As an historian of Islamic law and material culture, I focus on theological responses to objects made by non-Muslims. Over the course of the twentieth century, an astonishing array of commodities and technological innovations crossed international boundaries to enter Middle Eastern markets. Muslim consumers regarded most foreign objects as irrelevant from a religious perspective. But a number of new products that Americans and Europeans perceived in a secular light provoked a religious response. In the early twentieth century, gramophones became controversial when Muslims began to play on them records of the Qur’an. Muslims knew that they needed to prostrate themselves to the ground at designated verses (sujud al-tilawa). But the idea of bowing humbly before a Talking Machine greatly disturbed them. They feared that a religious gesture that had traditionally signaled a believer’s submission to God would appear—with the machine in front—as an idolatrous act. As a result jurists faced a theological conundrum. They had to deliberate whether and if so how Muslims should use a “secular” instrument that interfered in some respects with Muslim rituals. A similar issue emerged in Saudi Arabia by the end of the twentieth century, in relation to mobile digital devices that could display the text of the Qur’an. Consumers wondered whether it was permissible to take these highly portable, pocket-sized machines to the restroom; they had scruples in particular about subjecting scripture, in this digitalized form, to ritual impurities. Their concerns gave rise to intriguing fatwas that challenge profoundly scholarly wisdom on Salafi thought. Although historians and political economists have paid significant attention to Muslim views of modernity and capitalism as abstract concepts, they have not analyzed in any depth pious responses to new material objects. And no scholar has systematically examined Salafi fatwas addressing Western objects and technological innovations. The result has been a scholarship far removed from the very material environment that gave concrete meaning to the concepts of capitalism and modernity. My research indicates a high degree of continuity in Salafi approaches to modern things over the course of the twentieth century. It shows that when they contemplated the use of new machines, Salafi legal thinkers worried greatly about ritual matters. My research also demonstrates that, instead of applying mechanically “fundamentalist” precedents to reject modern things, Salafis actually engaged in a highly creative enterprise to justify the adoption of most technological innovations while placing religious limits on proper usage.