Brotherhood has a clear definition of the period at this time.

234
00:24:27,580 --> 00:24:30,640
And here I just want to show you three a picture of three men.

235
00:24:31,210 --> 00:24:40,630
First, Mohamed Hamza, the founder of the second Abdul Rahman al killed a leading figure with an unsustainable eventually becomes head.

236
00:24:41,020 --> 00:24:45,550
And the third one, I'm going to simply note something. Their beards are different.

237
00:24:45,730 --> 00:24:50,350
They look pretty similar. You couldn't tell one of the Salafi and one as an Islamist.

238
00:24:50,590 --> 00:24:56,190
This will soon change. Neither of us, typically or luckily, have anything close to the vest.

239
00:24:57,620 --> 00:25:04,610
Now, there's two reasons why this is interesting. The first is the process by which the Brotherhood articulate this model facial hair.

240
00:25:04,970 --> 00:25:13,310
And this comes from a 1944 article published in the Brotherhood's Journal When a muslim on a scholar by the name of say,

241
00:25:13,310 --> 00:25:20,150
etc., who later a couple of years later publishes the casino, which is this key legal text for the Brotherhood.

242
00:25:20,690 --> 00:25:26,390
And a setback makes the argument that men should grow their beard but not let it become excessive,

243
00:25:26,690 --> 00:25:31,400
that the moderation that was that was a is the best in all matters.

244
00:25:32,030 --> 00:25:35,090
Now, this is clearly adopted by the business,

245
00:25:35,510 --> 00:25:42,800
but part of what's so interesting here is not simply that acerbic takes this particular view, but the source that he uses to justify it.

246
00:25:43,490 --> 00:25:53,389
So so if he claims to the fist as a peer, as the minimum length for a beard, contrary to ideas about even Omar going, there hasn't been.

247
00:25:53,390 --> 00:25:58,130
Omar used to trim his beard to a minimum of this before going on his own.

248
00:25:58,580 --> 00:25:59,780
Okay. That's right.

249
00:26:00,260 --> 00:26:07,850
Now, what's fascinating is this is later used by Salafis, but here it's used by say it's there to argue that one can trim the beard.

250
00:26:08,060 --> 00:26:13,610
He completely ignores the fitness measurements and he focuses on the practice of trimming the beard,

251
00:26:13,850 --> 00:26:19,729
which again, further underscores the limits of literalism as an approach to the corpus generally,

252
00:26:19,730 --> 00:26:26,990
to Salafism in particular, because here we have two radically different understandings of this particular Hadith report.

253
00:26:27,890 --> 00:26:33,740
Now, we also might note that it is during the subsequent period that the cost of growing a beard increased substantially.

254
00:26:34,220 --> 00:26:44,000
And here we might move from the thirties and forties to the post 1952 period, particularly the point after 1954 when Gamal Abdel Nasser is in power.

255
00:26:44,450 --> 00:26:54,470
Unequivocally, before that it was him then Mohammed Libya, in which we see the emergence of a major crackdown of serious repression of the Brotherhood

256
00:26:54,770 --> 00:27:00,570
after an attempted assassination of Abdel Nasser by a couple of members of the organisation.

257
00:27:00,590 --> 00:27:06,680
And this is essentially used as a pretext for cracking down on the organisation more broadly.

258
00:27:07,280 --> 00:27:12,250
And it's during this period that the beard becomes a target of repression,

259
00:27:12,830 --> 00:27:18,920
that we have these memoirs of the Muslim Brothers from this period who describe how when they were in prison,

260
00:27:18,920 --> 00:27:25,010
particularly in the military prison, the society, their beards were shaved off in the top of their head.

261
00:27:25,010 --> 00:27:35,110
Hair was off, their head was shaved off. And there's also a speech that Abdel Nasser gave in 1966 in the Delta textile town of the mahalla,

262
00:27:35,120 --> 00:27:41,600
a cobra in which he identified those who grow beards with the enemies of Egypt.

263
00:27:41,630 --> 00:27:50,420
And here I want to read this particular quote. Someone who grows out his beard comes to you and says that socialism is disbelieving.

264
00:27:51,470 --> 00:27:57,530
Someone who claims that socialism opposes religion is the person who will take the country's wealth for themselves.

265
00:27:58,040 --> 00:28:03,710
Now, this claim was clearly directed at the Muslim Brotherhood, but it certainly wasn't limited to them.

266
00:28:04,040 --> 00:28:10,400
So it's unsurprising in this context that we don't see the development of a distinctly Salafi conception of the beard.

267
00:28:10,640 --> 00:28:16,910
These social consequences during this period are too high, the cost of repression is too high.

268
00:28:17,030 --> 00:28:22,040
The risk of repression of being even associated with the Brotherhood is significant.

269
00:28:22,430 --> 00:28:28,150
And this challenge of association is something that will come up also in the 1980s.

270
00:28:29,280 --> 00:28:35,420
All right. So this brings us to the 1970s, to the rise of Abdel Nasser successor, Mohamed Al Gore.

271
00:28:35,620 --> 00:28:40,020
So that's the rise of a broader Islamic revival in Egypt during this period,

272
00:28:40,260 --> 00:28:49,620
which involved not just Islamist movements such as the Brotherhood, the Jamal Sharia or Ansar al-Sunna, not just the Islamic student movement,

273
00:28:49,620 --> 00:28:54,329
the Jamaat e Islami, but also state institutions such as the Ministry of Endowments,

274
00:28:54,330 --> 00:29:01,470
particularly the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, as well as the Islamic Research Academy at Al-Azhar University.

275
00:29:01,710 --> 00:29:08,040
But what I want to focus on here is a particular aspect of activism during this period, namely that of the Jamaat e Islami.

276
00:29:08,220 --> 00:29:15,270
And here you can see an image of Jamaat e Islami aid celebrations from the late 1970s or early 1980s.

277
00:29:15,690 --> 00:29:21,750
And here I simply wanted to note two things. One is that many, but not all of these men have bushy beards.

278
00:29:23,000 --> 00:29:30,500
The second is that many of them are wearing the Jedediah, which is a longstanding feature of Egyptian dress in the countryside,

279
00:29:30,740 --> 00:29:36,290
but was repurposed in the 1970s as a neo traditional marker of authenticity.

280
00:29:36,590 --> 00:29:43,610
But really, I want you to focus on something in particular about the gender, namely that these gender beards do not appear.

281
00:29:43,730 --> 00:29:49,250
The men wearing these jobs do not appear to be observing the prohibition against letting one's robes hang down,

282
00:29:49,700 --> 00:29:53,180
which would require that the other be a cease and the ankle.

283
00:29:53,570 --> 00:30:02,750
It doesn't for the most part. So here we have further hints that the prohibition against Isobel has not quite been revived yet.

284
00:30:02,780 --> 00:30:06,020
No, some members of the Jamaat e Islami end up joining the Brotherhood.

285
00:30:06,470 --> 00:30:11,750
So the question of Isobel wouldn't be an issue here, but many of them end up joining Ansar Mohammed here.

286
00:30:12,350 --> 00:30:17,120
And what's so striking is that Isobel doesn't seem to be in effect here yet either.

287
00:30:18,530 --> 00:30:22,790
Now in this period, there's this broader challenge for some elephants,

288
00:30:23,000 --> 00:30:28,280
namely the association of these bushy, bearded men with violence both within and beyond Egypt.

289
00:30:28,850 --> 00:30:38,479
In the case of within Egypt. We have the example of the upper Egyptian branches of the Jamaat e Islami engaging in

290
00:30:38,480 --> 00:30:43,790
coercive enforcement of the Islamic obligation of commanding right and forbidding wrong.

291
00:30:43,790 --> 00:30:49,040
Do three levels to this obligation by, you know, in one's heart, by tongue and by hand.

292
00:30:49,340 --> 00:30:52,010
And they are choosing to engage in the first,

293
00:30:52,430 --> 00:30:59,330
which is in many respects actually not really reflective of how this duty has been understood historically.

294
00:30:59,960 --> 00:31:06,260
Because if we were to look at Michael Cook's magisterial work and the duty to command right and forbidden wrong,

295
00:31:06,470 --> 00:31:14,480
we very much see that the coercive enforcement of this duty in Islamic history almost exclusively is identified with state authorities,

296
00:31:14,720 --> 00:31:20,750
in part because it is such a double edged sword, powerful mode of social regulation.

297
00:31:20,990 --> 00:31:23,930
But it can also lead to incredible infighting.

298
00:31:26,150 --> 00:31:31,610
It's also the case, though, that there's the association of bushy, bearded men with violence outside of Egypt.

299
00:31:31,610 --> 00:31:41,640
And here we come to 1979 to the attack on the Grand Mosque of Mecca by the Jamal or the Salafi group that commands right and wrong.

300
00:31:41,660 --> 00:31:53,270
It does happen. And part of what's so striking about the attack on the Grand Mosque, the Mecca, is not simply that they were wearing bushy beards now.

301
00:31:53,270 --> 00:31:57,649
It's simply that some of them actually appeared to have properly Salafi beards that

302
00:31:57,650 --> 00:32:02,300
we can see trimmed moustaches among some many of the men who have been arrested.

303
00:32:02,630 --> 00:32:06,070
But also the fact of how they are then understood.

304
00:32:06,140 --> 00:32:14,630
And here I'm quoting from a newspaper interview with Salman bin Abdulaziz in a Saudi newspaper from 1980.

305
00:32:14,840 --> 00:32:17,960
Now, so men bin Abdulaziz is the current king at this point.

306
00:32:18,200 --> 00:32:22,970
He was the governor of Riyadh, is, of course, the father of Mohammed bin Salman.

307
00:32:23,450 --> 00:32:30,290
And he explained at this time in this interview in a Saudi newspaper, I spent a lot of time reading Saudi newspapers from this period.

308
00:32:30,860 --> 00:32:37,670
He explains that the problem with the JAMA Festival was not simply that they were present there,

309
00:32:38,410 --> 00:32:43,670
that it was also that they were hiding under the name of Salafism.

310
00:32:44,540 --> 00:32:52,610
Some associate that the issue was not simply their engagement in violence and that they resemble herders,

311
00:32:52,940 --> 00:32:55,940
but that they were laying claim to the mantle of Salafism.

312
00:32:57,000 --> 00:33:03,900
So this brings us to the late 1970s, and particularly to Saudi Arabia,

313
00:33:04,140 --> 00:33:11,610
but to the role of a certain Egyptian in Saudi Arabia by a man named Ahmed Ali Taha, the man who actually passed away recently.

314
00:33:11,790 --> 00:33:19,200
Now, the man had received his Ph.D. at Eisenhart in 1973 and had gone to Imam to teach.

315
00:33:19,470 --> 00:33:24,660
From 77 to 81 at the Islamic University in Virginia was in some sense this fascinating

316
00:33:24,660 --> 00:33:30,030
intellectual meeting point of activists and thinkers throughout the Middle East and South Asia.

317
00:33:30,870 --> 00:33:34,589
It had many South Asian Muslim scholars and activists.

318
00:33:34,590 --> 00:33:38,100
There had many Arab Muslim scholars and activists there.

319
00:33:39,260 --> 00:33:40,850
Now, what I'm interested in, though,

320
00:33:41,030 --> 00:33:49,760
is a series of articles that Ryan wrote in the Official Journal of the Islamic University of Medina in the late 1970s.

321
00:33:50,150 --> 00:33:58,040
And in the first of these two articles, he laid out the Hadith narrations regarding the necessity of growing the beards,

322
00:33:58,370 --> 00:34:06,240
and specifically here stating that these narrations about the practices that orient one to God is not the sin of the situation.

323
00:34:06,410 --> 00:34:12,860
And one of the Hadith approaches he cited included both growing the beard and trimming the moustache.

324
00:34:13,220 --> 00:34:15,320
Okay, so he's foregrounding the beard. Great.

325
00:34:15,350 --> 00:34:22,400
But what he also does, which is so interesting to us, is he introduces in Salafi circles or as a solo scholar.

326
00:34:22,800 --> 00:34:27,920
The first time I could find a real discussion of the question of the minimum length of the beard,

327
00:34:28,340 --> 00:34:32,730
and he asks the question, Should the beard be a minimum of one cup an hour to cover a cup of the type?

328
00:34:33,200 --> 00:34:39,709
And he argues that it should be one contribute to a minimum of a fist to the extent that it

329
00:34:39,710 --> 00:34:46,910
serves a man's distinguished bearing and that those who reject any form of trimming the.

330
00:34:47,980 --> 00:34:56,080
They really risk it becoming frightening and that there's a real concern that this will look uncouth, that it will look frightening,

331
00:34:56,920 --> 00:35:04,930
and that the proper beard allows Muslim men to not just represent their party, but to represent their masculinity.

332
00:35:05,350 --> 00:35:12,580
So we here have the fist as a measurement. We also have a real concern with visibility of what it looks like.

333
00:35:13,000 --> 00:35:16,570
It's not simply a question of reflection of internal state.

334
00:35:16,900 --> 00:35:20,620
There's a real social performance aspect here to.

335
00:35:21,750 --> 00:35:27,930
But part of what's so striking about Adrian is how much of a minority voice he is during this period.

336
00:35:28,320 --> 00:35:35,310
We have a series of pamphlets written by Salafi scholars from the late seventies through mid 1980s,

337
00:35:35,700 --> 00:35:40,350
and we have no evidence here of a consensus on the fist as a minimal measure.

338
00:35:41,040 --> 00:35:49,170
We have a 1982 pamphlet by a serious Salafi Osman bin Abdelkader or something that says nothing about the length of the period.

339
00:35:49,830 --> 00:35:56,940
We have a 1984 work by a Jordanian, Salafi and student of Muhammad Nasr, Beni Ali al-Harbi,

340
00:35:57,180 --> 00:36:03,270
that states that the beard stretches, quote, from the hair below the lower lip to the hair that grows under the chin.

341
00:36:04,610 --> 00:36:06,890
This trend also extends to Saudi Arabia.

342
00:36:07,190 --> 00:36:14,870
In a 1985 pamphlet, the Saudi scholar Hamoud al-Zawahiri notes that the Prophet Mohammed had a thick spear, that he was cut.

343
00:36:16,190 --> 00:36:21,810
Indeed, even Abdulaziz even best doesn't mention a minimal length of the beard.

344
00:36:21,830 --> 00:36:25,940
In a 1983 ruling in the Kuwaiti Islamist magazine.

345
00:36:26,210 --> 00:36:34,640
Mr. So the fist is not yet standard among Salafis across the Middle East and indeed in of 1986.

346
00:36:34,640 --> 00:36:40,310
But whether the then head of Ansar al-Sunna, Mohammed Zia mohammed, Ali Abdul Rahim.

347
00:36:40,340 --> 00:36:47,420
Note that it's forbidden to shave the beard, yet doesn't specify whether one can commit and if so, to what extent.

348
00:36:48,320 --> 00:36:55,630
There is, however, an Egyptian Salafi during this period that makes it clear statement about the fist and that is Mohammed bin Ismail.

349
00:36:56,750 --> 00:37:01,210
What this point is a second tier figure in the Egyptian society.

350
00:37:01,460 --> 00:37:08,750
He later becomes much more important owing to his founding role in the CIA or some of the court in Alexandria.

351
00:37:09,020 --> 00:37:10,370
But in the mid 1980s,

352
00:37:10,490 --> 00:37:19,580
he is very much in the second tier and argues that the question is whether one should trim the beard to a minimum of a fist or two fists,

353
00:37:19,970 --> 00:37:26,390
and that the most appropriate solution is that the beard not exceed this in order to avoid excess.

354
00:37:27,140 --> 00:37:34,600
But what's really striking here is that apart from a look at them, we have no evidence that the beard is the standard measurement,

355
00:37:34,610 --> 00:37:39,650
while a decade later it will very clearly be the standard measurements.

356
00:37:41,080 --> 00:37:47,560
So the question then becomes what happens? What happens between the 1980s and the 1990?

357
00:37:48,980 --> 00:37:55,340
And to understand this, we need to think about the religio political scene in Egypt in the second half of the eighties,

358
00:37:55,610 --> 00:37:58,340
namely the role of jihadi groups,

359
00:37:58,700 --> 00:38:08,540
most of whom were not so fussy in targeting civilian populations and state institutions, in assassinating ministers and journalists alike.

360
00:38:09,620 --> 00:38:18,440
Now the problem here is the bushy bearded man problem, namely that you have Salafis with their bushy beard as you have.

361
00:38:18,710 --> 00:38:24,440
You had the jihadi groups whose members support bushy beard, and they're hard to distinguish.

362
00:38:24,710 --> 00:38:32,990
And so what we start to hear from Saleh from this period is this problem of getting hauled in with the jihadis because they look like them.

363
00:38:33,050 --> 00:38:41,470
This is the problem of state security services. And here we have a 1987 article, an editorial in Ansar Assuntos mouthpiece Tawhid,

364
00:38:41,750 --> 00:38:49,340
in which the journal the editor events his frustration that in the aftermath of incidents of terror and violence in Cairo and he uses those terms,

365
00:38:49,610 --> 00:38:50,659
writers have, quote,

366
00:38:50,660 --> 00:39:00,110
sought to make people fear every bearded man accusing those who wear the beard and the long road robe or that the beb of terrorism.

367
00:39:00,830 --> 00:39:08,870
This is also echoed in Saudi publications, particularly in a band which is affiliated with the Saudi Sahwa or Awakening movement.

368
00:39:09,260 --> 00:39:15,140
And in a 1987 article in that journal and author wrote an article titled Where Is Egypt Going?

369
00:39:15,560 --> 00:39:19,760
And noted the increasing popularity of the beard and the long road in Egypt.

370
00:39:20,210 --> 00:39:25,130
And he complained that proponents of jihad in Egypt were not necessarily Salafi.

371
00:39:26,190 --> 00:39:36,690
So to come back to the anecdote that I opened with of Ahmed Nasser and announcing what it means to be Sunni, we have got a visibility problem.

372
00:39:37,410 --> 00:39:43,649
We've got a problem that Salafis are not visibly distinct from their non Salafi counterparts.

373
00:39:43,650 --> 00:39:48,780
And that happens to be the case that those counterparts are coming in for significant repression from

374
00:39:48,780 --> 00:39:55,499
state security agencies and that quite a few Salafis are not terribly happy about being dragged along,

375
00:39:55,500 --> 00:40:03,659
and understandably so. It's also during this period that we see the emergence of the third as a condition of being a Salafi.

376
00:40:03,660 --> 00:40:06,810
And here there's two fatwas that I want to bring to the story.

377
00:40:07,230 --> 00:40:15,150
One is a fatwa that was issued in response to a letter from a student at the School of Maritime Transportation in Egypt.

378
00:40:16,350 --> 00:40:17,520
And it's to Abdulaziz Aziz.

379
00:40:17,520 --> 00:40:25,920
And it basically explains that the School of Maritime Transportation requires that student say, what should this student do?

380
00:40:26,700 --> 00:40:33,989
The beard is obligatory. So what should you do? Is in the school, he is facing the coercive power of the Egyptian state,

381
00:40:33,990 --> 00:40:41,820
particularly of a set of regulations that also apply for the military and says, listen, we're going to try to sidestep the problem.

382
00:40:43,210 --> 00:40:50,260
Get me a letter certifying your religious commitment as a skier from the head of our son, Mohammed Ali Abdul Rahim.

383
00:40:50,470 --> 00:40:55,240
And we will help you transfer to a Saudi university such as the Islamic University.

384
00:40:56,290 --> 00:41:04,150
By contrast, there's another such request from 1988 as well to stymie another major Saudi summit.

385
00:41:04,930 --> 00:41:11,800
You've been able to say me in takes, what one might say says the less accommodationist approach.

386
00:41:12,460 --> 00:41:17,980
His first request you get is from a conscript in the Egyptian army asking what should he do?

387
00:41:18,580 --> 00:41:28,629
And instructs him that the entirety of the army's lower ranks should disobey their superiors and should instruct them that,

388
00:41:28,630 --> 00:41:35,320
quote, This sin is the reason for the failure and defeat of Arab armies here to Israel.

389
00:41:36,290 --> 00:41:47,660
So this time is not providing a workaround, let's say, and is, you know, potentially exposing the folks who listen to him to significant consequences.

390
00:41:48,350 --> 00:41:54,290
Now, in this context, once our son has had Muhammad Ali Abdul Rahim offer something of an offering,

391
00:41:54,710 --> 00:42:02,030
and he argues that while growing the beard is indeed obligatory, such an obligation is not absolute.

392
00:42:02,360 --> 00:42:08,479
And in those instances in which the, quote, discord caused by growing a beard is greater than that from shaving it,

393
00:42:08,480 --> 00:42:12,110
the invocation of fitna here in shaving is permissible.

394
00:42:12,440 --> 00:42:17,580
So there are extenuating circumstances that can justify shaping the beard.

395
00:42:18,170 --> 00:42:24,530
But even this argument for extenuating circumstances underscores this broader shift that the

396
00:42:24,530 --> 00:42:32,000
beard has become a crucial aspect of what it means to be absolutely a non-negotiable condition.

397
00:42:32,360 --> 00:42:37,640
So that then to negotiate an exception, you need to create extenuating circumstances.

398
00:42:38,870 --> 00:42:41,480
So by the mid 1990s,

399
00:42:41,840 --> 00:42:52,670
the consensus that a Salafi beard was distinguished by a fist length at a minimum and a trimmed moustache was the norm, not the exception.

400
00:42:53,940 --> 00:43:01,169
But in 1995, we find a heated debate on the topic of the beard between Ibn Bez and Mohammed Nasreddin,

401
00:43:01,170 --> 00:43:06,390
although many said two of the three heavyweights of cell to have both beating scholars.

402
00:43:07,260 --> 00:43:10,200
The issue at hand is whether one can trim the beard.

403
00:43:10,830 --> 00:43:19,530
IBN does argues that the obligation to grow the period is absolute, whereas al-Banna argues that it is permissible to trim it up to exist,

404
00:43:19,680 --> 00:43:28,259
and that claiming that it's impermissible to trim it is constitutes bizarre idiocy or additional innovation,

405
00:43:28,260 --> 00:43:38,070
which is to say a requirement added on to a legitimate act of worship that is not actually based in legitimate texts,

406
00:43:38,280 --> 00:43:42,120
that the act of worship is required, but the additional requirement is illegitimate.

407
00:43:42,300 --> 00:43:48,780
Now, needless to say, lobbing a charge of bid of any form in Salafi circles is really.

408
00:43:49,860 --> 00:43:56,879
Those are fighting words. But leaving that fight aside, what we can know is that despite their differences,

409
00:43:56,880 --> 00:44:02,670
if in bed and other than to agree that the fist is the minimal measure, the fist is the reference point.

410
00:44:02,970 --> 00:44:08,990
Whereas. Just a decade prior, there was no such consensus.

411
00:44:09,010 --> 00:44:16,070
It was just Mohammed bin Ismail. So what's the significance of this story?

412
00:44:16,100 --> 00:44:24,530
How are we to understand self instead of his claim to replicate the golden model of the Prophet Muhammad's community in seventh century Arabia?

413
00:44:24,920 --> 00:44:33,560
Put differently, what does it mean to cite the past? How does citation involve a process of textual and social reconstruction?

414
00:44:34,070 --> 00:44:37,730
And what are the assumptions that undergird this project now?

415
00:44:37,850 --> 00:44:43,460
So is it claims to continuity with the seventh century casts light on this movement so understanding.

416
00:44:44,300 --> 00:44:47,930
But they tell us very little about its origins or development.

417
00:44:48,650 --> 00:44:50,810
In this talk and in the book more broadly,

418
00:44:51,200 --> 00:44:58,910
I show not only that Salafism is a project best understood in terms of the ideological contestation of the 20th century,

419
00:44:59,120 --> 00:45:02,810
but also that its defining logic of its social practices.

420
00:45:03,140 --> 00:45:03,799
Specifically,

421
00:45:03,800 --> 00:45:14,570
this linkage between ethics and visible self regulation are inextricably linked to the emergence of powerful states and modern mass societies.

422
00:45:15,110 --> 00:45:25,280
Far from politicising daily life. So this is a response to the politicisation of daily life by offering a distinctly modern ethics of communication.

423
00:45:26,030 --> 00:45:32,960
At the same time, though, such projects are often incomplete or ambiguous, as I argue in the book, more broadly,

424
00:45:33,380 --> 00:45:42,560
multiple practices must be performed simultaneously, precisely because of concern with individual practices of facial hair, store pretence or gender.

425
00:45:42,560 --> 00:45:45,410
Segregation is not exclusive to Salafism,

426
00:45:45,740 --> 00:45:51,650
and because practices that distinguish Salafis in one country may not serve that function in another country.

427
00:45:52,780 --> 00:46:01,960
No. An emphasis on practice also reveals the material and perceptual conditions that have transformed Islamic scholarly reasoning in the 20th century,

428
00:46:02,320 --> 00:46:08,830
building on previous scholarship that dissects the subtle yet significant transformations of longstanding tools.

429
00:46:09,700 --> 00:46:19,180
And here, I think, for example, Ginette Kadri's wonderful recent book on Sheikh Mohammed and of course, Customs A Man's Series of works.

430
00:46:19,960 --> 00:46:30,190
This book explores practices of citation as they are transmitted through Islamic print media and embodied by men and women in daily practices.

431
00:46:30,670 --> 00:46:35,440
My emphasis on Salafism as a project of social reconstruction and textual

432
00:46:35,440 --> 00:46:41,139
reconstruction your own ostensibly straightforward textual approach also challenged.

433
00:46:41,140 --> 00:46:46,390
This challenges the assumption, sometimes implicit, other times explicit that.

434
00:46:47,430 --> 00:46:57,090
Contemporary Islamic movements rely on a model of embodied practice that is continuous in its CoreLogic with a premodern Islamic ethical tradition.

435
00:46:57,630 --> 00:47:05,430
This approach was prominent in the scholarship on the Anthropology of Islam valuably cast light on engagement with pre-modern religious texts.

436
00:47:05,820 --> 00:47:12,690
Yet the story of Salafi piety generally in social practice in particular reveals how

437
00:47:12,690 --> 00:47:18,420
the citation of past authorities is not necessarily a historically continuous act.

438
00:47:18,870 --> 00:47:24,959
As such, I argue that contemporary forms of Islamic piety are shaped primarily by the

439
00:47:24,960 --> 00:47:29,370
communicative conditions of modernity and the social world of the participants,

440
00:47:29,610 --> 00:47:33,630
and only secondarily by this discursive Islamic ethical tradition.

441
00:47:35,360 --> 00:47:35,749
Finally,

442
00:47:35,750 --> 00:47:43,880
this is the story of Islamic law that relies on media sources that are generally considered secondary to understanding the development of Islamic law.

443
00:47:44,750 --> 00:47:53,240
Now, previous studies that foreground such landmark religious texts valuably illustrate the end point of religious debates.

444
00:47:53,630 --> 00:47:59,090
But they don't necessarily tell us as much about the granular process, the ideological contestation,

445
00:47:59,090 --> 00:48:06,320
not merely within a given movement, but among movements that periodicals and pamphlets allow us to reveal.

446
00:48:07,310 --> 00:48:14,180
Some of my focus here is on the power of tracing the process by which legal rulings emerge through periodicals

447
00:48:14,180 --> 00:48:21,530
and pamphlets to understanding some of these what are perceived to be more highbrow questions of Islamic law.

448
00:48:22,010 --> 00:48:28,700
Now, I've covered a lot here, so I'm going to leave it at that. I want to thank Osama again for hosting and moderating.

449
00:48:28,700 --> 00:48:32,330
And I look forward to the questions and conversation that will follow.

450
00:48:33,200 --> 00:48:40,609
Thank you so much, Aaron. That was really sort of a wonderful and broad overview of actually in some respects,

451
00:48:40,610 --> 00:48:45,620
one main theme of your book, because there are so many of the themes you listed for at the beginning.

452
00:48:45,620 --> 00:48:50,360
So I guess it's a message to all the attendees that if you want to get the full picture,

453
00:48:50,430 --> 00:48:53,870
get your hands on the book, and I'm certainly going to be reading the rest of it.

454
00:48:54,770 --> 00:48:59,420
I've got so many questions for you, Aaron, but I'm just going to ask you one to start off with.

455
00:49:00,230 --> 00:49:09,620
You refer to Jeannette Kadri's fantastic recent work and the contrast that he presents between sort of the ruptures of modernity,

456
00:49:09,860 --> 00:49:11,089
transformations of tradition,

457
00:49:11,090 --> 00:49:19,160
as it were, verses the Zaydi and Mahmoud in school of basically saying, Well, there's this continuity and that's what we want to focus on.

458
00:49:19,580 --> 00:49:25,780
And I, I haven't sort of read Jeanette's work carefully enough to really come to a conclusion,

459
00:49:26,540 --> 00:49:32,479
but my initial impulse is to say that at what point is something a break with

460
00:49:32,480 --> 00:49:37,910
tradition that is so distinctive that it really deserves that sort of name.

461
00:49:38,240 --> 00:49:46,280
And I look at the way in which we're thinking about groups like Salafism, which I think you very helpfully identify, have these social dimensions.

462
00:49:46,430 --> 00:49:52,820
There are group dynamics that arise from wider social forces and indeed political forces, the emergence of the nation state and so on.

463
00:49:53,810 --> 00:49:59,150
To what extent is that different, for example, in the pre-modern world to the emergence of the hub as a phenomenon?

464
00:49:59,450 --> 00:50:02,719
Right. That's such a radical transformation.

465
00:50:02,720 --> 00:50:09,049
One could argue that we're no longer really referring to sort of the Koran.

466
00:50:09,050 --> 00:50:15,500
And sooner or as we sort of might know in the early period about the transformation

467
00:50:15,500 --> 00:50:22,010
from the localised sinners of various states with a canonisation of Islamic law,

468
00:50:22,010 --> 00:50:25,460
as Shamsi is nicely put it.

469
00:50:25,880 --> 00:50:33,100
And so yeah, I kind of that's one of the things that makes me wonder is it a case of processions,

470
00:50:33,410 --> 00:50:38,570
so to speak, like things are actually just happening the way they always have been on some level?

471
00:50:39,360 --> 00:50:51,290
Well, so I think actually the example of this transition to the mass system and the adoption of the method of the paucity of a whole Hadiths critique

472
00:50:51,890 --> 00:51:02,030
of local rulings and this but this real reliance on the Hadith corpus as the basis for decision making is a really interesting parallel.

473
00:51:02,300 --> 00:51:09,140
Now, in some sense, I think this transformation we're seeing in the context of modernity is as momentous as that.

474
00:51:10,040 --> 00:51:14,450
Right now, the question of whether the more things change, the more they stay the same.

475
00:51:15,530 --> 00:51:21,470
It's certainly the case that we have these kinds of developments in pre-modern Islamic history.

476
00:51:22,000 --> 00:51:22,110
I mean,

477
00:51:22,160 --> 00:51:34,459
I think works such as tonight is a really helpful helping of a think of almost a post must have world or a world in which methods continue to exist.

478
00:51:34,460 --> 00:51:39,680
I mean he calls this uses the term the trans regional method in which they continue to exist,

479
00:51:39,680 --> 00:51:45,080
but they don't have the same social, political and institutional weight.

480
00:51:46,350 --> 00:51:56,220
And I think the scholarship in some sense is still trying to figure out how to make sense of how that has shaped Islamic thought in practice.

481
00:51:56,820 --> 00:52:01,590
I think another really important shift is the nationalisation of religious authority.

482
00:52:02,040 --> 00:52:05,699
The fact that we have, for example, in 1895, the richest in Egypt of a state,

483
00:52:05,700 --> 00:52:12,450
we'll see the emergence of expertise as the model for authority and so forth.

484
00:52:12,870 --> 00:52:19,500
We've got this really momentous intellectual and social shifts of modernity and also political shifts, of course.

485
00:52:19,710 --> 00:52:27,940
And the question then is how do we make sense of what are the stakes of making sense of them in terms of this longer Islamic tradition?

486
00:52:27,960 --> 00:52:33,270
Because, look, I went down the Islamic studies rabbit hole precisely so I could ask the question not merely of what's different,

487
00:52:33,270 --> 00:52:40,080
but also what is simpler. And what's so striking about the Salafis when we think about their project of reconstruction,

488
00:52:40,830 --> 00:52:46,680
is that they cite a series of Hadith reports in talking about social distinction.

489
00:52:47,730 --> 00:52:52,950
They cite a series of have these reports that are primarily premised on distinguishing Muslims from non-Muslim.

490
00:52:52,950 --> 00:52:57,990
And in some countries, it's about distinguishing yourself from the Jews, the Christians, the Zoroastrians.

491
00:52:58,560 --> 00:53:05,880
Now, the challenge in the post-colonial period is not Muslim non-Muslim distinction, it's Muslim Muslims, it's internal self differentiation.

492
00:53:06,210 --> 00:53:14,760
And in some respects, that makes the Hadith corpus a starting point, but only a starting point for these practices of social distinction,

493
00:53:15,180 --> 00:53:23,760
that the question of internal Muslim distinction are really not present in the corpus in a way that is accessible to Salafis.

494
00:53:24,300 --> 00:53:28,440
So we can draw out the continuity of the pre-modern tradition, probably construct.

495
00:53:28,800 --> 00:53:34,140
We can even draw out the ways in which aspects of the Salafi project draw on that.

496
00:53:34,830 --> 00:53:46,379
What I would say, though, is that there's a danger in making too great a claim to continuity, because the danger is not merely that.

497
00:53:46,380 --> 00:53:53,550
It obscures the extent to which to which Salafis are doing things in very different ways.

498
00:53:53,880 --> 00:54:04,490
And the internal M.O. of Salafism as a project is that they are similar to their ideological adversaries, such as secular nationalists or Islamists.

499
00:54:04,770 --> 00:54:09,089
So the fact that all of them are concerned with visible visibility,

500
00:54:09,090 --> 00:54:13,770
that they're all concerned with beards, they all have the claim about facial hair is not a coincidence.

501
00:54:14,070 --> 00:54:18,360
It's a reflection that they are all emerging in the shadow of the modernising Egyptian state.

502
00:54:19,260 --> 00:54:23,339
But I also think that one of the benefits of foregrounding the ruptures of the 20th

503
00:54:23,340 --> 00:54:27,000
century is it allows us to think comparatively without the religious traditions.

504
00:54:27,330 --> 00:54:34,530
And here and this is something I talk about in the book, I really think with a 1994 article by Soloveitchik,

505
00:54:34,560 --> 00:54:43,110
who is a scholar at Yeshiva University in New York City, which is the flagship the academic flagship of modern Orthodox Judaism.

506
00:54:43,740 --> 00:54:47,590
He's also the son of Joseph Stalin, who, along with ROUDEBUSH,

507
00:54:47,610 --> 00:54:54,300
a place seen as one of the two sort of towering figures of modern Orthodox Judaism in the 20th century red states.

508
00:54:54,480 --> 00:55:00,030
Now there's this article that the younger self wrote in the Jewish tradition in 1984,

509
00:55:00,270 --> 00:55:10,230
in which he identifies the increasing stringency of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Haredim Jewish communities over the course of the 20th century.

510
00:55:10,680 --> 00:55:18,150
And he does it through a particular legal question of the requisite amount of food required to perform certain commandments,

511
00:55:18,870 --> 00:55:20,550
perform certain religious obligations.

512
00:55:20,760 --> 00:55:30,810
But essentially what he shows is that the religious the stringency accepted by pious orthodox and ultra orthodox Jews by the end of the 20th century,

513
00:55:31,650 --> 00:55:43,020
would have made their predecessors, their pious predecessors, as it were, in the early 20th century, lacks to take the tradition seriously.

514
00:55:43,590 --> 00:55:44,760
The question is why?

515
00:55:45,030 --> 00:55:57,180
And here we can discover some real parallels with some in the he identifies the spread of print and the normative power of modern science.

516
00:55:57,390 --> 00:56:00,450
And so we think about why it's so important to be precise.

517
00:56:00,780 --> 00:56:03,860
First of all, Salafis aren't the only Muslims who care about being precise.

518
00:56:03,870 --> 00:56:11,610
It's worth stating that. It is also the case that this debate over precision among all Muslims, especially Salafis,

519
00:56:11,850 --> 00:56:19,530
is crucially inflected by the idea that it's precise practice that is most legitimate and that comes from the norm,

520
00:56:19,650 --> 00:56:23,070
the emergence of the normative documents of modern science.

521
00:56:23,460 --> 00:56:33,480
We also might say that while the rupture of Soloveitchik story is a rupture in some sense of migration to the United States and the Holocaust,

522
00:56:33,840 --> 00:56:39,840
the rupture of the Salafi story of the Egyptian story is the fall of the caliphate,

523
00:56:40,200 --> 00:56:45,630
the decline of the modern system, and a new set of questions that come to be.

524
00:56:46,360 --> 00:56:48,670
In the context of a post-colonial state.

525
00:56:49,180 --> 00:56:58,930
And so part of the reason I argue for thinking about the 20th century isn't simply because that's where the material left me,

526
00:56:59,110 --> 00:57:04,510
but mostly because it really opens up, analytically speaking, so exciting comparative angles,

527
00:57:04,750 --> 00:57:10,360
because then some of these are taken out of this box where Salafism is explanatory in terms of

528
00:57:10,360 --> 00:57:17,110
Salafism or even a boxed of this exceptional Middle East or Islam to a broader global perspective.

529
00:57:17,380 --> 00:57:20,650
Right. Fantastic. Thank you. A really comprehensive answer.

530
00:57:20,660 --> 00:57:25,360
And it's sort of also generated actually a question.

531
00:57:25,360 --> 00:57:30,549
And I hope the sort of earlier question is, well, indulge me if I go to the second question,

532
00:57:30,550 --> 00:57:36,430
because actually directly responds to or sort of asks you to expand your analogy,

533
00:57:36,440 --> 00:57:44,860
you did an interesting analogy with Orthodox Judaism and the Heretic movement in in I guess, North America, but it probably extends beyond that.

534
00:57:45,460 --> 00:57:49,810
And someone is asking you to maybe test the limits of your knowledge by asking

535
00:57:49,810 --> 00:57:53,720
is there a parallel or similarity with Christian sects in Europe to Salafism?

536
00:57:53,740 --> 00:58:01,180
What is your opinion? I you know, one of the important things I have learned in doing a few things, you know,

537
00:58:01,180 --> 00:58:05,680
about the things you don't know about and you don't claim to know about things you don't know about.

538
00:58:05,890 --> 00:58:10,780
So I I'm going to acknowledge that that's not a parallel that I can draw.

539
00:58:11,290 --> 00:58:13,750
This is I think why is for people like yourself and myself,

540
00:58:15,100 --> 00:58:21,309
though I did want to ask though and you kind of talked about the normative power of science.

541
00:58:21,310 --> 00:58:24,490
Does that come up in the book? Yes. Okay. Fantastic.

542
00:58:25,510 --> 00:58:28,930
So it particularly comes up in the discussion of pressing issues,

543
00:58:29,230 --> 00:58:36,400
because the essential question, legally speaking of the praying and shoes in the Hadith corpus,

544
00:58:36,400 --> 00:58:45,610
then in the motherhood tradition, is one of ritual cleanliness, of purifying the shoes so that they don't have the jester.

545
00:58:45,910 --> 00:58:49,360
Right now in the 20th century.

546
00:58:49,900 --> 00:58:57,310
So first of all, sort of to kind of say what is that inches drops off with the exception of the high school among Muslims more broadly.

547
00:58:57,610 --> 00:59:04,540
In part because we have this transition from Islam as a desert project to Islam as an urban project,

548
00:59:04,540 --> 00:59:09,520
and you have the development of these ornate mosques, often with very nice carpets.

549
00:59:10,120 --> 00:59:17,620
And we had the emergence of this norm against wearing shoes in mosques then and then tell us this in the mid 20th century.

550
00:59:17,920 --> 00:59:21,970
Now, the other thing I would note, though, and this is sort of striking to the 20th century, is that.

551
00:59:23,090 --> 00:59:27,320
When somebody is need to explain why they're not praying and choose.

552
00:59:27,830 --> 00:59:37,970
Right. They conflate in fascinating ways between the purity laws of the Islamic tradition and modern hygiene.

553
00:59:38,240 --> 00:59:44,450
So they one of the claims that's made is that Islam is the religion of cleanliness and

554
00:59:44,450 --> 00:59:50,150
will do and to Yemen are given as examples of Islam being the religion of cleanliness.

555
00:59:50,450 --> 00:59:56,960
But cleanliness and modern hygiene are not the same as.

556
00:59:58,390 --> 01:00:03,370
Ritual purity, right? It's not that they're inconsistent with them, but they're simply not the same.

557
01:00:03,730 --> 01:00:06,430
And that's the argument against praying and shoes.

558
01:00:07,120 --> 01:00:16,120
Increasingly, it becomes it would be to a it would be rude, it would muck up the carpet even if you were ritually pure and so forth,

559
01:00:16,300 --> 01:00:21,520
which is to say it's employing a logic that is essentially second tier.

560
01:00:21,520 --> 01:00:25,419
I mean, the other logic that is employed is it will cause fitna in your mosque.

561
01:00:25,420 --> 01:00:27,090
So you shouldn't do it. Right.

562
01:00:27,910 --> 01:00:38,070
But in the forties and fifties, when serious leaders were arguing for the importance of pagans, Jews didn't care that it caused a commotion.

563
01:00:38,080 --> 01:00:46,780
That was the whole darn point. It was this incredibly provocative move to distinguish Salafis from their not Salafi counterparts.

564
01:00:47,140 --> 01:00:52,630
And part of the move here was, you know, part of what we're doing here is that Salafis are often praying and not policy,

565
01:00:53,030 --> 01:00:58,630
and they really want to be able to distinguish themselves. And training issues is a real way to distinguish yourself.

566
01:00:58,840 --> 01:01:05,050
It's also a way to drive other folks absolutely crazy because, you know, what are you doing?

567
01:01:05,100 --> 01:01:06,790
You know, the response, right, is, what are you doing?

568
01:01:07,120 --> 01:01:15,159
And so the fact that by the late 20th century, fitna was being in a dove is being invoked is really,

569
01:01:15,160 --> 01:01:21,520
really interesting because the point from the beginning, not the whole point, but that was one of the points.

570
01:01:21,520 --> 01:01:25,570
It was emulating the prophet in a way that was also socially provocative.

571
01:01:25,870 --> 01:01:31,810
Right. I mean, your sort of comments about praying in shoes and I've not read that chapter yet,

572
01:01:32,200 --> 01:01:39,010
but it's a reminder to me, actually growing up in Manchester in the 1990 and 2000,

573
01:01:39,460 --> 01:01:45,370
that there were people in Manchester who called themselves Salafis who would actually create

574
01:01:45,370 --> 01:01:49,000
commotion in mosques by coming in with their shoes and insisting on praying in them.

575
01:01:49,300 --> 01:01:53,680
And so, I mean, these sorts of things have their afterlives and in Europe as well.

576
01:01:54,490 --> 01:02:02,140
So I want to go to the to another question from the audience, and I want to remind the audience, you know, please feel free to put in your questions.

577
01:02:02,860 --> 01:02:09,220
So, Nafisa, he asks, I think that the discussion has been overwhelmingly about the Arab world.

578
01:02:10,030 --> 01:02:13,959
This might again stretch your knowledge a bit, but you are a student of classism.

579
01:02:13,960 --> 01:02:16,520
And so I think it's the right question.

580
01:02:17,230 --> 01:02:22,630
Do you want to say something about the Salafis and India, Pakistan and Malaysia and other parts of the Muslim world, perhaps.

581
01:02:23,200 --> 01:02:28,849
So this is a transnational story of Salafism that's focussed on the Arab world and in particular in Egypt,

582
01:02:28,850 --> 01:02:36,810
that one could write a history of Salafism in South Asia, say, with a group such as al-Qaida.

583
01:02:37,030 --> 01:02:44,630
And one of the interesting things that we see among scholars in, of course,

584
01:02:44,650 --> 01:02:53,830
the 20th century is the increasing adoption of the lock up book, the sort of name of the scholars, name of these.

585
01:02:54,370 --> 01:02:59,830
So it's interesting. So it's clear that Salafism is also a project in South Asia.

586
01:03:00,870 --> 01:03:09,330
Now I chose to focus the project on the Arab world, on Egypt in particular, because every transnational project needs a geographic centre.

587
01:03:09,870 --> 01:03:13,080
What I would argue is twofold. One is that.

588
01:03:14,320 --> 01:03:19,990
Arabs Salafis have been have very much shaped this discourse must very much shape practice.

589
01:03:20,020 --> 01:03:28,630
I'd also say, though, that there's some really interesting intersections between South Asian scholars and Arab scholars on this matter.

590
01:03:29,110 --> 01:03:32,649
And something I bring up in the book, but it didn't mention the talk.

591
01:03:32,650 --> 01:03:37,590
Today is actually a pamphlet that was edited by Abdel Aziz Ibn.

592
01:03:38,470 --> 01:03:46,480
And it was originally written by Muhammad Zakaria Alawi, so a leading Deobandi scholar from this period.

593
01:03:46,840 --> 01:03:56,440
It was a pamphlet on the. This was before any of these pamphlets on the beard had started coming out, and it was discussing the idea.

594
01:03:56,800 --> 01:04:00,040
But this was a Deobandi scholar. This is not a salacious issue scholar.

595
01:04:00,400 --> 01:04:06,970
And this happened to be a Deobandi scholar who in the mid 1970s had migrated to Saudi Arabia.

596
01:04:07,210 --> 01:04:11,680
It had originally been published in Urdu and here it was being translated in Arabic.

597
01:04:12,160 --> 01:04:22,810
And so this is in some sense, there's a story to be told that after my story about the interaction between these understandings

598
01:04:23,080 --> 01:04:28,570
of the beard between the Middle East and South Asia or between the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

599
01:04:28,780 --> 01:04:30,700
So I started so in writing this book,

600
01:04:31,120 --> 01:04:39,280
I certainly wouldn't say that my ambition or what I achieved was to tell a comprehensive story of some of the practice throughout the world.

601
01:04:39,640 --> 01:04:49,360
Well, I would say that my goal was to tell a new and in-depth the North story of the emergence of Salafi practice in the Arab world, a key centre,

602
01:04:50,320 --> 01:04:59,440
and to reveal the logic that drove the emergence of that story to tell us something about the emergence of Salafism as a social project.

603
01:05:00,100 --> 01:05:09,160
And I would say that were I to focus this on another where this book to be written about Salafism in another part of the world,

604
01:05:09,550 --> 01:05:14,380
the trajectory in terms of the local specifics might look somewhat different,

605
01:05:14,770 --> 01:05:18,340
but I strongly suspect that the ultimate end result would be pretty similar.

606
01:05:18,880 --> 01:05:27,670
Right. Thank you. So I wanted to actually ask you specifically about the point that you make midway in the presentation about, I mean,

607
01:05:27,670 --> 01:05:37,720
really wonderful sort of set of three photos, right, where the bids from each other so hasn't been the hum of the city and Abdurrahman with him.

608
01:05:37,820 --> 01:05:46,299
And in some respects in a sense the couple that hasn't really come of age in the modern era yet in the Egyptian debate, incidentally,

609
01:05:46,300 --> 01:05:52,420
I mean Mohammed's victory and then the way that the position in the capital is pretty normative when the end of the month, as far as I understand.

610
01:05:52,420 --> 01:05:59,590
So I mean, they're. Yeah. I mean, that's my sense within the kind of humour that it's like it's supposed to be a hub.

611
01:05:59,710 --> 01:06:05,410
And so the event is a visually sort of when it comes to facial hair indistinguishable in my view, from Salafis.

612
01:06:06,130 --> 01:06:14,980
But in the middle of the 20th century in Egypt, you have a number of very prominent figures who don't really seem to have beards.

613
01:06:16,300 --> 01:06:19,150
You know what we would recognise as beards today? Right.

614
01:06:19,540 --> 01:06:26,650
And I wonder if you could perhaps explain a little I mean, I think I've even seen Chloe, you know, clean shaven.

615
01:06:26,980 --> 01:06:28,750
He, of course, born in 1926.

616
01:06:28,750 --> 01:06:37,780
You have people like Ahmad Shakir, who is, you know, a towering figure in in Hadith studies and highly respected by the onset of Sana mohammed.

617
01:06:37,780 --> 01:06:42,910
That was so the sort of like all who are associated with the US have very often just clean shaven.

618
01:06:43,180 --> 01:06:46,890
You think about all of the famous artists like Corey Abdel Basset, right?

619
01:06:47,350 --> 01:06:54,070
And so I wonder, like and so I've got the I mean, comes from a literature background, so maybe that's to be expected.

620
01:06:54,670 --> 01:06:58,450
But actually I kind of wonder, it's one thing to say you have to have it this link.

621
01:06:58,450 --> 01:07:01,750
It's another thing to say it's perfectly fine to be clean shaven.

622
01:07:02,260 --> 01:07:06,790
And I if you look at that debate in the book at all that, you know,

623
01:07:06,880 --> 01:07:11,110
people are being clean shaven because there's obviously a range between those two positions.

624
01:07:11,530 --> 01:07:18,550
Yeah. So I think this is a really interesting question because the print button.

625
01:07:19,560 --> 01:07:23,850
Model of an Islamic masculinity is a bearded man.

626
01:07:24,300 --> 01:07:28,800
But this is what distinguishes a mature man from a boy.

627
01:07:29,800 --> 01:07:40,320
But this is in some sense the mark of having completed puberty, and his work on this is particularly helpful then fascinating.

628
01:07:40,560 --> 01:07:46,890
And also a Sunday night to my body. And so the question then is, well, what changes in the 20th century?

629
01:07:47,130 --> 01:07:56,280
And here, I really think it's the model of secular nationalism, the clean shaven man, the clean shaven man as representative of progress,

630
01:07:56,280 --> 01:08:02,440
of a future for Egypt, of the intellectual and social and cultural pressures that that put on us.

631
01:08:03,420 --> 01:08:08,760
We already know that they were in a position where they had to really reformulate their claims

632
01:08:08,760 --> 01:08:14,579
to intellectual authority to respond not merely to this radically new intellectual terrain,

633
01:08:14,580 --> 01:08:17,790
but also to the fact that.

634
01:08:19,210 --> 01:08:29,800
The position of the AMA within the system is a mediator between ruler and ruled was really being established by the rise of mass politics.

635
01:08:30,280 --> 01:08:40,989
That this is part of the reason why people like Mohammed Panofsky and the second head of Ansar Abdulrazaq of ICP are

636
01:08:40,990 --> 01:08:49,900
educated us higher than leave because they're ultimately interested in playing a role in politics and society broadly.

637
01:08:50,200 --> 01:08:53,860
And it just doesn't appear to offer opportunities for that.

638
01:08:54,400 --> 01:08:56,980
So we have kind of this massive dislocation.

639
01:08:57,220 --> 01:09:05,980
And in the context of this mass dislocation, we have a model of the offending of the clean shaven men with a moustache.

640
01:09:06,340 --> 01:09:10,000
And this is something of a cultural ideal.

641
01:09:10,510 --> 01:09:17,890
And it's sort of one of these fascinating cultural ideals, because while it's linked to folks who are middle class,

642
01:09:18,010 --> 01:09:21,970
it's also performed by those who will fit that category economically.

643
01:09:22,120 --> 01:09:24,640
And it's a real question for us,

644
01:09:25,210 --> 01:09:35,550
because one of the real challenges of this period for us scholars is that as far as essentially a ladder of social mobility declines precipitously,

645
01:09:35,650 --> 01:09:46,300
that it still works for an elite but and is still remarkably accepting of folks who are blind, such as Abdul Hamid Kish.

646
01:09:46,990 --> 01:09:52,330
And this is out now. So there are still aspects of this old tradition that one can succeed in.

647
01:09:52,510 --> 01:10:00,450
But these are exceptional cases. And that the. For a lot of folks who are considering an education or for that matter,

648
01:10:00,810 --> 01:10:07,320
as another Oxford grad Hillary complex button on Darling shows are considering.

649
01:10:07,650 --> 01:10:11,400
Well, can I split the difference and go to the loom? 54?

650
01:10:12,550 --> 01:10:13,890
Well, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

651
01:10:14,700 --> 01:10:23,939
The question of how to navigate, not just questions of facial hair, but the broader questions of socio economic mobility and identity.

652
01:10:23,940 --> 01:10:33,030
That facial hair index are really challenging ones, so I find it altogether unsurprising that summer scholars often don't have beards.

653
01:10:33,270 --> 01:10:40,680
I will also say this is one of the critiques that some of these makers assert that, you know, the scholars don't have beards anymore.

654
01:10:40,740 --> 01:10:46,830
So this is the evidence that Utsav has declined, that it's an embodied visual evidence.

655
01:10:47,400 --> 01:10:53,970
But this is what tells you they're not really committed anymore, that they're really not the ears of the prophet anymore.

656
01:10:54,360 --> 01:11:02,730
They can't even keep a beard anymore. And so here we might think of the Salafi claim to the beard as in some sense.

657
01:11:03,830 --> 01:11:10,370
You know, we have this premodern Islamic tradition of the period as a marker of masculinity, generally Islamic masculine in particular.

658
01:11:10,610 --> 01:11:15,079
Then we go to the secular nationalist project and then we can see Islamic movements,

659
01:11:15,080 --> 01:11:20,659
and in their emphasis on the period as reacting and drawing on the pre-modern Islamic traditions,

660
01:11:20,660 --> 01:11:25,310
but fundamentally and unmistakeably reacting to the secular nationalist challenge.

661
01:11:25,570 --> 01:11:36,500
All right. Fascinating. I wanted to ask you about and perhaps just a reflection on the the I guess,

662
01:11:36,860 --> 01:11:42,020
the sort of ongoing debate in some respects about what is it to be a Salafi.

663
01:11:42,380 --> 01:11:47,870
So I think this is a very wide ranging debate, to be honest, that there is the genetic genealogy question,

664
01:11:47,870 --> 01:11:53,420
which you kind of allude to in your introduction with, I think, both here and Francophile and so on.

665
01:11:54,170 --> 01:11:58,010
But at the same time, there's also the question of typologies.

666
01:11:58,010 --> 01:12:02,300
And this is something I kind of struggle with as a scholar. I talk about this a little bit in my book.

667
01:12:02,660 --> 01:12:06,139
What does it mean even to categorise these people? These are useful typologies.

668
01:12:06,140 --> 01:12:11,209
They're heretics for analysis and so on. But what you describe from even I mean,

669
01:12:11,210 --> 01:12:20,510
which doesn't altogether surprise me in terms of what he told all the junior officers of the Army isn't terribly cultist, is it?

670
01:12:21,380 --> 01:12:26,780
And we always categorised as a quietest. So, I mean, I think that.

671
01:12:27,950 --> 01:12:35,270
I mean, these these I think you'll agree that these sort of categories are archetypes that we're using for convenience,

672
01:12:35,390 --> 01:12:38,390
but they're all, you know, sort of breaks of the trend.

673
01:12:38,570 --> 01:12:42,860
How do we understand even what they mean? Because that's an extremely subversive position.

674
01:12:42,890 --> 01:12:50,720
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's not coincidental that it makes the statement about officers in another country.

675
01:12:51,050 --> 01:13:02,480
Right. Right. That we might think of quiet ism as reflecting a relationship to local political authorities rather than a lack of engagement

676
01:13:02,480 --> 01:13:08,990
with questions of politics or lack of ability or interest in engagement with questions of political authority more broadly.

677
01:13:09,770 --> 01:13:20,299
I think we might also say that there is a certain ambiguity between holding these theological and legal commitments and commitments to practice,

678
01:13:20,300 --> 01:13:32,060
mind you, and quiet ism, that there are instances where quiet ism as a project, which I think they do take seriously, normatively speaking.

679
01:13:32,720 --> 01:13:36,200
But there are instances where one really needs to thread it.

680
01:13:36,200 --> 01:13:38,959
And you know, and I'm thinking to use my Christmas book here,

681
01:13:38,960 --> 01:13:47,240
I'm about Muhammad Ali to see where he tells the story of something when he when there's a ruler who's engaged in their culture,

682
01:13:47,270 --> 01:13:51,560
what to do about it and sort of like this is to help you as well.

683
01:13:51,830 --> 01:14:01,380
I would simply say I would not call the Progressive a césaire, but I would simply note that this particular action could be categorised as loose,

684
01:14:01,430 --> 01:14:05,780
sort of very, very careful talk about the action, not the person.

685
01:14:06,230 --> 01:14:16,880
So I think look, I think the real the fundamental tension is about how these scholars understand Tawhid, which of course all Muslims uphold.

686
01:14:17,300 --> 01:14:26,270
But the Salafi understanding of Tawhid is a minoritarian one on a theological level within broader Islamic history.

687
01:14:26,270 --> 01:14:34,670
And also over the course of the 20th century comes to really expand, to involve a set of questions or in this context,

688
01:14:35,000 --> 01:14:41,100
potential sources of conflict that simply weren't an issue 50 years before.

689
01:14:41,330 --> 01:14:49,530
So, you know, for example, this question of the beard. It wouldn't have necessarily been an issue for a Salafi scholar in 1930.

690
01:14:49,560 --> 01:14:52,830
It clearly is by the late 1980s.

691
01:14:53,520 --> 01:14:58,829
And one of the things I actually argue in the book is that this is because Salafi conceptions

692
01:14:58,830 --> 01:15:07,070
of Tawhid have really redefined the relationship between data and other actions.

693
01:15:07,110 --> 01:15:17,580
You have traditionally this distinction between evidence and that you have this broad category of or other custom, which is across time and place.

694
01:15:17,850 --> 01:15:26,280
And one of my arguments is actually that some of these. Draw on custom in a way that is historically discontinuous to the tradition that they are.

695
01:15:26,430 --> 01:15:31,080
They adopt a concept of custom that's actually taken from secular nationalism,

696
01:15:31,380 --> 01:15:38,280
the concept of custom in which custom served as the basis of nations at the basis of communities to say,

697
01:15:38,280 --> 01:15:41,190
you know, this is why a custom is so important to target.

698
01:15:41,340 --> 01:15:47,400
And in doing so, they on the one hand, this means that they can lay claim to authority to regulate the past socially,

699
01:15:47,760 --> 01:15:52,350
because these issues of social practice are no longer matters of local discretion.

700
01:15:52,890 --> 01:15:56,400
They are matters of desire that one can't disagree on.

701
01:15:57,180 --> 01:16:03,450
The problem is that if you found this explicitly stated in this way, or this is your analytical sort of deduction.

702
01:16:03,480 --> 01:16:11,400
So what I am able to do is link between changing the use of the term other and an

703
01:16:11,400 --> 01:16:18,900
article that appeared in the Syrian Salafi periodical Islamic in the early 19 9040s,

704
01:16:19,380 --> 01:16:23,730
which we know leading members of our centre were reading.

705
01:16:23,970 --> 01:16:26,700
This is an article by a non Mohammed bin commander.

706
01:16:28,080 --> 01:16:36,510
But what we see after that point is the slow adoption of precisely the concept that al-Khatib is setting for somebody.

707
01:16:36,980 --> 01:16:40,290
I mean, it's worth noting, you're right, that it's a matter of Islam.

708
01:16:40,290 --> 01:16:44,540
He also hosted Muhammad also on a regular basis.

709
01:16:45,960 --> 01:16:54,540
And so this is a really this is sort of one of the points of the book where I nearly fell out of my chair, said, oh, my gosh, what?

710
01:16:54,720 --> 01:17:01,500
And this is, you know, not just important for understanding how Salafis view theology law, but also this.

711
01:17:02,500 --> 01:17:12,310
Expansion of the domain in Basra is actually essentially the precursor to the emergence of the Salafi manhunt that it's from 1930,

712
01:17:12,430 --> 01:17:21,190
36 through sixties, that we see this adjustment, this expansion of embeds into domains formerly occupied by custom.

713
01:17:21,700 --> 01:17:26,750
And then based on that, we see the emergence of the Salafi franchise.

714
01:17:27,550 --> 01:17:34,510
Fascinating. So, you know, I was right to sort of mention only Lucianne, who shows, of course, in your introduction in the footnotes.

715
01:17:34,510 --> 01:17:42,130
But his book, because your arguments seem to sort of fit quite well with some of what he's argued obviously in a transactional register.

716
01:17:42,520 --> 01:17:47,500
But I guess you're sort of enriching the debate specifically with respect to Egypt.

717
01:17:49,240 --> 01:17:55,480
Yeah, it's been a while since I read his book that I will revisit that as well, giving you lots of reading to do.

718
01:17:55,490 --> 01:18:05,979
I'm sure you have plenty of I'm sure you've lots of time used it. So I we have a couple of more I guess they've been sent in as in the Q&A.

719
01:18:05,980 --> 01:18:12,310
But the more I think like comments. So I guess we close with these just reflections on Ahmed Kandil sort of.

720
01:18:12,730 --> 01:18:17,650
Yeah, that's interesting. In Egypt, Mohammed Abdu wrote an article accepting Darwinian Theory of Evolution.

721
01:18:17,650 --> 01:18:22,620
So this is sort of I think there might have been other people as well around the time doing that.

722
01:18:22,840 --> 01:18:28,180
And then later the Muslim Salafis refused, but refused the theory of evolution.

723
01:18:28,450 --> 01:18:32,919
There seems to be a transition from the 19th 20 century position towards science and modernisation.

724
01:18:32,920 --> 01:18:38,980
Of course, you're keen to point out that Abdou doesn't fit that paradigm, but I'll leave it to you to do, I suppose.

725
01:18:40,120 --> 01:18:43,720
So one of those is argument is actually that of Ginnever himself,

726
01:18:44,400 --> 01:18:59,480
the conceptual history of that he was a proponent of moderate reform of Islam and that there is some case for considering that the category,

727
01:18:59,520 --> 01:19:05,679
some of the fire could encompass some folks to some degree in the period in the interwar period.

728
01:19:05,680 --> 01:19:11,920
But that really post-war post-World War two, this category really significantly narrowed.

729
01:19:12,370 --> 01:19:14,050
And this is also how you explain why,

730
01:19:14,350 --> 01:19:21,820
I suppose the publishing house published a lot of things that totally don't fit theologically, legally with Salafism today.

731
01:19:23,380 --> 01:19:35,140
Now, I think part of what's so interesting here is that this underscores a key driver in the formulation of solipsism.

732
01:19:35,140 --> 01:19:43,390
And this is an argument that there makes that this transition from colonial to post-colonial rule is a really important transition,

733
01:19:43,690 --> 01:19:49,719
that because it means that it's just simply a question of internal distinction,

734
01:19:49,720 --> 01:19:58,000
it's that the Egyptian Muslims for the first time have the opportunity to basically have it out over key issues with other Egyptian Muslims.

735
01:19:58,780 --> 01:20:05,530
And so in this category, you really need in this context, you really need to explain where you fit in, what your appeal is.

736
01:20:05,830 --> 01:20:15,100
And so folks who essentially prior to quote unquote, coming to power were at least in some kind of loose Islamic reformist alliance.

737
01:20:15,310 --> 01:20:19,510
They're different. And we see this in any kind of sort of opposition coalition.

738
01:20:20,200 --> 01:20:31,450
Once you have to really hash out those differences, well, then that coalition becomes increasingly hard to hold together.

739
01:20:32,710 --> 01:20:39,730
And so, yeah, I mean, I think this is part of what I'm doing in this book, though, and I think this is important, as we understand,

740
01:20:39,730 --> 01:20:45,940
some of that is to really situate cells in their broader ideological world, to understand the ways in which they.

741
01:20:48,470 --> 01:20:54,799
While claiming distinction are so fundamentally shaped by other movements.

742
01:20:54,800 --> 01:21:00,050
And here we might also think of the broader point about nationalism always being transnational,

743
01:21:00,650 --> 01:21:08,480
that all claims to national identity are not simply internally oriented, that they are also about contrasting yourself with other nations.

744
01:21:08,510 --> 01:21:15,110
You might also think about the global historian Christopher Bailey's point about the emergence of national dress in the

745
01:21:15,110 --> 01:21:22,040
long 19th century and the way in which the emergence of national dress is about nations performing for other nations,

746
01:21:22,520 --> 01:21:26,870
about the extraction of a particular element of indigenous clothing,

747
01:21:27,110 --> 01:21:32,030
and the positioning of that as a national dress to compare with that of other nations.

748
01:21:32,750 --> 01:21:37,130
And so I think it's precisely this process of clarification of the distinction

749
01:21:37,820 --> 01:21:42,230
that really goes into the sense of really allows us to replace solipsism.

750
01:21:43,190 --> 01:21:52,930
As a movement of the 20th century and avoid falling into the trap of telling a story of of us is primarily in terms of the Koran and some.

751
01:21:54,910 --> 01:22:01,360
Aaron Rock Singer. It's really been a wonderful sort of hour and a half of discussion of your latest book,

752
01:22:01,720 --> 01:22:07,060
In The Shade of the Sun Set of your piety in the 20th Century Middle East, I think.

753
01:22:07,750 --> 01:22:14,620
I encourage all of the audience members to try and get their hands on it and explore the other

754
01:22:14,620 --> 01:22:20,110
dimensions that we didn't really explore in quite so much systematic detail besides the beard.

755
01:22:20,740 --> 01:22:26,650
And really, it's been wonderful just having the opportunity to talk to you about your freshly pressed book.

756
01:22:26,920 --> 01:22:28,900
Well, thanks for having me. This is a lot of fun.

757
01:22:28,930 --> 01:22:35,800
And yeah, you know, you can buy the book on Amazon or from the University of California Press authors say it's easier on Amazon.

758
01:22:36,130 --> 01:22:42,820
But yeah, I'm I'm really excited for this book to kind of be read by folks beyond those who study science specifically,

759
01:22:42,820 --> 01:22:47,530
because I think it's had something to say about modern Islam in the modern Middle East more broadly.

760
01:22:48,430 --> 01:22:53,440
Thank you very much. And we look forward to having you in Oxford in person in the not too distant future.

761
01:22:53,710 --> 01:22:58,570
Kick it out. That sounds great to me. All right. Good evening.