Circuits of Faith: Migration, Education, and the Wahhabi Mission

By Michael Farquhar

The Islamic University of Medina was established by the Saudi state in 1961 to provide religious instruction primarily to foreign students. Students would come to Medina for religious education and were then expected to act as missionaries, promoting an understanding of Islam in line with the core tenets of Wahhabism. By the early 2000s, more than 11,000 young men from across the globe had graduated from the Islamic University.

Circuits of Faith offers the first examination of the Islamic University and considers the efforts undertaken by Saudi actors and institutions to exert religious influence far beyond the kingdom's borders. Michael Farquhar draws on Arabic sources, including biographical materials, memoirs, syllabi, and back issues of the Islamic University journal, as well as interviews with former staff and students, to explore the institution's history and faculty, the content and style of instruction, and the trajectories and experiences of its students. Countering typical assumptions, Farquhar argues that the project undertaken through the Islamic University amounts to something more complex than just the one-way "export" of Wahhabism. Through transnational networks of students and faculty, this Saudi state-funded religious mission also relies upon, and has in turn been influenced by, far-reaching circulations of persons and ideas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Nov 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781503600270

Michael Farquhar

Michael Farquhar, a former writer and editor at The Washington Post, is the bestselling author of numerous books, including the critically acclaimed Behind the Palace Doors and Secret Lives of the Tsars, as well as the popular Penguin "Treasury" series: A Treasury of Royal Scandals, A Treasury of Great American Scandals, A Treasury of Deception, and A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Farquhar, Michael (Michael J.), author.

Title: Circuits of faith : migration, education, and the Wahhabi mission / Michael Farquhar.

Other titles: Stanford studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic societies and cultures.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2016. | Series: Stanford studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic societies and cultures | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016029388| ISBN 9780804798358 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503600270 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Jāmiʻah al-Islāmīyah bi-al-Madīnah al-Munawwarah—Influence. | Jāmiʻah al-Islāmīyah bi-al-Madīnah al-Munawwarah—Foreign students. | Islamic religious education—Saudi

Arabia. |Wahhābīyah—Saudi Arabia—Influence. | Islam and state—Saudi

Arabia. | Islamic fundamentalism. | Transnationalism.

Classification: LCC LG359.M47 F37 2016 | DDC 297.7/709538—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029388

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion Pro

CIRCUITS OF FAITH

Migration, Education, and the Wahhabi Mission

MICHAEL FARQUHAR

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Transformations in the Late Ottoman Hijaz

2. Wahhabi Expansion in Saudi-Occupied Mecca

3. National Politics and Global Mission

4. Migration and the Forging of a Scholarly Community

5. Rethinking Religious Instruction

6. A Wahhabi Corpus in Motion

7. Leaving Medina

Conclusion

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

This book came into being via a roundabout route. When I first started thinking about the research project which would eventually give rise to this volume, my concerns were initially quite theoretical in nature; I was interested in exploring the ways in which pietist forms of Islamic da‘wa, or religious mission, may perform fundamentally political work like shaping the public sphere, forging subjectivity and carving out spaces for the exercise of agency. Early on, I had the idea of considering these questions as they applied in Egypt. Yet the more I worked to develop my knowledge of the religious sphere in Egypt in the last decades of the twentieth century, the more I was drawn time and again to a powerful but elusive narrative of growing Saudi influence from the 1970s onwards. The same pattern was also to be found in the wider literature on Islamic da‘wa and particularly in the growing body of work on modern Salafism; nods to the alleged impact of Saudi petrodollars were widespread but there were few places that one might turn to learn more about how that impact was supposed to have played out in practice. It was that convergence—between a set of theoretical concerns about pietist da‘wa and social and political power, on the one hand, and an empirical story that seemed profoundly important but largely unwritten, on the other—that would eventually set me on the path to writing this book and which would shape the account that emerges in its chapters.

The resulting work is a history of how the Saudi political and religious establishments sought to extend Wahhabi influence into Muslim communities around the world from the mid-twentieth century. It tells a story of some of the institutions and individuals involved, and it situates that story in relation to political, cultural and social transformations tracing back to the late Ottoman period. But it is also an effort to think through what it means for actors in a given national sphere to export a particular religious framework, how material wealth may figure in these kinds of processes, and the power relations, forms of agency, and social and political struggles which may emerge from and shape these processes.

From the start, it was clear that there were many practical reasons for the relative absence of detailed studies on this topic. The politicization of the question of Saudi state-backed missionary work and other forms of Salafi proselytizing, particularly since 9/11, has heightened the sensitivity of many of those who fund such initiatives or who otherwise move in these circles. As a result, questions inevitably arise about the motivations of a researcher seeking to understand this history. In some circumstances, such suspicions may dovetail with the fact that the Wahhabi and broader Salafi traditions are often characterized by an exclusivist stance in relation to those perceived as outsiders, be they Muslim or non-Muslim. A separate challenge derives from the sheer scale of the historical dynamics at stake here; exploring processes which stretch across countless national borders is unavoidably a complex and time-consuming undertaking. Moreover, Saudi research visas are relatively difficult to come by, and some key sites, including the campus of the Islamic University of Medina (IUM)—the institution which is the focus of this book and which is located within the city limits of Medina—are closed to non-Muslim researchers like myself.

Yet as I committed to pursuing this line of research, the project gradually began to open up. The vast geographical extension of the processes that I hoped to understand presented opportunities as well as challenges. Through the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, I was able to spend two months undertaking fieldwork in Saudi Arabia, and that time was invaluable. But I was also able to interview former students and staff members of the IUM during seven months in Egypt and over an extended period in the United Kingdom. (Most IUM graduates and students interviewed for this project are identified in the endnotes only by letters, in order to respect their privacy.) Along the way, I came to meet a very diverse range of people, many of whom were only too happy to tell their stories. At the same time, while the English-language coverage of Saudi state-funded da‘wa is quite limited, often impressionistic and sometimes inaccurate, Arabic-language searches proved fruitful. Libraries in Riyadh, Jidda and Cairo yielded authorized histories of the IUM, prospectuses, staff lists and other kinds of promotional literature. I was also able to access issues of the university journal going back to the late 1960s, and to gather memoirs, local press coverage, encyclopedic biography collections written by and about individuals who had been involved in the IUM project, YouTube videos of former students describing their experiences in Medina, and many other kinds of materials besides. Together, they form a rich corpus, providing for an account which not only traces key events, personalities and institutional frameworks but which also makes room for the perspectives and experiences of participants themselves.

While the chapters that make up this volume are bound together by an overarching historical narrative, each is intended to open a window on a distinct dimension of the book’s subject matter—from transformations in the educational sphere in the late Ottoman and early Saudi periods, to the political context of the founding of the IUM and to the make-up of its faculty, the styles and content of instruction that took shape on its campus, and the trajectories of its students. Readers seeking a route into some of these issues without working through the entire book are advised to make time for the introduction, which sets out the analytical framework employed throughout and provides a road map for the chapters. After that, individual chapters are sufficiently self-contained that it should be possible to jump ahead to those that appeal most.

This book has been more than six years in the making. For all its limitations, I hope that this time has at least been sufficient to bring to it a firm empirical grounding, a historical perspective, and a degree of nuance that is sometimes lacking in public discourse on the matters that it seeks to address.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the years that it has taken for this book to come to fruition, I have racked up a great many debts. Thanks go first and foremost to John Chalcraft, for his extraordinarily patient and dedicated counsel. So many of the ideas in this book are ultimately rooted in his questions and suggestions that I long ago gave up trying to acknowledge all of them individually. It has been a privilege to work with a scholar whose breadth of knowledge, critical insight and political conscience will remain an inspiration for a long time to come. Likewise, I am immensely grateful to Madawi Al-Rasheed, James Piscatori and John Sidel, all of whom offered valuable critique of work emerging from this project at various points in the process. It was John Sidel who first pointed me in the direction of an article by Bradford Verter which would prove to be a key inspiration for the historiography developed in these pages.

At Stanford University Press, Kate Wahl has offered support, practical advice and incisive editorial feedback with enviable efficiency, Nora Spiegel and Micah Siegel have helped to smooth the submission process, and Elspeth MacHattie has been a wonderful copyeditor. The manuscript also benefited greatly from the input of the two anonymous reviewers enlisted by SUP, whose detailed comments were hugely useful when it came to making the final round of revisions.

I would like to extend my appreciation to the former students and staff members of the Islamic University of Medina who lent me their time and trust. If there is no such thing as objectivity in the writing of history, I hope that I might at least have justified that trust with sobriety and some degree of nuance.

Besides those mentioned above, many others have read and commented on earlier versions of chapters and papers which eventually made their way into this book. Neil Ketchley has been especially generous with his time in this regard. Others who have been kind enough to engage with draft work include Richard Gauvain, Stéphane Lacroix, Michael Laffan, Matthias Determann, Jonathan Githens-Mazer, Amir Syed, Samuel Everett, Hania Sobhy, Steffen Hertog, and the anonymous reviewers at the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Others still shared ideas and questions as participants and audience members in seminars and conferences. These events included Modern Salafism: Doctrine, Politics, Jihad, a seminar convened by Robert Gleave at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, in April 2012; the Gulf Studies Conference at the Centre for Gulf Studies, University of Exeter, in July 2012; Centres of Learning and Changes in Muslim Societies: The Global Influence of al-Azhar, al-Madinah and al-Mustafa, a conference organized by Masooda Bano and Keiko Sakurai at the University of Oxford in August 2012; Transnational Connections and the Reform of Islamic Education, 1820–1950, a panel at the Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting in Denver in November 2012, organized by Hilary Kalmbach; a public seminar convened by the Kuwait Program on Development, Governance and Globalisation in the Gulf States at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in December 2012; Migration, Politics and Contested Identities in the Middle East, a panel at the Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans in October 2013, organized by Hélène Thiollet; and other events at the American University in Cairo, the LSE Department of Anthropology and the LSE Department of Government.

To try to individually thank the countless people who helped to make this project possible by assisting in the search for sources, offering introductions, and in any number of other ways, would be an impossible task and would inevitably lead to embarrassing omissions. Some specific acknowledgments are scattered in the notes throughout the book, but many other individuals offered support and I am very grateful to all of them.

I would also like to thank Laleh Khalili, who went very far out of her way to offer important and hugely appreciated counsel in the period when I was first considering embarking on this project. In the years that have elapsed since then, Katherine Zebiri has been very generous indeed with her time and advice.

All translations from the Arabic not otherwise credited are mine. I am indebted to Lamiaa Shehata, Ismail Ahmed and Reem Abou-El-Fadl for advice on some finer points of translation.

Some material in this book previously appeared elsewhere. I am grateful to and acknowledge Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint from Saudi Petrodollars, Spiritual Capital, and the Islamic University of Medina: A Wahhabi Missionary Project in Transnational Perspective, which appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies 47, no. 4 (2015); and Edinburgh University Press for permission to reprint from The Islamic University of Medina Since 1961: The Politics of Religious Mission and the Making of a Modern Salafi Pedagogy, which appeared in Masooda Bano and Keiko Sakurai (eds.), Shaping Global Islamic Discourses: The Role of Al-Azhar, Al-Medina, and Al-Mustafa (Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

Research for this book was made possible by generous funding from the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the University of London Central Research Fund, the Gilchrist Educational Trust, the Abdullah al-Mubarak al-Sabah Foundation and the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. Staff at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh facilitated visa documents and provided me with office space during a period as a visiting researcher at that institution between January and March 2012. In the time since completing the initial research for this book, I have been lucky enough to benefit from a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, hosted in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. While that fellowship is devoted to a separate research project, both it and the support of colleagues at SOAS have helped to make the process of finalizing this manuscript considerably easier and more pleasurable than it might otherwise have been.

It goes without saying that the responsibility for any errors of omission, commission or interpretation is mine alone.

Ending with those who matter most, deepest love and thanks go to my parents and sister for their endless support, and also, finally, to my wife, for her limitless reserves of warmth, love, friendship and humor. After all that it has meant in the way of long absences, sprawling working hours and clumsy preoccupation, this book is dedicated to her.

INTRODUCTION

IN THE LAST DECADES of the twentieth century, many Muslim communities around the world witnessed the growing influence of Salafism, a style of Islamic religiosity characterized by a distinctive set of creedal and legal principles which are understood by its adherents to reflect the authentic beliefs and practices of the earliest generations of Muslims. The rise of Salafism, with its perceived rigidity, antimodernism and exclusivism, has been the cause of considerable anxiety on the part of Muslim and non-Muslim observers alike. Seen as an alien intrusion in many of the communities within which it has gained a foothold, it has come to be associated in the popular imagination with atavistic brutality, misogyny, sectarianism, anti-Semitism and political violence. In the clamor to understand the nature of this phenomenon and to explain how it has achieved such seemingly unprecedented momentum, it has become common to invoke a form of cultural imperialism emanating from Saudi Arabia. An article published by the news agency France 24 in 2012 is emblematic of this line of thinking. The piece opens with a pen portrait of black Salafi banners hanging over anti-American protests from Sanaa to Benghazi, along with Salafis destroying traditional religious shrines in Libya and Mali, demolishing supposedly heretical works of art in Tunisia, and taking up arms in Syria. The author goes on to quote an expert on the region, who explains that the religious doctrine at stake in such cases is basically an export version of Wahhabism, the conservative form of Sunni Islam which predominates in Saudi Arabia. Since the oil boom of the 1970s, he argues, the Saudis have been financing [Wahhabism] around the world.¹ Elsewhere, Saudi religious sway has similarly been identified as a source of social conflict across the Global South, from Indonesia to Kashmir.² Meanwhile, alleged creeping Wahhabism in Muslim communities in Europe and the United States has time and again been condemned as a Saudi export we could do without.³

On the face of it, efforts to explain the worldwide rise of Salafism in these terms, as the product of an extension of Wahhabi influence made possible by Saudi oil money, appear to offer an appealingly neat and compelling narrative. Yet on closer inspection, this narrative raises as many questions as it initially seems to answer. What exactly is the export version of Wahhabism that is supposedly at work here and what is its relationship with the diverse strands of Salafi religiosity that have proliferated around the world in recent decades? Through what channels and frameworks have these processes occurred? Who are the Saudis involved in these dynamics and what are their motivations? And how have their target audiences responded? Claims about the export of Wahhabism also raise problems of a more theoretical kind. It is not immediately obvious what precisely it means to speak of exporting a particular religious or cultural framework, or what circumstances might facilitate movements of religious migrants, ideas, practices and institutions across borders. There is surely a need for attention to the ways in which these things may in fact undergo changes as they are translated into new geographical, social, cultural and political contexts, and the factors which might contribute to shaping the outcome of these transformations. Moreover, there are vexing questions to be asked about how exactly it is that objective material capital—the oft-noted petrodollars—may feed into subjective processes of cultural change. If it is indeed possible to identify a relationship between flows of material capital and cultural transformation, then one must surely consider how human agency figures in this picture and what power relations are established which might variously constrain or facilitate such agency.

It is with a view to delving into such questions that this book develops a historical account of one particularly important mode of Saudi religious expansion.⁴ In order to get a handle on this vast and diffuse phenomenon, I focus on influential new Islamic educational institutions, founded in Saudi Arabia in the twentieth century, which came to sit at the heart of cross-border circuits of students and scholars from all over the world. Migrants have for centuries traveled long distances in order to perform the hajj and to teach and undertake religious studies in the holy cities of the Hijaz, on what is now the western seaboard of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This book explores the ways in which the operation of these cross-border circuits, and the cultural, social and political influence that they have long exerted in locations far beyond the Arabian Peninsula, was impacted by the rise of the modern Saudi state, the access of state actors to material resources made available in part from oil rents, and the investment of those resources in educational projects geared towards da‘wa—which may be loosely translated in this context as religious mission—with global reach.

While non-Saudi students and scholars have taught and undertaken religious studies in an array of settings in the kingdom since the early twentieth century, at the heart of the account offered here is the Islamic University of Medina (IUM), which was launched by the Saudi state in 1961 as an explicitly missionary venture. Since that time, the IUM has been distinguished from the kingdom’s other Islamic universities by its goal of offering fully funded religious instruction primarily to young, non-Saudi men, who from the start made up over 80 percent of its student body. The expectation was that, after graduation, they would return to their communities of origin or travel on elsewhere as du‘āt (sing. dā‘iya), or missionaries. Although they were certainly expected to preach to non-Muslims, the focus was on offering guidance to Muslim communities seen as having deviated from orthodox belief and practice. By 2001, nearly 11,600 non-Saudi students, hailing from virtually every country around the world, had secured undergraduate qualifications from the IUM, and a decade later its president declared that the university could boast over 30,000 graduates.⁵ Many of these alumni have become prominent Salafi figureheads in locations across the globe. For the first decades of its existence, the IUM also recruited large numbers of staff from beyond the kingdom. As a result, its faculty came to accommodate an extraordinarily diverse range of luminaries—from ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Baz, later appointed Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, to Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani, the Albanian-born scholar who is undoubtedly the most important Salafi hadith specialist of the modern period. Such figures have worked at the IUM alongside affiliates of Islamist movements like the Egyptian Muslim Brothers and the Pakistani Jamaat-i Islami, and Salafi movements including the Egyptian Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya and the South Asian Ahl-i Hadith. A missionary project on this scale has been made possible by substantial state funding. Rough calculations based on data published by the IUM itself suggest that even by the late 1990s, the university’s total running costs since the time of its founding had racked up to an amount equivalent to over 1,400 million US dollars at today’s exchange rates.⁶

The cross-border circuits which grew up around this one institution have previously been identified as a key framework through which Saudi actors have sought to extend their religious influence beyond the kingdom’s borders, with the IUM singled out by one commentator as being at the centre of the global Wahhabi mission.⁷ Yet, like much public discourse on the broader phenomenon of Wahhabi expansion, discussion of the IUM and its efforts to promote Salafism worldwide has frequently been characterized by basic inaccuracies and a sometimes staggering degree of obfuscation. To give just one example, Dore Gold’s polemic work Hatred’s Kingdom uncritically quotes Hajj Salih Brandt, Chechnya’s special envoy to Europe, as asserting:

The whole political agenda of Wahhabi Fundamentalism (what the West now calls Islamism) . . . [is] a deviation of Islam taught in Madinah University in Saudi Arabia, sponsored by the Saudi government and exported from there. . . . Out of it have come Hamas, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, the FIS [Islamic Salvation Front], Sudan, and now the gangs roaming Chechnya and Daghestan.⁸

It is left to the reader to puzzle over the sense in which Wahhabi Fundamentalism might usefully be considered as equivalent to Islamism, or how any of these individuals and movements—let alone Sudan—are products of Wahhabism as taught at the IUM.

With its historicized focus on one very specific aspect of the far broader set of issues that fall under the rubric of Saudi religious expansion, this book seeks to move past loose, speculative generalizations. By pulling on a single empirical thread—a particular nexus between migration, education and religious mission—vague abstractions like Salafization and Wahhabization can be made to give way to concrete institutional frameworks, and the biographies and memories of identifiable students and scholars. Moreover, this historicized approach makes it possible to achieve a richer understanding of recent dynamics of Wahhabi expansion by situating them in relation to long-standing processes of migration, religious transformation, and state- and nation-building.

In telling the story of the IUM, I develop an analytical framework with broader application for understanding the ways in which material capital possessed by certain Saudi actors has provided for the exercise of power and influence in the religious sphere abroad. The hope is that this framework will make it possible to get beyond talk of the export of Wahhabism, a metaphor which is as ubiquitous as it is problematic. Instead, I argue that Wahhabi expansion, as reflected in the history of the IUM, is better thought of as a series of unequal transactions occurring within the terms of a transnational religious economy. The latter is understood here as consisting in the circulation—both within and across borders—of religious migrants, social technologies, and material and symbolic forms of capital.

This conceptualization offers new ways of understanding how material resources have contributed to granting certain Saudi actors privileged status within extensive cross-border processes involving a diversity of persons and institutions, and an array of local and national contexts. It provides for an understanding of migrants involved in these dynamics not merely as vectors of religious doctrine but as creative agents with their own values, interests and ambitions. Equally importantly, it serves to underline the extent to which the progress of Saudi state-funded da‘wa has been bound up with transformations in the very Wahhabi institutions and practices which lay at its heart, partly as a result of the assimilation of new elements from outside the historical Wahhabi tradition. This approach thereby provides tools for thinking about some of the dynamics at stake in the evolution of the Wahhabi tradition itself within Saudi Arabia’s borders since the early twentieth century. It also offers a basis for interrogating the commonplace intuition that Wahhabi expansion has amounted in some sense to an extension of Saudi political hegemony or soft power.⁹ Before sketching the contours of this historiography, it is necessary to briefly consider two key labels—Salafism and Wahhabism—which are unavoidable in a study of this nature and yet are so ambiguous and contested as to require some dedicated discussion.

ISLAMIC, SALAFI AND WAHHABI TRADITIONS

The terms Salafism and Wahhabism may be usefully understood with reference to Talal Asad’s conception of Islam itself as a dynamic and heterogeneous discursive tradition.¹⁰ Tradition in this view does not denote an ossified set of beliefs and practices, endlessly reproduced across space and time. Rather, as elaborated by Samira Haj, Islam in this understanding consists in an overarching framework of inquiry within which Muslims bring a particular body of texts, practices and styles of reasoning to bear in diverse ways upon the array of new circumstances and problems that present themselves in different social and historical contexts.¹¹ In the same vein, Salafism may in turn be conceived as a tradition within a tradition. Where the overarching Islamic tradition is lent coherence by such broad elements as belief in the oneness of God and the mobilization of arguments legitimated with reference to the Qur’an, the Salafi tradition is further distinguished by a more specific overlapping set of methodological principles, texts and practices.

The term Salafism is notoriously slippery, used by various commentators at various times to label a plethora of different phenomena.¹² However, Bernard Haykel has offered a useful definition of the Salafi tradition as being characterized primarily by several interconnected features. The first of these is an emphasis on emulating the beliefs and praxis of the Salaf al-Salih, or the pious ancestors, often taken to denote members of the Muslim community who lived in the period from the time of the revelation of the Qur’an until the death of the jurist Ahmad ibn Hanbal in 855. The second is a distinctive conception of tawḥīd, or the unicity of God, which in turn tends to give rise to the view that many traditional Islamic practices constitute shirk, or polytheism. The third key feature is a stress on combating perceived unbelief, particularly any attitudes or practices understood as amounting to shirk. The fourth is an insistence that the Qur’an, the sunna and the consensus of the Prophet’s companions are the only legitimate bases of religious authority. The fifth is an emphasis on purging illegitimate innovations (bida‘, sing. bid‘a) understood to have corrupted Islamic belief and praxis over the centuries since the time of the Salaf al-Salih. The final feature described by Haykel is a commitment to the view that the Qur’an and the sunna are clear in meaning, and that a strict constructionist interpretation of these texts is sufficient to guide Muslims for all time and through all contingencies.¹³

Salafism as defined here is an exclusively Sunni phenomenon, the sunna which is so central to this mode of religiosity consisting in the corpus of traditions recorded in the canonical Sunni hadith collections.¹⁴ It is also worth noting that, as Haykel underlines, Salafism thus defined does not encompass late nineteenth-century reformists like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani or Muhammad ‘Abduh. While al-Afghani and ‘Abduh have often been depicted as representatives of a particular brand of modernist Salafism, their theology differed from that outlined above. Moreover, their ecumenism contrasted with the exclusivist attitudes towards non-Salafi Muslims which many contemporary Salafis derive from this theology.¹⁵

As with the broader Islamic tradition of which it is a part, the Salafi tradition is again by no means either homogeneous or fixed across time and space. Rather, Salafis draw on this tradition as a basis for engaging with whatever issues present themselves in the particular contexts in which they live their lives. The conclusions that they reach about appropriate ways of responding to any given matter can and frequently do strongly conflict. Contemporary Salafis dispute one another fiercely over such issues as the legitimacy of political activism and the permissibility of violent action as a means for effecting political change under current conditions. Yet their sharply divergent views and the heated debates in which they engage are a matter of disputation within a common framework of inquiry.¹⁶

While the term Salafi may have positive connotations, evoking the historical and religious authenticity of the Salaf al-Salih, the label Wahhabi is an exonym generally considered derogatory by those to whom it is applied.¹⁷ It is used here for lack of a better alternative and because of the importance of distinguishing the Wahhabi tradition from the broader Salafi tradition of which it, in turn, is part. While Wahhabism displays all of the features of Salafism outlined above, it has certain further characteristics which justify treating it as a distinguishable sub-tradition within the broader Salafi tradition. These features include the central place given within it to works authored by the eighteenth-century reformer Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, from the region of Najd in Central Arabia, and certain of his descendants. Another feature of the Wahhabi tradition is a distinctive approach to jurisprudence. In principle, Wahhabism shares with many other modes of Salafism a commitment to rejecting blind emulation of the rulings of any of the conventionally recognized schools of Islamic law. The view within the Salafi tradition that the meaning of the Qur’an and the sunna is quite transparent and that these, along with the consensus of the Companions of the Prophet, are unrivalled as sources of religious guidance tends to give rise to an emphasis on deriving legal rulings with direct reference to these sources rather than relying on secondary works authored by jurists associated with the established law schools. However, in practice Wahhabism has historically been very closely associated with the Hanbali jurisprudential tradition.

Once again, it is worth emphasizing that Wahhabism has always been marked by diversity, both over time and at any given point in time. The views expressed by Wahhabis have varied on a whole range of issues—including, for example, the question of how to manage relations with non-Muslims and non-Salafi Muslims.¹⁸ As with any other discursive tradition, the texts, principles, practices and other elements which make up the Wahhabi framework of inquiry have proved amenable to diverse interpretations and applications.¹⁹

THE ECONOMY OF WAHHABI EXPANSION

Conceiving of Islam, Salafism and Wahhabism as mutable discursive traditions offers a point of departure for a nuanced understanding of Saudi state-funded missionary work and its impact in locations around the world. It suggests ways of understanding the coexistence of heterogeneity, transformation and coherence in the religious beliefs and practices at stake, it provides for the problematization of static notions of orthodoxy, and it makes it possible to move past oversimplified dichotomies such as that posited between the modern and the traditional.²⁰ As Samuli Schielke has observed, conceiving of Islam as a discursive tradition suggests productive ways of thinking about religious phenomena without treating them as merely epiphenomenal of political or economic dynamics. Moreover, it serves to underline that—in the context of the particular set of dynamics at stake in this book, as in other contexts—Muslims’ engagement with their religion is neither the outcome of blind adherence, nor the result of coercion, but an active and dynamic process of engagement with ideals of good life and personhood.²¹ This is a significant point, given the tendency in many circles to see Salafi proselytizing as a more or less mindless matter of indoctrination.

At the same time, a theoretical framework for understanding Wahhabi expansion must do more than this. In the first place, this understanding of Islam as a kind of discourse—encompassing shifting configurations of texts, modes of reasoning and embodied practices—tells us little about the role that material economies may play in relation to religious life. It thus offers few tools for considering how wealth possessed by Saudi state actors has fed into dynamics of religious transformation beyond the kingdom’s borders. To make this point is not to call for a revival of modes of analysis which reduce religious phenomena to economic phenomena. Rather, what is required is consideration of how these two spheres of life may intersect.

A second issue is the need to develop a convincing model of the relations of power which undergird and are generated by Saudi state-funded missionary efforts; this includes power relations between Saudi state actors and the kingdom’s religious establishment, for example, or between Saudi religious actors and the communities around the world whose beliefs and practices they seek to influence. Certainly, power and resistance have an important place in existing literature informed by the notion of Islam as a