Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani (d.1999) is considered one of the founding fathers of Salafism in the modern period, and one of his most famous but least understood pursuits is his editions of nearly all of the Sunni hadith compendia. Titled "Bringing the sunna before the people," the project was also perhaps the most near and dear to his heart, and he wrote of it that "it is the most important project of my life...to which I have dedicated my youth, with which I have spent my middle age, and with which I now complete my old age." It is also within his comments on these commentaries that Albani began using the term "manhaj" (methodology) to refer to his scholarly intervention, which would become a slogan for his followers and a claim to authenticity during a time of not only new questions of religious authority in the midst of political and pedagogical change, but also as a signal to local authorities that they are fundamentally distinct in their priorities and nature from Islamists and, later, jihadis, who, Albani's followers claim have corrupted the tradition. When Albani first began using the term "manhaj," however, it was not without controversy. Just as Albani achieved admiration by his followers for the project's ambitious scope, so too he attracted enmity from more traditional scholars who saw in his "authentic" editions of the classical works a tinge of hubris at challenging their institutions of authority. It was in the context of this project that many of his famous rivalries with Muhammad Said Ramadan al-Buti, Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghudda, and others took place. And it was also in the context of professional and political marginalization of Albani and of his Salafi movement that these works first saw the light of day. This paper examines not only Albani's driving motive behind this project, but also the ways in which he used the space of the traditional Islamic commentary to institutionalize his views on hadith within the canonical works and to provide a vehicle for his followers to gain unmediated access to these teachings at a time of political and professional hostility towards Islamic activism. Today, just as at its inception, "manhaj" and the claims to scientific rigor that the term evokes, became a kind of compass for Albani and his followers to navigate and survive the stormy seas of Islamic politics in the late twentieth century.

Tracing the development of the term Salafiyya long has proved vexing for intellectual historians of twentieth-century Islam. In the early twentieth-century, the term arose in multiple contexts that bespeak a deeper underlying shift in Islamic intellectual history. My paper compares notions of the Salafiyya in the pre-independence work of Moroccan ʿālim and political activist ʿAllal al-Fasi (d. 1974) and relevant sections of Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) and Rashid Rida’s (d. 1935) Tafsīr al-Manār. It takes their outward reference to the salaf al-ṣāliḥ as a starting point for discussing two fundamentally different constructions of Islamic modernism. Whereas Abduh uses the concept of the doctrine of the salaf (madhhab al-salaf) to prescribe stringent restrictions on ascertaining God’s knowledge, al-Fasi professes the Salafi movement (ḥaraka salafiyya) as a directive for spiritual, social, and political liberation. At first glance, the relevant texts of the two authors may seem incongruent for comparison. On the one hand, Abduh’s madhhab al-salaf is firmly set in the tradition of metaphysics derived from proper scriptural interpretation. On the other, al-Fasi’s elaboration of the “Salafi movement” (al-ḥaraka al-salafiyya) amounts to a broad call to engage with worldly phenomena as a means to spiritual revival. However, looking beyond each author’s attachment to the term salafī reveals a more foundationally divergent modernist outlook that this paper seeks to explicate. My paper argues that the specific role that each envisions for the individual Muslim represents a paradigmatic shift in the history of Islamic modernism more significant than reference to the salaf. In particular, their diverging visions of individual’s subjectivity vis-à-vis the Islamic tradition demonstrates this difference. Whereas Abduh sharply circumscribes access to the metaphysical tradition to protect it from unqualified “commoners” (ʿawām), al-Fasi implores his masses of listeners to liberate their minds and spirits as a means of liberating their society. Al-Fasi thereby encourages the individual’s participation and requires acute engagement with the world around them. In doing so, he shows only nominal concern for the scriptural and metaphysical tradition to which Abduh emphatically gives ultimate primacy. In the end, I contend that al-Fasi’s focus on forming individual mentalities in worldly terms points to the replacement of metaphysics by politics in Islamic modernist paradigms. The political teleology that al-Fasi conflated with spiritual revival provides a lens into this shift that dominated Islamic modernism for the rest of the twentieth century.

The renowned late Syrian ʿālim Shaykh Mohammad Said Ramadan al-Buti (d.2013) has been called “the leading religious authority in the intellectual disputes in Islam about modern life”; no figure has represented the so-called “traditionalist” school of Sunni Islam in contemporary times as well as al-Buti. Known for his adversarial relationship with Shaykh Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani and other Damascene Salafi ulama, al-Buti articulates a commitment to the past balanced by a sensitivity to the questions and challenges of modernity. A champion for the perseverance of a classical legal tradition, Al-Buti’s views raise dire implications on the place of religious authority in the modern age and the popularization of Salafi thought and practice. This paper will focus on al-Buti’s vehement stances against Salafism as seen through his writings, which center on two key tropes: refuting Salafi ideology by means of historical revisionism and decrying the dangers of “anti-madhabism” (known as la madhhabiyya) espoused by his ideological opponents. Most crucially, al-Buti relies on polemical tactics for his arguments to make the case for “traditional” approaches to Islamic legal sources as the premier epistemology for Muslims in contemporary times Through a textual focus on al-Buti’s anti-Salafi works as well as those of his Salafi counterparts, this paper will explore the emergence of “traditionalist” scholars out of modern debates over Islamic reform who lay claim to an “Islamic tradition” by deploying the polemical anvil of “illegitimate innovation” (bida‘a); a tactic generally wielded by his adversaries. I argue that argumentative polemics are certainly not a recent genre in Islamic legal literature. However, by possessing an awareness to the temporal element inherent in the modern epistemic shift, al-Buti’s writings serve as a lens to the emergence of a distinct category; an “Islamic tradition” that seeks to negate Salafism. At the intersection of competing visions of law and history, traditionalism has emerged as a key contender for religious authority in contemporary Islam.

Contemporary Salafism is a global religious movement and its male participants, whether quietist (Madkhalī), Islamist (Ḥarakī), or Jihadist (Jihādī), are often distinguished from their non-Salafi co-religionists by their full beards. What do these beards reveal about Salafi conceptions of masculinity and how do they allow us to understand the inseparability of practices of self-fashioning pertaining to politics, religion and gender? While previous studies of Salafism have addressed masculinity as represented in Salafi calls for gender segregation, the practical outgrowth of successful gender segregation –whether enforced by state institutions or by sub-state communities –is that Salafi masculinity is necessarily formed primarily among other men. Drawing on contemporary Salafi pamphlets and Internet message boards, this presentation examines debates over the Salafi beard and what the multifaceted performance of this practice can reveal about the entanglement of its wearer in broader questions of textual hermeneutics, political allegiance, fashion, and military service. After laying out key conceptual challenges in the study of Salafi masculinity and the sources through which one can study this question, this paper argues that the beard represented a central site for the negotiation of masculinity among religious scholars and state modernizers in the twentieth-century Middle East. The second half of the paper, in turn, examines the project of Salafi masculinity from the theory to practice, arguing that Salafi scholars sought to articulate a vision of religious masculinity that distinguished their flock from their co-religionists and state planners, alike. By contrast, those outside the scholarly elite mediated political and religious frameworks of facial hair as they simultaneously sought style, piety, financial security and brotherhood at the key sites of neighborhood barbershops and the military barracks. By highlighting the broader ideological battles of facial hair and the ways in which bearded Salafis seek to structure public space, this presentation casts light on the ways in which gender shapes how Salafi men participate in pious individual cultivation and community formation alike.