Shi'ism and the Rise of Salafi and Wahhabi Doctrine: Another View
One of the most common refrains that one hears from scholars of Islamic law in the United States, when asked why it is that they barely address Shi'ism, is that they don't really understand it, they haven't studied it, they can't really access it, and so they tend to avoid it in their scholarship. These folks let me be clear are by no means driven by animus, I think they'd genuinely like to learn more, and in fact quite a few approach me to try to learn ways to teach Shi'ism. But in their own work, because they haven't really considered it, they sort of think the best thing to do is just to talk about Sunnism, and to indicate they aren't going to address Shi'ism, which deserves separate study in its own right. Wael Hallaq I think says this explicitly in one of his books.
As a corollary to my general theme of I wish people studying Islamic law would look to something beyond legal doctrine to explain the evolution of legal doctrine, I wonder whether or not my colleagues might be doing Sunnism a disservice by adopting the positions that they do. In these ruminations, I focus, as always, on the modern world.
And in the modern world, a great deal of Sunnism has been deeply, fundamentally affected by the austere anti-rationalist creed of Salafism, which really got its start in Saudi and spread throughout the Sunni world through the use of petrodollars, to such an extent that your average Sunni in much of the world is almost reflexively a Salafi. All of the Sunni Islamist movements, from the Taliban and Al Qaeda to the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood, are all Salafi in outlook even if they don't overtly state it. (More on that later.)
This is all sort of old hat, everyone knows it. But if looking at these things while excluding Shi'ism, I think you sort of miss a key aspect of the rise of Wahhabism and more broadly Salafism. That is, if you look at the area in which Salafism arose (Saudi and in particular eastern Saudi, the gulf nations in that region, southern Iraq), the Shi'a are quite a significant minority. I think personally it's a little silly to look at Salafism without at least considering the possibility that it is a REACTION to Shi'i thought and Shi'i influence in the region. Certainly their attitude towards the Shi'a was very negative, they did attack Holy Shi'a Sites, they did declare Shi'a infidels.
Yet while this is discussed, its influence on Salafi doctrine is less addressed. People sort of recite the rise of Salafism as a theory that sort of goes "well, the Muslim world has gone all bad, it must be everything that happened since the earliest followers of the Prophet died, let's wipe away all that crap and go back to that period and all will be well." Okay, but why does that hold, among Sunnis who ran caliphates whose achievements stunned the world? Why not go back to the Baghdad calipate, or the Syrian one, why the immediate followers of the Prophet?
There can be any number of reasons for this, but if one says we EXCLUDE the practices of people following the Prophet, so much of what the Shi'a do is then rendered un-Islamic. How can you commemorate the death of the Prophet's Grandson and make a big to-do about it, when clearly it was not something the Prophet himself and his Companions and their immediate Successors did. You're innovating! You are an infidel! This argument is not available if you want to go back to Harun al-Rashid and the Baghdad caliphate, once there Shi'ism gains legitimization it would not otherwise have. The Salafi position also by the way DELEGITIMIZES huge portions of medieval Sunni thought, but more on that later.
Consider also the extreme (and I mean extreme) literalism of the Salafi readings of the Qur'an. "The Most Beneficent One (referring to God), who sits on His Throne." The Salafi says that must mean God has some sort of form, what kind who knows really, but some sort befitting His Majesty, that He uses to sit on a Throne.
Now let's be clear, this does not come from the broad consensus of classical Sunni thought, my friend Mohammad Fadel at Toronto can demonstrate this a hundred times over, though I've read enough to be sure of this too. So where does it come from? Is one possible influence the fact that the Shi'a are decisively focussed on the Qur'an's hidden meanings (the ta'wil), and that they use this to read any number of verses any number of ways to justify any number of Shi'i doctrines, from the martyrdom of the Prophet's Grandson to the Imamate? The Salafi doctrine strips all of that away, and yes again at the cost of consistency with the Sunni past, but that's less important.
Then this literalist nonsense, as well as the innovation absurdity, spread, and infect the entire Muslim world, to the point where we have Egyptian courts and Egyptian judges actually declaring in the Abu Zaid case brought against a professor by the Muslim Brotherhood (see Kristen Stilt's article on the remaking of Islamic law for a great synopsis and analysis of this case) apostasy to say something that I personally find too obvious to even think about, that God on the Throne is magnificent, poetic and metaphorical language that inspires our awe of Him but that isn't literally true (an old guy in a chair with a beard, come on, THAT's insulting God). Again, this Salafi position, now the official position of Egypt it seems, is in absolute derogation of Sunni medieval theory, and a notion spread that medieval theory matters none, what really counts is the Prophet and his Companions. Peculiar and particular social conditions give rise to an idea, the idea then spreads due to other conditions (oil) well beyond its initial conditions to impose itself on a broader set of systems, and this then establishes itself as Islamic "doctrine", maybe not in the ivory tower but certainly in the world where it counts, and centuries of history are thereby erased. This really deserves study it isn't receiving.
And to be clear, I am not suggesting that Shi'ism is the ONLY influence on Salafi legal doctrine, but it seems quite clearly to be there, and it is, largely, undiscussed, and will remain so as long as folks continue to look at Sunni Muslim doctrine as somehow independent of the conditions that created it, and independent of any other doctrine being promulgated by its chief rival within the Muslim polity.
HAH
As a corollary to my general theme of I wish people studying Islamic law would look to something beyond legal doctrine to explain the evolution of legal doctrine, I wonder whether or not my colleagues might be doing Sunnism a disservice by adopting the positions that they do. In these ruminations, I focus, as always, on the modern world.
And in the modern world, a great deal of Sunnism has been deeply, fundamentally affected by the austere anti-rationalist creed of Salafism, which really got its start in Saudi and spread throughout the Sunni world through the use of petrodollars, to such an extent that your average Sunni in much of the world is almost reflexively a Salafi. All of the Sunni Islamist movements, from the Taliban and Al Qaeda to the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood, are all Salafi in outlook even if they don't overtly state it. (More on that later.)
This is all sort of old hat, everyone knows it. But if looking at these things while excluding Shi'ism, I think you sort of miss a key aspect of the rise of Wahhabism and more broadly Salafism. That is, if you look at the area in which Salafism arose (Saudi and in particular eastern Saudi, the gulf nations in that region, southern Iraq), the Shi'a are quite a significant minority. I think personally it's a little silly to look at Salafism without at least considering the possibility that it is a REACTION to Shi'i thought and Shi'i influence in the region. Certainly their attitude towards the Shi'a was very negative, they did attack Holy Shi'a Sites, they did declare Shi'a infidels.
Yet while this is discussed, its influence on Salafi doctrine is less addressed. People sort of recite the rise of Salafism as a theory that sort of goes "well, the Muslim world has gone all bad, it must be everything that happened since the earliest followers of the Prophet died, let's wipe away all that crap and go back to that period and all will be well." Okay, but why does that hold, among Sunnis who ran caliphates whose achievements stunned the world? Why not go back to the Baghdad calipate, or the Syrian one, why the immediate followers of the Prophet?
There can be any number of reasons for this, but if one says we EXCLUDE the practices of people following the Prophet, so much of what the Shi'a do is then rendered un-Islamic. How can you commemorate the death of the Prophet's Grandson and make a big to-do about it, when clearly it was not something the Prophet himself and his Companions and their immediate Successors did. You're innovating! You are an infidel! This argument is not available if you want to go back to Harun al-Rashid and the Baghdad caliphate, once there Shi'ism gains legitimization it would not otherwise have. The Salafi position also by the way DELEGITIMIZES huge portions of medieval Sunni thought, but more on that later.
Consider also the extreme (and I mean extreme) literalism of the Salafi readings of the Qur'an. "The Most Beneficent One (referring to God), who sits on His Throne." The Salafi says that must mean God has some sort of form, what kind who knows really, but some sort befitting His Majesty, that He uses to sit on a Throne.
Now let's be clear, this does not come from the broad consensus of classical Sunni thought, my friend Mohammad Fadel at Toronto can demonstrate this a hundred times over, though I've read enough to be sure of this too. So where does it come from? Is one possible influence the fact that the Shi'a are decisively focussed on the Qur'an's hidden meanings (the ta'wil), and that they use this to read any number of verses any number of ways to justify any number of Shi'i doctrines, from the martyrdom of the Prophet's Grandson to the Imamate? The Salafi doctrine strips all of that away, and yes again at the cost of consistency with the Sunni past, but that's less important.
Then this literalist nonsense, as well as the innovation absurdity, spread, and infect the entire Muslim world, to the point where we have Egyptian courts and Egyptian judges actually declaring in the Abu Zaid case brought against a professor by the Muslim Brotherhood (see Kristen Stilt's article on the remaking of Islamic law for a great synopsis and analysis of this case) apostasy to say something that I personally find too obvious to even think about, that God on the Throne is magnificent, poetic and metaphorical language that inspires our awe of Him but that isn't literally true (an old guy in a chair with a beard, come on, THAT's insulting God). Again, this Salafi position, now the official position of Egypt it seems, is in absolute derogation of Sunni medieval theory, and a notion spread that medieval theory matters none, what really counts is the Prophet and his Companions. Peculiar and particular social conditions give rise to an idea, the idea then spreads due to other conditions (oil) well beyond its initial conditions to impose itself on a broader set of systems, and this then establishes itself as Islamic "doctrine", maybe not in the ivory tower but certainly in the world where it counts, and centuries of history are thereby erased. This really deserves study it isn't receiving.
And to be clear, I am not suggesting that Shi'ism is the ONLY influence on Salafi legal doctrine, but it seems quite clearly to be there, and it is, largely, undiscussed, and will remain so as long as folks continue to look at Sunni Muslim doctrine as somehow independent of the conditions that created it, and independent of any other doctrine being promulgated by its chief rival within the Muslim polity.
HAH
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