4 - The Salafi Revolution

Summary

This chapter looks at Kevseri’s conflicts with the emerging Salafi trend. It looks first at his approach to ʿAbduh and the modernists, and how it differed from Sabri’s, then reviews the polemical debates between Kevseri and his Salafi opponents as they evolved from the 1920s to the early 1950s. While like Sabri he saw the tajdīd reformers as attempting to transform Islam into a calque on post-Enlightenment religion, Kevseri identified what would become the Salafi movement as more destabilising to the Islamic tradition, since it was speaking more authentically from within it with the aim of radically altering its multivocal, heterogenous disposition. It considers that Kevseri was able to delay the final semantic stabilisation of the term Salafi around the ideas that characterise the ideological movement of that name today, but that Syrian ʿālim Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī used the work of Kevseri as a foil against which he was able to construct ’Salafism’ following Kevseri’s death.