On Salafism by Azmi Bishara;

Author:Azmi Bishara;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conversely, Abdelwahab Meddeb (1946–2014 CE) not only considers Wahhabism a species of “political Islam” but also dedicates most of his book on political Islam to it.28 For Meddeb, Wahhabism is the continuation of an Islamic tradition that runs from Ibn Hanbal through Ibn Taymiyya to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. In reality, while Ibn Abd al-Wahhab conceived the Prophet and his companions through Ibn Hanbal, Ibn Taymiyya did not, as he disagreed with Ibn Hanbal on several points. Drawing such a line forces Meddeb to view a decline in the historical development of ideas, just as the Salafis themselves conceive history of Muslim civilization. However, in this case, it is the history of Salafism from Ibn Hanbal to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab in decline, which would be true if such a chain of succession existed. Meddeb firmly adopts an epistemological approach based on comparison of root and branch, thereby branding Wahhabism as a degenerate version of its origin,29 which is true according to this model.30

The key difference between Meddeb’s and Zubaida’s analysis is that Zubaida’s 1989 CE book, Islam, the People and the State, predates the rise of al-Qaeda, while Meddeb’s book was published after 9/11. These books illustrate how current affairs shape research agendas and perspectives. Prior to 9/11, scholars refused to see Wahhabism as part of the modern landscape of political Islam (i.e., the militant activism under such intense study in the 1970s and 1980s CE). After 9/11, scholars asserted that Wahhabism is the fountainhead of modern fundamentalism and the most dangerous movement in Islam. This illustrates how Islamic intellectual currents are classified not only according to the taxonomy of religious phenomena and mode of religiosity but also according to contemporary political developments. As such, it is necessary to review the history of studies on Islamic political movements (or Islamism) with an eye to understanding how they are characterized differently depending on the political motives and contexts.

Just as contemporary religious fundamentalism is rooted in the internal and external critique of the conservative religious establishment and the shift from popular religiosity to mass religiosity, so too is contemporary rebellious Wahhabi Salafism. Influenced by political Islamist religiosity, Wahhabi Salafism has broken free of the control of the Wahhabi religious establishment—which it considers a puppet of Al Saʿud—and seeks to hold the Saudi state accountable for implementing Wahhabi teachings. Rather than accepting the practices and laws of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as the worldly embodiment of Shariʿa, both reformists and takfīri Salafis in Saudi Arabia now use Wahhabism to hold it accountable. Although Ibn Abd al-Wahhab did not represent an activist political Islam in the sense used by academics today, the twentieth-century CE Wahhabi type of Salafism became a key component of the ideology of many activist movements. In fact, Wahhabism was initially a minor trend with an austere puritanical understanding of religion.

The onset of the Arab Cold War between the Saudi bloc and Egypt in the 1960s and the West’s political exploitation of the struggle to fight Arab nationalism and communism enabled

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