“In Pursuit of Reform”

Abstract

The religious and intellectual history of early modern and modern Islam is often reduced to a teleological and Arabo-centric narrative, in which modernity began with Napoleon’s Egyptian Expedition or the Nahḍa, the Arab Renaissance. Within this narrative, the succession of Sufism, Islamic reformism, Islamism, and Salafism is seen as a “genealogy of Islamism.” Using a regressive history approach, and presenting the currents of international historiography on Islam between the fifteenth and the twenty-first century, this article seeks in contrast to illuminate the plurality of possible pathways and the heterogeneous nature of historical moments. Moving backward through time, it attempts to identify ruptures and continuities, and to highlight successive interpretations of medieval authors and concepts (such as salafiyya). In so doing, it endeavors to demonstrate the constructed nature of the received historiographical narrative of late nineteenth-century “Islamic reformism,” as well as that of “Arabic thought in the liberal age.” Historiographical debates on the “neo-Sufism” and Aufklärung of the eighteenth century have led to a better understanding of Islam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, a thirst for renewal (tajdīd) flourished in hadith, Islamic law, and Sufism. Recent research on the process of “confessionalization” over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has highlighted the importance of political factors in developments of Islam during the age of the three Empires (Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman).

L’histoire religieuse et intellectuelle de l’islam à l’époque moderne et contemporaine est souvent réduite à un récit-maître arabo-centrique et téléologique dans lequel la modernité commencerait avec l’expédition d’Égypte ou la Nahḍa, la Renaissance arabe. Cette histoire verrait se succéder soufisme, réformisme musulman, islamisme, salafisme, soit une « généalogie de l’islamisme ». Dans une démarche d’histoire régressive, cet article éclaire la pluralité des voies possibles comme le caractère hétérogène des moments historiques, grâce à la présentation des dynamiques courantes de l’historiographie internationale sur l’histoire de l’islam entre le xv^e et le xxi^e siècle. Remontant vers l’amont, il s’agit de repérer les ruptures et les continuités, les lectures successives de tel auteur médiéval et de tel concept (comme salafiyya). L’article s’efforce de démontrer la nature construite de la vulgate historiographique du « réformisme musulman » de la fin du xix^e siècle, comme celle sur « la pensée arabe à l’âge libéral ». Les débats sur le « néo-soufisme » et sur l’Aufklärung du xviii^e siècle ont conduit à une meilleure connaissance de l’islam de la fin de l’époque moderne. Entre le xv^e et le xvii^e siècle, s’épanouit une soif de renouveau (tajdīd) en hadith, en droit musulman et en soufisme. Les recherches récentes des ottomanistes sur les processus de « confessionnalisation » aux xvi^e et xvii^e siècles montrent l’importance des facteurs politiques dans ces évolutions de l’islam à l’âge des trois Empires (moghol, safavide, ottoman).

The religious and intellectual history of Islam in the early modern, modern, and contemporary periods was long reduced to an Arabo-centric, teleological master narrative which ran something like this: “After Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, and as a result of European and Syro-Lebanese Christian influence (variant: thanks to Mehmet Ali and a few enlightened Muslim thinkers such as the Egyptian Rifāʿat al-Ṭahṭāwī) came the nineteenth-century Nahḍa or Arab Renaissance, which in turn enabled the birth of a more or less secular Arab nationalism; alas, in the second half of the twentieth century this development came into conflict with Islamism, which had emerged with the Muslim Brotherhood and was fueled by Saudi Arabia.” Alongside this first narrative, which has never been completely overturned, sits another that is now dominant: “As a result of Ottoman reforms and European domination, traditional Islam (variant: Sufi Islam), which had been somewhat unsettled by the advent of Wahhabism, was succeeded by the Islamic reform movement, which developed in the late nineteenth century and was founded in Egypt by Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and Muḥammad ʿAbduh, followed by Rashīd Riḍā. However, the movement’s initial aims were betrayed, and in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries it gradually gave way to Islamism and ultimately Salafism.”¹ All sorts of developments and variants get grafted onto this basic framework, which has become a kind of vulgate. It has been asked whether Islamic reformism contained the embryo of Islamism, as Leninism contained Stalinism. In Turkey, the “Nahḍa to Islamic reformism” sequence has been identified with the grand narrative of “tanzimat (reforms), end of the Ottoman Empire, Young Turks, Atatürk,” with variations on the magnitude (or marginality) of Ottoman modernity and the reality (or non-existence) of Turkish laiklik (secularism, the Turkish translation of laïcité). Shia Iran, meanwhile, has always emphasized the singularity of its political and religious experience. This well-established outline, which no historiographical progress has been able to unravel, has been embroidered by a goodly number of historians of Arab countries, Turkey, and Iran with nationalist, communitarian, or apologetic narratives which, with the help of popularized and widely diffused versions, have consistently undermined the efforts of connected history.

The primary aim of this second master narrative (the “Sufism, reformism, Islamism” sequence) is to reconstitute the “genealogy of Islamism,” to use the resonant title of Olivier Roy’s 1995 book.² This brief work begins with a linear account—even as Roy emphasizes the role of Third-Worldist ideologies and dictatorial repression in the development of Islamism, and despite the fact that in other texts he focused on post-Islamism and hypothesized that the foundation for radical Islamist thinking is religious ignorance. This recurrent genealogical approach signals, intentionally or not, the triumph of radical Islam, since that strand is now understood to be the mainstream of modern Islam—a widespread idea that has never really been scrutinized. These cursory narratives, which smother so many Muslim voices, are compounded by the avalanche of Islamist literature, whose references and content require closer examination. There is a strong temptation to spare ourselves the labor of establishing a genuine history of the texts, including their production, transmission, editions, uses, distortions, re-uses, and intertextuality. Instead, when we go looking for “origins,” we find them as if they were so many little winged Minervas springing fully armed from Jupiter’s brain. Leaping back over the centuries like this has encouraged the widespread teleological claim that twenty-first-century Jihadism expresses the reality of “original” Islam. The greater the vigilance that today’s grim, terrifying events force us to exercise with regard to Islamist currents, the more historians’ work is reduced to the production of chronological mementos—of a “prehistory” of Islamism—and the work of specialists of Islam to sets of terminological flash cards or a few concepts. This in turn transforms the great authors of Islam’s past into a gallery of ancestors destined to transmit their heredity without indirect lineages, genetic mutations, or faux pas. Moreover, these ancestors are now in competition with one another because today’s analysts, writing under the pressure of current events, work to retrace not one but two genealogies, applying a Manichean dichotomy to Muslim authors of the past in which they are cast either as precursors of Islamic radicalism or as pioneers of an enlightened Islam compatible with modernity (with “us,” the West).³ In short, with the aim of reconstituting the history of Islamism—or, on the contrary, of offering hope to anyone wishing to look beyond Islamism—we repeat a linear narrative that fails to take the density of cultural and religious history into account. The illusory quest for origins and authenticity by nationalists, Islamists, Salafists, and some scholars would appear to be doomed by the complexity of the long and little-known period between the fifteenth and the eighteenth century: they are all searching for a univocality that has never existed. This in turn explains why the thesis of Islamic exceptionality has remained largely uncontested.

Clearly, then, such accounts choose to ignore the intertextual, ambivalent culture that was actually dominant in medieval, early modern, and modern Islam. In a brilliant book, Thomas Bauer neatly expresses what all lovers of Arabic literature come to learn: Islamic culture is not a bleak, univocal destiny dictated by a tragic, ineluctable present; the Muslim Middle Ages were not a Pandora’s box from which sprang either the zephyrs of eighteenth-century reform or the hurricanes of contemporary Islamism.⁴ Rather, we must put the history of Islam into perspective in relation to historians’ studies of texts—both manuscripts and printed works—and studies by specialists of cultural history.

“In pursuit of reform,” this article will retrace this history to show the plurality of paths and the heterogeneity of particular historical moments, presenting current developments and dynamics in the international historiography on Islam between the fifteenth and the twenty-first century. Working “regressively” to examine the presumptive genealogies, we will pass through several stages and thresholds, to better discern breaks, continuities, currents, environments, and above all the successive or contradictory readings of particular medieval authors, texts, or concepts. In the first section, I recall some of the aporias that make it so difficult to write a complete history of early modern and modern Islam today. I then take the example of the term salafiyya, discussed in detail by Henri Lauzière, to broach the issue of conceptual terminology. Turning to the late nineteenth century, I show how the accepted narrative of Islamic reformism is actually an ideological construct. Albert Hourani’s 1962 appraisal of “Arabic thought in the liberal age,” as his book is titled, contained a good many distortions and omissions.⁵ The only thing that can truly shed light on nineteenth-century Islamic thought is an improved knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Islam—as we learned nearly thirty years ago from the debates on “neo-Sufism” and the hypothesis of an eighteenth-century Islamic Aufklärung. More recent research has revealed a thirst for renewal (tajdīd) in the disciplines of fiqh (Muslim law) and Sufism between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries—precisely those fields of knowledge that nineteenth-century reformists considered outdated and sclerotic. The final section, a discussion of politics informed by Ottomanist studies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century processes of “confessionalization,” leads me to conclude with a call to develop a religious anthropology of Islam and to revive the historical study of texts.

In Defense of a Religious History of Early Modern and Modern Islam

Never has the need for a history of early modern, modern, and contemporary Islam been so acute, and never have we been so close to writing it.⁶ Just as others have produced histories of Judaism or Christianity, specialists of Islam might write a history of the religion since the fifteenth century, noting its currents of thought, its leading figures and foot soldiers, its institutions and sanctuaries, the development of popular piety and mystic texts, religious practices, conversion and interconfessional relationships, forms of secularization, Islamist currents, new religious movements, literary and artistic expressions of religious feeling, resurgences and latencies, breaks in continuity and disappearances. As the volume edited in 2009 by the Italian scholar Roberto Tottoli showed, new lines of questioning and new research topics are being defined at the outer reaches of religious anthropology, Islamic studies, and social history.⁷ In 1994, the German historian Reinhard Schulze published a sweeping history of Islam in the twentieth century, which was updated in 2016.⁸ But no synthesis of the history of Islam since the early modern era exists in either French or English. The lack of such texts is partly but not exclusively due to a number of factors: the inflated number of publications overall, the growing numbers of collective volumes, an appetite for microstoria or topical but rapidly dated essays, the fragmentation of project-funded research, and a compartmentalization by region, type of source, and language.

Another major cause is the increasing tendency to use the same secondary literature. Everyone quotes what everyone else is quoting, in a historiographical landscape that is dominated by works in English. The ignorance or misunderstanding of studies in other European languages, or of secondary literature in Arabic or Turkish (for example), can create embarrassing situations. For instance, Esther Peskes’s essential PhD dissertation on the beginnings of Wahhabism, published twenty years ago, remains unknown in France.⁹ If the problem is simply one of language, then perhaps all we need to do is translate?¹⁰ Perhaps not. Stefan Reichmuth’s great work in English about Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī, which covers Islam in the eighteenth century from West Africa and Morocco all the way to India, is hardly ever cited and even less often read, perhaps due to ignorance of the literature of that period.¹¹ The scarcity of specialists of early modern and modern Islamic literature in any language in France has left a gaping hole in place of any properly literary study of the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman periods, whose poetry is nevertheless crucial to understanding the Islam of the time.¹²

While it is important to recognize the pioneering French-language studies on “peripheral Islam” and the Sufi brotherhoods,¹³ Islamic reformism, and, more recently, Islamic law, their influence has been marginal compared to that of research on Islamism and Salafism. This has been compounded by anglophone specialists’ poor mastery of French, which contributes to widening the gulf between French Islamologie, currently in crisis (and yet producing fine work), and the thriving, fast-growing international discipline of Islamic studies. One has only to leaf through Die Welt des Islams, a journal by the Orientalist publisher Brill, founded in 1951 and specialized in the history of Islam from the eighteenth century onwards, to observe the dearth of French authors alongside the plethora of texts in English. When it comes to Islam, generalist introductions in French tend to settle for repeating inaccurate information—or simply avoid the subject.¹⁴ And what of the media, which circulate so many clichés about political Islam? The fact that there are no collections of source materials on modern and contemporary Islam (either in bilingual editions or in French translation) is highly significant.¹⁵ Who even reads the primary sources and the studies?

Conceptual History: The Example of Salafiyya

Recent debates about the concept of salafiyya demonstrate the need to return to the texts themselves. Concepts and terminology are fundamental issues in the historical study of Islam. Most of the concepts used—less than accurately—in Western historiographical debates (including renouveau/revival, reform, and Muslim modernism/réformisme) do not correspond to an existing term in Arabic but have instead been back-translated and reified by Arabic speakers and colleagues from the Muslim world. And when concepts used in European languages claim to translate particular Arabic terms, they should themselves be seen as conventions that must be interrogated. For example, the German word Ssufismus (Sufism), coined by the Orientalist August Tholuck in 1821, encompasses a much greater body of religious thought and practices than the Arabic word taṣawwuf, which relates to the doctrinal arena alone. Another example is Nahḍa. Used by Arab intellectuals to translate “Renaissance” (Italian, Spanish, and others), the word is back-translated as “Arab Renaissance,” and understood to designate a development assumed to have taken place following a period of decline (ʿaṣr al-inḥitāt). This terminological back-and-forth is thus more of an a posteriori discursive construction than anything else; it does not refer to any clearly defined current of thought.¹⁶ Translating iṣlāḥ into French as réforme is just as problematic, since the underlying assumption is that late nineteenth-century reform in the Islamic world is somehow the equivalent of Europe’s sixteenth-century Réforme, that is, the Reformation. Finally, tajdīd (renewal) has been studied so closely and rigorously that it would be inadmissible to persist in seeing this essential concept as merely the antonym of taqlīd (blind imitation of masters), which in legal usage was also opposed to ijtihād (the effort to interpret).

Like Kremlinologists, specialists have drawn up their detailed pictures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century versions of Islamism. But the different movements they have identified intersect with globalizing, secularized political ideologies that are often (though not always) relatively removed from Islam, Islamic spirituality, and its theological underpinnings. What are we to call these movements? Rejecting the terms that were initially used, “fundamentalism” or intégrisme, scholars began speaking in the 1990s of “political Islam” or “Islamism,” though these labels did not correspond to those used by the protagonists themselves.¹⁷ Not that indigenous terms are more precise; they often refer to mythical legitimations plucked out of a muddled memory where the given word alone is supposed to elicit adherence or endorsement. This is precisely the case with the word “Salafism,” imposed by Saudi dogma and the media in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In fact, salafiyya has various meanings and refers to notions that differ depending on the text and the historical moment, as does wahhābiyya, which has also been extensively used, and in itself signifies both “Wahhabism” and “Wahhabis.”

If most specialists of current Islamism and Salafism look for the roots of what they are studying in the Islam of the past—or rather, in references produced by Islamists and specialists of Islam—this is because the Salafist stance forces them to do so, emphasizing as it does the notion of intellectual genealogy and brandishing terms gleaming with what Nicolas Michel called the “veneer of indigénat”: salaf (ancestors), al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ (loyalty and disavowal, a principle used to justify the excommunication, or takfīr, of other Muslims), akhlāq (morals or ethics), bidʿa (blameworthy innovation), maṣlaḥa (the community interest),¹⁸ and others. But what do those words mean, in what period, and in whose writings? Does similarity in usage between two or more terms indicate equivalency or kinship? How can we historicize these ubiquitous concepts without a historical dictionary of the Arabic language? Should we not exhume other concepts, dismissed or denatured by the Salafists, such as taḥqīq, meaning “verification” of the faith through demonstrative arguments? Khaled El-Rouayheb has shown the importance of taḥqīq in the rise of the rational sciences (that is, rational and logical theology) in the seventeenth century.¹⁹ Or perhaps we should study debates within Sufism, knowing as we do now that Sufism fueled all reformist Sunnite currents, including those that broke away from it? And yet doctrinal Sufism remains terra incognita for the overwhelming majority of specialists of contemporary Islam.

And what of the concept of salafiyya itself, first clarified in the 2000s by a few early, brilliant studies?²⁰ In 2010, the Canadian scholar Henri Lauzière criticized the term,²¹ which had been used to designate late nineteenth-century Islamic reform, identifying it as a French Orientalist construction attributable to Louis Massignon and amplified by Henri Laoust’s renowned 1932 article, “Le réformisme orthodoxe des ‘Salafiya.’”²² In 2016, Frank Griffel, a German specialist of Islam, argued against Lauzière that the term was valid. Comparing late nineteenth-century reformism with the Salafist parties of contemporary Egypt, Griffel suggested that Lauzière’s conceptual history lacked historical depth and accused him of neglecting crucial references such as Schulze’s great Islamischer Internationalismus.²³ Lauzière retorted by pointing out the difference between Griffel’s analytic concept and the concept as used in the sources themselves. This interesting debate has enabled researchers to formulate their questions more rigorously, demonstrating the need for a longue durée approach.²⁴

We all know that the term salafiyya refers to al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ, the pious ancestors of Islam’s beginnings, starting with the Prophet, whose ethics and behavior were to be emulated.²⁵ Largely due to the influence of Saudi Wahhabi terminology, Salafism, whether quietist or activist, has come to be identified with Islamic radicalism. But once again, the term “Salafism” had already been ratified by Western Orientalists to designate the reformist Muslim movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What should we make of this ambivalence? Nearly eighty years after Laoust’s article, Lauzière established that “Islamic reformists,” specifically al-Afghānī and ʿAbduh, did not use the term salafiyya to refer to themselves. In nineteenth-century sources, salafī designated not a “Salafist” in the sense used today but, as Lauzière observed, a Muslim who professed the fideism of Hanbali theology on the question of the divine attributes (and who therefore rejected Muʿtazilī rationalism and Ashʿarī theologians’ more moderate variant).²⁶ Moreover, the biographical sources of the time portray the salafī as a scrupulous, ascetic Muslim—often an intensely pious Sufi—very much concentrated on reproducing the mores and ethics of the Prophet in their own life.

For Lauzière, the term salafiyya only acquired its current meaning of ideological militancy toward the end of the 1920s, when it began to designate a purist movement in contemporary Islam and the theological underpinnings of that current. This new meaning can be attributed to the Salafiyya Press and Bookstore (al-Maṭbaʿa al-salafiyya), a publishing house, bookshop, and meeting place founded by two reformist Syrians who had emigrated to Cairo. One of them was Muḥibb al-Dīn al-Khaṭīb (1886–1969), whom Laoust knew personally. Al-Khaṭīb’s trajectory clearly illustrates the important role played by the breaks and ruptures of the late Ottoman Empire in the complex genesis of Islamist movements. Initially a disciple of the Sufi shaykh Ṭāhir al-Jazāʾirī (1852–1920) in Damascus, and a student at Syria’s renowned public school Maktab ʿAnbar, al-Khaṭīb, who also sojourned in Istanbul, was a fervent Arab nationalist who supported the Hashemites during the Arab Revolt in 1916. When the French mandate was instated in Syria, he emigrated to Cairo to campaign against the secularized Islam of Taha Hussein and ʿAlī ʿAbd al-Rāziq on grounds that were simultaneously nationalist, xenophobic, and puritanical.²⁷ Al-Khaṭīb became a close friend of Riḍā and started his own journal, Al-Fatḥ, in which he hailed the birth of Saudi Arabia and made it clear that salafiyya should now turn to neo-Hanbalism.²⁸ These ideas corresponded to particular social milieus. The Anṣār al-Sunna, founded in 1926, and the Young Men’s Muslim Association (YMMA), founded under al-Khaṭīb’s aegis in 1927—just two of the groups in what would prove a veritable incubator of youth movements in the Muslim world—were preludes to Ḥasan al-Bannā’s creation of the Muslim Brotherhood Society in 1928. This milieu was in turn related to the circle of Shakīb Arslān (1869–1946), whose exile in Geneva and French-language journal La nation arabe were instrumental in turning Salafism into a transnational movement based in Europe, supported by the European Fascists of the time and violently anti-Western.

William Cleveland studied Arslān’s life in his significantly titled 1985 work, Islam against the West.²⁹ Lauzière was Cleveland’s student and was following in his footsteps when, in 2016, he reconstituted the intellectual trajectory of the Moroccan Taqī al-Dīn al-Hilālī (1894–1987), presenting him as the typical Salafist.³⁰ Initially a tijānī Sufi, al-Hilālī circulated between Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Nazi Germany. He taught at the Islamic university of Medina and later promoted purist Salafism in Casablanca. Although al-Hilālī accepted some of the ideas being diffused by the nationalist reformers (“modernist Salafists,” in Lauzière’s terminology), deeming them useful in the fight against colonialism, his own ideas took a decidedly more radical turn in the years immediately following Moroccan independence. It was at that time that he came to adhere to a “purist Salafism”—here Lauzière adopts Bernard Haykel’s definitions³¹—that rejected all rationalism and embraced the theological core of the neo-Hanbali doctrine, founded on the ideas of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). In the late 1970s, under Saudi and Wahhabi influence, “purist” Salafist notions began to take precedence over “modernist” Salafist ones, the latter remaining loyal to late nineteenth-century Islamic reformism. Al-Hilālī’s Salafism dictated that a Muslim’s sole concern was “purity” and that only the true Islam could lead to salvation: the legal schools were explicitly disavowed and speculative theology categorically rejected; theological doctrines were seen as reprehensible innovations; the neo-Hanbali doctrine alone, identified with the beliefs of the first Muslims, was licit. Another feature of this radicalism was the categorical rejection of scriptural interpretation. Lauzière has shown how that position is both close to and different from Wahhabism: both are puritan and admit only the neo-Hanbali vision, but Salafism alone, by way of its Ottoman and reformist heritage, accepts a degree of modernity. Lauzière’s important book therefore enables us to classify Salafists’ discourses about themselves throughout the twentieth century on the basis of their conceptual and theological positions.³² Yet although the rather rigid distinction between “modernist Salafists” and “purist Salafists” does help us better understand the debates of the time, we cannot use it to account for what eludes those categories. The historical study of Algerian Islam, for example, shows both the vitality of active réformisme in the post-independence state and the birth of a kind of protean Islamism,³³ while the study of Saudi Islam indicates that it was influenced by more currents of thought than its austere philosophy would suggest.³⁴ We must therefore keep the fluidity, multiplicity, and perishable historicity of doctrinal systems firmly in mind.

Lauzière’s generally convincing demonstration raises many questions about earlier ideas and events, since it does not take into account the Ottoman period or most of the nineteenth century. Islamic reformism cannot be thought of as a stable, established movement, and in any case its ties with Islamism (or Salafism) must be carefully examined. To advance further, we need to reexamine the history of Sufism, the Ottoman legacy, and Egyptian Islam, all of which played such important roles in these intellectual and theological debates. If, as Lauzière argued, the word salafiyya does not accurately designate late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Islamic reformism, how then might this better be characterized? We must return to Laoust’s 1932 article, which has itself become an indispensable primary source (what Griffel called a “document”). Laoust had the insight to capture in vivo, through the books and journals that he brought back from Cairo and the connections he made there, the emergence of a new generational, social, and ideological phenomenon: young, urban intellectuals with a modern education, the products of the first phase of the demographic transition and fiercely nationalistic, were developing new ideas and engaging in new types of action. These young men had hardly any first-hand knowledge of the Ottoman Empire, and even less of the Hamidian caliphate. For them, Islam had become an identity issue, both nationalist and transnational, and a question of political resistance against the Western presence, the most diabolical manifestation of which was the Christian missions. The culture of exacerbated antagonism and the impatient thirst for modernity that Laoust described were not inherited from ʿAbduh and his circle. Laoust understood that this younger generation (Ḥasan al-Bannā and Sayyid Quṭb were both born in 1906) was breaking away from Islamic reformism: these men were practicing their own new methods of expression and action. Schulze called this break “neo-salafiyya,” necessarily suggesting that Islamic reformism itself was a form of salafiyya—an error denounced by Lauzière.

Refusing the Received Narrative of the al-Afghānī/ʿAbduh/Riḍā Trinity

We can now move on from the term salafiyya to examine what in France is called “Islamic reformism.” Ali Merad, who cut his teeth in the Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama, has given the best definition of the term to date: “the effort to adapt Muslim life and thought to the realities of modern times.”³⁵ Islamic reformism, a historical moment of the coalescing of ideas and emotions that culminated between the 1880s and the 1950s, was never a fully established dogmatic current.³⁶ It would be misleading to attribute such importance to its figureheads (authors who left behind identifiable printed texts and journals) when all evidence points to the existence of a proliferating, protean milieu made up of associations, societies, clubs, and schools of every sort—in which many Christians and Jews also participated—at the end of the Ottoman Empire. A broader perspective reveals a reformist moment in which statesmen and civil servants, literate Sufis and modernist reformists, European and American missionaries, men and women (a few female figures have been identified³⁷) all took part. In his book on Riḍā, Umar Ryad has brought to light reformist Muslim interactions with Arab Christians, Orientalists, and missionaries, figures who were simultaneously seen as abhorred foils, admired models, and worthy interlocutors.³⁸

Which ʿālim or intellectual of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century did not speak the discourse of reform? And yet it would be reductive to take these actors’ self-proclamations of renewal in the face of obscurantist resistance and “sclerosis” (jumūd) at face value. They were all more or less protagonists of the same Zeitgeist, influenced by positivism and social Darwinism, as well as by the expansion of a version of Sufism facilitated by the printing press and technological modernity, and later by Durkheimian sociology and the rise of nationalism in the new states established after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.³⁹ Under the repeated discourses lay shifting realities. The protagonists belonged, successively (and in some cases simultaneously), to different currents. They were not so much theorists—and even less theologians—as practitioners guided by the urgency of a critical situation, as Dyala Hamzah demonstrated in her PhD dissertation on Riḍā, which portrays him first and foremost as a polemical editorialist.⁴⁰

And yet a holy trinity of Islamic reformism continues to be taught, a catechistic creed transmitted in North Africa as if it were historical truth, adopted by the Muslim Brotherhood and their heirs⁴¹ and reproduced everywhere in the secondary literature. It goes like this: In the beginning there was al-Afghānī (d. 1897), followed by his Egyptian disciple ʿAbduh (d. 1905), who then passed the torch of reform to the Syrian Riḍā (d. 1935), who had settled in Egypt and founded the journal Al-Manār. To make this trinity less Arabocentric (that is, less Egyptocentric), auxiliary divinities can be added: Indians such as Siddiq Aḥmad Khan (1832–1890), founder of the Ahl-i Hadith movement, and the modernist Sayyid Aḥmad Khan (1817–1890); or Turks such as Said Nursi (1878–1960), whose Sufi-influenced work inspired Fethullah Gülen. Alternatively, the spotlight can be turned on the Syrian origins of Egyptian reformism: Shaykh Ṭāhir al-Jazāʾirī, known as the “Muḥammad ʿAbduh of Syria,”⁴² emigrated to Egypt, as did several of his disciples. Yet regardless of how it is embellished, the litany culminates with the ultimate link in the chain, in fact, the “goal” of the presumed filiation: the “founding fathers of salafiyya” passed their mantle to al-Bannā (1906–1949), the son of one of Riḍā’s disciples and the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. This led to the inevitable advent of militant Islamism, which produced Quṭb (1906–1966), the Pakistani Sayyid Abu ʾl-Aʿlā Mawdūdī (1903–1979), and their disciples, revealing the potential violence of Islamist ideologies. Once these foundations have been established, all that remains to be done is to describe the ramifications, scissions, and currents that developed out of the “Brotherhood matrix.”

Yet the fact is that whatever material is added and whatever qualifications are made in presenting it, the received narrative is nothing more than a convenient hagiographic collection of legends. Firstly, because what occurred was not the passing of a torch from one figure to the next but a rupture, a break in continuity. If we examine the first stage, the supposed shift from al-Afghānī to ʿAbduh, we can see that although al-Afghānī was indeed ʿAbduh’s master, and although they jointly published the eighteen issues of the journal Al-ʿUrwa al-wuthqā (The Firmest Bond, 1884) in exile, ʿAbduh returned to Egypt whereas al-Afghānī, courted by Sultan Abdülhamid, began to champion other causes. Al-Afghānī’s causes were political and pan-Islamist, whereas ʿAbduh was fighting for education and for Egypt. Moreover, the two men’s attitudes toward religion and spirituality were very different. ʿAbduh, who initially trained in Sufi Islam, later developed a curiosity for French literature and philosophy; he was open to and influenced by Muʿtazilism (a supposedly rationalist school of thought in medieval Islam) and his ideas were both innovative and apologetic. ʿAbduh’s relations with Europeans were courteous, interested, and distant. Al-Afghānī, on the other hand, was an Iranian Shiite influenced by shaykhism and philosophy, a Freemason with a passion for politics, and resolutely hostile to the British; his discourse varied depending on the many languages he wrote in and the audience he addressed.⁴³ Likely a deist, al-Afghānī viewed Islam as a system for combating colonialism. And we do have evidence of the never-mentioned fracture between them: when al-Afghānī died, ʿAbduh did not write an obituary for him.

The second stage, in the standard narrative, is the passing of the baton from ʿAbduh to Riḍā. Although it is true that Riḍā presented himself as ʿAbduh’s main disciple, Laoust noted while Riḍā was still alive that for his contemporaries this claim amounted to inheritance grabbing. Riḍā was not ʿAbduh’s beloved heir; ʿAbduh’s true successors were Qāsim Amīn (d. 1908), who may have served as his spokesman in Taḥrīr al-marʾa (The Liberation of Women), Shaykh Muṣṭafā al-Marāghī (1881–1945), and above all Shaykh Muṣṭafā ʿAbd al-Rāziq (1885–1947). ʿAbduh died in 1905, discouraged by the failure of his reform of al-Azhar University in Cairo, and his Muʿtazilī penchants were censored by his successors. Far from quoting the hadith at every opportunity, as Riḍā later did, ʿAbduh delivered bold fatwas whilst adapting to British colonization. It was after his death, and even more clearly after the First World War and the 1919 Egyptian Revolution, that Islamic reformism and Arab nationalism joined together and Egyptian nationalism became tinged with a simplified, normative, resolutely identity-focused, and in some instances xenophobic Islam. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire encouraged transnational militant itineraries: Riḍā was initially close to the Hashemites but ended his life close to the Saudis, working to rehabilitate Wahhabism.⁴⁴

And what of the third stage? Although there was a link between Riḍā and al-Bannā,⁴⁵ we also know for certain that al-Bannā’s true mentor was the aforementioned al-Khaṭīb, whom al-Bannā identifies as such in his precocious Memoirs. Al-Khaṭīb, as we have seen, was a disciple of Shaykh Ṭāhir al-Jazāʾirī, who had raised him. Clearly, then, we have found our way back to Syrian reformism, which included the followers of ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jazāʾirī (known to the French as Abdelkader and no relation to Shaykh Ṭāhir). It was Ṭāhir al-Jazāʾirī who had revived the thought of the Sufi mystic Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), and, together with his Syrian disciples, published certain writings by Ibn Taymiyya. The history of late nineteenth-century Syrian reformism as written by David Commins, Itzchak Weismann, and Thomas Eich⁴⁶ needs to be further examined in relation to the social history of education and printing, and to the migration of Syrian intellectuals to Egypt. Moreover, Egyptian Islam in the interwar period cannot be reduced to the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood movement. During the same period, reformists took over at al-Azhar, though their victory was Pyrrhic—primarily a matter of age, generation, and shifting context as the ulama were eclipsed by intellectuals trained in modern schools and at the university itself.⁴⁷

We can see that between each of the three supposed stages there was more in the way of breaks than continuity; a multiplicity of often contradictory, protean movements, certainly not a continuous filiation from one ineluctable school of thought to the next. Furthermore, this holy trinity of Islamic reformism is falsified by its Arabocentrism and Egyptocentrism. The narrative fails to take into account the diversity of Muslim countries and their own currents of thought. No, al-Afghānī was not the deus ex machina that set everything in motion. As an Iranian who traveled to India, came into contact with the Russian world in Afghanistan, taught in Egypt and later in Istanbul, and wrote in a number of languages, al-Afghānī’s trajectory illustrates the intellectual and religious ferment that colonialism helped to crystallize into an identity movement. But colonialism was not the cause of that movement. The directions taken by Islamic reformism did not first appear in the Arab world but rather among the Muslims of Russia, central Asia, and India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as Stéphane Dudoignon and Michael Kemper have shown in their remarkable respective studies of Islamic reformism in Russia and central Asia.⁴⁸ As for India, we cannot entirely dismiss Massignon’s intuition (inspired by the thought of Garcin de Tassy) that salafiyya began precisely there. Barbara Metcalf’s masterly book on Deoband paved the way for a considerable number of studies about Indian reformism,⁴⁹ including Michel Boivin’s work on the Ismailis of Sindh (now Pakistan)—following the groundbreaking research of Marc Gaborieau on Nepalese and Indian Islam—which brought to the fore the reformative actions of the third Aga Khan (1877–1957).⁵⁰ Many other examples could be cited. Everything suggests that in a context marked by population growth, the advent of the printing press, rising numbers of schools and their diversification, the establishment of modern states, new circulation routes, and, of course, European imperialism, multiple currents of Islamic reform were developing simultaneously. And everything also suggests that Sufi Islam, already a vital religious force, was the first to benefit from those developments, and that it benefited more than the reformist ideas that grew out of it.

To return to the birth of what is commonly called Islamic reformism in the Arab world, we can see that when al-Afghānī arrived in Egypt in the 1870s, his ideas were well received. Egyptian ulama had been developing their own vision of education, literature, the Arabic language, and Islam, based on their reading of fiqh and Sufism. A number of al-Azhar’s students were hungry for new ideas and career opportunities. And later, when Riḍā and al-Khaṭīb emigrated from Syria to Egypt, they encountered a restricted but active milieu that echoed all the way into the countryside; a milieu in which the development of schooling for boys, Quranic school reform, and the effects of colonization were eliciting stimulating new ideas. The same thing occurred in the Maghreb. It was not ʿAbduh’s travels in Tunisia and Algeria in 1903 that elicited a desire for religious reform there; that desire already existed, as we learn from James McDougall, who has observed both endogenous geneses and intertwining currents in Algeria during those decades.⁵¹ Sufis did not constitute a separate sphere or even a separate camp from reformists. They too, and at the same time, were questioning the challenges of modernity and considering how to confront the colonizing West.

Shiites as well as Sunnis were implicated in Islamic reformism. Although Shia reformism shared some features with Sunni reformism, it also had marked particularities due, as Sabrina Mervin has shown, to ulama circulating between Jabal ʿĀmil (now southern Lebanon), Iraq, and Iran.⁵² Werner Ende, followed by Rainer Brunner, stressed the importance of the rapprochement (taqrīb) that occurred between Twelver Shiites and Sunnis at that time, a normalization of relations that also affected minority Muslim currents such as Indian Ismailism and Mzabi Ibadism.⁵³ In addition to providing precious information about regional, confessional, and linguistic variants, the great monographic studies of reformist currents ultimately enable us to see Islamic reformism as a product of “global Islam.” They clarify the importance of taking a transnational approach when studying Muslims of this period, who were becoming increasingly mobile.⁵⁴ And before it was reformist Islam, this transnational Islam was Sufi Islam. In his exploration of intellectual and religious circulations from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, with a special focus on Egypt and Indonesia, Michael Laffan described the nineteenth century as a “Sufi century.”⁵⁵ The unprecedented diffusion of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought via the writings of the Egyptian hagiographer ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī (d. 1565), which could now be printed; the doctrinal changes brought about by “neo-Sufism”; the flowering of fiqh at the very moment it was threatened by internal criticism—any history of Islamic reformism needs to encompass these crucial developments.

“Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age”: Distortions and Appraisals

The reason that the history of Islamic reformism has failed to follow that prescription has to do with a prejudice inherent in the very notion of reform and reformism, and extremely well represented in the secondary literature: the idea that the reform of Islam was inevitable and desirable and that the turn of the nineteenth century marked a felicitous awakening after the long, dark Ottoman period. Historians have traditionally identified this threshold of modernity with one of the following: the arrival of Catholic missionaries in Mount Lebanon in the seventeenth century, in the wake of the Tridentine Reform; the advent of the Eastern Question (1774); Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition (1798); Muḥammad ʿAlī’s arrival in Egypt (1801); or Maḥmūd II’s elimination of the Janissaries (1826). In the French and Arabic historiography, everything—modernity, that is—began with Napoleon Bonaparte. And that is where Hourani opened his famous work, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (first edition 1962), in which he delivered an in-depth reading of nineteenth-century Arabic Christian and Muslim thought.⁵⁶ For many of today’s specialists of the contemporary Middle East, however, that same everything—modernity—began with the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1876 (or 1923), as the nineteenth century gradually sank into the temporal sfumato to which specialists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries relegated a “past” that they constantly evoked but about which they know relatively little.

It is important to state and restate the ruptures and accelerations of the nineteenth century, partly dictated by the Eastern Question: the first acceleration, in the 1830s; the decisive turning point of the 1850s–1860s, caused by the tanzimat and changes in the economic, legal, and cultural spheres; the brutal shift instigated in the 1880s by the colonial presence, new economic developments, and state-building. These breaks were characteristic of modernity. But did the dichotomy between “fossilized Islam” (ill adapted to modernity) and “modern Islam” (compatible with the West), presented in introductory literature on the subject, ever correspond to reality? Or was it rather—though this does not alter the dichotomy—that an anti-modern, nostalgic historiography highlighted an opposition between the sorely missed Sufi tradition and the unduly westernized or necessarily Islamist modern Islam, which was deplored?⁵⁷ In any case, research on fiqh, Muslim piety, and literature leads us to quite different conclusions than this reductive dichotomy. Suzanne Stetkevych, for example, has devoted a fascinating chapter to the renowned Egyptian poet Aḥmad Shawqī (1868–1932) and his neoclassical poetry in honor of the Prophet. Her analysis opens up a new perspective on the delicate relationship between poetry, politics, and reformism.⁵⁸

Despite the manifest contemporary interest in Henri Bergson’s thought—which might have softened these rigidly linear conceptions—the grand narrative of reformism, with its heroes and heralds, is still heavily promoted and widely diffused in the Middle East, where the general public continues to read Zuʿamāʾ al-iṣlāḥ (Leaders of Reform in the Modern Age) by Aḥmad Amīn (1886–1954). But the reformist narrative required a counterpoint, which it found in the backward “turban wearers”—Sufis, in a word; the rural populations supposedly attached to superstitions, saint worship, and practices that Orientalists had deemed obsolete. And so that category was duly set up in opposition to the reformists, the moderns, those who wore fezzes (and later hats), the proponents of the Enlightenment. The problem is that this tenacious dichotomy does not stand up to scrutiny. As Benjamin Fortna and Selçuk Akşin Somel have shown, many teachers in modern Egyptian and Ottoman schools were themselves turban wearers who practiced traditional teaching methods; conversely, future students of al-Azhar were attending classes at modern schools and would soon be studying at the university itself.⁵⁹ The life of Shaykh Abū l-Hudā al-Ṣayyādī (1850–1909) offers a good illustration of the complex relationship between “traditional” and “modern” Islam. Presumed to incarnate obscurantist Islam at the height of the Hamidian Ottoman Empire, and associated with the “rise of Islamic fundamentalism” in the shadow of Sultan Abdülhamid II,⁶⁰ Abū l-Hudā was first and foremost a Sufi shaykh concerned with ensuring publicity for his brotherhood, the Rifāʿiyya, by means of small printed pamphlets in a new and unprecedented format. He was also a homo novus who enjoyed the support of the Ottoman reformist milieu, as shown in Eich’s dissertation.

Just as the “retrogrades” turned out to be modern, so the “moderns” proved to be profoundly attached to tradition. In his introduction to Moralistes et politiques musulmans dans l’Égypte du xix^e siècle (1982),⁶¹ Gilbert Delanoue recounts how his research on nineteenth-century reformers revealed ulama versed in fiqh and Sufis enamored of pious traditions, not to mention libraries that afforded little room to the modern sciences and none to the rational sciences of the Islamic past. Were these Egyptian particularities? As it turns out, Hourani made the same observation in his preface to the 1983 re-edition of his celebrated 1962 work. To explain how he came to realize the modern slant he had ascribed to the thinking of authors who were in fact considerably indebted to tradition, Hourani cited Christian Troll’s research on Sayyid Aḥmad Khan.⁶² It was important, Hourani argued, not to misidentify what was in fact a religious system of thought, a vibrant spirituality, and myriad forms of devotion and models of sainthood still very much alive. Hourani was timidly attempting to rehabilitate a religious anthropology approach that might easily be overlooked by a history of ideas that failed to take social history into account or to move beyond listing genealogies, great ancestors, and second fiddles. That risk is still with us.

A considerable number of studies have worked to rehabilitate the neglected currents of nineteenth-century Islam. Historical studies of printing in the Islamic world have shown how the printing press, reputed to be the very instrument of religious reform,⁶³ initially—and for a long time—was used to express disciples’ loyalty to their masters. In the nineteenth century, acolytes began by printing the works of their shaykhs, producing an avalanche of Sufi piety, devotions to the Prophet, and Muslim casuistry that far outstripped the printing of science manuals or translations from European languages.⁶⁴ Indeed, in the Ottoman period, Sufism could almost be identified with Islam itself. Not that all Muslims were initiated Sufis, but they were all steeped in Sufi culture, the everyday religion of the empire’s Muslims, and it was in that soil that the reformists rooted their “ever so chaotic combat” (to use Delanoue’s expression), despite the fact that Sufism was their target. Buṭrus Abu-Manneh has shed light on the Sufi origins of Ottoman reforms,⁶⁵ while other research (notably that of Commins and Weismann) has highlighted the Sufi roots of Islamic reformism. As the empire was coming to its end, Ottoman Freemason philosophers were in the process of reinterpreting Sufi spirituality, rather than abandoning it.⁶⁶ Many still-active fundamentalist currents were simultaneously Sufi brotherhoods and Islamist movements, including the Tablighi Jamaat movement in India and the Nurçuluk movement in Turkey.⁶⁷ Only by exploring these zones of ambivalence can we accurately assess ruptures and differences.

Even as the decades passed and the different camps became more clearly distinguished from each other, borrowings and bridges between them persisted. We know that the young al-Bannā belonged to the al-Ḥasafiyya Sufi brotherhood, and more recently we have learned how close the Syrian and Turkish branches of the Naqshbandiyya brotherhood were to puritan Salafist movements. Without admitting it explicitly, Saudi Salafism borrowed much of its scrupulous piety, attachment to the Prophet, and even its literature from the authors and texts of medieval Sufism—while carefully expurgating all mysticism from those borrowings.⁶⁸ In fact, a break did occur, though not exactly the one described by the actors themselves, who were hungry for the legitimacy that comes with tradition and continuity. That break, political and theological, now splits contemporary Islam. The veiled (or unveiled) women and the bearded men who have (or have not) replaced the beardless and mustachioed men may actually stand for many diverse realities: these attributes can signify love of the Law and the Prophet and a pursuit of tradition, just as they can represent the radical rejection of that same tradition.⁶⁹ As Hamit Bozarslan has shown so well,⁷⁰ the insistence on bodily habitus and the enthusiasm for martyrdom, coming as they do after decades of leftist politics in the Middle East (until 1967, or 1979), are the consequences of a political failure. As soon as the Iraq-Iran conflict of 1980–1988, with its new justification of sacrificial martyrdom, erupted, Farhad Khosrokhaver began studying the links between Islamism and this death-obsessed nihilism. He found that the invocation of the martyred imam model was not inherited from some eternal Shiism but, on the contrary, marked the advent of a profoundly nihilist, eschatology-focused process of desacralization.⁷¹

Introductory works for broad publics are rife with rigid dichotomies intended to guide readers, but which actually go against historical fact. They posit oppositions between obscurantist and enlightened Islam, puritanical and pleasure-focused Islam, “clerical” Islam and “secular” Islam, Islam that is either compatible with modernity (read: the West) or incompatible with it (a new avatar of the Eternal Orient). This overall dichotomy is perfectly mirrored in the discourse of Islamists and Salafists, in the form of inverse phobias and fears: “Original Islam must be reinstated against corrupt Islam” (sullied by the West and by blameworthy innovations); “The West is a threat to Islam, which must be defended against this missionary/Zionist-American conspiracy responsible for so many bloody conflicts”; “Islamic mores (modesty, respectability, and family) need to be protected against Western mores (depravity and individualism).” These reciprocal oppositions owe a great deal to a long-standing culture of antagonism, reactivated during the colonial period,⁷² to Orientalism, and finally to what can only be described as a permanent state of conflict, whose Manichean representations depict the Middle East (or Islam, or Islamism) either as the perpetual aggressor or as the perpetual victim of persecution. In the Middle East, public adherence to one or another of these visions is strong: the Muslim Brotherhood’s political victory and subsequent failure following the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, and the increasingly oppressive reign of the AKP in Turkey, represent the conservative Islamic camp; its opposite is understood to be the liberal and modern camp (proponents of what the French might call laïcité). However, the clear divide in this Kulturkampf, as Bozarslan has called it, is an illusion. Although the bitterness of current debates appears to have brought us to a conceptual and ideological “clarification” about what Islam “is” (unfortunately involving violence, militias, and civil war), confusion reigns within Middle Eastern societies themselves. Ideological conflicts often serve as pretexts for other kinds of conflict, whether power struggles or territorial skirmishes.

Why not describe this confusion as well, the confusion felt by Muslims who do not recognize themselves either in the omnipresent teleological narrative or in the ineluctable genealogies and dichotomous clashes that prevail? They do not think of themselves as having chosen—or indeed of needing to choose—between a secular or depraved, liberal or despotic West (depending on the discourse) and a virtuous or puritanical, oppressed or Jihadist Islam (again depending on the discourse). The study of modern Islam used to overstress reformism; it then shifted to overstressing Islamism. Today it stresses Salafism. This hypertrophy of Islamismologie (the word was coined by the French linguist Pierre Larcher) can be partly explained by social demand: Western societies are hungry for categories that will help them understand current events.⁷³ But there are other reasons. The first is that it is easier to work on reformist or Islamist literature than to study religious practices that have left no written traces. Saint worship, “superstitions,” and “brotherhoods,” together with ordinary predications and other everyday rituals, are all denounced by Islamists, but although they are occasionally described, they are seldom studied.⁷⁴

That is because, as early as the nineteenth century, the hypertrophy of research on reformism reproduced the Orientalists’ own prejudices about religion, and specifically their evolutionist vision of it. Their discourse was predictive: Islam was described as it had perhaps been at the outset, how it should have been, and in terms of what it would actually become once it had been rid of obstacles and impediments—namely, its blind imitation of legal tradition and the “survivals and superstitions” propagated by Sufis. According to both Islamologists and reformists, fiqh and Sufism were the two stumbling blocks to overcome. Down with the tatters of tradition and popular devotions! According to one founder of Islamic studies, Ignác Goldziher (1859–1921), a Hungarian Jew whose thinking was driven by the rationalistic “science of Judaism” and who had nothing but contempt for the religion of the shtetls, Wahhabism was the most authentic current of Islam and was right to condemn the worship of saints, be they Muslim or pagan. Goldziher had attended al-Afghānī’s classes at al-Azhar, and his writings inspired the opponents of saint worship, who rejected popular religion as a form of paganism, in the same way as partisans of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah had done, or indeed the positivist scholars grouped around Ernest Renan who, in 1880, founded the discipline of the history of religions.⁷⁵ By choosing to focus on texts—that is, “authentic” sources—and by adopting the obsession with origins, Islamic studies condemned other “survivals” to obscurity. As Bauer has shown, the overdetermination of Arab culture by Islam led scholars to dismiss all study of anything that was not specifically religious: music, literature, poetry, eroticism, the customs of daily life, shared cultures, ambivalences. Orientalists’ predilection for Wahhabism and Islamic reformism long remained dominant. Five decades later, writing about the activism of Arab societies between the wars, Laoust hailed what he considered to be the felicitous apparition of an Islamic modernity with which Westerners might dialogue, more interesting than “backward-looking” Islam, focused on tradition and doomed by modernity and secularization. Following Charles Adams’s overtly pro-reform 1933 biography of ʿAbduh, Hamilton Gibb took a similar position in his study of what he called “the modern trends in Islam” in 1947.⁷⁶ Thirty years after Adams, in a brilliant Weberian study, Michael Gilsenan came to the conclusion that the Egyptian Sufi brotherhoods were having great difficulty in catching up with modernity and were therefore condemned to disappear.⁷⁷ And even when a current made up of traditionalist European Orientalist scholars, themselves hostile to modernity, began to develop in the twentieth century, those scholars were no more attentive to lived Islam than any others. Massignon, a devout Catholic steeped in counterrevolutionary religiosity, may have studied Sufism, but his interlocutors were reformists. The same is true of the famous traditionalists who converted to Islam, including René Guénon in Egypt and Martin Lings in Algeria. These men were city dwellers who disdained social structures and were only interested in interlocutors who resembled them; clearly, they did not contribute to providing a picture of lived Islam. The only scholars who took an interest in popular and local Islam were colonial-era ethnographers, who naturally were not themselves exempt from prejudices.

Indeed, it is striking to note how little work has been done on lived Islam, along the lines of studies by the Dominican Jacques Jomier, which relate in simple terms what was said in a Friday sermon, what Ramadan meant in a particular time and place,⁷⁸ the rates of religious practice at a given time within a given social class, which saints’ shrines received the most Thursday-evening visits, and which invocations were most often recited.⁷⁹ The distress of our times has exacerbated this disinterest. The great religious anthropology study, such as those conducted by Clifford Geertz and Ernest Gellner in North Africa, or by Brinkley Messick in the Arab Middle East,⁸⁰ is a thing of the past. Fieldwork has become difficult, if not impossible; sites where religious anthropology might be carried out are now to be found in long-inaccessible Iran.⁸¹ Elsewhere, researchers are often reduced to searching for the history of once widespread practices in hostile but precise Wahhabi sources, practices that seldom leave a trace in the secondary literature, from which jinns and magic are likewise absent.⁸² It is currently from our own countries—in field-less conditions, as it were—that we observe the complex manifestations of transnational Islam and the infinite Islamic production online.

Did “Neo-Sufism” Exist?

Returning to history and backtracking along the paths of regressive genealogy and retrospective illusions, let us now cross the threshold of the nineteenth century—if it is indeed a threshold—into the preceding ones. What happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before the tanzimat, Nahḍa, or reformism began to blossom? Before the mass presence of Europe and Europeans? What were the roots—simultaneously endogenous and inextricably linked to the rest of the world—of the nineteenth-century reforms? Specialists of Eastern Christianity have emphasized the importance of circulations between various groups and of “go-betweens” across Europe and the Orient. Bernard Heyberger has highlighted the influence of Counter-Reformation ideas on the history of Syrian Christians.⁸³ However, the real importance of Eastern Catholics and missionaries should not be overstated: since the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, Russian, Bulgarian, and Romanian researchers have fleshed out the picture with studies of the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire and their links to the Greek, Balkan, and Slavic worlds. And we now know more about the role of Protestant missions in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Armenia, and Kurdistan.⁸⁴ Overall, we need to widen the geographic and confessional perspective to consider other sites and centers, other intellectual exchanges. For example, the literary heritage of Ottoman Jews circulated well beyond the borders of the empire, encompassing exchanges of ideas and texts (translated from and into Yiddish) with Eastern European Hassidism. This phenomenon was accentuated when Central and Eastern European Jews began immigrating to Palestine.⁸⁵ In short, it is clear that many developments in modern piety, devotional interpretation, and demands for reform were occurring simultaneously in the three monotheisms, in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, following similar sequences.⁸⁶ In our “pursuit of reform,” it is crucial not to neglect this comparative perspective.

And yet all this has been overshadowed by the general obsession with genealogy. The search has been for the sources of Islamic reform, not for relevant comparisons. In the 1970s and 1980s, the idea came to dominate that we could improve our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Islam by studying eighteenth-century Sufi currents. The concept of neo-Sufism, which had been introduced by Fazlur Rahman in 1966, was popularized at this time by the research of John Voll, culminating in the volume he edited with Nehemia Levtzion in 1987.⁸⁷ Voll rightly noted the development of a network of ulama—Indian, Asian, and Arab—in Mecca and Medina, a development facilitated by the Pax Ottomanica. Ottoman waqfs (mortmain properties) bequeathed to the Holy Places enabled Sufis and ulama with state stipends from across the Muslim world to settle by the thousands in the Holy Cities.⁸⁸ Voll, a genuine pioneer, set himself the task of studying the ulama-Sufi networks that had come to link the Maghreb, Egypt, the Hijaz, Yemen, India, and even the Malay-speaking world.⁸⁹ These networks may have given rise to the Wahhabism that appeared in the 1740s and 1750s in Najd, at the center of the Arabian peninsula.⁹⁰ Although Voll’s successors have probably attached too much importance to intellectual genealogies and biographical sources, their readings of new sources and use of new methods has confirmed the importance of these contacts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in Medina.⁹¹ In the late 1990s, Roman Loimeier and Stefan Reichmuth’s network analysis provided a more thorough picture of the circulation of ideas and ulama throughout the Muslim world in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁹² Notably, Reichmuth and his students applied quantitative methods and mapping to identify authors and texts.

The term “neo-Sufism” was a convenient way of referring to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century revival of Sufi Islam—new texts, new authors, new ideas, new brotherhoods—which had already been noted in colonial-era historiography. Researchers began presenting the great figures of “neo-Sufism,” such as Aḥmad ibn Idrīs (1749/1750–1837), who advocated discarding the madhhab or legal rites, loathed speculative theology and philosophy, and argued for the return of ijtihād based on the Quran and the Sunna. The brotherhoods founded by two of his disciples, Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Sanūsī (1787–1859) and Muḥammad ʿUthmān al-Mirghānī (1793–1852), were considered activist. Four other shaykhs also embodied “neo-Sufism”: Shah Waliullāh (1703–1762) in Delhi; Aḥmad al-Tijānī (1737–1815), who was born on the edge of the Sahara and founded the Tijāniyya brotherhood; the Yemeni Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Shawkānī (1759–1834), studied by Haykel⁹³; and the Kurdish Shaykh Mawlānā Khālid (1779–1827), who founded the Mujaddidiyya brotherhood. For Rahman and Voll, “neo-Sufism” was grounded in the revival of hadith study, opposition to saint worship, and emphasis on the Way of Muḥammad. Theologically, new readings of Ibn ʿArabī’s hagiological and mystic models refocused the mystic quest on the Prophet, with whom Sufis now sought union rather than with God. “Neo-Sufism” also seemed to be characterized by the transformation of existing brotherhoods into better organized, more militant ones—the Khalwatiyya and Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya—and by the early nineteenth-century founding of new brotherhoods such as the Tijāniyya and the Sanūsiyya, which the colonists would soon come to fear.⁹⁴

In 1993, Bernd Radtke and Rex Seán O’Fahey’s groundbreaking article, “Neo-Sufism Reconsidered,” called the very notion of “neo-Sufism” into question.⁹⁵ Radtke read the texts with great care, a task made easier by the intensive labor of identification and publication that had been undertaken since the 1970s. Finding strong continuities between medieval Sufism and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sufism, he claimed that hadith study had been revived not in the eighteenth century but rather between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.⁹⁶ In short, the idea that “neo-Sufism” had ever existed was seriously undermined. How, then, can we explain the eighteenth-century mutations of Islam observed by historians?

Eighteenth-Century “Islamic Aufklärung” or Seventeenth-Century Rational Thought?

In 1990, Schulze articulated a new working hypothesis closely related to the “neo-Sufism” idea: an eighteenth-century Islamic Aufklärung that was neither a reaction to European imperialism nor a transfer of Western ideas; a development understood to have its own specific characteristics corresponding to a properly Islamic intellectual and cultural modernity. According to this argument, Islam in the eighteenth century underwent an endogenous Enlightenment independent of European modernity, opening up to both monist mysticism and rationality, with Islamic theocentrism mitigated by an anthropocentric dimension and reflecting a desire for novelty and emancipation on behalf of the bourgeoisie. Schulze’s new hypothesis coincided with the rejection of the theory of Ottoman decline and the newly positive assessment of the Ottoman period by specialists of economic and social history.⁹⁷ His thesis was met with strongly negative reactions among German Orientalists. Indignant specialists pointed to the meaning of Aufklärung, its fundamental components, its German singularity—that is, what made it different from the typically English “Enlightenment,” the decidedly Italian Illuminismo, and the ever so French Lumières. They contested the very idea of comparing such supposedly different worlds. Points of contention included the meaning of modernity embodied in the German Enlightenment, and therefore the extent to which it was secular, its Kantian dimension, and the influence of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation.⁹⁸ In 2000, Albrecht Hofheinz offered a synthesis of the debates, qualifying the distortions to which Schulze’s ideas had been subjected (after all, “neo-Sufism” did not mean “new Sufism”) and suggesting that the phenomenon in question could be most relevantly compared with Pietism.⁹⁹

After the criticism had been leveled and the qualifications made, after the notions of “neo-Sufism” and “Islamic Aufklärung” had been scrapped, the fact remained that something had happened in the history of Sufism and, more generally, in that of early modern Islam. Radtke, Schulze’s main adversary, presented a survey of research on primary sources as the basis for a fundamental reexamination of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century doctrinal Sufism.¹⁰⁰ Innovative studies of Ibn Idrīs and his disciples illustrated the Muslim attachment to Sufism.¹⁰¹ As Jean-Louis Triaud and Knut Vikør showed for the Sanūsiyya, John Hunwick and Radtke for the Tijāniyya, and Alexandre Papas for the Naqshbandiyya, the new brotherhoods of that time were not primarily activist. But there was something new. While the Way of Muḥammad was drawn from medieval Sufism, the brotherhoods that advocated following it were now speaking to a more numerous, sociologically diverse, and probably better educated audience (though not one versed in religious texts). There had never been so many Muslims—or so many Sufis. Advances in education, new uses of books and reading, trade-driven circulations in the Indian Ocean, the Islamization of Southeast Asia, and developments in Muslim law, doctrine, and religion during the Ottoman Empire all needed to be taken into account. Meanwhile, the hypothesis that a form of Muslim “revivalism” had emerged during the early modern period spurred researchers to study still earlier, seventeenth-century texts, including such renowned books of Sufi instruction as al-Sayr wa-l-sulūk by al-Khānī (1619–1697). Thirty years after Schulze put forward his idea, it must now be acknowledged that his initial intuition, though open to criticism and indeed roundly criticized, has been one of the most fruitful sources of inspiration for recent historiography. Whether derived from the “neo-Sufism” hypothesis (with its colonial roots) or the Islamic Aufklärung theory, inscribed in “world history,” the idea that an Islamic revival occurred during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has taken firm root in our historiography—along with another debate about the existence of an Islamic version of humanism.¹⁰²

The welcome proliferation of research on the brotherhoods and texts of the Islamic world was occasionally accompanied by pioneering, clarifying research in social history and anthropological fieldwork focusing on particular regions or brotherhoods, often in Islamic Africa, India, and central Asia—what French researchers called Islam périphérique.¹⁰³ But scholars also continued their search for the advent of an Islamic form of modernity and for the ancestors of contemporary Islamic currents. Monographic studies of the great figures of the seventeenth century, including the Indian Aḥmad al-Sirhindī (1564–1624) and the Syrian ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (1640–1731), brought little-known theological debates to light. In the twentieth century, Indo-Islamic historiography had portrayed Shaykh Sirhindī as the proponent par excellence of waḥdat al-shuhūd (the doctrine of apparentism or “the monotheism of witness”), the founding father of a form of Islamic proto-reformism, and the champion of the orthodox reaction to the religious syncretism promoted by the Mughal emperor Akbar (d. 1605). Sirhindī was therefore presented as having been hostile to Ibn ʿArabī’s waḥdat al-wujūd (the unicity of existence, or monism), which was often denounced as heterodox. As a champion of “neo-Sufism” and a militant nationalist, the Pakistani-American intellectual Fazlur Rahman saw Sirhindī as the epitome of the “neo-Sufi.” Samuela Pagani notes that Rahman himself was speaking “as a reformer determined to change the Muslim society [of the mid-twentieth century]. He identified Islamic authenticity—from which he excluded waḥdat al-wujūd—with the dynamism and activism of modernity.”¹⁰⁴ In 2000, following Alberto Ventura and Johan ter Haar, Yohanan Friedmann showed how that image was an a posteriori reconstruction, and that Sirhindī’s critique of Ibn ʿArabī’s metaphysics was in no way a categorical condemnation.¹⁰⁵ Though the anachronistic received narrative posits an opposition between a “reformist” Sirhindī and a “heterodox” al-Nābulusī, or, conversely, an “Islamist” Sirhindī and an “enlightened” al-Nābulusī, the fact is that both were Sufis, even though al-Nābulusī was in favor of waḥdat al-wujūd and Sirhindī adhered to waḥdat al-shuhūd. Pagani showed in her dissertation that when a group of Naqshbandi Sufis living in Medina in the late seventeenth century called on al-Nābulusī to issue a fatwa condemning Sirhindī’s thinking, this was in no way a confrontation between “orthodox” and “heterodox” groups, between ulama and Sufis, but rather a controversy between different Naqshbandi currents—all Sufis—about the ideas of Ibn ʿArabī.¹⁰⁶

Here we have arrived at what can be called the crux of the matter: tajdīd, or “renewal,” prophesied in the celebrated hadith about the “renewer” or “reformer” (mujaddid): every century, God sends someone to renew or revive the religion.¹⁰⁷ According to Ibn ʿArabī, the mujaddid was the man perceived by his time to manifest a perfect mystic identification with Muḥammad. Every such heir to the Prophet was a saint who would guide other men; he belonged to a history of salvation, and he would reset the continuously regenerated prophetic model. The seventeenth-century debate concerned imitation of the Prophet and the methods of intercession between the Prophet and the Seal of the Saints. Sirhindī had emphasized discontinuity between God’s Being and being as manifest in the Creation, together with the absolute superiority of prophethood over sainthood. Al-Nābulusī, on the other hand, believed that sainthood fulfilled a superior function to that of prophethood.¹⁰⁸ In the early modern period, mystic tajdīd, fueled by eschatological expectations, and legal tajdīd, inspired by al-Shāfiʿī, the recognized “reformer” of the second century of the hegira, were closely linked to notions of sainthood in Sunnism. It is clear that that medieval and early modern tajdīd have nothing to do with the reformist project of the late modern period, which on the contrary favored an absolute break with the historical tradition of the community.¹⁰⁹ In other words, the tajdīd that Riḍā formulated sometime between 1900 and 1930 is not the tajdīd al-Nābulusī was debating in the late seventeenth century, and regardless of the alleged genealogical connections, tajdīd is in no way the ancestor of iṣlāḥ. From the perspective of nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformism and Salafism, the only purpose of tajdīd is to purify Islam of reprehensible innovations introduced into the religious sphere.¹¹⁰

From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, the Prophet was at the center of all desires for reform. Ottoman ulama were interested in the esoteric puritanism of Muḥammad Birgivi (d. 1529) as put forward in his Al-Ṭarīqa al-muḥammadiyya (The Way of Muḥammad), whereas others were more attracted to the Sufi reform called for by the Moroccan Shaykh Aḥmad Zarrūq (d. 1494). The Moroccan ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh (d. 1719), whose words were collected by his disciple Aḥmad b. al-Mubārak al-Lamaṭī (d. 1742) in the Kitāb al-ibrīz,¹¹¹ also spoke of the Muḥammadan Way. For him, the Prophet was the mediator between the Creation and God; he intervened and guided his followers by way of illumination. Because the Way of Muḥammad was reproduced by the link between a shaykh and his novice, it could circumvent the usual chains of transmission and thereby guarantee redemption for those who knew how to follow it. These ideas had important consequences for fiqh. The flourishing of prophetic piety and the renewal of interest in the hadith seemed to suggest the eventual dissolution of the madhhabs; indeed, this idea appears in the writings of some early authors¹¹² and in the early nineteenth-century writings of Ibn Idrīs and al-Shawkānī. Later, a number of reformist Muslims without any esoteric connections would plead from a secular, rationalized perspective for the rejection of supposedly sclerotic Muslim law; that is, in favor of abandoning the madhhabs.

Leaving the path that reaches backward to the ancestors of Islamic modernism or contemporary Islam, and treating Sufism as a fact of wider Ottoman culture rather than a set of ardent doctrinal obligations that guided everything else, historians of Arabic literature and the Islamic textual world tend to emphasize the specificity—and indeed the “modernity”—of these centuries.¹¹³ In his weighty tome on Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī, indispensable to understanding the eighteenth-century Islamic world, Reichmuth reaches the conclusion that what had developed was a Sufi humanism. In a similar vein, Ralf Elger studied the Ottomans’ revival of the riḥla, or travel genre, with its autobiographical tones.¹¹⁴ While travel naturally continued in the direction of the Holy Places, it also extended to Istanbul: any ʿālim seeking to advance his career did well to make that trip and to visit the center of the empire. Africans and Moroccans, now integrated into an effective circulation system, traveled to the Holy Cities by way of Egypt, while Kurdish and Iranian intellectuals, who had been chased out by Safavid Shiization, converged on Syria and Anatolia. Meanwhile, new ideas from Yemen developed and spread to Egypt, India, and Indonesia. Later, the Ottoman withdrawal from Zaydi-held Yemen forced an aggiornamento of theological discussion and debate, impacting the very core of the empire.

A major collection of articles edited by Reichmuth and Florian Schwarz sheds considerable light on the abundance of Arabic literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including a proliferation of ego-documents of various kinds.¹¹⁵ An emphasis on friendship with homoerotic overtones seems to have been another dominant feature of the period. Dana Sajdi noted the same proliferation of ego-documents in eighteenth-century Syria and tried to identify sources of the Nahḍa in it,¹¹⁶ while Nelly Hanna, in her study of Egypt, linked ego-documents to the rise of education in Cairo during an economically favorable period.¹¹⁷ The relationships between history and memory during the Ottoman era and the new self-consciousness they produced continue to be explored in the wake of studies by the late Ulrich Haarmann, a great specialist of the Mamluks.¹¹⁸ However, the spectacular increase in secondary literature by Turkish researchers writing in either Turkish or English over the last two decades is new, and has finally enabled us to move beyond Arabocentric views of the Ottoman East. At last, a rapprochement between scholars of Arab culture and Ottomanists is underway, by means of a history of mentalities (Aslı Niyazioğlu and Marinos Sariyannis) that also extends to dream narratives and ghost stories.¹¹⁹

Every day, specialists are discovering additional evidence that, far from being a period of decline, the seventeenth century was one of new ideas. Going against persistent assumptions,¹²⁰ El-Rouayheb has shown how fully logic and the rational sciences were flourishing in Istanbul and Syria (much more so than in Cairo) under the combined influence of the Ottoman peripheries, Morocco, and Kurdistan.¹²¹ Although he posited an unnecessary dichotomy between the history of ideas and social history, excluding fiqh and Sufism from the scope of his research, El-Rouayheb’s important work has given us access to the categories used by scholars of the time. And Francesca Bellino, following in the wake of Hilary Kilpatrick, has recently written an impressive overview of how the sciences were classified in the Ottoman period.¹²²

Tajdīd, Sufism, and Fiqh

Reflecting on the intertextuality of Islamic culture is a way of escaping a chronological narrative and the ever-frustrated quest for the origins of reform. It turns our attention instead to the history of religious revivals on two “continents” of Muslim knowledge: fiqh and Sufism. Finally applied to Islamic culture, textual history as renewed by Roger Chartier, together with the Foucauldian history of knowledge, are producing very fine results. Indeed, they would seem to offer the only alternative to the obsession with origins; certainly the only one capable of taking part in a dialogue with the ahistorical textual obsession of the Salafists. The widespread notion that useless glosses, transmitted as psittacisms, paralyzed Islamic thought was long accepted by both classical Orientalists and reformist Muslims. The idea was that the only texts worthy of study were the original texts (matn, pl. mutūn) and new writings freed of commentary; in other words, writings either from the time of Islam’s beginnings or from the present moment. This attitude amounted to a categorical rejection of the textual depth of tradition. Working in the early 1980s, under Laoust’s supervision, on the writings of nineteenth-century Egyptian ulama, Delanoue was the first to take the glosses and commentaries characteristic of Azharian culture seriously. At the time, his focus was social history: “The absence of originality in this genre of works does not divest them of their great interest; they show us how and by what vectors the brotherhoods’ beliefs and practices were diffused.”¹²³

“Absence of originality”? In the early 1980s, scholars had yet to fully explore the contents of the works in question and so to discover their creative aspects, the ways in which they were in fact constitutive of Islamic culture as a whole. By rereading these same texts more carefully, specialists of the early modern period have since observed the dynamism of Sufi Islam and the mutations of fiqh. Being attentive to echoes between texts from different periods has enabled researchers to confirm a truth already illustrated here by the bitter arguments about “neo-Sufism”: until very recently in the history of Islam, debates and conflicts took place between Sufis, not between Sufis and proto-Islamists or Sufis and crypto-Wahhabis. This is one of the takeaways from the important volume edited by Frederick De Jong and Radtke in 1999, Islamic Mysticism Contested.¹²⁴ In the fifteenth century, for example, there was heated debate in Cairo about Ibn Taymiyya’s ideas on intercession (istighātha, tawassul) and saint worship, at precisely the time that Mamluk Sufis, soon to be followed by Ottoman Sufis, were popularizing the thought of Ibn ʿArabī. Another takeaway: close relationships developed between the different Islamic disciplines, between taṣawwuf and hadith, or between fiqh and taṣawwuf. Pagani has studied in great detail the synthesis that the celebrated Egyptian hagiographer al-Shaʿrānī (d. 1565)—the main propagandist of the medieval Ibn ʿArabī during the Ottoman period—tried to achieve between the latter’s mystic thought and the foundations of Islamic law. His rapprochement of legal and mystic notions worked to legitimate personal interpretation of texts (ijtihād), inspired by inner revelation and illumination, which in turn could be used to critique the authority of the schools of law. Al-Shaʿrānī also praised ikhtilāf, or legal pluralism, considered a divine grace.¹²⁵ However, he remained loyal to the four legal rites, which he sought to defend against the primacy of the Hanafi rite imposed by the Ottomans.¹²⁶ Later, al-Nābulusī defended legal pluralism within his own Hanafi school in reaction to puritanical Kadızadeli censorship and the decree that turned Ottoman ulama into state functionaries.¹²⁷ Driven by the fear of “Ottoman decline” and occasionally supported by imperial religious policy, the Kadızadelis lashed out at cafés, taverns, and even saints’ shrines.

Although Ibn ʿArabī’s philosophy was continuously debated, it just as continuously influenced and informed Sufism—as attested by al-Shaʿrānī’s reading of it. His ideas opened the door to a millenarian messianism proclaiming the absolute certainty of the legal statutes, and to the rejection of the rites on the basis of a distinction between divine sharia law and its interpretation or application (tashrīʿ). The further theological development of Sunni Islam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reinforced eschatological perspectives by bringing the Believer even closer to the Prophet. Tilman Nagel has examined the celebrated Jawharat al-tawḥīd (The Gem of Islamic Theology) by Ibrāhīm al-Laqqānī (d. 1631), the Ashʿarī theology text most frequently studied at al-Azhar until the late nineteenth century. Comparing it to the Ashʿarī Sunni professions of faith that developed from the eleventh to the seventeenth century, Nagel found that the apparition of the Hidden within and beneath the Visible became a key trait of Islam, while hadith study was understood to reveal the hidden certainty of salvation.¹²⁸ Belief in intercession by the Prophet and the saints, closely related to Sufi eschatology, reflected the belief in interaction between the living and the dead by means of devotional practices. In the eighteenth century, Wahhabi esotericism, which rejected the notion of any posthumous ties between the soul and the body, had effectively already condemned those beliefs and practices as innovations tainted with associationism (shirk)—well before reformist secularizers began combating devotional practices considered “backward” (because no longer understood) in the late nineteenth century.¹²⁹

While specialists of Sufism were discovering the scope and severity of Sufi debates in the Ottoman period, extremely productive examinations of legal literature—of the relationships between legal writings and practice, of theoretical texts, and of the social roots of Muslim law—were renewing our knowledge in that area. Since the 1980s, many fine studies of normative texts, fatwas, practical legal documents, and court archives have been carried out by specialists of Ottoman law. The exceptionally high quality of Astrid Meier’s research on Syria shows how much can be achieved when these different types of sources are studied together.¹³⁰ In 1984, an important article by Wael Hallaq called into question the standard assertion that Muslim law had become sclerotic or fossilized; specifically the idea that by the ninth or tenth century the “gate of ijtihād” had been closed.¹³¹ And as early as 1988, Baber Johansen was looking into the possibility that changes had occurred in classical and postclassical legal doctrine. In 1994, Haïm Gerber’s dynamic, enthusiastic study showed the creative ways in which Ottoman law had been renewed.¹³² More recently, in 2015, Guy Burak assessed the effect of the Ottoman conquest on Hanafi law in Syria.¹³³ Other researchers have begun to explore the rejection of legal rites (lā madhhabiyya) that seems to be at the origin of contemporary Salafism.

It is therefore often on the basis of studies of law that more general thinking on Islamic culture is developing. Following research into the study of fiqh, the perspective widened in the 2000s to include other areas of Islamic culture, notably by means of more attentive readings of manuscripts, their marginalia, and their ownership marks. The history of Islamic books, long confined to manuscript study, began to extend to printed texts, library catalogs, and finally commentaries. This renewal of textual history can be considered a continuation of the medievalist Konrad Hirschler’s intrepid exploration of the history of books and libraries.¹³⁴ And in the near future, when these corpora have come to be better read, better known, and better understood thanks to the use of FRBR norms in libraries,¹³⁵ databases and digital resources will likely help us to move forward with more precision, exact dates, and scholarly rigor. In this regard, we might mention the first three conferences on the culture of commentary, whose proceedings were published respectively in 2009 in Alexandria under the aegis of Yūsuf Zaydān; in 2013 in the journal Oriens, under the supervision of Asad Ahmed and Margaret Larkin; and in 2017 in Cairo by the Institut dominicain des études orientales.¹³⁶ Driven by new philological and literary approaches, these studies on the culture of commentary in Islam, many of which are the work of researchers from Muslim countries, have bolstered investigation into the intertextuality of Islamic culture. On the basis of this renewal of cultural and intellectual history, new studies of Islamic theology (Muʿtazilism, Ashʿarism, Maturidism, neo-Muʿtazilism) are on the rise, driven by the challenges of the current situation.

The Age of Empires: A Time of “Confessionalization”

As we have attained, over the past twenty-five years, a vision of the dynamism of Islam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—far removed from the sclerosis for which it is so often vilified or the search for the Salafists’ ancestors—new approaches to the social and political causes of such profound shifts have likewise emerged. The effects of the Ottoman conquest have been listed, including circulations, a spectacular increase in pilgrimages to the Holy Places, and the importance of being trained in Istanbul and of Hanafi fiqh. Specialists of the Arabic-speaking world interested in issues of continuity or rupture between the time of the Mamluks and the early Ottoman period (that is, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) study the impacts of the Ottoman conquest on the “Arab provinces.”¹³⁷ Ottomanists, meanwhile, approach the sixteenth century by way of the struggles of Sunni orthodoxy and militant Safavid Shiism to define their respective versions of Islam. The Safavid revolution, together with the population displacements and the wave of conversions triggered by the Ottoman conquest of Anatolia and later the Arab provinces, directly impacted the religious and intellectual history of the region. Constructed in opposition to each other, the two empires are considered to have determined their own, distinct religious policies. In Turkish-language historiography, the notion of the Ottomans’ eternal Sunni identity influenced studies by Ottomanists such as Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, whose work, dating from the early twentieth century, has been partially translated into English.¹³⁸ Irène Mélikoff in France and Ahmet Yaşar Ocak in Turkey further developed this idea of Ottoman Turkish Sunni Sufism and Safavid Persian Shia Islam in opposition, adding an opposition between the Islam of urban, sedentary ulama, some of them Sufis (the Mevlevis)—what they called a text-based or “high” Islam—and the tribal and even nomadic Islam of the Sufis of rural Anatolia (the Bektachis): a “low” Islam, transmitted orally and open to syncretic, magical, and shamanic practices. This dichotomy is clearly an umpteenth variation on the “two-tiered model” that Peter Brown long since rejected in relation to ancient Christianity and Christian saint worship. Influenced first by the ethnographic leanings of the colonial period and later by nationalist ideology, research on Islam has been slow to call into question this duality, which has had a lasting impact on French ethnography in North Africa and Russian ethnography in central Asia.

Ottomanists, then, narrated the history of a sui generis Islam, from the outset Hanafi, Maturidi, and Sunni, which initially tolerated the heterodox dervishes (Kizilbash) fighting on the frontiers during the Ottoman conquest (while showing no such generosity to the Byzantines, Serbs, and Albanians). But when Shah Ismaïl proclaimed Shiism to be the state religion of Safavid Iran in 1501 and war broke out between Iran and the Ottoman Empire, the latter’s definition of Sunni orthodoxy became more severe. In this narrative, the Kizilbash and their messianic hopes were declared to be heretical and the Ottomans set to combating them, together with all popular, rural, Alevi, and “crypto-Shia” forms of Islam.¹³⁹ Many Sufi orders professing the “oneness of existence” doctrine, including the Bayrami-Melami and the Gülsheni, were henceforth suspected of heterodoxy and accused by their opponents of pantheism and associationism.¹⁴⁰ For its part, Safavid Iran drove out both Sunnis and Sufis. Two imperial state ideologies thus confronted each other in the form of parallel constructions, each with its own propaganda and idea of Islamic orthodoxy. This seductive picture has since been strongly nuanced by historians contesting its sharp opposition between scholarly Islam and popular Islam,¹⁴¹ as well as the very notion of a dichotomy between Sunnis and Shias in the religious landscape of medieval Anatolia, given that confessional ambiguity was a constant at the time. As early as 1995, Cemal Kafadar argued that research on fifteenth-century religious history in Anatolia and the Balkans should in fact be highlighting a kind of “metadoxy,” since the Ottoman state was not initially interested in enforcing any particular orthodoxy.¹⁴²

But the Ottoman state-building process still needed to be linked not only to sixteenth-century religious and political conflicts but also to the conquest of the Arab provinces. In 1516–1517, the Ottomans conquered Egypt, Syria, and the Hijaz under the banner of morally reforming those populations on the basis of Ibn ʿArabī’s ideas, legitimated by a fatwa from the shaykh ül-Islam, and the building of a mausoleum on the tomb of the al-shaykh al-akbar (as Ibn ʿArabī was known), located on the heights of the newly conquered city of Damascus. Another act in the construction of Ottoman orthodoxy was the decree of 1518, which raised the Hanafi legal rite to the status of law throughout the empire.¹⁴³ Specialists are still debating whether the choice of a more exclusive theology, whose definitions and justifications of excommunication derived from Ashʿarism rather than the Hanafi-Maturidi position, was the sign of a new level of intolerance in the Ottoman Empire.¹⁴⁴ Migration, the mass Sunnitization of populations (though never complete and especially hard to impose on the empire’s eastern borders), and the formulation of an imperial Islamic discourse all converged: the Ottoman sixteenth century was indeed an age of Sunni “confessionalization,” even if this process was never fully accomplished.

The important notion of “confessionalization” (Konfessionsbildung, Konfessionalisierung) was created by German historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Tijana Krstić was the first to apply it to the Ottoman Empire during the same period, to designate a process concurrent with Islamization.¹⁴⁵ Like most Ottomanists, she interpreted “Safavid Shiization versus Ottoman Sunnitization” as a competition between states and a phase in state-building. In an article published in 2013, Derin Terzioğlu adopted Krstić’s powerful structuring ideas but moved away from the classical historiographical perspective. For Terzioğlu, the “Sunnitization” of Ottoman Islam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could not primarily be explained by the advent of the Safavids or state policy, but was instead part of a longer-term process involving the rising power of the ulama and the diffusion of Islamic learning throughout Ottoman society. It was during the reigns of Mehmed II (r. 1444–1446 and 1451–1481) and Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512) that Sufis were first persecuted as heretics, whereas under Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520–1566), two phenomena worked to Islamize society at a deep level: the construction of hundreds of mosques, even in villages (the decree of 1537), and the mandatory diffusion of preaching, most likely in Turkish. Those policies were similar to the ones that the Mamluks had implemented in Egypt a century earlier, in part against the Copts. Cornell Fleischer had already stressed the importance of the last years of Suleiman’s reign¹⁴⁶; more recent studies describe how references to Islamic law and the definition of orthodoxy took on a new significance in discourse and in the collective consciousness during the institutionalization of Sunnism in the second half of the sixteenth century. It would seem that when Ottoman expansion was abruptly curbed and the Ottomans were forced to abandon their ambition of world domination, these developments facilitated a stricter definition of Sunni Islam by Sufi ulama who had been driven out of Iran.

Terzioğlu set out to reexamine the definitions of what Sunna or being Sunni might have meant in different periods.¹⁴⁷ Once again, we encounter the issue of terminology. The “Shariatization” of imperial Islam, codified by the shaykh ül-Islam—specifically Kemalpaşazâde (d. 1534) and Ebüssuûd Efendi (d. 1574), whose offices had also worked to institutionalize the use of fatwas—ultimately produced a normalized Sunni discourse that impacted on both public and private life. This is consistent with Gerber’s intuition that “these centuries witnessed a considerable deepening and spread of the awareness of the Shariʿa and Islamic learning.”¹⁴⁸ In 2010, Reem Meshal drew attention to the effects of the sweeping legal changes made by the Ottomans during the conquest of the Arab provinces, their propaganda as “renewers” of the faith, and the initial tension during Suleiman’s reign between fiqh and the secular law of the sultan (qānūn). Ultimately, the impact of Hanafi domination, which imposed a particular version of orthodoxy and paved the way for legal codification, ran up against the legal plurality advocated by the Egyptian ulama. Meshal saw the sixteenth-century debates in Cairo as a confrontation between two “antagonistic Sharias.”¹⁴⁹ The processes of confessionalization and Shariaization compounded existing tensions between non-Muslims and Muslims, orthodoxy and heterodoxies, orthopraxy and lived Islam, and between various Sufi currents. These already strong tensions, which gave rise to the puritan movement of the Kadızadeli, were further exacerbated in the seventeenth century, partly due to new Ottoman wars against Iran and the elaboration and institutionalization of Twelver Shiite theology in Safavid Iran under Shah Abbas (r. 1587–1629). Conversions of Christians and Jews living in the Ottoman Empire also intensified during this period, as shown in studies by Krstić and Marc David Baer.¹⁵⁰ Simultaneously, Eastern Christians were engaged in their own process of confessionalization.¹⁵¹

We have yet to assess the circulations between Turkish and Persian-language Ottoman Islam and the Arabic-language Islam that developed during the Mamluk period (1250–1517). Terzioğlu claims to have identified a Mamluk version of Hanbalism—the “neo-Hanbalism” of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328)—which may in turn have influenced Ottoman orthodoxy, and a kind of Sunni revival during the Mamluk period in reaction to the Mongol invasions. A new crux of the matter, then, since it brings us back to a key author—Ibn Taymiyya—identified by eighteenth-century Wahhabis as a crucial source of inspiration, edited and published by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformists, and cited by twentieth- and twenty-first-century Salafists. Current research by medievalists such as Jon Hoover and Caterina Bori seeks to explore the “continent” of Ibn Taymiyya’s complex writings and how they were read in the centuries that followed.¹⁵² These histories of the reception of Ibn Taymiyya’s works should be positioned alongside Alexander Knysh’s study of the reception of Ibn ʿArabī.¹⁵³

Were the relentless debates on Ibn Taymiyya’s works in fifteenth-century Egypt proof of a traditionalist revival, as Terzioğlu claims? We should probably understand them as part of the movement to convert the Coptic countryside to Islam. For the first time, Islam was becoming not only the leading religion in Egypt (which it had probably been since the thirteenth century) but overwhelmingly so. The revival was also due to Moroccan, North African, and Shādhilī—read Sufi—influence, the political importance of which has been demonstrated by Vincent Cornell.¹⁵⁴ The thesis that politics were the source of religious reforms arises again and again: the end of the Abbasid caliphate during the Mongol conquest (1258) and the fall of the Mamluk caliphate during the Ottoman conquest (1517) encouraged the rise of invisible hierarchies dominated by the “pole” of Sufi cosmogonies.¹⁵⁵ This leads us back to Haarmann’s suggestion that the Ottoman conquest led Arab intellectuals to withdraw into their own circles and focus on their own preoccupations in an unprecedented way, fueling new practices of reading and writing. Meanwhile—and here we can follow Nagel’s hypothesis—emphasis on the believer’s relation to the Prophet and the prophetic model led to a proliferation of those claiming to be his descendants and the rise of more personal forms of religious devotion.

I will stop here, at this fascinating fifteenth-century theological turning point already identified by Nagel. The Mongol conquests had shattered the conduits by which traditions were transmitted and encouraged syntheses and assessments, esoterism dominated, and hadith study triumphed—it was the dual advent of an age of prophetic piety and the age of empires. Islam’s first globalization process already bore many of the traits of the modern era.

As Racine’s Phèdre put it, “n’allons point plus avant.” Having followed the river back such a distance, we have run up against waterfalls—those fourteenth- and fifteenth-century breaks in continuity that are the Reconquista, the Mongol invasions, and the Black Death—and so, like explorers seeking the sources of the Nile, we are forced to a halt. The different rhythms and forms of Islamization, the ethnic and confessional tectonic shifts produced by the Mongol invasions, the fracture between the Arab and Turkish-Iranian worlds—everything seems to have led us right here, even if we can glimpse still further upriver the thirteenth century of Ibn ʿArabī and the hominization of Islam through the figures of the Prophet and the saints.

Cautiously, then, let us stop at this indisputable fifteenth-century turning point, the “first globalization,” and restate the necessity of the vain quest for origins, together with the need for a narrative that can be constructed and deconstructed. However misleading linear history may be, teachers cannot dispense with a chronological narrative for their students, since the absence of such a narrative enables counter-truths to prosper—like the purely apocryphal one currently gaining momentum under Salafist influence, which claims that Wahhabism was a reaction to British colonialism. The effects of denying history are disastrous. Many Muslim students throughout the world consider exegesis, hadith, and manuals, written by traditionalist authors (hadith specialists) and jurisconsults of the past or by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Wahhabi and Salafist authors, to be the only trustworthy sources, and in any case much more so than the writings of Orientalists, whose motives and methods are necessarily suspect. As a colleague of mine, confronted with the problems of teaching Islamic studies at university, has written: “A thorough review of Arabo-Muslim learning and writings is necessary, the first task being to clearly and accurately establish the chronological order of all medieval, early modern, and modern texts, and of all the authors these students use as references. The point is to show them that the writings belong to different moments in the development of Arabo-Muslim thought, and thereby to lead them to question the false constructions that contemporary Islamic theology uses to make its arguments.”¹⁵⁶

To recover a working narrative, then, let us turn around and go with rather than against the current of time. Fifteenth-century Sufism was diffused and circulated through a globalization process that was amplified by the Ottoman conquest of the Arab provinces in the early sixteenth century. The age of the three empires—Mughal, Ottoman, Safavid—corresponded with the establishment of esoteric hierarchies, the entry of Sufis into the public space, and the emergence or intensification of antagonisms such as that opposing Sunnis and Shiites in a process of more strictly defined confessionalization. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the empires had become stable, Islam did indeed experience a “modern” dynamic involving new methods of writing and new types of belonging. In this context, and alongside a burgeoning “rationalist” literature, a Sufi culture that partook fully of the general culture of the time flourished from Morocco to Indonesia. The success that some of the new Sufi brotherhoods attained at the end of the eighteenth century can probably be explained by a remarkable rise in the average level of education and by the diffusion of the ideas of Ibn ʿArabī and his successors, while in India and Russia, Islam was already having to confront the challenges of the European presence. From the 1830s, and especially the 1850s, the era of reforms engendered different forms of secularization, of which “Islamic reformism” was only one manifestation. Reforms and reformism were movements largely shared by the Jews and Christians of the Muslim world at that time. The last third of the nineteenth century witnessed the gradual disintegration of legal and cultural systems, in spite of their resilience—a process that became radicalized during the interwar period for political and demographic reasons. This was the time of salafiyya, followed by neo-salafiyya—whatever one thinks of the two terms. The nineteenth-century rejection of tradition seems to have been dictated by new direct access to scriptural sources, in turn made possible by printing, the rationalization of time and space, the codification of “Islamic law” that took place during the colonial period, and the considerable influence of the new schools. But that process also involved new reformulations of older ideas: those of Ibn ʿArabī, those of Ibn Taymiyya, and a neo-Hanbalism revised by nineteenth-century Wahhabism. These reformulations converged on the possibility of abandoning the legal rites (madhhab), at precisely the time when fiqh, yet to be disrupted by the tanzimat, was still dominant.

At no time did state-formation, printing, or the press replace the culture of manuscripts and oral transmission. The break that occurred in the Arab world in the 1880s did not obliterate the world of traditional Islam, a world about which we still know so little. Highly traditional Islamic culture contained the ferments of its own reform, and, as Reichmuth has so energetically shown, it is perhaps the study of “Prophetic piety” that will ultimately enable us to understand Islamic reform movements. The connections between nationalism and Islamic reformism in the twentieth century maintained ambiguities that state independence would soon shatter, thereby revealing diverse forms of Salafism, as Lauzière has so effectively shown. Then came the proliferation of Islamist movements, which have varied by state, nation, and the focus of the struggles, but which are, in all cases, a concentrate of the formidable bitterness generated by Western policies in general, American policies in particular, and the abscess of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The emergence and development of these movements owe relatively little to Muslim scholars of the past and their writings, and a great deal to politics and globalization. Studying the Ottoman period does not allow us to reconstitute any kind of genealogy—on the contrary, it shows the futility of such attempts—but rather makes it possible to insist on the rupture represented by the explosive proliferation of contemporary Islamisms. No, all is not eternal Islam. Iṣlāḥ did not follow directly from medieval tajdīd. Sufism is not fixed and immutable through the ages. And the Islam of the past was not some future Islamism that was unaware of itself. When contemporary writings, movements, and practices claim to be loyal to a certain past, when they express a desire to be so, that claim and that desire are themselves always new.

Researchers must now accept the fact that although it is incumbent on them to provide contemporary society with a narrative, they must also know how and when to abandon that narrative and work instead on particular temporal sequences, topics, and themes. Much work remains to be done in the field of religious anthropology. We must also acquire greater skill in the close reading of Islamic intertextuality and its complex uses. And we must continue to qualify, revise—and in some instances, scrap—unquestioned linear genealogies and intellectual categories. Should we assume that there have been leaps, discontinuities, and latency periods when some currents and authors seem to disappear into the shadows, only to be drawn out later by new studies and editions? And if so, how do those processes operate? Is a given author or study isolated, or representative? How can we assess their reception other than through a careful study of library catalogs—which is so seldom carried out?

It is easy to see the immediate relevance of the research cited here. The studies I have referred to were not and are not being carried out in a peaceful world. The continuous flow of publications in Arabic and Turkish, together with the edition and re-edition of fundamental texts that continue to sound timely to Muslim readers, clearly show that these debates are not reserved to scholars alone. We may deplore the lack of critical spirit or sense of historicization in the knowledge that has come to invest such a wide range of different propagandas, but it cannot be denied that this is a time of combat, perhaps not unlike the time of Islamic reformism, whose heritage is now being undermined by the rediscovery of tradition, an ever-resurgent hydra that Islamic reformism thought it had decapitated even as it was itself taking nourishment from it. Undermined, too, by the secularized modernity of Islamism or neo-fundamentalism itself. Under the circumstances, it takes great courage for historians to do what they must: maintain their own standards for truth, curiosity, and adventure. A true religious history, neither apologetic nor accusatory, must accomplish a polyphonic anamnesis of all currents in Islam, recounting their complexity, oscillations, richness, and, ultimately, their humanity. Early modern, modern, and contemporary Islam are neither an ISIS-branded end-of-history nor an eternal Manichean battle between Islam and the secular current, between Sufis and Islamists, or even between modernist and purist Salafists.