Welcome to everyone for one of the Oxford Middle East Centre's Book Review sessions.
And it's really a pleasure for me to welcome back a one of our alumni and a colleague of mine from my doctoral days at Princeton.
So Aaron Rock Singer, who is a an undergraduate from over a decade ago at this point at Oxford in the modern Middle Eastern Studies program,
and afterwards joined Princeton, which is where we met for the first time, and completed his Ph.D. and his first book, Under the Customs of Man.
And we actually attended some of the same classes.
It's really a wonderful opportunity to have you back, Aaron, and really would like to welcome you to talk about your second book.
So Aaron has a young scholar who has been remarkably prolific at this point in his career,
has published two books and I guess over a dozen articles at this point, perhaps, but only ten.
But I understand that there's inflation these days, so I see how we get the 12th.
Right? Right. And and so your work has been particularly focussed on Egypt's modern Egypt and the movement currently known as Salafism.
In many respects. Your interlocutors are people like only those here.
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, and your first book was practising Islam in Egypt, principally Islamic Revival.
And I think it's a very significant contribution that complicates the sort of the generic picture of
the Islamic revival that is seen as suddenly emerging out of out of the blue almost in the 1970s.
And you really sort of do wonderful digging and looking at exactly sort of the context in which various
actors are engaging that in that process and not just sort of it's not a uniform process by any means.
So I think that that was a wonderful sort of contribution to the literature on contemporary Islam.
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.
And this one is in the shade of the sun, solitary piety of the 20th century Middle East.
Thank you. Thank you. And I've started reading the text really sort of brilliantly written and always wonderful to see you engage the sort of
literature so constantly and thoughtfully and really looking forward to your presentation for the next 40 or so minutes.
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.
So without further ado, I'd like to welcome you here and to go ahead and present.
Thank you. The Osama's wonderful to be here virtually.
It'd be even more lovely to be in person, but that would be a very long journey.
I obviously have very, very fond memories of my days at the Middle East Centre at St Anthony's College.
You noted that I had worked with Walter Armbrust when I was a grad student at Oxford,
and in many respects working with Walter was really formative in terms of asking the
kinds of questions of social practice and performance that lie at the heart of this book.
I later went down the Islamic Studies rabbit hole, but this was really before.
And I sometimes joke that insofar as I studied with Walter first, I wasn't socialised as an economist,
but I think that actually that different socialisation has real benefit in terms of thinking through some of the questions of Islamic studies.
I want to thank also Michael Wallace for inviting me and also to Caroline for taking care of all the details for this talk.
And yes, I think back very fondly to our days as grad students are presented at some two classes and
also to kind of see the work that you and other of our classmates have produced since then.
So we get this talk by noting a moment about 12 years ago, in the early 20 tens,
when I first came across the term gender mixing and saying as I was doing my dissertation on the rise of the Islamic revival in 1970s Egypt,
I assumed that this came from Salafism in some sense as a caution,
decided to verify that it actually came from Salafis and to establish when Salafis came to express this concern.
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,
was ultimately to serve as the basis for this for not just an article that was published in Islamic law and society,
but also for this book project more broadly on the emergence of the state.
Social practices.
Now on the screen you can see the cover of my book, which itself is based on a 1980 pamphlet that features prominently in Chapter four of the book.
This is a pamphlet entitled Flirting and the Danger of Women Joining Men in Their Workplace.
It's published by a leading Salafi scholar from Saudi Arabia by the name of Abdul Aziz ibn Bez, or Ibn Best, for sure.
And Ibn Basil Re-occur in the story. Now,
this particular pamphlet was published by a now defunct Egyptian publishing house about
the length and is unusual among depictions among editions excuse me of this text.
And if you tell us the text for probing in its very visceral depiction of the issue at hand.
On the cover of this text. We have an image of an allegedly flaunting woman.
We have her brown hair flowing out from under her blue cloak.
Her blue cloak has a tear on the front belt to suggest a plunging neckline.
And she has a bottle of wine, a glass of wine, and a deck of cards on the table.
Now, this image offers a vivid depiction of Salafism concern with visibility,
which is a key theme of today's talk and its focus on regulating public behaviours.
And it summons a variety of effective responses,
enthusiastic agreement with people who are on board with the Salafi project and for those who are not.
A range of others reactions. Now, if a picture is worth a thousand words,
this illustration reflects how Salafis came to articulate a vision of public piety premised on the linkage between ethics and visibility.
And this is going to be a theme that I come back to frequently.
Today, however, I'm going to be telling a story not of gender segregation, but of the emergence of a distinctly Salafi beard.
I want to begin with the basics of our story.
In the 1980s, Egyptian Salafi, at least in conversation with like minded scholars from across the Levant to the Persian Gulf,
came to a consensus regarding a seemingly secondary question the required length of the beard.
They are now in the process, as they cited the precedent of the first three generations of the Muslim community,
this being known as the pious ancestors of Ayatollah.
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.
The question is how we understand the emergence of the Salafi beard.
Now, what we understand Salafism as a project is to understand it as a literalist interpretive project,
and that in some respects the Salafis portray it themselves.
The argument is that the meaning of the Koran and the Hadith corpus, the authenticated corpus,
is self-explanatory, but the literal explanation doesn't do much for us here because we have a time gap.
Salafism in Egypt emerges in the 1920s and thirties, but the beard doesn't emerge as a consensus issue until the 1980s.
So we essentially have a 50 year time gap. And so the explanation of literalism there doesn't make a ton of sense.
Or if we are to take literalism as an explanation, we need to actually consider literalism as a highly complex,
interpretive project that doesn't necessarily offer clear answers.
From the get go. No, I'm talking about the minimum.
The fist for the beard with also might reference the premodern fifth tradition in which this minimum appears quite regularly.
This is an easily visible measurement is 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 in the premodern tradition.
It's clear. But what's interesting here is not the fact that there's precedent,
but how that precedent is utilised in a distinctly 20th century project of religio geopolitical mobilisation and change.
And finally, we might come to the discursive Islamic ethical tradition approach,
most popular in the works of Mahmood and Al Assad and Charles Hirst, and inspired by Assad's work,
which sees Islamic piety in contemporary Egypt generally Salafi piety in particular as reflective of a
longstanding ethical project in which visible signs are secondary and reflective of internal state.
But they are not central to those internal state.
And part of the argument for the linkage between ethics and visibility that
I'm making today is for where the centrality of visible performance to piety.
And this brings me to a quote that I have at the bottom of this slide regarding the novel function of the beard in some of the circles in the 1980s.
And this is from a an article published in 1988 by the leading Egyptian social organisation, Ansar Jihad.
And this is an organisation that this project really centres on.
It centres on its publications specifically, and it's by a leading preacher within the organisation during this period,
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.
Now, we first might note that certainly here is a claim to is a claim by Salafis to the Salafi
understanding of Islam being the what should be the Sunni understanding of Islam.
But in some sense, I'm more interested in the first part of this quote, a noble announcement to introduce society.
We have a concern with visibility here. We have a concern with a social body known as society here.
The relationship implied here between one's visible practices and the broader social hall.
And this is going to be something we get into in greater detail in the talk.
So in some when we look at Ahmed Thomas's invocation of the function of the beard in the 1980s, it raises as many questions as it answers.
And I'm going to seek to provide some answers to the question of where this understanding of the beard comes from,
how it links between ethics and visibility, and what that can tell us about some of the isms development as a movement.
Now.
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,
and in some sense culminated in unrelated the 2016 book The Making of Salafism,
which was a conceptual history of the terms of the idea,
and argued that it came by the 1920s and thirties to refer to a commitment on the one hand to a neo theology,
and on the other hand to deriving all law from the Koran and the sin.
And I really build off of those years, work here with a crucial addition,
which is that if we want to understand the conceptual history of what it means to be Salafi, it's not enough to note, to write,
to note rightly as well as it does that to be Salafi is to be defined by these two intellectual characteristics by one,
a theological approach and the other a legal approach that these approaches actually are manifested in practice.
And if we want to understand Salafi approaches to theology and law, we also have to understand Salafi practice,
because it is precisely in the realm of practice that questions of theology and law often play out.
Now, I've distinguished myself a little bit among folks who study Salafism as the guy who focuses on beards and pants.
And I take this with sort of some amusement, because I actually think that understanding beards and pants,
which is to say understanding Salafism as a social movement, is really crucial to understanding how this movement develops.
It's not secondary or separate questions in theology of law or even politics, but intimately linked to that.
You're also intervening in a broader conversation in which Salafis who engage in politics are sometimes known as Islamists,
sometimes known as political Salafis or Salafis who engage in political violence.
Salafi jihadis or jihad utilities are disproportionately represented in the literature and in the news coverage of Salafism.
Even though the vast majority of Salafis are actually quiet, they don't engage in political contestation.
The extent that they engage in politics, you might say, they engage in the politics of everyday life.
I'm also very interested here to intervene in a conversation about the reproduction of the prophetic paradigm in the 20th century.
And by that, I mean there's no question that throughout time and space,
since the rise of Islam, Muslims have been seeking to emulate the Prophet Muhammad.
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,
but what is distinct to the 20th century is this linkage between ethics and visibility in emulating the Prophet Muhammad.
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.
Finally, this book touches on a series of debates in the Anthropology of Islam about the nature and roots of Islamic piety,
in particularly engages with the work, as I noted, of Muhammad and Charles Hirschman.
And here I want to note something in particular about the work of some of us, which has in some sense been overlooked.
And to be clear, I think this is a really important book.
But Mahmood studies a series of four mosques, and she doesn't really identify who those mosques are affiliated with.
Ideologically speaking, she identifies the groups that they're affiliated with.
Now, one of those groups that they're affiliated with is the first mosque is Ansar Mohammed, Egypt's oldest Salafi organisation.
A second is affiliated with Jamaat and another Salafi organisation.
And a third of these mosques is affiliated with the Sharia, the lawful society for those who cooperate to work according to the Quran and centre,
which, while not necessarily Salafi as an organisational philosophy, has significant Salafi influences within it.
And this is actually a dynamic that is acknowledged by figures such as even vets that feel occasionally this
is one of the rare groups that's not strictly Salafi that gets a compliment from him that they get the right.
So looking at Mahmud's story as a disproportionately Salafi story, I have a particular focus on how she understands piety and visibility,
namely for Muhammad in the story that she tells and also the story that her skin tells.
Piety is primarily the internal state.
The visible is secondary, if not tertiary, whereas for Mohamud it is the Islamists who are concerned with visible performance.
And what I argue in this book is that this is not representative of Salafism during this period.
And more broadly, she argues that the regulative logic of this women's mosque movement is derived from the pre-modern Islamic theological tradition,
and I offer a challenge to that approach as well.
Now, to tell this story, I had to go a bit far afield in terms of sources,
a lot of scholarship anthologies and draws on these major theological legal compendia.
These are obviously really important sources,
but what I would say is equally important in the understanding of the development of ideas and practices over time.
And here I'm making an argument not just for the consideration of these kinds of sources in social history,
but also intellectual history in the form of periodicals, magazines, journals, pamphlets.
Because these give us a sense of the granular process by which ideas and practices emerge over time.
And indeed, looking at periodicals in particular,
help us understand how it comes to be that certain positions are canonised or made orthodox in the form of pamphlets that we get the process.
We also can trace when Salafis are not talking about these issues in the clear ways that they later discuss them.
Now, to tell a story, I focus on Egypt.
But this is a story that draws heavily on sources from elsewhere in the Middle East, particularly from Syria, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
And in line with the fact that solar system is a transnational project defined not merely by what is going on locally,
but also by a set of intellectual networks that are transnational networks of migration as well, particularly between Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
So too does the book follow those paths of migration.
And in the book, I make an argument about the origin of 40 Salafi practices one inches the second beard,
the third gender segregation, and the fourth, the prohibition against letting one's robes hang down or expelled.
And these four practices give us a story of the differing trajectories of reproduction, of prophetic practice, and in the case of praying and shoes.
In some respects is the most surprising trajectory we have,
because this is a practice that in the forties and fifties is really valorised by leading members of Ansar Ahmadiyya.
But in the face of political repression and social opprobrium, by the end of the 20th century,
as soon as leaders are making arguments for why someone should avoid engaging in this praiseworthy practice rather than perform it,
which is not one what one expects from Salafis.
So the question then is how should we understand self as a as a project?
Where does it come from?
Now, the Salafi self-understanding in this respect is that Salafism comes from the ground as it directly derived from the crown.
And we should take that self-understanding seriously. So we are deeply committed to these two textual purposes, but that's not enough.
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.
In the 20th century, Middle East actually emerges from the 19th century modernising states and the role of uniforms and dress within them.
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.
And this is really indebted to the work of Khalid Fahmy in particular.
And the point here is that in the mid-19th century, under the Ottoman Egyptian state,
it increasingly became the case that to participate in the state institutions when needed to dress in a certain way,
and that dressing in that way was not merely a form of regulating individual practice.
But it suggested you were on board with this project, that you were signalling with your clothing,
your allegiance to a particular state, to a particular project.
And this is something that we see persists under British colonial rule beginning in 1882 and then under colonial rule beginning in 1922.
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
colonial rule and specifically refers to something known as the politics of the self.
So that this idea that Egyptians need to self-regulate in the service of a broader social whole about what they look like.
Is it actually reflective or is assumed to be reflective of what they stand for?
And part of what's so striking is that these understandings of the linkage between
one's allegiance or ethics and visibility carry over into the interwar period.
And here I'll just give a very short example.
In the 1930s in Egypt, we have a battle between various shirts movements, the blue shirts in the West, the green shirts of young Egypt.
We also have a broader the broader emerges of India as a cultural category.
This middle class cultural this middle cultural stratum.
And to be offended is to wear a suit and the goods.
And there's a great deal of discussion spilt over.
What it means to be an offender and what it means to perform one's offender hood.
Lucy Resolvers book is particularly fantastic in this regard.
The point here is that we have this linkage between commitment to a particular cultural ideal and how one dresses,
and indeed an assumption that how one dresses really brings home one's ideological commitment.
So you're all note an episode from 1936 between young Egypt and the West.
They were at this point. We had a pretty contentious relationship.
The blue shirts in the green shirts were essentially their paramilitary organisations.
And at some point in 1936 was leadership says to its rank and file in the blue shirts, take off your shirts.
We don't want to provoke Egypt at this point, which underscores the things,
the symbolic centrality of wearing the blue shirts to ideological contestations during this period.
It underscores this assumed linkage not only within the war, but between the West and Egypt as the linkage between ethics and visibility.
So now we get to the topic that you actually were expecting to hear about the Salafi fears.
The origins of sort of the beginning of this talk are really, you know, walls around a fault.
Now, part of what's interesting about the thirties and forties, this is a point that unrealised theory has made,
is that under colonial rule, the dividing line is still between coloniser and colonised,
which overlaps but is not identical to a divide between Muslim, between Christians and Muslims,
because there are, of course, Coptic Christians in Egypt who are indigenous to Egypt.
But in many ways, this line between Muslim and Christian is a dividing line of the colonial project.
And that's kind of what's so interesting about thirties and forties amongst all of these
is that there's very little discussion of what a distinctly Salafi period looks like.
Instead, there's simply a discussion of the importance of growing a beard.
And in 1948, the founder of On Social Media, Mohammed Hamida, 60,
is asked this question and essentially responds used to grow the beard and let it become legible.
That's his advice on what it means, what a proper Islamic period looks like.
Growing doesn't let it become plentiful. You then expand on the fact that it serves not merely to distinguish Muslim and Muslim men from Muslim women,
but just English Muslim men from their non-Muslim counterparts.
So on the one hand, he's conscious of visible distinction,
but he isn't yet concerned with making a linkage between necessarily between ethics and visibility.
And he certainly hasn't specified the required length. Now, part of what makes this lack of specificity,
specificity excuse me so interesting during this period is that the Muslim Brotherhood has a clear definition of the period at this time.
And here I just want to show you three a picture of three men.
First, Mohammed Hamza, the second,
the founder of and the second Abdul Rahman and killed a leading figure with an unsustainable eventually becomes head.
And the third I'm going to simply note something. Their beards are different.
They look pretty similar. You couldn't tell one of the Salafi and one as an Islamist.
This will soon change. Neither of us typically.
Or you have anything close to the vest. Now, part of why there's two reasons why this is interesting.
The first is the the process by which the Brotherhood articulate this model facial hair.
And this comes from a 1944 article published in the Brotherhoods journal when a muslim a scholar by the name of a say,
etc., who later a couple of years later publishes DICKERSON, which is the key legal text for the Brotherhood.
And a setback makes the argument that men should grow their beards so but not let it become excessive,
that the moderation that was that was a is the best in all matters.
Now, this is clearly adopted by the business.
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.
So some of the claims to the fist as appear as the minimum length for a beard condom about if Omar
Guzman hasn't been Omar used to trim his beard to a minimum of assist before going on a heist.
Okay, that's the idea. What's fascinating is this is later used by Salafis, but here it's used by states to argue that one can trim the beard.
He completely ignores the seriousness measurements, and he focuses on the practice of trimming the beard,
which again further underscores the limits of literalism as an approach to the hybrid corpus generally to Salafism in particular,
because here we have two radically different understandings of this particular Hadith report.
Now, we also might note that it is during this period that the Court during the subsequent hearing,
excuse me, that the cost of growing a beard increased substantially.
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.
Unequivocally, before that it was him. Then again, in which we see the emergence of a major crackdown on serious repression of the Brotherhood
after an attempted assassination of Abdel Nasser by a couple of members of the organisation.
And this is essentially used as a pretext for cracking down on the organisation more broadly.
And it's during this period that the beard becomes a target of repression.
But we have these memoirs of Muslim Brothers from this period who describe how when they were in prison,
particularly in the military prison the entire day, their beards were shaved half off the top of their head, hair on top.
Their head was shaved off. And there's also a speech that Abdel Nasser gave in 1966 in the Delta textile town of a hollow Cobra,
in which he identified those who grow beards with the enemies of Egypt.
And here I want to read this particular quote.
Someone who grows out his beard comes to you and says that socialism is disbelieving.
Someone who claims that socialism proposes religion is the person who will take the country's wealth for themselves.
Now, this claim was clearly directed at the Muslim Brotherhood, but it certainly wasn't limited to them.
So it's unsurprising in this context that we don't see the development of a distinctly Salafi conception of the beard.
These social consequences during this period are too high.
The cost of repression is too high, the risk of repression of being even associated with the Brotherhood.
It's significant and this challenge of association is something that will come up also in the 1980s.
All right. So this brings us to the 1970s.
To the rise of the Masters successor, Mohamed Al Gore of Sadat, to the rise of a broader Islamic revival in Egypt during this period,
which involved not just Islamist movements such as the Brotherhood, the Sharia or Ansar al-Sunna,
not just the Islamic student movement, the Jamaat e Islami, but also state institutions such as the Ministry of Endowments,
particularly the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, as well as the Islamic Research Academy at Al-Azhar University.
But what I want to focus on here is a particular aspect of activism during this period, namely that of the Jamaat e Islami.
And here you can see an image of Jamaat e Islami celebrations from the late 1970s or early 1980s.
And here I simply wanted to note two things. One is that many, but not all of these men have bushy beards.
The second is that many of them are wearing the Jedediah, which is a long standing feature of Egyptian dress in the countryside,
but was repurposed in the 1970s as a neo traditional marker of authenticity.
But really, I want you to focus on something in particular about the gender, namely that these gender beards do not appear.
The men wearing these jobs do not appear to be observing the prohibition against letting one's robes hang down,
which would require that the other sees the ankle.
It doesn't, for the most part. So here we have further hints that the prohibition against Isobel has not quite been revived yet.
Now some members of the Jamaat e Islami end up joining the Brotherhood.
So the question of Isobel wouldn't be an issue here, but many of them end up joining on somebody media.
And what's so striking is that Isobel doesn't seem to be in effect here yet either.
Now, in this period, there's this broader challenge for Salafis,
namely the association of these bushy, bearded men with violence both within and beyond Egypt.
In the case of within Egypt, we have the example of the upper Egyptian branches of the Jamaat e Islami engaging in
coercive enforcement of the Islamic obligation of commanding right and forbidding wrong.
There are three levels to this obligation by hand, by, by, you know, in one's heart, by tongue and by hand.
And they are choosing to engage in the first,
which is in many respects actually not really reflective of how this duty has been understood historically.
Because if we were to look at Michael Cook's magisterial work on the duty to command right and forbidden wrong,
we very much see that the coercive enforcement of this duty in Islamic history almost exclusively is identified with state authorities,
in part because it is such a double edged sword, powerful mode of social regulation.
But it can also lead to incredible infighting.
It's also the case, though, that there's the association of bushy, bearded men with violence outside of Egypt.
And here we come to about 1979 to the attack on the Grand Mosque of Mecca by the Jamat or the Salafi group that commands right and wrong.
It does happen.
And part of what's so striking about the festival's attack on the Grand Mosque, the Mecca, is not simply that they were wearing bushy beards now.
It's simply that some of them actually appeared to have properly Salafi beards that
we can see trimmed moustaches among some many of the men who have been arrested,
but also the fact of how they are then understood.
And here I'm quoting from a newspaper interview with Salman bin Abdulaziz in a Saudi newspaper from 1980.
Now, so men bin Abdulaziz is the current king at this point.
He was the governor of Riyadh, is, of course, the father of Mohammed bin Salman.
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.
He explains that the problem with the Jimma Celestial Festival was not simply that they were present there,
that it was also that they were hiding in under the name of Salafism.
Some also feel that the issue was not simply their engagement in violence,
but that they resemble herders, but that they were laying claim to the mantle of Salafism.
So this brings us to the late 1970s, and particularly to Saudi Arabia,
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.
Now, the man had received his Ph.D. at a start in 1973 and had gone to Imam to teach from 77 to 81 at the Islamic University in Madina
was in some sense this fascinating intellectual meeting point of activists and thinkers throughout the Middle East and South Asia.
It had many South Asian Muslim scholars and activists there.
It had many Arab scholars and activists there.
Now, what I'm interested in, though,
is a series of articles that Al-Arian wrote in the Official Journal of the Islamic University of Medina in the late 1970s.
And in the first of these two articles, he laid out the Hadith narrations regarding the necessity of growing the beard,
and specifically here stating that these narrations about the different practices that all orient one's one to God is not the sin of the situation.
And one of those one of the Hadith reports you cited included both growing the beard and trimming the moustache.
Okay, so he's foregrounding the beard. Great.
But what he also does, which is so interesting to us, is he introduces in Salafi circles or as a solo scholar.
The first time I could find a real discussion of the question of the minimum length of the beard,
and he asks the question, Should the beard be a minimum of one cup? That ought to become a cup effect.
And he argues that.
It should be one contribute to a minimum of a fist to the extent that it serves a man's distinguished bearing and that those who reject any form of.
Of trimming the. They really risk it becoming frightening and that there's a real concern that this will look uncouth, that it will look frightening.
And that the proper beard allows most stealthy Muslim men to not just represent their piety, but to represent their masculinity.
So we here have the fist as a measurement. We also have a real concern with visibility of what it looks like.
It's not simply a question of reflection of internal state.
There's a real social performance aspect here to.
But part of what's so striking about Adrianne is how much of a minority voice he is during this period.
We have a series of pamphlets written by Salafi scholars from the late seventies through mid 1980s,
and we have no evidence here of a consensus on the fist as a minimal measure.
We have a 1982 pamphlet by a serious Salafi, Usman Abdulkadir, or something that says nothing about the length of the period.
We have a 1984 work by a Jordanian, Salafi and student of Muhammad Nasreddin, the Beni Ali al-Harbi,
that it states that the beard stretches quote from the hair below the lower lip to the hair that grows under the chin.
This trend also extended to Saudi Arabia.
In a 1985 pamphlet, the Saudi scholar Hamoud Al Azari notes that the Prophet Mohammed had a thick spear, that he was cut.
Indeed, even if Bess doesn't mention a minimal length of the beard in a 1983 ruling in the Kuwaiti Islamist magazine.
Mr. So the fist is not yet standard among Salafis across the Middle East and indeed in of 1986.
But whether the then head of Ansar al-Sunna, Mohammed Dhia Mohammed Ali Abdul Rahim.
Note that it's forbidden to shave the beard, yet doesn't specify whether one can commit and if so, to what extent.
There is, however, an Egyptian Salafi during this period that makes it clear statement about the fist and that is Mohammed bin Ismail.
What this point is a second tier figure in the Egyptian society.
He later becomes much more important owing to his founding role in the CIA or some of the court in Alexandria.
But in the mid 1980s,
he is very much in the second tier and argues that the question is whether one should just trim the beard excuse me to a minimum of a fist or twist,
and that the most appropriate solution is not exceed this in order to avoid excess.
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,
while a decade later it will very clearly be the standard measurements.
So the question then becomes what happens? What happens between the 1980s and the mid 1990?
And to understand this, we need to think about the religio political scene in Egypt during the second half of the eighties,
namely the role of jihadi groups,
most of whom were not Salafi in targeting civilian populations and state institutions, in assassinating ministers and journalists alike.
Now the problem here. Is the bushy bearded man problem, namely that you have Salafis with their bushy beard,
as you have jihadi jihadi groups whose members support bushy beard and they're hard to distinguish.
And so what we start to hear from Saleh PDX from this period is this problem of getting hauled in with the jihadis because they look like them.
This is the problem of state security services. And here we have a 1987 article, an editorial in Ansar Assuntos Muftis,
a Tawhid in which the Journal the editor evinces frustration that in the
aftermath of incidents of terror and violence in Cairo and he uses those terms,
writers have, quote, sought to make people fear every bearded man accusing those who wear the beard and the long road robe or the beb of terrorism.
This is also echoed in Saudi publications, particularly in Bayan, which is affiliated with the Saudi Sahwa or Awakening movement.
And in a 1987 article in that journal and author noted, an author wrote an article titled Where Is Egypt Going?
And noted the increasing popularity of the beard and the long road in Egypt.
And he complained that proponents of jihad in Egypt were not necessarily Salafis.
To come back to the anecdote that I opened with Ahmed Nasser and announcing what it means to be Sunni.
We have got a visibility problem. We've got a problem that Salafis are not visibly distinct from their non counterparts.
And that happens to be the case that those counterparts are coming in for significant repression from state security
agencies and that quite a bit Salafis are not terribly happy about being dragged along and understandably so.
It's also during this period that we see the emergence of the beard as a condition of being a Salafi.
And here there's two fatwas that I want to bring to the story.
One is a fatwa that was issued in response to a letter from a student at the School of Maritime Transportation in Egypt, not Kobani.
And it's to Abdul Aziz. It basically explains that the School of Maritime Transportation requires that students say, what should this student do?
The beard is obligatory. So what should you do? Is in the school, he is facing the coercive power of the Egyptian state,
particularly of a set of regulations that also apply for the minister and says, listen, we're going to try to sidestep the problem.
Get me a letter certifying your religious commitment as a skier from the head of our son, Mohammed Ali Abdul Rahim.
And we will help you transfer to a Saudi university such as the Islamic University.
By contrast, there's another foster request from 1988 as well.
To me, another major Saudi sign up, even unless they I mean, takes what one might say is the less accommodationist approach.
His first request you gets is from a conscript in the Egyptian army asking what should he do?
And instructs him that the entirety of the army's lower ranks should disobey their superiors and should instruct them that,
quote, This sin is the reason for the failure and defeat of Arab armies here to Israel.
So the state is not providing a workaround, let's say, and is, you know, potentially exposing the folks who listen to him to significant consequences.
Now, in this context, sir, as soon as had Mohammed Ali Abdul Rahim offer something of an offering,
and he argues that while growing the beard is indeed obligatory, such an obligation is not absolute.
And in those instances in which the, quote, discord caused by growing a beard is greater than that from shaving it.
So invocation of fitna here in shaving is permissible.
So there are extenuating circumstances that can justify shaping the beard.
But even this argument for extenuating circumstances underscores this broader shift that the
beard has become a crucial aspect of what it means to be a Salafi non-negotiable condition.
So that then to negotiate an exception, you need to create extenuating circumstances.
So by the mid 1990s,
the consensus that a beard was distinguished by a fist length at a minimum and a trimmed moustache was the norm, not the exception.
But in 1995, we find a heated debate on the topic of the beard between Ibn Bez and Mohammed Nasreddin,
although many said two of the three heavyweights sell it to both leading scholars.
They both are. The issue at hand is whether one contributed.
Beard even does argues that the obligation to grow the period is absolute,
whereas Albini argues that it is permissible to trim it up to exist and that claiming that
it's impermissible to trim it is constitutes bizarre industrial or additional innovation,
which is to say a requirement added on to a legitimate act of worship that is not actually based in legitimate texts,
that the act of worship is required, but the additional requirement is illegitimate.
Now, needless to say, large lobbying, a charge of bid of any form in Salafi circles is really those are fighting words.
But leaving that fight aside, what we can know is that despite their differences,
if indeed and other than to agree that the fist is the minimal measure, the fist is the reference points.
Whereas. Just a decade prior, there was no such consensus.
It was just Mohammed bin Ismail who cut the.
So what's the significance of this story? How are we to understand?
Cell phone systems claim to replicate the golden model of the Prophet Muhammad's community in seventh century Arabia.
Put differently. What does it mean to cite the past? How does citation involve a process of textual and social reconstruction?
And what are the assumptions that undergird this project now?
So is it claims to continuity with the seventh century? Cast light on this movement's self-understanding.
But they tell us very little about its origins or development in this talk and in the book.
More broadly, I show not only that Salafism is a project best understood in terms of the ideological contestation of the 20th century,
but also that its defining logic of its social practices.
Specifically,
this linkage between ethics and visible self regulation are inextricably linked to the emergence of powerful states and modern mass societies.
Far from politicising, daily life is a response to the politicisation of daily life, but offering a distinctively modern ethics of communication.
At the same time, though, such projects are often incomplete or ambiguous.
As I argue in the book, more broadly, multiple practices must be performed simultaneously,
precisely because of concern with individual practices of facial hair, store pretence or gender.
Segregation is not exclusive to Salafism,
and because practices that distinguish Salafis in one country may not serve that function in another country.
No. An emphasis on practice also reveals the material and perceptual conditions that have transformed Islamic scholar Ali.
Reasoning in the 20th century builds on previous scholarship that dissects the subtle yet significant transformations of longstanding tools of thick.
And here, I think, for example, two countries wonderful recent book on Sheikh Mohammed and of course, customs amounts series of works.
This book explores practices of citation as they are transmitted through Islamic print media and embodied by men and women daily practices.
My emphasis on Salafism as a project of social reconstruction and textual reconstruction.
You're an ostensibly straightforward textual approach also challenged.
This challenges the assumption sometimes is implicit, other times explicit that.
Contemporary Islamic movements rely on a model of embodied practice that is continuous in its CoreLogic with a premodern Islamic ethical tradition.
This approach was prominent in the scholarship on the Anthropology of Islam valuably cast light on engagement with pre-modern religious texts.
Yet the story of Salafi piety generally in social practice in particular reveals how
the citation of past authorities is not necessarily a historically continuous act.
As such, I argue that contemporary forms of Islamic piety are shaped primarily by the
communicative conditions of modernity and the social world of the participants,
and only secondarily by this discursive Islamic ethical tradition.
Finally, this is the story of Islamic law that relies on media sources generally,
and that are many media sources that are generally considered secondary excuse me to understanding the development of Islamic law.
Now previous studies that foreground such landmark religious texts valuably illustrate the end point of religious debates.
But they don't necessarily tell us as much about the granular process, the ideological contestation,
not merely within a given movement, but among movements that periodicals and pamphlets allow us to reveal.
Some of my focus here is on the power of tracing the process by which legal rulings emerge through periodicals
and pamphlets to understanding some of these what are perceived to be more highbrow questions of Islamic law.
Now, I've covered a lot here, so I'm going to leave it at that.
I want to thank Osama again for hosting, moderating, and I look forward to the questions and conversation that will follow.
Thank you so much, Aaron. That was really sort of a wonderful and broad overview of actually in some respects,
one main theme of your book, because there are so many of the themes you listed for at the beginning.
So I guess it's a message to all the attendees that if you want to get the full picture,
get your hands on the book, and I'm certainly going to be reading the rest of it.
But I just want to remind everyone that if you'd like to ask any questions, please feel free to put them in the chat and the trickling at the moment.
And I will be turning to them in just a moment. I've got so many questions for you, Aaron, but I'm just going to ask you one to start off with,
which kind of you refer to and kadri's fantastic recent work and the contrast
that he presents between sort of the ruptures of modernity and transformation,
transformations of tradition, as it were, verses the Zadie and Mahmoud in school of basically saying,
well, there's, there's continuity and that's what we want to focus on.
And I, I haven't read Jeanette's work carefully enough to really come to a conclusion,
but my initial impulse is to say that at what point is something,
a break with tradition that is so distinctive that it really deserves that sort of name.
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 to them.
There are there are group dynamics that arise from wider social forces and indeed political forces, the emergence of the nation state and so on.
To what extent is that different, for example, in the pre-modern world to the emergence of the media as a phenomenon?
Right. That's such a radical transformation.
One could argue that we're no longer really referring to sort of the Koran.
And sooner or as we sort of might know in the early period about the transformation
from the localised centres of various states with the canonisation of Islamic law,
as Chomsky is nicely put it.
And so yeah, I kind of that's one of the things that makes me wonder is it a case of process specific,
like things are actually just happening the way they always have been on some level?
Well, so I think actually the example of this transition to the mass system and the adoption of the method of the paucity of Hadiths critique
of local rulings and this this real reliance on the Hadith corpus as the basis for decision making is a really interesting parallel.
Now, in some sense, I think this transformation we're seeing in the context of modernity is as momentous as that right now.
The question of whether the more things change, the more they stay the same.
It's certainly the case that we have these kinds of developments in pre-modern Islamic history, and I think works such as today is a really helpful,
healthy, I think of almost a post must have world or a world in which methods continue to exist.
I mean, he calls this the use uses the term the trans regional hub in which they continue to exist,
but they don't have the same social, political and institutional weight and.
I think that we're still 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 and practice.
I think another really important shift is the nationalisation of religious authority.
The fact that we have, for example, in 1895, the richest in Egypt of the state,
we'll see the emergence of expertise as the models for authority and so forth.
We've got this really momentous intellectual and social shifts of modernity and also political shifts, of course.
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?
Because, look, I went down the Islamic studies rabbit hole precisely so I could ask the question not merely of what's different,
but also what is simpler and. What's so striking about the Salafis?
When we think about their project of reconstruction, is that they cite a series of Hadith reports in talking about social dysfunction.
They cite a series of Hadith reports that are primarily premised on distinguishing Muslims from non-Muslims.
And in some countries, it's about distinguishing yourself from the Jews, the Christians, the Zoroastrians.
Now, the challenge in the postcolonial period is not Muslim, non-Muslim Muslim Muslims, it's internal self differentiation and in some respects.
That makes the corpus a starting point, but only a starting point for these practices of social distinction.
That the question of internal Muslim distinction are really not present in the corpus in a way that is accessible to Salafis.
Now, I think the question of so we can draw out the continuity of the premodern tradition,
probably construed, we can even draw out the ways in which aspects of the Salafi project draw on that.
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.
It obscures the extent to which to which the lefties are doing things in very different ways.
And the internal memo of Salafism as a project,
which is that they are similar to their ideological adversaries, such as secular nationalists or Islamists.
So the fact that all of them are concerned with visible visibility,
that they're all concerned with beards, they all have the claim about facial hair is not a coincidence.
It's a reflection that they are all emerging in the shadow of the modernising Egyptian state.
But I also think that one of the benefits of foregrounding the ruptures of the 20th
century is it allows us to think comparatively without the religious traditions.
And here and this is something I talk about in the book, I really think with a 1994 article by Soloveitchik,
who is a scholar at Yeshiva University in New York City, which is the flagship the academic flagship of modern Orthodox Judaism.
He's also the son of Joseph Jack, who, along with ROUDEBUSH,
a place seen as one of the two sort of towering figures of modern Orthodox Judaism in the 20th century red states.
Now, there's this article that the younger Sullivan wrote in the Jewish tradition in 1984,
in which he identifies the increasing stringency of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities over the course of the 20th century.
And he does it through a particular legal question of the requisite amount of food required to perform certain commandments,
perform certain religious obligations.
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,
would have made their predecessors, their pious predecessors, as it were, in the early 20th century, lacks to take the tradition seriously.
The question is why?
And here we can discover some real parallels with them in the he identifies the spread of print and the normative power of modern science.
And so we think about why it's so important to be precise.
First of all, some of these aren't the only Muslims who care about being precise.
It's worth stating that this is also the case that this debate over precision among all Muslims, especially Salafis,
is crucially inflected by the idea that it's precise practice that is most legitimate and that comes from the norm,
the emergence of the normative documents of modern science.
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,
the rupture of the Salafi story of the Egyptian story is the fall of the caliphate, the decline of the modern system,
and a new set of questions that come to be asked and in the context of a post-colonial state.
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,
but mostly because it really opens up, analytically speaking, so exciting comparative angles.
Because then Salafis are taken out of this box where Salafism is explanatory in terms of Salafism
or even a box out of this exceptional Middle East or Islam to a broader global perspective.
Right. Fantastic. Thank you. A really comprehensive answer.
And it's sort of also generated actually a question.
And I hope the sort of earlier question is, well, indulge me if I go to the second question,
because it actually directly responds to or sort of asks you to expand your analogy.
You did an interesting analogy with Orthodox Judaism and the Haredi movement in in I guess North America probably extends beyond that.
And someone is asking you to maybe test the limits of your knowledge by asking
is there a parallel or similarity with Christian sects in Europe to Salafism?
What is your opinion? I know one of the important things I I've learned doing a few things, you know,
about the things you don't know about and you don't claim to know about things you don't know about.
So I I'm going to acknowledge that that's not a parallel that I can draw.
This is I think why is for people like yourself on my side. So I did want to ask, though, and you kind of talked about the normative power of science.
Does that come up in the book? Okay, fantastic.
So, you know, it particularly comes up in the discussion of praying and.
Because the essential question legally speaking of the praying and shoes in the Hadith corpus then in the bathtub,
tradition is one of ritual cleanliness, of purifying the shoes so that they don't have the jester.
Right now in the 20th century.
So first of all, sort of to kind of say what is that print inches drops off with the exception of the high school among Muslims more broadly,
in part because we have this transition from Islam as a desert project to Islam as an urban project.
And we have the development of these ornate mosques, often with very nice carpets.
And we had the emergence of this norm against wearing shoes in mosques and now in the 20th century.
The other thing I would and then tell us in the mid 20th century now the other thing I would note,
though, and this is sort of striking to the 20th century is that.
When somebody is need to explain why they're not praying and choose.
Right. They complete in fascinating ways between the purity laws of the Islamic tradition and modern hygiene.
So they know one of the claims that's made is that Islam is the religion of cleanliness
and will do and to Yemen are given as example of Islam being the religion of cleanliness.
But cleanliness and modern hygiene are.
Not the same as. Ritual purity.
Right. It's not that they're inconsistent with them, but they're simply not the same.
And that's the argument against praying and shoes.
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,
which is to say it's employing a logic that is essentially second tier.
I mean, the other logic that is employed is it will cause fitna in your mosque.
So you shouldn't do it. Right.
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.
That was the whole darn point. It was this incredibly provocative move to distinguish Salafis from their not Salafi counterparts.
And part of the move here was, you know,
part of what we're doing here is that Salafis are often playing a non policy and they really want to be able to distinguish themselves.
And training issues is a real way to distinguish yourself.
It's also a way to drive other folks absolutely crazy because, you know, what are you doing?
You know, the response, right, is, what are you doing?
And so the fact that by the late 20th century, fitna was being in a dove is being invoked is really, really interesting, right.
Because, you know. Sorry, go ahead. Because that was the whole point from the beginning.
But it's not the whole point. But that was one of the points. It was emulating the prophet in a way that was also socially provocative.
Right. I mean, your sort of comments about praying and shoes and I've not read that chapter yet,
but it's a reminder to me, actually growing up in Manchester in the 1990 and 2000,
that there were people in Manchester who called themselves Salafis who would actually create
commotion in mosques by coming in with their shoes and insisting on praying in them.
And so, I mean, these sorts of things have their afterlives and in Europe as well.
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.
So Nabi Zaki asks, I think so, that the discussion has been overwhelmingly about the Arab world.
And this might again stretch your knowledge a bit, but you are a student of classism.
And so I think it's the right question.
Do you want to say something about the Salafis and India, Pakistan and Malaysia and other parts of the Muslim world, perhaps.
So this is a transnational story of Salafism that's focussed on the Arab world and in particular in Egypt.
One could write a history of Salafism in South Asia, say, with a group such as I did.
And one of the interesting things that we see.
Among the scholars in over the course the 20th century is the increasing adoption of the lock up book,
the sort of name of the scholars, name of these.
So it's interesting. So it's clear that Salafism is also a project in South Asia.
Now, I. This is I.
I chose to focus the project on the Arab world, on Egypt in particular, because every transnational project needs a geographic centre.
What I would argue is twofold. One is that.
Arab Salafis have been have very much shaped this discourse have much, very much shift practice.
I'd also say, though, that there's some really interesting intersections between South Asian scholars and Arab scholars on this matter.
And something I bring up in the book but don't it didn't mention the talk.
Today is actually a pamphlet that was edited by Abdel Aziz Ibn and but was originally written by Muhammad Zakaria Pahlavi,
so a leading Deobandi scholar from this period.
It was a pamphlet on the theory. This was before any of these pamphlets on the beard had started coming out.
And it was it was discussing the idea.
But this was a Deobandi scholar. This is not a salacious issue scholar.
And this happened to be a Deobandi scholar who in the mid 1970s had migrated to Saudi Arabia.
It had originally been published in Urdu and here it was being translated in Arabic.
And so this is in some sense, there's a there's a story to be told after my story about the interaction between these understandings
of the period between the Middle East and South Asia or between the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
So I say so in writing this book,
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.
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,
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.
And I would say that. We're trying to focus this on another where this book should be written about Salafism in another part of the world.
The trajectory in terms of the local specifics might look somewhat different,
but I strongly suspect that the ultimate end result will be pretty similar.
Right. Thank you. So I wanted to actually sort of specifically about the point that you make midway in the presentation about,
I mean, really wonderful sort of set of three photos, right, where the bids from each other.
There hasn't been the hum of the city and I forget the smile Rocket Abdurrahman with him.
And in some respects, in a sense, the couple hasn't really come of age in the modern era yet in the Egyptian debate.
Incidentally, I mean, the critique and then the way that their position on that is pretty normative in the Hanafi month, as far as I understand.
So I mean, they're the yeah, I mean, that's my sense within the Hanafi method, it's like it's supposed to be a hub.
And so there is a visually sort of when it comes to facial hair, indistinguishable, in my view, from Salafis.
Right. 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.
You know what we would recognise as beards today?
Right. And I wonder if you could perhaps explain a little I mean, I think I've even seen Chloe, you know, clean shaven.
He, of course, born in 1926.
You have people like Ahmed Shakir, who is, you know, a towering figure in in Hadith studies and highly respected by the onset of son Mohammed.
That was so the sort of like all who are associated with the as her very often just clean shaven.
You think about all of the famous artists like Gloria Abdel Basset.
Right. And and so I wonder like and so it's got to I mean, comes from a literature background.
So maybe that's to be expected. But I kind of wonder like it's one thing to say you have to have it this link.
It's another thing to say it's perfectly fine to be clean shaven.
And I with you, if you look at that debate in the book at all that, you know,
people are being clean shaven because there's obviously a range between those two positions.
Yeah. So I think this is a really interesting question because the print button.
Model of Islamic masculinity is a bearded man.
But this is what distinguishes a mature man from a boy.
But this is in some sense, the mark of having completed puberty.
And his work on this is particularly helpful then fascinating.
And also a Sunday night to my body. And so the question then is, well, what changes in the 20th century?
And here, I really think it's the model of secular nationalism.
The clean shaven man, the clean shaven man as the representative of progress of a future for Egypt,
of the intellectual and social and cultural pressures that that put on us.
We already know that they were in a position where they had to really reformulate their claims
to intellectual authority to respond not merely to this radically new intellectual terrain,
but also to the fact that.
The position of the AMA within the health system is essentially mediator between
ruler and ruled was really being established by the rise of mass politics.
That this is part of the reason why people like Mohammed Hamad of 60 and the second head of Ansar Abdulrazaq of our city
are educated outside and leave because they're ultimately interested in playing a role in politics and society broadly,
and it just doesn't appear to offer opportunities for that.
So we have kind of this massive dislocation, and in the context of this mass dislocation,
we have a model of the offending of the clean shaven men with a moustache.
And this is something of a cultural ideals.
And it's sort of one of these fascinating cultural ideals, because while it's linked to folks who are middle class,
it's also performed by those who will fit that category economically.
And it's a real question for us, because one of the real challenges of this period for us, for scholars,
is that as far as essentially a ladder of social mobility declines precipitously, that it still works for an elite, but.
And is still remarkably. Accepting of folks who are blind, such as Abdul Hamid Kish.
And this is out now. So there are still aspects of this old tradition that one can succeed in.
But these are exceptional cases and that be for a lot of folks who are considering in this area education or for that matter,
as another Oxford grad Hillary complex button on Darling shows are considering.
Well, can I split the difference and go to DAR the loom 54 Yeah, yeah, exactly.
The question of how to navigate, not just questions of facial hair, but the broader questions of socioeconomic mobility and identity.
That facial hair index are really challenging ones, so I find it altogether unsurprising that summer scholars often don't have beards.
I will also say this is one of the critiques that some of these make of us that, you know, the scholars don't have beards anymore.
So this is the evidence that Azhar has so declined that it's an embodied visual evidence.
But this is what tells you they're not really committed anymore, that they're really not the ears of the prophet anymore.
They can't even keep the beard anymore. And so here we might think of the Salafi claim to the beard as in some sense.
You know, we have this premodern Islamic tradition of the period as a marker of masculinity, generally Islamic masculine in particular.
Then we go to the secular nationalist project and then we can see Islamic movements,
and in their emphasis on the period as reacting and drawing on the pre-modern Islamic tradition,
but fundamentally and unmistakeably reacting to the secular nationalist challenge.
All right. Fascinating.
I wanted to ask you about and perhaps just a reflection on the I guess, the sort of ongoing debate in some respects about what is it to be a Salafi.
So this is it's a very wide ranging debate, to be honest, that there is the genealogy genealogy question,
which you kind of allude to in your introduction with, I think both here in front gravel and so on.
But at the same time, there's also the question of our typologies, and this is something I kind of struggle with as a scholar.
I talk about this a little bit in my book. What does it mean even to categorise these people?
These are useful typologies. They're heretics for analysis and so on.
But what you describe from the know what they mean,
which doesn't altogether surprise me in terms of what he told all the junior officers of traditionally isn't terribly clear test is it now.
And we always categorised as a quietest. So I mean I think that.
I mean, these these I think you're telling me that these sort of categories are archetypes that we're using for convenience,
but they're all, you know, sort of breaks of the trend.
How do we understand even what they mean? Because that's an extremely subversive position.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's not coincidental that I mean, makes the statement about officers in another country.
Right. Right. That we might think of quiet ism as reflecting a relationship to local political authorities rather than a lack of engagement
with questions of politics or lack of ability or interest in engagement with questions of political authority more broadly.
I think we might also say that there is a certain ambiguity between holding these theological and legal commitments and commitments to practice,
mind you, and. Quiet isn't that there are instances where quiet ism as a project which I think they do take seriously normatively speak.
But there are instances where one really needs to thread it.
And you know, and I'm thinking to use my book here on Abu Mohammed Monte to see where he tells the story of something,
when he when there's a ruler who's engaged in their culture, what to do about it, and sort of this is to help you as well.
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,
sort of very, very careful talk about the action, not the person.
And so I think, look, I think the real the fundamental tension is is about how these scholars understand Tawhid, which, of course, all Muslims uphold.
The Salafi understanding of Tawhid is a minoritarian one on a theological level within
broader Islamic history and also over the course of the 20th century comes to really expand,
to involve a set of questions or in this context, potential sources of conflict that simply weren't an issue 50 years before.
So, for example, this question of the beard. It wouldn't have necessarily been an issue for a Salafi scholar in 1930.
It clearly is by the late 1980s.
And one of the things I actually argue in the book is that this is because Salafi conceptions
of Tawhid have really redefined the relationship between data and other actions.
You have traditionally this distinction between evidence and that you have this broad category of word for other custom,
which is across time and place. 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.
They adopt the concept of custom that's actually taken from secular nationalism,
the concept of custom in which custom served as the basis of nations and the basis of communities to say,
you know, this is why a custom is so important to target. And in doing so, they on the one hand,
this means that they can lay claim to a vast social arrangements to lay claim to authority to regulate a vast social,
because these issues of social practice are no longer matters of local discretion.
They are matters of theirs that one can't disagree on.
The problem is that if you fund this explicitly stated in this way or this is your analytical sort of deduction.
So what I am able to do is link between changing the use of the term other and an article
that appeared in the Syrian Salafi periodical as Islamic in the early 19th 1940s,
which we know leading members of our centre were reading.
This is an article by a non Mohammed bin commander.
But what we see after that point is the slow adoption of precisely the concept that al-Khatib is setting for somebody.
I mean, it's worth noting, you're right, that it's a matter of Islam.
He also hosted Muhammed, also on a regular basis.
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 and said, oh, my gosh, what?
And this is, you know, not just important for understanding how Salafis view theology law, but also this.
Expansion of the domain in Basra is actually essentially the precursor to the emergence of the Salafi manhunt that it's from 1930,
36 through sixties, that we see this adjustment, this expansion of bed into domains formerly occupied by custom.
And then based on that, we see the emergence of the Salafi franchise.
Fascinating. So, you know, I was right to sort of mention only Lucianne, who shows up, of course, in your introduction in the footnotes.
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.
But I guess you're sort of enriching the debate specifically with respect to Egypt.
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.
I'm sure you have plenty of I'd say you have lots of time views that. So I we have a couple more I guess they've been sent in as in the Q&A.
But the more I think like comments. So I guess we sort of these just your reflections on Ahmed Kandil was sort of interesting in Egypt.
Mohammed Abdul wrote an article accepting Darwinian theory of evolution.
So this is sort of I think there might have been other people as well around the time doing that.
And then later the Muslim Salafis refused, but refused the theory of evolution.
There seems to be a transition from the 19th, 20th century position towards science and modernisation, of course.
You're keen to point out that Abdou doesn't fit that paradigm, but I leave it to you to do, I suppose.
So. So one of those is argument is actually that Abdou never called himself in the conceptual history of that.
He was a proponent of moderate reform and that there is some case for considering that the category
of the fear could encompass some folks to some degree in the period in the interwar period.
But that really post-war post-World War two, this category really significantly narrowed.
And this is also how you explain why, I suppose, to be published.
He has published a lot of things that totally don't fit theologically or legally with Salafism today.
Now, I think part of what's so interesting here is that this underscores a key driver in the formation of Salafism.
And this is an argument that there makes that this transition from colonial to post-colonial rule is a really important transition,
that because it means that it's not simply a question of internal distinction,
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.
And so in this category, you really need to in this context, you really need to explain where you fit in, what your appeal is.
And so folks who essentially, prior to, quote unquote, coming to power were really in some kind of loose Islamic reformist alliance.
They're different. And we see this in any kind of sort of opposition coalition.
Once you have to really hash out those differences, well, then that coalition becomes increasingly hard to hold together.
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,
some of that is to really situate cells in their broader ideological world, to understand the ways in which they.
Whilst claiming distinction are so fundamentally shaped by other movements.
And here we might also think of the broader point about nationalism always being transnational,
that all claims to national identity are not simply internally oriented, but they are also about contrasting yourself with other nations.
You might also think about the global historian Christopher Bailey's point about the emergence of national dress in the
long 19th century and the way in which the emergence of national dress is about nations performing for other nations,
about the extraction of a particular element of indigenous clothing,
and the positioning of that as a national dress to compare with that of other nations.
And so I think it's precisely this process of clarification of distinction that really gives the sense of really allows us to replace of.
As a movement of the 20th century and avoid falling into the trap of telling a story of telling us is primarily in terms of the Koran and some.
Aaron Rock Singer. It's really been a wonderful sort of hour and a half of discussion of your latest book,
In The Shade of the Sun Electric Piety and the 20th Century Middle East.
I think I encourage all of the audience members to try and get their hands on it and explore the
other dimensions that we didn't really explore in quite so much systematic detail besides the beard.
And really, it's been wonderful just having the opportunity to talk to you about your freshly pressed book.
Well, thanks for having me. This is a lot of fun. And yeah, you know, you can buy the book on Amazon or from University of California.
Press authors say it's easier on Amazon.
But yeah, I'm I'm really excited for this book to kind of be read by folks beyond those who study science specifically,
because I think it's had something to say about modern design in the modern Middle East more broadly.
Thank you very much. And we look forward to having you in Oxford in person in the not too distant future.
Kick it out. That sounds great to me. All right. Good evening.