SPIRITUAL CAPITAL AND WAHHABI RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY

Judging by local press coverage, plans to establish an Islamic university in Medina to host non-Saudi students appear to have gathered pace from around 1958, a moment in history when Saudi rule faced serious challenges on multiple fronts. In Egypt and across the Middle East, the momentum was very much with various brands of radical republicanism that decried the hereditary privileges of monarchy and whose proponents, particularly Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir, were actively engaged in efforts to destabilize the Riyadh regime. Moreover, within the kingdom itself the ruling family was fractured by the competing claims of Saʿud, his brother Faysal, and a faction of more junior princes.Footnote ³ In this context, it seems clear that much of the impetus behind the IUM was political. The new missionary initiative aimed to counter the transnational extension of leftist republican projects by advancing a competing program grounded in claims to historical and religious authenticity. Insofar as it represented an award to the Wahhabi religious establishment, it also stood to bolster patronage relations between dynastic actors and this key constituency. Finally, it would give concrete expression to narratives of national and dynastic legitimacy—grounded in the tropes of kingly munificence, pious leadership, enlightened religious mission, and guardianship of the Holy Cities—for consumption by domestic audiences.Footnote ⁴

This moment also saw a relative opening up of a Wahhabi scholarly establishment that—notwithstanding enduring internal debates over how to deal with non-Muslims and non-Wahhabi Muslims—had historically been decidedly exclusivist.Footnote ⁵ A certain amount of change in this regard had begun to occur gradually from the 1920s, as the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance won the political backing of high profile figures abroad such as the Cairo-based Syrian reformist Muhammad Rashid Rida.Footnote ⁶ Occurring around the same time, the 1929 suppression by King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz of the exclusivist Ikhwan militias that had previously served his cause consolidated the standing of those sections of the Wahhabi establishment displaying relatively pragmatic attitudes in regard to dealings with non-Wahhabi Muslims.Footnote ⁷ By the 1950s, the Wahhabi establishment was formally headed by Muhammad ibn Ibrahim Al al-Shaykh who, as grand mufti, was prepared to reach out to religious dignitaries from beyond the Arabian Peninsula.Footnote ⁸

However, despite this gradual process of bridge-building, the Saudi religious establishment at the time was arguably ill equipped to engage in an ambitious effort to extend its authority and influence to Muslim communities around the world. Evaluations of the capacity and standing of the Wahhabi scholarly community in the mid-20th century vary. In a work published in the first half of the 1960s, Hafiz Wahba—an Egyptian who had been employed by the Saudi state for several decades—gave a scathing account:

Wahba's comments merit attention insofar as they reflect the perspective of an outsider who was at the same time well acquainted with the kingdom and had cordial relations with senior Wahhabi scholars. That said, he was no religious specialist and his limited knowledge of the matters at stake is reflected in the fact that he appears to err even in naming one of the scholars he mentions.Footnote ¹⁰ In fact, after the deaths between 1920 and 1930 of those listed by Wahba, Najd did still boast individuals of considerable learning. Some, such as ʿUmar ibn Salim, Sulayman ibn Sihman, and ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Saʿdi would pass away in the decades that followed. However, others—such as Muhammad ibn Ibrahim and a younger generation including the future grand mufti ʿAbd al-ʿAziz ibn Baz—remained active when the IUM opened its doors. All the same, while such figures were certainly equipped to hold sway within the Najdi context, there is reason to doubt that the bases of their standing could alone have provided for the extension of this authority beyond the Wahhabi fold.

Religious authority within the Wahhabi establishment at the time—and the ways in which this authority came to be remade and extended over the decades that followed—may be usefully understood with reference to the notion of spiritual capital, proposed by Bradford Verter as the basis of a model which “treats religious knowledge, competencies, and preferences as positional goods within a competitive symbolic economy.”Footnote ¹¹ Spiritual capital may be embodied in the individual believer as a result of education or socialization, in the form of religious knowledge, tastes, and skills; it may be objectified in the form of material items such as religious texts or ritual objects; or it may be institutionalized in corporate structures, which thereby acquire the capacity to authorize religious goods.Footnote ¹² It is amassed, invested, and exchanged within the terms of a broader Bourdieusian “economy of practices,” which also encompasses overlapping transactions in cultural, material, and social goods. Thus material wealth may pay for the production and purchase of ritual objects, for example, or religious qualifications may open doors to certain forms of paid employment.Footnote ¹³ At the same time, the value of any given form of spiritual capital as a basis of religious standing is not stable; it may be assessed according to differing “hierarchies of religious value” in disparate subcultural contexts.Footnote ¹⁴ Moreover, these “hierarchies of value” are themselves in constant flux, as actors wield whatever authority is at their disposal in struggles to define the worth of particular religious texts, practices, and bodies of knowledge. In this sense, spiritual capital represents both a “medium” of conflict (in that accumulation of such capital increases one's authority to engage in disputation over the definition of correct belief and praxis) and an “object” of conflict (in that the value of any given form of spiritual capital is itself subject to contestation).Footnote ¹⁵

While Verter is concerned primarily with understanding dynamics that play out across the variety of subcultural contexts existing within the religious field in any given national sphere, his ideas may be applied to the globe-spanning struggles to define Islamic orthodoxy into which the Wahhabi establishment inserted themselves, involving actors situated across the array of subcultural currents constituting the Islamic tradition. When it came to extending their influence beyond the Wahhabi fold, I argue, the Saudi religious establishment faced the problem not of a lack of spiritual capital per se, but rather of a lack of spiritual capital in forms that might be readily recognized as legitimate and valuable bases of religious authority by diverse Muslim communities around the world.

At this point, it is necessary to situate Wahhabism in relation to Salafi and, more broadly, Islamic beliefs and praxis. If Islam is understood as a discursive tradition, then Salafism amounts to a subcultural “tradition within a tradition,” marked out by a distinctive set of principles and points of reference.Footnote ¹⁶ While the label is contested and often vaguely applied, Bernard Haykel has defined contemporary Salafism as characterized by several interconnected features. These include: an emphasis on the purity of the beliefs and praxis of the salaf al-ṣāliḥ (pious ancestors), often understood to denote members of the Muslim community prior to the death of the jurist Ahmad ibn Hanbal in 855; a distinctive understanding of tawḥīd (the unicity of God), which in turn tends to give rise to the view that many traditional Islamic practices constitute shirk (polytheism); a stress on combating perceived unbelief, particularly shirk; an insistence that the Qurʾan, the sunna, and “the consensus of the Prophet's companions” are the only legitimate bases of religious authority; an emphasis on purging illegitimate innovations (bidaʿ, sing. bidʿa) understood to have corrupted Islamic belief and praxis; and a conviction that the Qurʾan and the sunna are clear in meaning and offer sufficient counsel in all circumstances.Footnote ¹⁷

Wahhabism displays all of these features and those who are labelled Wahhabis would typically prefer to think of themselves simply as Salafis. However, Wahhabism has certain additional characteristics that justify treating it as a distinguishable subcultural tradition within the broader Salafi fold.Footnote ¹⁸ One of these is the central place given within it to works authored by the 18th-century Najdi reformer Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab and certain of his descendants. Another feature of the Wahhabi tradition is a distinctive approach to jurisprudence. In principle, Wahhabism shares with many other modes of Salafism a commitment to rejecting blind emulation (taqlīd) of the rulings of the mainstream Sunni schools of law, in favor of verifying legal rulings by independent reasoning (ijtihād) with direct reference to the Qurʾan and the sunna. However, in practice the Wahhabi tradition has historically been very closely associated with Hanbali jurisprudence.Footnote ¹⁹

If the construction of religious authority in regard to a given audience involves the accumulation of symbolic resources in forms recognized as legitimate and valuable by that audience, then religious mission by its very nature presents challenges. The fact of reaching out to individuals or communities who subscribe to different subcultural traditions or different belief systems altogether ensures that the problem of divergent “hierarchies of religious value” inevitably comes into play. Insofar as the bodies of knowledge and other religious competencies of the Wahhabi scholarly community in the mid-20th century related ultimately to foundational texts such as the Qurʾan and the canonical hadith collections, they at least met minimal criteria for recognition as legitimate bases of religious authority in Sunni communities beyond the Peninsula. However, the content of Wahhabi scholarship—particularly in core disciplines such as ʿaqīda (creed) and fiqh (jurisprudence)—was in many ways grounded in knowledge, skills, and texts with somewhat more limited traction. In ʿaqīda, Wahhabism referred back to a Salafi creedal tradition grounded in a corpus structured around works by Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab and earlier scholars who had been formative influences on his thinking, such as Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim. The reach of this Salafi creedal tradition remained relatively limited in comparison with the more pervasive Ashʿari and Maturidi traditions. In law, the Hanbali legal practice characteristic of Wahhabism was also relatively marginal when seen in the perspective of the wider Muslim world.Footnote ²⁰ Compared with the Hanafi madhhab, which boasted followers from Western Anatolia to the Indian Subcontinent, or the Shafiʿi, whose influence stretched from East Africa to Java, primary adherence to the Hanbali jurisprudential tradition was largely restricted to the interior of the Peninsula and some other scattered enclaves.

Beyond the question of the content of their scholarship and the embodied capacities to which this gave rise, it is also significant that the qualifications borne by the Wahhabi establishment circulated within networks which were relatively closed and obscure to the outside world. It is true that, from its earliest days in the lifetime of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, Wahhabi scholarship had never been hermetically sealed from the world beyond the Peninsula. Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab himself studied in Medina under the hadith scholar Muhammad Hayya al-Sindi (d. 1750), from the town of Adilpur in what is now Pakistan; and in fact there is credible evidence that this experience played a significant role in catalyzing his shift toward reformist commitments, including criticism of taqlīd and many popular religious practices.Footnote ²¹ Comparable long-distance connections persisted to some extent over the two centuries that followed. After Muhammad ʿAli's troops overran the Saudi capital al-Dirʿiyya in 1818, some Wahhabi scholars were exiled to Egypt, whence they subsequently returned to Najd with experience of study in settings such as al-Azhar.Footnote ²² Later in the 19th century, the Wahhabi establishment built up links with the Ahl-i Hadith Salafi movement in India.Footnote ²³ Throughout this period, the Wahhabis also had a certain number of sympathizers scattered among scholarly communities from the Maghrib to Iraq.Footnote ²⁴ There are even some reports of students traveling from beyond the Peninsula to study with Wahhabi scholars in the first half of the 20th century. For example, individuals are said to have made their way from Iraq, Yemen, and the Levant to receive instruction from the young Ibn Baz in the town of al-Kharj near Riyadh.Footnote ²⁵ Nonetheless, the scope of such long-distance connections should not be exaggerated. Moreover, in light of the earlier discussion regarding recognition of capital, it is notable that the scholarly communities involved—such as the Ahl-i Hadith—were often already committed to understandings of Islam grounded in principles, practices, and corpuses that overlapped with the Wahhabi tradition.

Wahhabi religious instruction thus remained relatively parochial in ways that had implications for the kinds of symbolic resources available to the Wahhabi establishment. As in other contexts at the time, certification in Najd took the form of ijāza qualifications issued by an individual scholar to an individual student following a period of instruction in a study circle.Footnote ²⁶ In the early 20th century, a towering Wahhabi scholar such as Saʿd ibn ʿAtiq had been able to boast credentials of this kind accumulated through extensive scholarly relations, encompassing prominent Indian hadith specialists such as Siddiq Hasan Khan and Nadhir Husayn al-Dihlawi, with whom he had studied in Bhopal.Footnote ²⁷ Such symbolic capital, accrued in distant locations from scholars with far-reaching reputations, stood to be widely recognized as a legitimate basis of authority in contexts well beyond the Wahhabi heartlands of Najd. However, Ibn ʿAtiq had died several decades before the founding of the IUM and those at the core of the Wahhabi establishment in this period otherwise had limited access to such widely recognized resources. On the whole, they relied on forms of certification that circulated largely among those studying and teaching in local centers of learning in Najd. This parochialism is clear in the biographies of ten individuals listed by the historian Muhammad ibn ʿAbd Allah al-Salman as examples of particularly prominent figures teaching in mosque study circles in Riyadh in the first half of the 20th century. The majority of these men were bound by kinship as members of the extended Al al-Shaykh family comprising descendants of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, and many were very closely related as brothers, fathers, sons, uncles, and nephews. All had completed their own studies within the Peninsula, mostly within Najd, and substantial overlap between lists of their respective teachers and students confirms the relative insularity of the circles in which they operated.Footnote ²⁸

In the decades leading up to the founding of the IUM, the Saudi monarchy had already begun a process of securing the services of certain scholarly circles from within the Peninsula that were somewhat more cosmopolitan than the core Wahhabi establishment. These included figures from the Hijaz who had longstanding pilgrimage connections with locations across the Islamic world. They also included individuals from the Najdi town of ʿUnayza, which was relatively well connected to locations beyond the Peninsula through trade relations, and whose scholars had historically used these ties to engage with far-reaching networks spanning the Hijaz, the Levant, the Gulf, and South Asia.Footnote ²⁹ Individuals from these backgrounds were, for example, co-opted to head the Saudi state-run education system that began to emerge in the Hijaz in the second half of the 1920s.Footnote ³⁰ In this way, and also through the hiring of migrants from beyond the Peninsula to teach in Islamic institutes geared toward training domestic cadres, the Saudi state and religious establishment gradually began to secure access to an increasingly diverse array of symbolic resources. It was just such a process, I suggest, which would continue to gather momentum at the IUM.

REACHING ABROAD

From the time that it opened its doors, the IUM was clearly identifiable as a distinctively Wahhabi project. It was put in the care of doyens of the Wahhabi establishment, with the grand mufti Ibn Ibrahim in principle holding the title of university president. In practice, the IUM's day-to-day workings were overseen by his deputy, Ibn Baz. The latter formally became university president in 1970 and remained in that post for a period of five years, after which the IUM was run by a series of less prominent Saudis.Footnote ³¹ It was also the case that university syllabuses were constructed around the Salafi conception of tawḥīd, the cornerstone of the Wahhabi tradition; and, at least at the time of its founding, fiqh syllabuses were clearly oriented toward the Hanbali madhhab, in line with Wahhabi mores.Footnote ³² In the same instance, other aspects of the university's institutional character came to be diversified in ways arguably bound up with its efforts to legitimize itself as a missionary project with global ambitions. Below the top level of management, non-Saudis from divergent geographical, religious, social, and political backgrounds rapidly became numerically dominant both among its teaching staff and also on its senior Advisory Council.

According to the IUM's founding document, Advisory Council members were to be selected to achieve geographical breadth and a range of expertise, and they were to meet regularly to discuss the university's structure and functioning.Footnote ³³ Issues that they considered included syllabuses, amendments to the university statutes, and the establishment of new colleges.Footnote ³⁴ The council included an array of religious luminaries drawn both from within and from far beyond Salafi networks. The first council included just two Saudis, Ibn Baz and ʿAbd al-Muhsin al-ʿAbbad, a young scholar from Zilfi who taught at the IUM from the time that it opened and would later take charge of the university for a period following Ibn Baz's departure.Footnote ³⁵ Alongside them sat three prominent scholars and activists from South Asia: Mawdudi and Nadwi, both well-known non-Salafi figures who had attended the meeting described at the start of this article, and Muhammad Dawud al-Ghaznawi of the Ahl-i Hadith Salafi movement in Pakistan. They were joined by two Egyptians: ʿAbd al-Razzaq ʿAfifi, who had just quit as head of the Salafi movement Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya in Egypt in order to settle in Saudi Arabia; and Hasanayn Muhammad Makhluf, a prominent Azhari and former grand mufti of Egypt. Two Iraqi members were Muhammad Mahmud al-Sawwaf, a senior Muslim Brother who relocated to the kingdom around this time; and Muhammad Bahjat al-Athari, a student of the turn-of-the-century Iraqi Salafi scholar Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi. Syrian members included Muhammad al-Mubarak, a cofounder of the Syrian Muslim Brothers; and Muhammad Bahjat al-Bitar, who came from a prominent line of Salafi scholars in Damascus. Others hailed from Indonesia, Aden, Mauritania, Tunisia, Jordan, and elsewhere.Footnote ³⁶

When it came to the faculty itself, non-Saudi teaching staff were hired mainly from the Middle East and North Africa, presumably in large part because the language of instruction was Arabic. Foreigners were an important presence right from the start, and by the early 1970s staff lists described just eight of thirty-three faculty members as Saudi. Of the remainder, over half were Egyptian nationals while others hailed from Jordan, Syria, Morocco, and Pakistan.Footnote ³⁷ Even out of those listed as Saudi at that time, more than half had acquired Saudi citizenship after relocating to the kingdom from their home communities in countries including Egypt, Mauritania, Algeria, and Mali. A massive expansion of the university in the wake of the 1970s oil boom led to a further influx of migrant staff members. By the early 1980s, university documents classed as Saudi less than two-fifths of its faculty members—who in total now numbered nearly 400 individuals—and, again, it is clear that even this category included scholars born outside the kingdom who had since settled there. Non-Saudi faculty at this time included over 130 Egyptians, as well as dozens of Sudanese and lesser numbers from Syria, Jordan, Iraq, India, Pakistan, Morocco, Palestine, South Yemen, Mauritania, and even Australia.Footnote ³⁸

Far from being absorbed anonymously into low-ranking positions, these migrants occupied highly visible posts within the university framework. The Syrian Muslim Brother Muhammad al-Majdhub, for example, spent fifteen years as a member of the editorial board of the university journal, a publication that included contributions from countless non-Saudi staff and bore the stamp of foreign social movements whose members were involved in the IUM project.Footnote ³⁹ A program for monitoring student life and organizing activities outside of class was headed for more than a decade from the mid-1970s by the Egyptian Muslim Brother al-Sayyid Nazili.Footnote ⁴⁰ Non-Saudis and naturalized citizens were represented on the University Council, a body that oversaw operational matters. They also sat on the councils of the university's constituent colleges, and served as heads of departments within colleges.

The migrations that helped to shape this diverse faculty—and that were in turn shaped and sustained by the IUM's existence—followed a host of trajectories. A proportion of those scholars from beyond the kingdom who became involved in the IUM stayed for a limited period before returning to their countries of origin. For some of these sojourners, including Advisory Council members who had no other long-term business in Saudi Arabia, visits to Medina might simply have been long enough to attend a meeting. For others, the stay could be very lengthy. The leading Ahl-i Hadith scholar ʿAbd al-Ghaffar Hasan recalled that after being hired by an IUM staff member who had traveled to his house in Pakistan in the mid-1960s, he had hoped to spend the rest of his life in Medina. In the event, he taught hadith studies there for sixteen years before returning to Pakistan and taking up a position on the official Islamic Ideological Council charged with advising the government on matters of shariʿa.Footnote ⁴¹ Particularly as the university expanded and its teaching body grew, a great many staff likely fell into the sojourners category, often recruited on a temporary basis from institutions such as al-Azhar.Footnote ⁴² Their journeys were facilitated in part by IUM deputations that traveled abroad—including to Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Pakistan—specifically with a view to contracting new employees.Footnote ⁴³

The faculty also included individuals who either had already settled permanently in Saudi Arabia prior to the founding of the IUM or would do so after taking up employment there. These immigrants remained in the kingdom for the duration of their lives, frequently becoming naturalized citizens, starting families, and integrating into the new cultural, religious, and social milieu in which they found themselves. One such figure was ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Qariʾ, born around 1911 in Kokand, in the Fergana Valley in what is now Uzbekistan. He had relocated to the Hijaz as a young man, and had studied and taught in various religious educational institutions in Mecca and Riyadh before taking up a post teaching Qurʾan and Qurʾanic recitation at the IUM from the time of its establishment.Footnote ⁴⁴ His son, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Qariʾ, would go on to study at the IUM before himself becoming a longstanding member of its faculty, serving as dean of its College of the Qurʾan and Islamic Studies in the early 1980s.Footnote ⁴⁵

For a final category of migrants, a stint in Medina represented just one stage on long and convoluted cross-border pathways. This kind of itinerant trajectory is illustrated in the biography of the Moroccan reformist scholar Taqi al-Din al-Hilali, who was invited by Ibn Baz to join the IUM faculty in 1968. By this time in his life, al-Hilali had spent periods studying and teaching not only in his native Morocco but also in the Saudi-occupied Hijaz in the 1920s, and in Algeria, Egypt, India, Iraq, and Germany. During these peregrinations, he had made contact with Rashid Rida in Cairo, taught Arabic literature and studied English at the Dar al-ʿUlum college run by the Nadwat al-ʿUlamaʾ in Lucknow, earned a doctorate from the University of Berlin, and been arrested by the Spanish colonial authorities in northern Morocco over his links to the Egyptian Muslim Brothers.Footnote ⁴⁶

The migrations that converged on the IUM campus were sometimes channelled through longstanding pilgrimage and educational circuits. Many of those who would become leading figures at the university had in this way turned up independently on the Saudis’ doorstep in the decades prior to the IUM's founding. ʿUmar ibn Muhammad Fallata, who headed an IUM-affiliated school in Medina known as Dar al-Hadith before serving as university secretary general from 1978 until 1983, had himself been born just as his parents were approaching Mecca at the end of a long passage from Nigeria in the 1920s. This journey in turn built on pilgrimage links to the Hijaz dating back to his grandfather.Footnote ⁴⁷ He and many other migrants came into contact with one another and with Wahhabi scholars through local educational networks in Najd and the Hijaz, teaching and studying together in sites including mosques, private schools, and a new set of religious colleges overseen by the Wahhabi establishment in Riyadh from the early 1950s. The forging of such connections is seen in the trajectory of another high-profile IUM staff member, Muhammad al-Mukhtar al-Shinqiti, who arrived in the Hijaz as a pilgrim in 1939 having apparently traveled most of the 5,000-kilometer journey from his native Mauritania on foot. Before taking up a teaching post at the newly opened IUM, where he would remain until the early 1980s, he studied with scholars in Mecca and Medina, and taught in the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, a private school in Jidda, and a state-run religious institute in Riyadh.Footnote ⁴⁸

Apart from pilgrimage routes, exile politics also played a part in driving migrations to Medina. The experience of Muslim Brothers seeking refuge in Saudi Arabia from persecution in countries across the region is particularly well known. Crackdowns on Muslim Brothers in Egypt in 1954 and again in the mid-1960s—followed by the release of many members of the organization from jail under Anwar al-Sadat in 1971—and periods of concerted repression in Syria and Iraq from the late 1950s onwards contributed to pushing large numbers of Brothers into employment in the Saudi education system and wider economy.Footnote ⁴⁹ The biographies of many of those who took up roles at the IUM—either as part of its teaching faculty or as members of its Advisory Council—cohere with this broad pattern.Footnote ⁵⁰ However, the role of exile politics in this regard did not start and end with the crackdowns on the Brothers; similar dynamics also occurred earlier as a result of colonial repression. The prominent IUM staff member Hammad al-Ansari, for example, had originally been compelled to flee the French Sudan—which would later become Mali— to the Hijaz as a result of pressure exercised by the colonial authorities there during World War II.Footnote ⁵¹ Similarly, the aforementioned ʿUmar Fallata was himself a devoted student of ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Ifriqi, another scholar from the French Sudan who had settled in the Hijaz after apparently fleeing a run-in with the colonial authorities. Al-Ifriqi, who was viewed by the French as a key expatriate leader of anticolonial contention,Footnote ⁵² ran the Medina Dar al-Hadith until his death in 1957, after which time it was taken over by Fallata and then in 1964 absorbed into the IUM.Footnote ⁵³

Besides Muslim Brothers, the university faculty came to include individuals associated with a variety of other social movements, particularly the South Asian Ahl-i Hadith and the Egyptian Salafi movement Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya. Established in Egypt in 1926, Ansar al-Sunna already had a longstanding relationship with the Saudi religious and political establishments by the time the IUM emerged. Its founder Muhammad Hamid al-Fiqi had settled in the Hijaz in the 1920s and forged close relations with the Saudi political establishment. As mentioned above, the movement secured an effective presence on the IUM's founding Advisory Council in ʿAbd al-Razzaq ʿAfifi, an Ansar al-Sunna stalwart who had previously taught in Saudi Arabia and who in around 1960 ended a brief stint as president of the organization in Egypt in order to settle permanently in the kingdom. ʿAfifi was subsequently appointed to top religious bodies in Saudi Arabia, including the Council of Senior ʿUlamaʾ.Footnote ⁵⁴ A number of Egyptian Salafi scholars associated with Ansar al-Sunna also took up teaching positions at the IUM.Footnote ⁵⁵ The movement's members, whose creed was considered sound by the Wahhabi establishment, were even trusted with teaching and setting syllabuses on the sensitive subject of tawḥīd.Footnote ⁵⁶

As mentioned previously, the South Asian Ahl-i Hadith also had enduring ties to the Wahhabi establishment which went back even further than those of Ansar al-Sunna. In the last quarter of the 19th century, Najdi ʿulamaʾ—including the aforementioned Saʿd ibn ʿAtiq—began traveling to Delhi and Bhopal to study with Ahl-i Hadith scholars such as Siddiq Hasan and Nadhir Husayn al-Dihlawi.Footnote ⁵⁷ It was an Indian Ahl-i Hadith affiliate, Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Dihlawi, who in the early 1930s founded the Medinan Dar al-Hadith, which would subsequently be taken over by al-Ifriqi and ʿUmar Fallata and then folded into the IUM framework. Al-Dihlawi also established a religious school of the same name in Mecca around the same time, in cooperation with an Ansar al-Sunna-linked Egyptian scholar named ʿAbd al-Zahir Abu al-Samh. Just as the Medina Dar al-Hadith had been absorbed by the IUM in 1964, so the Mecca Dar al-Hadith was brought under its administrative umbrella in 1971.Footnote ⁵⁸ In addition to the appointment of the Ahl-i Hadith's Muhammad Dawud al-Ghaznawi to the IUM's founding Advisory Council, teaching posts at the university were subsequently given to scholars from the movement including Hafiz Muhammad Gondalavi, ʿAbd al-Ghaffar Hasan, and ʿAbd al-Karim Murad.Footnote ⁵⁹

For many migrants who arrived in Medina through these diverse routes, a spell at the IUM offered an opportunity to combine employment seen as benefiting the global umma with career advancement and the chance to take advantage of relatively high wages. Egyptians who have worked at Saudi Arabia's Islamic universities emphasize the material remittances made possible by these circular migrations, which could be used to support personal projects such as setting up a home and starting a family, as well as the value associated with spending time in the proximity of the Holy Cities.Footnote ⁶⁰ Saudi connections also benefited movements whose members were involved at the IUM. On one occasion in the mid-1970s, for example, the university made a donation of 50,000 riyals to the Nadwat al-ʿUlamaʾ.Footnote ⁶¹ In the few years after the Ahl-i Hadith founded a madrasa known as the Jamiʿa Salafiya in Banaras in 1966, the IUM sent teachers to support the fledgling institution.Footnote ⁶² According to Muhammad Qasim Zaman, the Banaras Jamiʿa Salafiya also happened to be partially funded by Saudi Arabia and to have been “inaugurated . . . by the Saudi ambassador.”Footnote ⁶³ In addition, the IUM maintained formal relations with an Ahl-i Hadith madrasa of the same name in Faisalabad, whose students “are regularly sent for higher studies to Saudi Arabia” after which “many return to teach in this and other Ahl-i Hadith madrasas.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The flows of religious migrants that grew up around the IUM were thus bound up with transactions in material capital, which could in turn be put to work in the service of an array of projects, religious and otherwise. As I argue in the following section, these same transactions also involved the exchange and accumulation of symbolic resources.

MIGRATION, BUREAUCRATIZATION, AND LEGITIMIZATION

Academic debate on the role of foreigners in Saudi Islamic universities such as the IUM has tended to revolve around the part that they are reputed to have played in catalyzing the emergence of the politically engaged domestic Islamist current known as the Sahwa, which peaked in the kingdom in the early 1990s. Some observers have emphasized the influence that Muslim Brothers from Egypt and the Levant, as well as the Syrian former Muslim Brother Muhammad Surur Zayn al-ʿAbidin, arguably exerted on local activists.Footnote ⁶⁵ Others have been inclined to downplay the role of migrants in this regard, tending to give weight instead to indigenous traditions and grievances in the crystallization of Sahwi activism.Footnote ⁶⁶ This debate's focus on the Saudi national sphere, I suggest, has tended to sideline another set of considerations relating to cross-border flows of scholars and educators centered on institutions such as the IUM—that is, the ways in which the co-optation of religious migrants contributed to legitimizing the extension of Wahhabi influence and the authority of the Saudi religious establishment beyond the kingdom's borders.

Even as the IUM absorbed this influx of foreign staff, the content of its teaching remained clearly informed by Wahhabi concerns. Soon after its founding, the IUM's fiqh syllabuses underwent a subtle shift away from their original Hanbali bent toward an approach that was framed as explicitly comparative and encompassing the mainstream Sunni schools of law.Footnote ⁶⁷ While there is evidence that this development related in part to the presence of migrant staff and recognition of the need to cater to a diverse student body, it also meshed with a broad shift in 20th-century Saudi Arabia away from narrow adherence to Hanbali fiqh; and it was consistent with the emphasis that had always existed within the Wahhabi tradition—in principle, if not always in practice—on the rejection of taqlīd in favor of ijtihād.Footnote ⁶⁸ At the same time, creed syllabuses in use in the early 1990s remained firmly grounded in the Salafi conception of tawḥīd that is the bedrock of the Wahhabi tradition.Footnote ⁶⁹

Juxtaposed with this Wahhabi-oriented program of study, the diversity of accents, appearances, and modes of comportment of the migrants who made up the IUM faculty no doubt gave credence to the university's claims to be a beacon for universal Islamic mission, rather than for a quite distinct subcultural tradition rooted in the very particular social, geographical, and historical context of Najd. On a cosmetic level, at least, this diversity surely helped to dilute the impression of a project operating narrowly in the service of the Wahhabi establishment and the Saudi state. In a more specific sense, however, migrants who taught at the IUM also arrived in Medina as bearers of spiritual capital in a diversity of forms that would be recognized as legitimate bases of religious authority in Muslim communities around the world.

The knowledge and skills brought by migrant staff members provided for core Wahhabi commitments to be built into programs of study that expanded enormously over time to span the gamut of Islamic sciences. The undergraduate syllabus at the time of the university's founding fit on a single page. It outlined one program of study built around eleven subjects, most of which—including tawḥīd, fiqh, hadith studies, Qurʾanic exegesis, and grammar—had long been mainstays of Wahhabi scholarship. Moreover, these subjects were taught to a significant extent from texts—including Ibn Qudama's fiqh manual al-Muqniʿ and the Qurʾan commentary of al-Baghawi—that had also long featured in the Wahhabi canon.Footnote ⁷⁰ By the early 1990s, undergraduate syllabuses stretched to over 200 pages, albeit including some repetition. While core Wahhabi commitments remained firmly in place, study options by this time had grown to include dozens of disciplines and subdisciplines. These in turn were taught with reference to a vastly expanded array of texts, the latter including many points of overlap with the diverse corpuses that formed the bases of religious learning in other subcultural contexts across the Muslim world.Footnote ⁷¹ The presence of works by Azharis and figures associated with movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Ansar al-Sunna, and the Ahl-i Hadith is evidence that the expansion and diversification of IUM syllabuses were bound up with the involvement of migrant staff.

In addition to embodied skills and knowledge, migrant staff also brought with them qualifications accumulated through engagement with extensive networks of individuals and institutions that far surpassed the scope of the Wahhabi circuits of Najd. Some faculty members had accumulated symbolic resources of this kind entirely through traditional forms of instruction, rooted in study circles with individual scholars. One particularly renowned figure to fit this profile is Muhammad al-Amin al-Shinqiti, who in the 1940s made the epic overland journey from his home in Mauritania to the Hijaz in order to perform the hajj. Besides working at the IUM, he would earn a place at the heart of the Saudi religious establishment, eventually joining the kingdom's Council of Senior ʿUlamaʾ.Footnote ⁷² A former student of his at the IUM recalled that, playing on the fact that the Arabic word for a university or school certificate also refers to the formula by which Muslims avow their faith, al-Shinqiti used to declare, “I have only one shahāda: ‘lā ilāha illā Allah.’”Footnote ⁷³ What he also had, however, was an extensive reserve of informal, personalized qualifications accrued over the course of an educational career that spanned studies in rural Mauritania with members of his family, scholars of his tribe and marabouts, as well as the mosque circles of scholars in Mecca and elsewhere in Saudi Arabia. Similarly, his high-profile IUM colleague Jabir Abu Bakr al-Jazaʾiri—prior to moving to Saudi Arabia in the early 1950s—had studied in his native Algeria with individuals including the Salafi al-Tayyib al-ʿUqbi, who was in turn an associate of the renowned reformist figurehead Ibn Badis.Footnote ⁷⁴ Such men thus had scholarly pedigrees that would be recognizable far beyond the Peninsula.

Other migrant staff held forms of certification bestowed by institutions, rather than individuals, across the Middle East and far beyond. Many of those employed at the IUM in the early 1970s held the shahāda ʿālamiyya, equivalent to a master's degree, while others had undergraduate and master's degrees or doctorates. Their qualifications covered subject areas including jurisprudence, Qurʾanic studies, hadith studies, grammar, literature, and pedagogy.Footnote ⁷⁵ By the early 1980s, the vast majority of staff had university degrees.Footnote ⁷⁶ An especially large proportion of them had studied at al-Azhar, its graduates accounting for nearly a third of the more than 130 staff members teaching at the IUM's flagship College of Shariʿa at that time. While the Azharis in the College of Shariʿa were mostly Egyptians, they also included individuals from Jordan, Sudan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia itself. The deans of the university's five colleges at that stage were all Saudi citizens. However, at least three of them also boasted degrees from al-Azhar.Footnote ⁷⁷ Significant numbers of staff at the IUM in the early 1980s had also been trained at the Islamic University of Umm Durman in Sudan, an institution with strong historical ties to both al-Azhar and Cairo's Dar al-ʿUlum.Footnote ⁷⁸ Other migrant staff members had studied at universities elsewhere in Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Morocco, Libya, Pakistan, and even the United Kingdom.Footnote ⁷⁹ In some cases, their claims to scholarly authority in this religious context rested in part on qualifications earned outside of what might be readily thought of as the religious educational sphere, indicating how symbolic resources could be put to work across multiple fields. Significant numbers bore degrees earned in broadly secular institutions in Muslim-majority countries, while some were alumni of European institutions such as the Universities of London and Edinburgh.Footnote ⁸⁰ These diverse forms of certification—from venerable centers of Islamic learning such as al-Azhar, as well as younger but nonetheless well-established religious universities and even secular institutions across the Middle East and Europe—were displayed prominently in promotional literature produced by the IUM.

Material investment in the hiring of migrant staff thus provided for the accumulation of the symbolic resources that are a prerequisite for any religious educational institution hoping to authorize a given set of religious goods, to authoritatively critique and thereby delegitimate other kinds of religious goods, and to bestow religious status and authority upon its own studentsFootnote ⁸¹—in short, to engage effectively in struggles to define orthodoxy. Importantly, spiritual capital was brought by migrant staff members in an array of forms, the legitimacy and value of which stood to be readily recognized in the communities far beyond the kingdom which were the intended recipients of the IUM's mission. Diversified reserves of symbolic resources—including ijāza certificates accumulated through far-reaching scholarly networks, and degree certificates from well-known and widely respected institutions—stood to have substantially greater traction in a broader range of contexts than would qualifications accrued in the parochial study circles of Najd.

Of course, there were often significant disparities between the religious traditions within which migrant staff had originally accumulated their own capacities and qualifications, on the one hand, and the Wahhabi-oriented modes of religious instruction that these resources were now being used to legitimize, on the other hand. The very large Azhari contingent, for example, had been trained in an institution that has historically been associated primarily with the Ashʿari creedal tradition and the Hanafi, Shafiʿi, and Maliki schools of law, in contrast with the Salafi creed and distinctive approach to fiqh that defined the IUM. In practice, I suggest, the legitimization of the university rested in part on the capacity to break down, blur, or elide such distinctions. This was a simple matter in the case of staff members who had themselves undergone religious conversions of sorts. In recounting the trajectory of Muhammad al-Amin al-Shinqiti, for example, his IUM colleague and biographer Muhammad al-Majdhub notes that as a young student al-Shinqiti had held reservations about the Wahhabi tradition. However, he then met Saudi scholars in the Haramayn, read works of the Hanbali law school for the first time, and encountered the writings of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim. We are told that he consequently underwent a transformation, consciously transcending his Maliki upbringing and dedicating himself to re-studying hadith collections in light of his new understanding of their status as a key source of fiqh derivation.Footnote ⁸² Through such conversion narratives, the pious devotion, scholarly capacities, and qualifications of a lifetime of study spanning different subcultural contexts could effectively be mobilized to legitimize Wahhabi teachings.

More routinely, such distinctions appear to have been tacitly elided. It was not necessary for foreign scholars and religious functionaries to wholeheartedly accept the validity of Wahhabi doctrine and social norms in order to take up lucrative employment in the Saudi education system; and anyway the teaching of especially controversial subjects at the IUM, particularly tawḥīd, was largely the preserve of Saudis and a small number of foreign Salafis.Footnote ⁸³ It seems likely that a significant proportion of the qualified and skilled migrants whose presence helped to lend credibility to the IUM did not agree with the details of its missionary message in their entirety, particularly in core matters of creed. In the teaching of law, this elision may have been smoothed to some extent by the IUM's shift away from the clear primacy given to Hanbali jurisprudence in its original syllabuses. More broadly, it was no doubt facilitated by the increasingly bureaucratized modes of instruction that crystallized there over time. An elaborate, fixed syllabus—including not only curricula specifying required and recommended texts, but also detailed lists of intended learning outcomes—limited the autonomy of individual staff members and allowed the Saudi scholars who headed the institution and its constituent colleges to direct and maintain oversight of teaching.

This bureaucratized system of education—in contrast to the personalized study circles that had historically been the prevailing mode of instruction in the Peninsula—also paved the way for the institutionalization of the diverse symbolic resources brought by migrant staff, such that these could be appropriated and incorporated into the fabric of the university itself. Previous research has considered the relatively straightforward transmission of spiritual capital in objectified forms through gift giving, and the ways in which this may reconfigure social relationships and status.Footnote ⁸⁴ While the knowledge, qualifications, skills, and other capacities of individual IUM staff members were not material objects to be physically transferred in this sense, it is nonetheless possible to observe specific processes by which these embodied symbolic goods came to form bases of specifically institutional authority.

In the course of time, the IUM cohered as an entity with its own corporate identity, over and above that of the individual persons who taught there. In promotional literature stamped with the university's name and logo—consisting of an archway, a minaret, and an open book radiating the light of correct knowledge—their qualifications could be displayed not only as personal credentials but also as institutional resources. Similarly, written syllabuses could outlive the tenures of the individual staff members in whose knowledge and skills they were grounded. As a consequence of such processes, the university—in ways distinct from the standing of individual scholars—acquired the capacity to authorize the content of its teaching and to issue pro forma certificates of qualification to its students. This folding of individual capacities and qualifications into the ambit of the institution was further promoted through a strategy of absorbing its own graduates back into its faculty. Within years of opening its doors, the IUM began hiring its own alumni to teach in its affiliated secondary- and intermediate-level institutes.Footnote ⁸⁵ By the early 1980s, over a quarter of those working in its flagship College of Shariʿa were IUM graduates, almost all of them recruited from among the small proportion of Saudis who had studied there.Footnote ⁸⁶ Skills and certification acquired at the IUM—in part through the input of migrant staff members—were thus drawn upon as resources to be bestowed by the same institution to the next generation of students.

DOMESTICATING THE IUM

By the early 1990s, the practice of co-opting foreigners to work at the IUM was coming to an end. At the start of that decade, nearly 90 percent of the 385 members of the IUM's teaching staff were described in university literature as Saudi. Toward the end of that decade, there were no more than a handful of non-Saudi staff left on campus. An authorized history of the IUM frames this development as part of broader, countrywide efforts to “Saudize” the national economy.Footnote ⁸⁷ The university's history is thus in retrospect narrated in terms of the growing autonomy of a Saudi institution from the foreigners whose efforts had made its operation possible in the first place. In a parallel development in the course of the 1990s, the IUM also came increasingly under the sway of adherents of a distinctive strand of Salafism most prominently associated with faculty members Muhammad Aman al-Jami and Rabiʿ ibn Hadi al-Madkhali. This mode of Salafism gives pride of place to the purification of creed and the principle of default obedience to incumbent political authority, and it is distinguished by the stridency of its adherents’ attacks on politically engaged Islamists. The Jamiyya or Madkhaliyya, as it is often labeled, came to strongly color the IUM's missionary project from the 1990s, its proponents backed by the regime as a bulwark against Islamist challenges to Saudi dynastic legitimacy.Footnote ⁸⁸ At the same time as the IUM gained increasing autonomy from migrant actors and resources, its role as an instrument of national state power was thus brought ever more sharply into focus.

Yet recent research has emphasized that the religious current represented in the figures of al-Madkhali and al-Jami itself has diverse roots, for it is tied to the scholarship of the Albania-born former IUM staff member Nasir al-Din al-Albani and the thinking of the South Asian Ahl-i Hadith.Footnote ⁸⁹ More pertinently, particularly given the argument being made in the present article, the religious authority of its key figureheads is in many cases also grounded in their imbrication in just the kinds of migratory circuits discussed here. Al-Madkhali was one of a minority of Saudis admitted to study at the IUM in its early years. He counted among his teachers not only Saudis such as Ibn Baz and al-ʿAbbad but also migrant scholars who worked there at the time, including Muhammad al-Amin al-Shinqiti and al-Albani. As Roel Meijer has noted, he derives particular authority from the epithet “carrier of the flag of [knowledge] of jarḥ wa-taʿdīl [the science of evaluating the validity of a hadith text by evaluating the characters of its transmitters] in this age,” bestowed upon him by al-Albani.Footnote ⁹⁰

The role of such cross-border transactions in bolstering the religious standing of the figureheads of this current comes through more clearly still in the biography of al-Jami. Born in eastern Ethiopia in the early 1930s and educated in the Shafiʿi environment of his village and nearby settlements, al-Jami made the journey to Saudi Arabia via Somalia and Yemen in time for the hajj season of 1950. Once there, he studied not only with Najdi scholars such as Ibn Baz and Ibn Ibrahim but also with an array of migrants, including the aforementioned West Africans Muhammad al-Amin al-Shinqiti, ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Ifriqi, and Hammad al-Ansari, the Egyptian Ansar al-Sunna scholars ʿAbd al-Razzaq ʿAfifi and Muhammad Khalil Harras, and the Egyptian Salafi ʿAbd al-Razzaq Hamza. He would subsequently earn a master's degree from the University of Punjab and a doctorate from Cairo's Dar al-ʿUlum.Footnote ⁹¹ Even as the IUM came to be purged of foreign staff, these cross-border connections—cited in biographical materials as evidence of al-Jami's religious credentials—point to the legacy of transactions within a far-reaching transnational economy of migrants, material resources, and spiritual capital which played a role from the start in enabling and legitimizing the operation of its Wahhabi missionary project.