A closer look at Louis Massignon’s claims

Despite its older origins as a category, Wahhabism was still subject to a fair amount of misunderstanding at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1900, it prompted the Syrian intellectual Muhammad Kurd ʿAli to devote the first article he ever wrote for the journal al-Muqtataf to debunking common distortions about the Wahhabis, their history, and their beliefs.Footnote ⁵ Reputed authors, both in the Middle East and in Europe, still had a tendency to speak of Wahhabism in questionable ways. Muhammad ʿAbduh, for example, reportedly described the Yemeni scholar Muhammad al-Shawkani (d. 1834) as a ‘moderate Wahhabi [wahhābiyyan muʿtadilan]’ in a private conversation with Rashid Rida in 1898. If Rida’s recollections are accurate, it was an odd choice of label for al-Shawkani, who had criticised the Wahhabis late in his life.Footnote ⁶

Henri Garrot (d. 1925), an Algeria-based commercial arbitrator turned historian, did worse. In his 1,100-page history of Algeria, for which he won a prestigious Montyon award from the French Academy in 1911, Garrot made a curious claim. Sunni Muslims hold the Wahhabis to be schismatic, he wrote, because of the latter’s views on the Qurʾan. According to Garrot, the Wahhabis incurred the opprobrium of other Muslims due to their belief that the Qurʾan could and should have been ‘written [écrit]’ in a purer form of Arabic—namely, in the dialect of Najd rather than in the Hijazi dialect.Footnote ⁷ One wonders where or how Garrot got such an idea, which implies that the Wahhabis either denied the divine origin of the revelation or believed that it had been improperly communicated to humankind. Still, Garrot was not alone in peddling misinformation about the Wahhabis. These kinds of inaccuracies were commonplace, and this is precisely why Louis Massignon wrote a short article on the subject in late 1919. Another look at his claims is thus in order.

Following the victory of Saudi forces over the troops of Sharif Husayn at the Battle of Turaba in the summer of 1919, the Parisian press witnessed a sudden fascination with Wahhabism. Pundits could not always be trusted, however, and Massignon complained that two Christian Syrian exiles in Paris had made careless statements about the Wahhabis. The first was Dr Georges Samné (Jūrj Samna), general secretary of the Central Syrian Committee and editor of the Correspondance d’Orient. His article in the newspaper Le Temps falsely claimed that Wahhabism derived from Shiʿism.Footnote ⁸ A former associate of his, Ibrahim Salim Naggiar (Najjār), replied to Samné in the pages of the Paris-based journal L’Asie arabe, where he wrote that in fact the Wahhabis were Sunnis who followed the principles of Dawud al-Zahiri (d. 884).Footnote ⁹ This was too much for Massignon, who took it upon himself to set the record straight. He wrote his own article in the French scholarly journal Revue du monde musulman to explain that Samné and Naggiar were both wrong and to clarify the ‘true’ doctrinal origins of Wahhabism. That was the title of his article. Wahhabis are neither Shiʿis nor Zahiris, Massignon states; they are ‘strict Hanbalis’—strict in the sense that they are more uncompromising than other Hanbalis on certain issues, such as the visitation of tombs and the issue of whether bidʿa (religious innovation) could lead to takfīr (anathema).

This was a valid point. What makes Massignon’s article interesting to an intellectual historian, however, is not so much its treatment of Wahhabism as its inclusion of a short addendum that contains the first-ever mention—and offers the first-ever historical narrative—of an alleged ‘Salafi movement’. In the space of about two pages, Massignon fashioned and gave a name to a brand-new conceptual artefact that eventually became a staple of scholarship on modern Islam. He did not borrow it from anyone, nor did he simply describe an intellectual reality that was there for everyone to see. Rather, Massignon concocted the notion of a Salafi movement out of various scraps of reading and memory. At first glance, it is not clear why he did so. His addendum appears to digress from the main topic of his article. But various clues allow us to understand what he was trying to accomplish, how he put together the notion of a Salafi movement, and what he meant to convey by it.

The most obvious clues are chronological and geographical. Massignon affirms that the Salafi movement is a ‘modern’ movement: its birthplace is India, and its date of birth is the early nineteenth century. How did he arrive at this conclusion? One might assume that Massignon based his account on first-hand testimonies or on primary-source research, but the reality is more disappointing. Massignon merely repurposed an old and now discredited sub-narrative of the history of Wahhabism. Early nineteenth-century India, it turns out, is also the exact time and place where Massignon claims Wahhabism was first exported outside of the Arabian Peninsula. This is because, like most orientalists of his time, Massignon subscribed to the idea that the Indian reformer Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi (d. 1831) had converted to Wahhabism during his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1822 and had then brought Wahhabism back to India upon his return in 1823. Indeed, Massignon states that Wahhabism ‘rapidly implanted itself’ in north-western India at the time of Sayyid Ahmad.Footnote ¹⁰ This label, however, was a misnomer.Footnote ¹¹

But then, if we are to believe Massignon, a transformation occurred. Once Wahhabism allegedly took root in India, it morphed into something different: it became the Salafi movement. Massignon implies that the transformation was almost immediate. While he links Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi to the Wahhabi movement, he associates the Salafi movement with Sayyid Ahmad’s disciple, Muhammad ibn Ismaʿil (d. 1831), who died the same year as his mentor. Therefore, one is forced to conclude that the alleged metamorphosis of the Indian Wahhabi movement into the Salafi movement occurred within eight years of Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi’s return to the subcontinent. But this is all that Massignon writes about this purported transformation. He does not provide any explanation for it; he merely puts a new label on an old bottle. The historical narrative of the Salafi movement that he offered in 1919 was nothing other than a retooled version of the pre-existing narrative of Wahhabism in India that prevailed in British scholarship.

There is plenty of evidence to bear this out. One rendition of the British narrative appears in The Imperial Gazetteer of India, which Massignon later admitted to knowing.Footnote ¹² It relies, among other sources, on Rev. Thomas Hughes’ nineteenth-century Dictionary of Islam. Under the entry ‘Wahhabi’, Hughes begins the story of Wahhabism in India with Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi, followed by his disciple Muhammad ibn Ismaʿil, followed by the Ahl-i Hadith movement of the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹³ Massignon used the exact same storyline, with the exception that he called this movement ‘Salafi’ instead of ‘Wahhabi’ and added another branch of intellectual evolution by linking the Ahl-i Hadith of India to Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad ʿAbduh, Rashid Rida, and like-minded reformers.Footnote ¹⁴

To understand Massignon’s rationale in repurposing the older story of Wahhabism in India, it helps to know that several British orientalists held the so-called Indian Wahhabis to be qualitatively different from their Arabian counterparts. Hughes, for one, claimed that Indian Wahhabis were ‘not imbued with the same fanatical spirit’ as the Wahhabis of Najd, even though their religious principles were identical.Footnote ¹⁵ In the original edition of the book Mohammedanism, published in 1911, David Margoliouth concurred: Indian Wahhabis, he declared, had a ‘more tolerant’ attitude towards other Muslims than the original Wahhabis of Arabia.Footnote ¹⁶ This nuance appears to have prompted Massignon’s decision to use the story of Wahhabism in India as the foundation for a new analytical category. By using the labels ‘salafî’ and ‘Salafîyah’ (indiscriminately and often erroneously, it must be said), Massignon formally set Arabian Wahhabis apart from what he, too, considered to be a very similar though not quite identical group of Muslims. In short, he gave those allegedly more tolerant and less fanatical Wahhabis—in India and elsewhere—a different name.

Drawing the line

In 1919, Massignon did not consider the possibility that the Wahhabi and the Salafi movements could overlap. And yet, he claimed that the so-called Salafis shared ‘precisely [the same] programme’ of ‘strict Hanbalism’ as the Wahhabis, in that they both called for a return to the same pristine Islam.Footnote ¹⁷ Where, then, did Massignon draw the line between Muslims whom he considered at once so distinct and so similar? The main criterion he used for sorting them into different categories was political—namely, their respective willingness or ability to enforce a shared religious programme. Massignon is not explicit about this in his 1919 article, but his logic is clear enough. On the one hand, he writes that, ‘Wahhabism is the political practical application of Ibn Taymiyah’s neo-Hanbalism.’Footnote ¹⁸ On the other hand, he describes the Salafi movement as an ‘intellectual’ and ‘theoretical’ movement.Footnote ¹⁹ Readers are thus made to understand that while Wahhabis have political authority and some coercive power, Salafis do not—or at least not to a significant extent. So, while Massignon affirms that Wahhabis and Salafis share the same ideals, he implies that only the Wahhabis have the power to translate these ideals into reality. This explains why he refers to the so-called Salafi movement as ‘a latent [form of] Wahhabism’.Footnote ²⁰ The Salafi movement has the potentiality of Wahhabism, he claims, but that potentiality has not been actualised. To be actualised, the Salafi movement would have to become politicised and gain political leverage—in which case it would turn into Wahhabism.

For Massignon, in other words, the Salafi movement is the caterpillar, whereas the Wahhabi movement is the butterfly. They are essentially the same creature, yet they are different and mutually exclusive. The biological analogy must not be carried too far, however, because Massignon implies that the metamorphosis can go both ways: the butterfly can just as well turn into (or revert to being) a caterpillar. Wahhabis who lose their political edge are to be recategorised as Salafis, as Massignon claims happened in India sometime between 1823 and 1831, when the imported Wahhabism transformed into the Salafi movement. We see the same logic at play in Massignon’s mention of an exceptional case: that of a few so-called Indian Wahhabis who did not metamorphose into Salafis. Indeed, in his 1919 article, Massignon claims that Wahhabism ‘continues to exist [subsiste encore]’ in north-western India among the Afridis, Mohmands, and Orakzais—three Pashtun tribes based in the border region separating today’s Pakistan and Afghanistan.Footnote ²¹ He does not explain his reasoning, but one can connect the dots. These three Pashtun tribes had a long history of fighting against either local Sikhs or British imperial forces. In the late nineteenth century—but also, in some cases, up until the time of Massignon’s writing—they fought and gave the British-controlled Indian Army a run for its money.Footnote ²² Since military action is political in character, Massignon categorised these groups as ‘Wahhabis’. They could not belong to the so-called Salafi movement, which he conceptualised as being toothless.

Besides this political criterion, Massignon also distinguished between Wahhabis and so-called Salafis on the basis of geography. Wahhabism, for him, was primarily a phenomenon of the Arabian Peninsula. In 1919, the only non-Arabian area in which Massignon posited the presence of Wahhabis was the province of Punjab in India, where the Afridis, Mohmands, and Orakzais lived. (He meant to include the North-West Frontier, which by then had been detached from the Punjab.) Massignon would later claim that a few Wahhabis existed in other parts of colonial India, such as Bengal, as well as in isolated sections of Iraq. But those were exceptional cases. Overall, Massignon made it clear that the ‘political’ Wahhabi movement was geographically circumscribed. By contrast, he affirmed that its ‘social’ or non-political version—the Salafi movement—had already spread its influence globally.Footnote ²³ It was not geographically bound.

In the 1920s, Massignon somewhat recalibrated this geographical criterion. One nugget of information found in his Annuaire du monde musulman (Yearbook of the Muslim World), which first came out in 1923, is noteworthy. Massignon writes that there are some Hanbalis in the Hijaz and that those who live in the vicinity of Khurma are of Wahhabi tendency, whereas those who live in Jeddah are Salafis.Footnote ²⁴ He abstains from explaining the rationale behind this distinction, but, evidently, he did not think that all the strict Hanbalis of the Arabian Peninsula were Wahhabis. Given that Massignon continued to include this passage in later editions of his Annuaire, it does not appear to have been a one-time commentary on the political loyalties of different local Hanbalis (even though Khurma bordered Najd and its inhabitants had indeed experienced greater exposure to the Wahhabi call than those of Jeddah). So, what factor did Massignon consider in drawing this line between the ‘Salafi’ Hanbalis and the ‘Wahhabi’ Hanbalis who both lived in the Hijaz?

Another passage of his Annuaire, found in the entry on Mesopotamia, provides the key to understanding his thought. Massignon estimates the presence of a tiny minority of 1,000 neo-Hanbalis in Iraq. He then specifies that those who live in ‘cities’ are Salafis, whereas those who live in ‘tribes’ are Wahhabis.Footnote ²⁵ This is how his previous statement about the Hijaz must be interpreted. Khurma, an inland oasis, was a minor settlement in a largely Bedouin area.Footnote ²⁶ Massignon thus categorised the Hanbalis living around the oasis as Wahhabis and those of Jeddah, a major city on the Red Sea coast, as Salafis. On closer examination, a pattern emerges from Massignon’s writings: he reserved the label ‘Salafi’ for urban Muslims alone. The only physical environments where he said Salafis were present were cities. Between 1919 and 1923, he listed six of them by name: Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Jeddah, Bhopal, and Azamgarh (in Uttar Pradesh). He implied that there were no Salafis in rural areas, in the steppe, or in the desert.

Hidden behind this geographical criterion was a value judgement about behaviours and attitudes. To be a city dweller meant to be civilised. The recollections of General Édouard Brémond in Arabia illustrate this point. In September 1916, Brémond arrived in Jeddah as head of the French military mission to the Hijaz, mandated to assist Sharif Husayn and the Arab Revolt. During his two-year stay in the region, Brémond met Muhammad Nasif (d. 1971) on a few occasions. A leading notable and intellectual of Jeddah, Nasif is now commonly referred to as a Salafi. Brémond simply referred to him as a Wahhabi (‘sa religion était ouahabia’). Yet Brémond took care to note that Nasif ‘despised the Bedouins’ and harboured no antipathy towards Europeans—a sure sign of reasonableness from Brémond’s point of view. One day, during a gathering at Nasif’s house, the host’s young son appeared before the guests wearing an amulet around his neck. Brémond writes that Nasif recoiled. He took scissors to cut the pendant string, then put the amulet in his son’s hand and told him: ‘Take this thing to your mother and tell her that we are not savages.’Footnote ²⁷

Brémond, no doubt, considered Nasif a civilised Wahhabi. This was precisely the sentiment that Massignon tried to convey by distinguishing ‘Salafis’ from ‘Wahhabis’. A passage from his 1923 Annuaire provides further evidence. Massignon writes that ‘the low castes of [the south and the east of the Indian province of Bengal] profess an Islam that is aggressive and xenophobic, of Wahhabi appearance [d’allures wahhâbites]’. By contrast, he immediately adds that ‘in the cities one finds some adepts of the Salafi sect’.Footnote ²⁸ Evidently, Massignon reserved the term ‘Wahhabi’ for people he considered boorish. He thought of the Wahhabis as country Hanbalis, so to speak. By contrast, he thought of the Salafis as sophisticated city Hanbalis. The Hanbalis of Jeddah were a case in point.

But Massignon did not always apply this criterion consistently, in that he denied other city Hanbalis the privilege of being considered Salafis. In other regions of Arabia, such as Najd and Jabal Shammar, Massignon claimed that all Muslims were Wahhabis, even if they lived in an urban environment. We cannot tell why. Perhaps he thought that central Arabia was Wahhabi by definition (his geographical criterion), or perhaps he thought that Riyadh and Haʾil did not count as real cities where one could say that civilisation had flourished. It is doubtful, however, that demographic considerations factored into his assessment. In Palestine, Massignon estimated the number of Hanbalis at 100,000—a hundred times more than in Iraq. Presumably, some of them lived in urban areas and were ‘strict’ Hanbalis. Nevertheless, Massignon did not mention the presence of any Salafis among them.Footnote ²⁹ It is worth recalling that, of the six cities that Massignon listed as centres of the Salafi movement between 1919 and 1923, none was in Palestine.

This could be explained by the fact that Palestinian cities lacked something that the other six cities had in common. Those six cities all served as home bases for members of a small network of interconnected Muslim reformers whose nexus, from Massignon’s point of view, was the al-Alusi family of Baghdad—the family that had taken him under their wing during his stay in Iraq in 1907–1908. In Cairo, there was Rashid Rida and his associates. In Damascus, there were colleagues and students of the late Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi (d. 1914) and Tahir al-Jazaʾiri (d. 1920). In Jeddah, there was Muhammad Nasif and the Azhar-educated merchant-publisher ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Tilimsani. In Bhopal, there were disciples of the late Siddiq Hasan Khan (d. 1890), the leading figure of the Ahl-i Hadith movement. All of these individuals had been in direct contact with members of the al-Alusi family at some point. This was not lost on Massignon, and there are indications that he sometimes designated individuals and entities as ‘Salafi’ by association—that is, by establishing a connection between them and this urban network of Muslim reformers.

For example, Massignon labelled the Indian reformer Abu al-Kalam Azad (d. 1958) a ‘Salafi’, seemingly because, first, he considered Azad to be a ‘disciple of Rashid Rida’ (which was something of an exaggeration, though the two men met, corresponded, and respected each other’s work) and, second, because Azad had studied with the al-Alusi family in Baghdad in 1908.Footnote ³⁰ This associative criterion helps explain why in 1923 Massignon characterised Azamgarh—his sixth city—as a university centre of the Salafi movement. The most likely reason for its inclusion is that Azamgarh was the location of Dar al-Musannifin, also known as the Shibli Academy, named after Shibli al-Nuʿmani (d. 1914). Its director in the early 1920s was Sulayman al-Nadwi (d. 1953).Footnote ³¹ Both al-Nuʿmani and al-Nadwi, it turns out, were reformist scholars with close connections to Rida and Azad. They could thus be linked to the same urban reformist network, which, in Massignon’s mind, must have further justified the use of ‘Salafi’. Massignon was possibly unable to establish a similar connection with any of the 100,000 Hanbalis residing in Palestine, and this may be why he suggested that there were no Salafis among them.

Instant expert

Massignon spoke of Wahhabism and the Salafi movement in a tone of confidence and authority, but his claims on Salafi-related matters can be best described as scholarly improvisation. The above analysis is charitable insofar as it tries to capture the coherence in Massignon’s writings. His inconsistencies, by contrast, were numerous and obvious. After 1919, Massignon changed his narrative of the origins of the so-called Salafi movement. He started claiming—falsely—that al-Afghani and ʿAbduh had founded a reformist party named salafiyya in 1883, and he frequently contradicted himself without apparent reasons and without admitting it (or perhaps without realising it).Footnote ³² To use the language of philosopher Henry Frankfurt, Massignon did not always care whether the things he wrote had truth-value.Footnote ³³

Although he had originally imagined the so-called Salafi movement as a toothless, intellectual, urban, civilised, and global version of Wahhabism, Massignon struggled to abide by his own conceptualisation. Over time, he redefined the Salafi movement as a conservative form of Islamic modernism and kept introducing new labels that overlapped with previous ones in perplexing ways, without explaining what had changed in his thinking. Blurring his own line of demarcation, Massignon sometimes characterised Salafis as ‘half-Wahhabis’, ‘pro-Wahhabis’, ‘right-wing reformers’, and even as exponents of ‘Wahhabism’ in scare quotes.Footnote ³⁴ Between 1919 and 1929, he directly or indirectly ascribed a Salafi identity to so many Muslims—Hanbalis, non-Hanbalis, Indian Qurʾanists, Sufis, Zaydis, Ibadis, Twelver Shiʿis—that his initial portrayal of the so-called Salafi movement as the good twin of the Wahhabi movement, or as a latent form of Wahhabism, proved untenable.Footnote ³⁵

This was perhaps an inevitable consequence of his methodology. By privileging political, geographical, civilisational, and associative criteria for identifying Salafis, Massignon neglected what many scholars now regard as a determining factor: specific religious beliefs and epistemologies. Massignon paid surprisingly scant attention to the religious views of the individuals and institutions he deemed ‘Salafi’. His longest analysis on the subject did not exceed seven lines, and the broad religious programme of strict Hanbalism—which, in 1919, he claimed Wahhabis and Salafis shared—did not always reflect the convictions of the individuals and institutions that he subsumed under the so-called Salafi movement. One obvious example is that Muhammad ʿAbduh, who was by no means a strict Hanbali, did not advocate ‘the suppression […] of music and works of art’.Footnote ³⁶

On other issues, it was not even clear that this shared religious programme reflected the views of the Wahhabis themselves. In 1919, Massignon praised the ‘fertile originality’ of Wahhabism, which, he claimed, had reopened the gate of ijtihad. Yet two of the publications that he associated with the so-called Salafi movement explicitly contradicted this interpretation. Massignon either dismissed, or failed to notice, Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi’s refutation of the claim that Wahhabis were proponents of ijtihad. ‘It is a lie’, al-Alusi wrote in a book that Massignon cited in his 1919 article, ‘because the people of Najd are all followers [muqallidūn] of the school of Ahmad ibn Hanbal in law […] and [Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab] never called for ijtihad’.Footnote ³⁷ Rashid Rida largely agreed. In the summer of 1919, he, too, noticed a surging interest in the Wahhabis following the Battle of Turaba and decided to demystify them in al-Manar—a journal which, according to Massignon, exemplified the so-called Salafi movement. While Rida conceded in passing that Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab had practised some form of ijtihad in the eighteenth century, he described the Wahhabis of Najd as zealous Hanbalis. In their fanatical adherence to the Hanbali school of law, Rida wrote, they resemble the Hanafis of Afghanistan.Footnote ³⁸ This was no compliment coming from someone who opposed counterproductive legal partisanship (taʿaṣṣub). Rida found redeeming qualities in the Wahhabis, but the kind of fertile ijtihad that Massignon had in mind was not one of them.

What matters here is not whether, or to what extent, Massignon was right or wrong to depict the Wahhabis as proponents of ijtihad. Rather, it is the fact that he overstated the convergence of religious views between the Wahhabis and the people he categorised as Salafis. Simply put: the individuals, groups, institutions, and publications that Massignon listed as belonging to the so-called Salafi movement did not all share the programme of strict Hanbalism that he outlined. Scholars make mistakes, to be sure, and mistakes are easier to see after the fact. Perhaps Massignon did not have the time to read the August 1919 issue of al-Manar (the one in which Rida wrote about the Wahhabis), which came out at the same time as the articles by Samné and Naggiar appeared in the Parisian press. But it may not have mattered anyway, since, as mentioned earlier, Massignon paid very little attention to the religious beliefs and epistemologies of contemporary Muslims. This was a choice, not a mistake. He was far more interested in their goals, their activities, and their general attitudes (‘strict’, ‘moderate’, ‘political’, ‘intellectual’, ‘progressive’) than he was in the precise details of their theological and legal stances. His personal conception of what it meant to be a Salafi mirrored those interests.

Be that as it may, why did Massignon feel the need to create a separate conceptual box for these so-called Salafis in 1919? One thing is for sure: he loved to classify and categorise Muslims. It was, for him, a key part of providing ‘up-to-date, precise […], manageable, […] methodical, […] and strictly objective documentation’ for understanding the world of Islam.Footnote ³⁹ It won him some accolades. The French sociologist Edmond Doutté praised Massignon’s Annuaire for its ‘scientific’ character.Footnote ⁴⁰ Massignon’s purpose, however, was not merely academic: it was also political. As he wrote in 1919 in a colonial idiom of paternalistic benevolence, the ultimate objective of both the Revue du monde musulman—the journal he now managed—and of his then forthcoming Annuaire was to put knowledge at the service of France and, by extension, at the service of France’s adoptive Muslim children in North Africa and the Near East. Massignon proudly drew a parallel with Napoleon’s scientific expedition, which, he claimed, made Egyptians love France as much as it made Muslim Egyptians love Egypt.Footnote ⁴¹ For him, this was a legacy worth reclaiming now that France and its allies had won the First World War.

His decision to write about a so-called Salafi movement must be understood in this context. Already in early 1919, when he was still in the Middle East on assignment for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Massignon boasted of his intimate knowledge of the Arab scene and wrote biographical notices to his superiors in which he identified potential collaborators—hence his desire to distinguish between ‘fanatics’ and individuals whom post-war France could hope to rally.Footnote ⁴² The ones he later called Salafis were among the latter group. At the time, Massignon’s scholarship was inextricably linked to the broader objective of shaping ‘an indispensable working tool for a positive foreign policy [une politique extérieure réalisatrice]’.Footnote ⁴³

It is true that Massignon was familiar with the Arab intellectual and political scene. He also had the linguistic abilities to befriend and correspond with various Arab figures, including key Muslim reformers. Yet there is no indication that his understanding of the term ‘Salafi’ came from any of them or from their intellectual output—quite the contrary. To be clear, Massignon could have used or coined any label to name his new conceptual box. That he chose transliterated Arabic words—salafī and salafiyya—gave his propositions an appearance of indigeneity, which then established a presumption of credibility. But this should not detract from the fact that the category he created was a product of France. At the very least, it was packaged in France using ingredients from various sources. Although the word salafī was indigenous to the Muslim tradition, the way in which Massignon defined it and the history that he invented for it were not. And while some of the Muslim intellectuals whom Massignon studied did call themselves ‘Salafis’ (by which they meant something other than what Massignon thought), it did not follow that all of their associates should be called as such. In short, there was no intrinsic requirement that the word salafī be employed to denote the trend of thought that Massignon sought to capture, just as there was no intrinsic requirement that the word salafī be used in the way that Massignon used it.

Earlier sources prove instructive in this regard. In 1912–1913, when he taught a course in Arabic on the history of Islamic philosophical doctrines at the Egyptian University (now Cairo University), Massignon used more generic terms. In a grand effort to classify Muslim scholars from the third century Hijri to the modern era, he subsumed Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Dawud al-Zahiri, and Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab under the same category that he called iʿtiqādiyyūn (fideists). Massignon then defined those fideists as ‘literalists who adhere to the sacred texts without resorting to analogy or metaphorical interpretation’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In other words, this was an epistemological category: what set the fideists apart was their privileging of revelation over reason, as opposed to the other four categories of Muslim scholars that Massignon identified: mutakallimūn (speculative theologians), ḥukamāʾ (philosophers), bāṭiniyya (esotericists, such as the Ismaʿilis, who privileged an infallible imam over reason), and ṣūfiyya (Sufis, who privileged a combination of inspiration and spiritual unveiling over reason).

Massignon’s labels of choice were different back then, and so were his views on where Muslim scholars belonged in a classification system based on epistemology. According to the extant lecture notes from his 1912–1913 course, Massignon assigned Ibn Taymiyya to the category of ‘speculative theologians’, even though he had repeatedly referred to him as a literalist and as the precursor of Wahhabism in previous publications between 1908 and 1910.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet, he subsumed Nuʿman al-Alusi (d. 1899)—known for his efforts at rehabilitating Ibn Taymiyya in the modern era—under the category of ‘fideists’. He also designated ʿAbduh and Rida as ‘speculative theologians’, whereas he placed al-Afghani in the separate category of ‘philosophers’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Six years later, in 1919, Massignon flung all three men pell mell into the category of ‘Salafis’.

Despite the many questions that this older classification scheme raises, it tells us that Massignon did not use the label salafī while teaching at the Egyptian University. It was not because of ignorance of the term. Massignon’s first documented use of the word salafī to refer to a person dates from 1911—one year before he started teaching in Cairo. It appeared in one of the lists of new Arabic publications that he regularly compiled for the Revue du monde musulman. A scholar from Kuwait named ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Rushayd (d. 1938) had just published an anti-feminist tract, and Massignon brought it to the attention of French readers. As he introduced its author, Massignon simply transliterated and copied what he saw on the book’s cover page: ‘al Kowaytî al hanbalî, al salafî’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Using a conventional formula, al-Rushayd had identified himself by stating his place of birth and residence (Kuwaiti), the school of Islamic law that he followed (Hanbali), and the theological doctrine to which he adhered (in his case, Salafi). Various iterations of this formula in Arab biographical dictionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveal a pattern that leaves no doubt about the function of the word ‘Salafi’ in this context. For comparison’s sake, ʿAbd al-Razzaq al-Baytar (d. 1917), a major Syrian reformer, introduced his father as Damascene (his geographical identity), Shafiʿi (his legal identity), and Ashʿari (his theological identity).Footnote ⁴⁸

What we cannot ascertain is whether Massignon understood what al-Rushayd meant by ‘Salafi’ in 1911—namely, that it denoted a specific Sunni theological stance. Eight years later, in 1919, one still cannot be certain that Massignon understood the technical meaning of the term when he included it in his new classification scheme. Perhaps he did but still decided to use the term loosely and invent a historical narrative for it. Perhaps he did not and yet believed that he had correctly inferred the essence of what it meant to be Salafi. At any rate, Massignon eschewed the burden of having to provide evidence for the knowledge claims he made. One thing that we can establish with certainty is that these claims did not square with the primary sources that he cited. Many of these sources, in fact, contained information that could have helped Massignon think through the meaning of ‘Salafi’ among the Muslims he sought to classify.

For example, the term salafī appears in Nuʿman al-Alusi’s Jalaʾ al-ʿaynayn—a book that Massignon mentioned as early as 1909 and frequently cited in his own scholarship in the early 1910s. In it, salafī is used in its technical sense to designate adherents to the Hanbali creed who affirm divine attributes unlike the Ashʿaris and other theological adversaries, who interpret them metaphorically.Footnote ⁴⁹ In his seminal 1919 article on Wahhabism and the Salafi movement, Massignon listed at least three additional texts in which the term salafī is used likewise. It is found in Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi’s commentary on Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s Masaʾil al-jahiliyya, where al-Alusi clearly explains that the Salafis (al-salafiyyīn) are Muslims who take ambiguous scriptural passages—such as those concerning divine attributes—in their plain sense, without metaphorical interpretation.Footnote ⁵⁰ The term is harder to find but nonetheless present in al-Alusi’s Ghayat al-amani and in Ahmad ibn ʿIsa al-Najdi’s al-Radd ʿala al-Madrasi wa-l-Halabi—a treatise entirely dedicated to the rejection of speculative theology and the defence of the affirmation of divine attributes in their plain sense.Footnote ⁵¹

Later, in 1924, Massignon admitted his familiarity with Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi’s biographical dictionary (al-Misk al-adhfar) as well as his compendium of correspondence (Riyad al-nazirin). He knew that they were still in manuscript form, though he did not say whether or not he ever consulted them or had them copied.Footnote ⁵² In his biographical dictionary, al-Alusi used the word salafī several times to refer to the specific creedal commitments of Muslim scholars. In the most explicit passage, al-Alusi describes a scholar from Baghdad as ‘a Salafi in creed who was averse to metaphorical interpretation [kāna salafī al-ʿaqīda lā yamīlu ilā al-taʾwīl]’.Footnote ⁵³ His compendium of correspondence is less technical, but one can hardly miss a similar usage of salafī to denote a theological stance. The very first example appears on the second page of the manuscript in a 1909 letter from a Moroccan scholar who referred to himself as ‘Salafi in creed [al-salafī ʿaqīdatan]’.Footnote ⁵⁴

The point here is that Massignon could have, but did not, delve into his sources to try to make a more careful assessment of the meaning of salafī among the Muslim scholars he studied. Nevertheless, in 1919 he unnecessarily chose this Arabic word to name a new category of his own making without exercising the scholarly caution that was necessary to justify his choice and support his claims. For context, it is worth noting that Massignon wrote his article on Wahhabism and the so-called Salafi movement under the pressure of circumstances, without much prior thought or preparation. It was a sudden decision prompted by recent events in Arabia, and Massignon complained to his friend Jacques Maritain that he was overwhelmed with work at the time. He had just returned from the Middle East; he was teaching at the College de France for the first time; he had agreed to serve as the managing editor of the Revue du monde musulman, which was losing money and had to turn a profit; and he had to keep working on his dissertation, all while his two young children were sick and in great pain.Footnote ⁵⁵ Massignon had far too much on his plate in the fall of 1919 to think twice about the use of the word ‘Salafi’ in a short article that he wrote at the last minute before the journal went to press. Perhaps it is no wonder that he improvised and relied on his own intuition rather than on the guidance of Arab sources.

This was not a one-time occurrence, however. For all his analytical sensibility, encyclopaedic knowledge, and quality of mind, Massignon was not always the most meticulous researcher. Some have noted his tendency to read widely but at times not very deeply in primary sources. His student Henry Corbin called it ‘the helicopter method’, whereby Massignon ‘would “descend” from above upon a text, make a sort of reconnaissance study of it and then take off again and go somewhere else’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Massignon’s writings on the so-called Salafi movement between 1919 and 1925 betray a similar nonchalance towards primary sources. He had reasons for wanting to draw finer distinctions between Wahhabis and other thinkers and activists. In that sense, he was a perceptive analyst of Muslim societies. But the conceptual box that he threw together suffered from major design and manufacturing defects.

On the Arab side

In 1926, Father Anastas Mari al-Karmili (d. 1947), the Carmelite scholar of Baghdad who had been a friend and a correspondent of Massignon since their first meeting in 1908, received a letter from an unnamed contact in Beirut who asked him a simple question: ‘What is the Salafi doctrine [al-madhhab al-salafī] that the French orientalist Louis Massignon wrote about in some of his works?’ Indeed, there was nothing natural or self-evident about Massignon’s delineation of a so-called Salafi movement between 1919 and 1925. The questioner from Beirut thus ventured a guess: ‘Is it not the doctrine of Abu Tahir […] Silafi […], who died in Alexandria in [1180] and who was originally from Isfahan?’Footnote ⁵⁷

In Arabic, without short vowels, the spelling of ‘Silafi’ and ‘Salafi’ is identical. But ‘Silafi’—an old nickname derived from Persian—refers to someone with a cleft lip. It has nothing to do with ‘Salafi’. Father Anastas tried his best to clarify the matter. Born Butrus Mikhaʾil al-Marini in Baghdad and educated in Christian institutions in Iraq, Lebanon, Belgium, and France, he had established himself as one of the foremost scholars of Arabic linguistics and philology.Footnote ⁵⁸ He was also a francophone who read the Revue du monde musulman and followed Massignon’s work quite closely. He responded to the question in the pages of his own journal, Lughat al-ʿarab (The Language of the Arabs), whose publication had just resumed after a twelve-year interruption. Father Anastas began by disabusing the questioner of the notion that ‘Salafi’ might refer to a doctrine attributed to Abu Tahir al-Silafi (d. 1180), the famous scholar of Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt. He then continued:

This was a fair answer, but it was neither what Massignon had said nor what he had meant to say. Unless Father Anastas misread Massignon, he was being gracious in covering for his old friend with a more sensible explanation. Providing on-the-spot evidence for this explanation, however, proved tricky. Since there was no go-to lexicon for looking up the meaning of ‘Salafi’ in the mid 1920s, Father Anastas quoted from what he thought was the most appropriate source at his disposal: the Kitab al-zina of Abu Hatim al-Razi (d. 890). Such an early book of Islamic terminology was not the best choice for understanding a label that was hardly, if at all, in use during al-Razi’s lifetime. But Father Anastas made do with what he had and worked by analogy. He quoted al-Razi’s definition of ‘the partisans of hadith’, even though it better described the category of ‘fideists’ that Massignon had used at the Egyptian University in 1912–1913 than it described the category of ‘Salafis’ that Massignon developed from 1919 onwards.Footnote ⁶⁰

The way in which Father Anastas defined the Salafis entailed no distinction between them and the Wahhabis. On the contrary, he connected the Salafi doctrine to the region of Najd not once, but twice. Like many scholars who were familiar enough with the technical meaning of ‘Salafi’, Father Anastas saw no reason to draw a line of demarcation in matters of creed. And since ‘Salafi’ was traditionally and overwhelmingly used to refer to narrow matters of creed, there was hardly any other kind of distinction to be made. He simply stated that the Wahhabis were Salafis, in the sense that they were neither Ashʿaris nor Maturidis, and there was nothing more to it than that. We must not assume from this that calling the people of Najd ‘Salafis’ was necessarily an attempt at reputation control. Father Anastas, for one, was not a natural ally of the Wahhabis of Najd—at least on an intellectual level. Yet he did not hesitate to include them among the Salafis.

An even better example comes from the Hanbali scholar Mustafa al-Shatti (d. 1929), who had published a short treatise against the Wahhabis in Damascus in 1900.Footnote ⁶¹ This is the treatise that Massignon had used and cited in 1919 to distinguish between what he called ‘moderate’ and ‘strict’ Hanbalis. At the end of his treatise, al-Shatti adjoined remarks in support of major Sufi figures, most notably Ibn ʿArabi (d. 1240). He thus pursued his criticism of the Wahhabis for their opposition to Sufi investigations into the secrets of faith. The Wahhabis, al-Shatti claimed, ignore the intuitive knowledge of God (maʿrifa), which is neither rational nor scriptural. They also fail to realise that the Sufi notion of wahdat al-wujud (the oneness of being) is a search for true tawhid (God’s unicity). But al-Shatti—who referred to himself as Athari in creed, which, as Father Anastas pointed out, was synonymous with Salafi—did not draw a distinction between Salafis and Wahhabis.Footnote ⁶² Instead, he made the case that Ibn ʿArabi and other major Sufis abjured metaphorical interpretation (taʾwīl) in matters of theology and thus adhered to the Salafi creed (madhhab al-salaf; ʿaqīda salafiyya).Footnote ⁶³ What this meant is that these Sufis, like the Wahhabis, affirmed divine attributes in their plain sense. Therefore, they were all Salafis.

Up to a point, and only up to a point, al-Shatti was correct. Ibn ʿArabi did have an aversion to the metaphorical interpretation practised by speculative theologians. As such, he affirmed divine attributes and was opposed to denying or denigrating their literal sense.Footnote ⁶⁴ But this was only with regard to their apparent or outward meaning. Beyond that, Ibn ʿArabī also sought to unveil their hidden or inward meaning.Footnote ⁶⁵ Al-Shatti did not unravel the implications of this Sufi approach, but for our purposes the most interesting aspect of his comments lies elsewhere. In the process of defending the creed of great Sufi masters, al-Shatti indirectly acknowledged that the Wahhabis were Salafis, even though he spoke ill of them. The reason for this is that he understood ‘Salafi’ in its narrower technical sense: the word, for him, merely referred to a way of interpreting the outward meaning of divine attributes, which made it possible for one to be Sufi and Salafi at the same time. In his opinion, it was a matter of fact that the Wahhabis were Salafi in creed. Acknowledging this fact was not a favour to them.

Indeed, not all self-proclaimed Salafis of the Middle East agreed with the Wahhabis about matters of law, about the acceptable degree of religious tolerance, about what constituted unbelief and innovation, about politics, and even about the value of modern technology. (All Wahhabis did not even agree among themselves.)Footnote ⁶⁶ But these issues, for the most part, did not fall under the conceptual jurisdiction of the term ‘Salafi’ understood in its technical, narrower sense. By and large, Wahhabis and other self-proclaimed Salafis could thus all recognise themselves as being somewhere on the spectrum of Hanbali or Salafi or Athari theology—however they chose to call it. They were largely in agreement about what the Wahhabi scholar Sulayman ibn Sihman (d. 1930), quoting Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab himself, defined as ‘the science of [divine] names and attributes, which is called theology [ʿilm usūl al-dīn] and is also called beliefs [al-ʿaqāʾid]’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Therefore, it is not surprising that Father Anastas refrained from mentioning any of the peculiar distinctions that Massignon had made between Wahhabis and Salafis. It is also no wonder that Father Anastas went against Massignon and redefined the Salafis in a way that, in effect, excluded people like al-Afghani and ʿAbduh from this category. In short, Father Anastas’s answer to the questioner from Beirut highlights the fact that Massignon’s theories did not reflect the way in which self-proclaimed Salafis in the Middle East generally understood the term.

There were, of course, exceptions to this linguistic pattern. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, one already finds cases where Muslims used the label ‘Salafi’ in non-technical, broader, and vague ways. Intentionally or inadvertently, the popularisation and looser usage of the word caused its meaning to change and to expand beyond narrow matters of creed. But again, those were the exceptions rather than the rule, and one would be best advised not to place outliers at the centre of historical analysis. Overall, the technical meaning of ‘Salafi’ remained dominant in Arabic sources throughout the 1900s and the 1910s. For every exceptional case, there are many more examples of ‘Salafi’ being used in its traditional, narrower theological sense. And even when Muslim scholars voluntarily or involuntarily attached new layers of meaning to the word, they did not immediately conclude that ‘Salafis’ and ‘Wahhabis’ formed distinct groups. Some of them eventually did, but not until the late 1920s, when the popularisation of ‘Salafi’, its expanding meaning, and the emergence of ‘Salafism’ as a linguistically distinct concept (the abstract noun salafiyya) forced their hand.

Wahhabism as a subset of Salafism

If we think of conceptual categories as ‘letterbox pigeon holes in a department office’, and if we imagine empirical information and observations as ‘the particular pieces of mail that are distributed to these pigeon holes’, then the increasing amount of mail that was being crammed into the ‘Salafi’ letterbox in the 1910s and the 1920s had significant consequences. As the philosopher of science Alex Rosenberg aptly remarks: ‘Adopting a particular set of labels for boxes doesn’t prejudge what pieces of mail will come in.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Indeed, the more mail Muslim intellectuals sorted into the Salafi conceptual letterbox, the more they felt the need to enlarge that box, create subdivisions, and establish finer distinctions between Salafis and Wahhabis.

To trace this process, we may start with a then-anomalous use of the label ‘Salafi’ that dates from 1912. It comes from the work of none other than Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi. In his public writings, al-Alusi often used the label ‘Salafi’ in its narrower theological sense. On one occasion, however, he clearly did not. He relaxed his commitment to strict semantic standards in his 1912 rejoinder to an anti-reformist poem composed by his chief intellectual nemesis, the Sufi scholar and former chief-qāḍī of Beirut Yusuf al-Nabhani (d. 1932).

One could argue that al-Nabhani had set the stage for this to happen. His Shorter Poem in R (al-Raʾiyya al-sughra) was a feisty takedown of a mixed bag of Muslim reformers, from Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab to Jamal al-Din al-Afghani to Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi himself, to name only a few.Footnote ⁶⁹ Al-Nabhani fired accusations in every direction. Although he broke his poem down into various sections, some of which he devoted to a specific individual or cluster of individuals, the fact that his poem lumped together so many people with whom he disagreed for different reasons opened the door to conflation.

In this poem, al-Nabhani did not refer to any of his adversaries as Salafis. He did not use the term at all. For example, he spoke of al-Afghani, ʿAbduh, and Rida as Muslims ‘who pretend to be reformers [muṣliḥūn]’, whereas he placed Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi—his most well-known critic—among ‘the Wahhabis, the followers of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Al-Nabhani treated the latter group separately in the fifth section of his poem, which is the section to which al-Alusi responded in his 1912 treatise titled al-Aya al-kubra (The Greater Sign). Given the polemical nature of his rejoinder, al-Alusi chose a more respectable label to refer to the individuals whom al-Nabhani had condemned in the fifth section of his poem, and only that section (which did not deal with al-Afghani and ʿAbduh). Instead of ‘Wahhabis’, al-Alusi decided to use ‘Salafis’. He spoke specifically about the ‘Salafis of Najd’, while indicating that there were Salafis in other regions—such as himself in Iraq. In sum, al-Alusi countered al-Nabhani’s broad-brush critique with an equally broad-brush response. He made no substantive distinction between Wahhabis and Salafis because he merely traded one label for another.

From a narrow theological standpoint, as we have seen, to say that Wahhabis were Salafis posed no problem. It had been done before. But the accusations that al-Nabhani had levelled against the Wahhabis in his poem did not solely concern their interpretation of divine attributes. He had also accused them, among other things, of being untrue to the scriptures, of having a warped conception of tawhid, of being too prone to excommunication, and of deprecating prophets. By countering all of these accusations in one fell swoop, and by shifting the terminology from ‘Wahhabis’ to ‘Salafis’, al-Alusi ended up suggesting that Salafis were not only Muslims who avoided interpreting God’s attributes metaphorically but also Muslims who did not call on the dead for help, who did not visit tombs for devotional purposes, and who combated superstitions.Footnote ⁷¹ To us in the twenty-first century, this portrayal seems normal. But in 1912, it implied an uncharacteristically broad understanding of the label ‘Salafi’. And since al-Alusi wrote his rejoinder to the fifth section of al-Nabhani’s poem in the name of ‘the Salafis’, it was only a matter of time before someone assumed that the other reformers whom al-Nabhani attacked in the remaining sections of his poem (including al-Afghani and ʿAbduh) were Salafis as well.

Sure enough, it happened the following year. In 1913, a Qatari associate of al-Alusi and part-time pearl trader named Muhammad al-Marzuqi (d. 1935) followed in al-Alusi’s footsteps and wrote a response of his own to al-Nabhani’s poem. Al-Marzuqi, it turns out, was already an admirer of al-Alusi. He had greatly enjoyed Ghayat al-amani—the two-volume critique of al-Nabhani’s work that al-Alusi had previously published in 1907–1909—and we know that al-Marzuqi had been active in shipping copies of this book to people in Najd and on the Trucial Coast. In 1913–1914, he corresponded with al-Alusi about a series of rhymed works (manẓūmāt) that he was hoping to get printed for publication.Footnote ⁷² He was referring to some of the counter-poems that he and others had also written in response to al-Nabhani’s Shorter Poem in R.Footnote ⁷³

Al-Marzuqi admitted that he had read al-Alusi’s rejoinder prior to composing his own counter-poem.Footnote ⁷⁴ He thus used the same terminology, in that he, too, spoke of ‘the Salafis’ but in a way that is quite surprising. In the introduction to his counter-poem, which is dated 1913, al-Marzuqi references ‘the Hanbalis of Najd’ as well as ‘the greatest Salafi scholars [akābir al-ʿulamāʾ al-salafiyyīn] such as Mahmud Shukri [al-Alusi], Muhammad ʿAbduh, and [Jamal al-Din] al-Afghani’.Footnote ⁷⁵ This is highly irregular. In fact, it constitutes the only pre-1919, pre-Massignon ascription of the label ‘Salafi’ to al-Afghani and ʿAbduh that I am currently aware of. What seems to have happened is this: al-Marzuqi combined al-Nabhani’s catch-all approach (the lumping together of various Muslim figures) with al-Alusi’s use of the word ‘Salafi’ (to rename some but not all of the Muslim figures whom al-Nabhani had disparaged) and concluded that al-Afghani and ʿAbduh were Salafis, too—just like everybody else who bore the brunt of al-Nabhani’s criticisms.

Without additional information, it is hard to understand what al-Marzuqi was thinking. All we can affirm is that his short remark about al-Afghani and ʿAbduh being Salafi scholars is truly exceptional for 1913 and that it does not at all fit with the little we know about al-Marzuqi. He was a Hanbali hardliner who abhorred theological diversity, as his counter-poem and other sources show.Footnote ⁷⁶ With regard to takfīr, he was even more uncompromising than some of the leading Wahhabi scholars, whom he took to task.Footnote ⁷⁷ His intolerance of religious flexibility stood out. One witness says that al-Marzuqi once refused to greet a notable from Sharjah, in today’s United Arab Emirates, on the basis of the religious concept of loyalty and disavowal (al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ), because the notable in question cooperated with the British.Footnote ⁷⁸ For all these reasons, it is difficult to comprehend why or on what basis al-Marzuqi considered the free-thinking, non-Hanbali, Ashʿari-leaning, British-backed former grand mufti of Egypt to be a ‘Salafi’. One wonders whether he was cognisant of ʿAbduh’s positions, let alone of al-Afghani’s.

It may be tempting to suspect that Massignon built on these writings to concoct his definition of ‘Salafi’ in 1919, but caution is in order. There is no evidence that he knew of al-Marzuqi’s counter-poem, just as there is no evidence that he even knew about al-Nabhani’s Shorter Poem in R or al-Alusi’s rejoinder to it. Moreover, al-Alusi’s rejoinder remained in manuscript form until the twenty-first century, while copies of al-Marzuqi’s poem were, and still are, extremely rare.Footnote ⁷⁹ Had Massignon been fortunate enough to access them at some point between 1912 and 1919, there are reasons to believe that he would have let readers know about it. He was not one to refrain from displaying his knowledge of Arabic primary sources, even when they were virtually inaccessible.Footnote ⁸⁰

As mentioned earlier, there is at present no ground for presuming that Massignon borrowed his ideas from anyone in the Middle East. On the contrary, all the clues we have suggest that he acted alone and that he put together his peculiar understanding of ‘Salafi’ without direct input from Arab scholars. Nothing indicates, for example, that he ever discussed or inquired about Wahhabis or Salafis in his correspondence with the al-Alusi family, Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi, and Father Anastas. What is known of these exchanges shows, rather, that Massignon’s priority was always to locate and retrieve sources about the Sufi martyr al-Hallaj (d. 922)—the subject of both his main and complementary doctoral dissertations, which he did not defend until 1922.Footnote ⁸¹ Barring the discovery of compelling new evidence to the contrary, we should therefore resist the impulse to assume that Massignon was a transmitter rather than a creator of concepts and categories.

In any case, al-Marzuqi’s counter-poem did not even circulate widely in the Middle East and neither did al-Alusi’s unpublished rejoinder to al-Nabhani. None of these documents appears to have had much impact beyond a small circle of Arab associates. Their historical significance lies elsewhere: both were symptomatic of the popularisation and looser usage of the word ‘Salafi’ in the first decades of the twentieth century—a process that eventually led to the emergence of the Arabic abstract noun salafiyya, a neologism meaning ‘Salafism’. To the best of our knowledge, it first appeared publicly in Algeria in 1925.Footnote ⁸² Although this neologism was not immediately clear even to those who started using it, it was meant to refer to a broader reformist stance and not merely to a theological position. In that context of conceptual expansion and experimentation, the lack of distinction between Salafis and Wahhabis began to pose a problem.

In 1927, at a time when Algerian reformers were still in the process of drawing the contours of the new category of ‘Salafism’, a controversial scholar named Abu Yaʿla al-Zawawi (d. 1952) wrote yet another article to demystify the Wahhabis. An associate of Rashid Rida and of the late Tahir al-Jazaʾiri, al-Zawawi began by lamenting the widespread ignorance about Wahhabis in Algeria: ‘When I am asked about this word “Wahhabism” and about the creed of the brothers of Najd […], I hear people say that they are Muʿtazilis.’Footnote ⁸³ If al-Zawawi is to be trusted, this was a strange confusion indeed. The Muʿtazilis—the proponents of a theology that elevated the epistemological status of reason—hardly resembled the Wahhabis except perhaps in their denial of the punishment of the grave (ʿadhāb al-qabr), as one anti-Wahhabi tract from nineteenth-century Iraq argued.Footnote ⁸⁴ Al-Zawawi did not explain why anyone in Algeria might have confused the two groups. He limited himself to stating that the Wahhabis were Sunnis, Hanbalis in law, and followers of the way of Ibn Taymiyya both in reform and in their total concern (al-ʿināya al-tāmma) for the Sunna. He also insisted that they were Salafis, like himself.

But al-Zawawi, like so many others, remained vague about the meaning of ‘Salafi’. He quoted a source that declared the Wahhabis to be Salafis in creed specifically, in the traditional technical sense, but he himself used the word to refer to something of a character trait—namely, an aversion towards factionalism combined with a desire to recapture the intra-Muslim unity that existed in the early Islamic community.Footnote ⁸⁵ Although his conception of Salafism was not fully fleshed out, it entailed the rejection of religious partisanship (taʿaṣṣub), of legends and stories that have no basis in Islam, and, above all, of Sufism. This explains why al-Zawawi agreed to include Muhammad ʿAbduh among the Salafis and why he hesitated to extend the same courtesy to Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, whom he described as being inclined towards Sufism.Footnote ⁸⁶

Such an understanding of ‘Salafism’ was still too broad and too vague to find immediate acceptance among Algerian intellectuals. Al-Zawawi seemed unable to make up his mind about whether Muslims should only tolerate the one correct form of Islam—the pristine Islam of the origins—or whether they should tolerate Islamic diversity for the sake of Islamic unity. He praised the Wahhabis for their desire to restore the purity of Islam, even if they exaggerated in the process, but he nonetheless presented Salafism as an approach to Islam that made forbearance (tasāmuḥ) possible. Salafism, he suggested, would allow various Sunnis, Shiʿis, and Ibadis to come together as one united body—a necessity for any society or civilisation worthy of that name. Therefore, al-Zawawi lumped together the uncompromising Wahhabis of Najd and various modernist reformers as ‘Salafis’ because they all, in their own and somewhat contradictory ways, sought the revival of Islam without condoning Sufi excesses or relying on esoteric premises. (Their respective degrees of tolerance towards religious diversity, however, remained undiscussed.) Al-Zawawi’s lack of precision led to his stating that the umma had become divided into two groups: the Salafi Wahhabi reformers on the one hand, and the Sufis and their followers on the other.

This proposition received pushback from the editing team of al-Shihab, the Algerian journal in which al-Zawawi published his article. The journal objected to his sweeping categorisation and insisted on drawing a porous but clear line between Salafis and Wahhabis. In a footnote, a member of the editing team told readers that ‘Salafi reformers [al-iṣlāḥiyyūn al-salafiyyūn]’ should be considered a general category, whereas ‘Wahhabis’ should refer to a specific subset of Salafis, ‘those who take Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab as their religious guide [man ihtadaw bi-daʿwat Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb]’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The journal conceded that all Wahhabis were Salafis, but insisted that not all Salafis were Wahhabis. It was an early iteration of a distinction that has now become standard in the scholarship, but it was not standard yet in 1927. Previous distinctions had been merely geographical in nature, so as to convey that there existed Salafis in different Muslim lands. Al-Shihab, however, intimated that the distinction between Wahhabis and other Salafis also had to do with substance, that is, with a difference in teachings about Islam.

This distinction emerged because the conceptual convergence between Salafi and Wahhabi, which had been quite common among Muslim scholars until then, seemed less tenable now that the word ‘Salafi’ had a broader meaning. A Salafi was now a proponent of something called ‘Salafism’ (al-salafiyya) and not merely an adherent to Salafi theology. Because many more individuals now potentially qualified as Salafis, new conceptual niceties had to be established. Unfortunately for historians, the editing team of al-Shihab did not explain what it meant by ‘Salafi’, though debates in the Algerian press between 1926 and 1927 had strengthened the notion that Salafism referred to a type of reform that opposed Sufism and privileged scriptural evidence over esoteric knowledge (generally without any reference to the interpretation of divine attributes). Contrary to what one might assume, this is not quite what the word ‘Salafi’ had meant in previous decades and centuries.

Likewise, the journal did not explain what distinguished Wahhabis from Algerian Salafis. Was it the Wahhabis’ propensity to exaggerate in their fight against religious innovation, to which al-Zawawi alluded? Was it their strong attachment to the Hanbali school of law? (Al-Zawawi had referred to himself as a Maliki Salafi, though not one who succumbed to partisan bias.) Slightly later sources lead us to believe that these considerations must indeed have factored into the recategorisation. In 1933, Muhammad Saʿid al-Zahiri (d. 1956), one of the co-founders of the Association of Algerian Muslim ʿUlama, wrote that the Wahhabis, by virtue of being staunch Hanbalis in law, were more Sunna-oriented than the Malikis of Algeria:

Al-Zahiri seems to have considered a Salafi to be an orthoprax Muslim rather than an orthodox Muslim. He thus believed that the Wahhabis were different from, and better equipped than, Algerians because their Hanbali legal culture was more conducive to the attainment of ideal Salafi practice through a better emulation of the Prophet and a greater rejection of religious innovations.

His colleague Muhammad al-Bashir al-Ibrahimi (d. 1965), another leading figure of the Algerian reformist movement, also praised the Wahhabis in 1933 for their commitment to the Sunna. Yet he did not show the same appreciation for their staunchness: ‘[W]e blame them [the Wahhabis] for their exaggeration in [pursuing] the truth.’ Although al-Ibrahimi wished to defend the Wahhabis against their detractors, he admitted that there were indeed substantial differences between them and Algerian reformers: ‘We are Malikis […]. They are Hanbalis […]. In the way of reform, we use pens while they use authority [al-aqdām, lit. ‘feet’]. They use pickaxes to destroy tombs, whereas we talk to the person who builds them.’Footnote ⁸⁹

Two years later, in 1935, al-Ibrahimi spoke of Muhammad ʿAbduh as the father of modern Islamic reform and as a scholar who combined thought, opinion, independence of mind, and ‘true Salafism [al-salafiyya al-ḥaqqa]’.Footnote ⁹⁰ He had not used that terminology before. Whatever he understood by Salafism at the time, the conceptual interplay between this notion and his description of Wahhabism suggests that al-Ibrahimi expected proper Salafis to favour argumentation and patience over coercion and the use of drastic measures. If he considered Muhammad ʿAbduh to be among the best representatives of Salafism, then the label ‘Salafi’ could not, for him, be easily shared with the Wahhabis.

Was it a coincidence that al-Ibrahimi started using a label and a demarcation criterion which resembled those that Massignon had previously put forward? Maybe, maybe not. As is often the case, we do not have enough evidence to make a determination. All we know is that in the summer of 1935, two months before al-Ibrahimi ascribed Salafism to ʿAbduh and his brand of Islamic reform, a detailed distinction between Wahhabis and Salafis began to appear in the pages of the newly founded Moroccan journal al-Maghrib al-Jadid, published in Tetouan. Muhammad Hasan al-Wazzani (d. 1978), a Moroccan intellectual educated in Paris, decided to translate a long article on Salafism written three years earlier by a young French orientalist named Henri Laoust. The article in question was Laoust’s famous ‘Le réformisme orthodoxe des “Salafiya” et les caractères généraux de son orientation actuelle’ (The Orthodox Reformism of the ‘Salafis’ and the General Characteristics of Its Current Orientation’)—the field-defining article that reprised, amplified, and ultimately solidified Massignon’s revised claim that salafiyya was the name of a modern reformist party founded by al-Afghani and ʿAbduh.Footnote ⁹¹ In Algiers, al-Ibrahimi would have had the opportunity to read the first two instalments of al-Wazzani’s translation, but we do not know that he did.Footnote ⁹²

In Arabic, al-Wazzani rendered the title of Laoust’s article as ‘The Reformist Sunni Movement Known as Salafism and the General Characteristics of Its Current Orientation’ (al-Ḥaraka al-iṣlāḥiyya al-sunniyya al-maʿrūfa bi-l-salafiyya wa-l-ṣifāt al-ʿāmma li-wajhatihā al-ḥāḍira).Footnote ⁹³ Serialised over a period of six months from July 1935 to January 1936, the translation made Laoust’s categorisation, choice of labels, and historical premises available to Arabic readers. Not only that, but Laoust’s conceptualisation of Salafism, which built on Massignon’s, received the imprimatur of a respectable journal connected to major Muslim activists from various parts of Morocco, including Muhammad al-Makki al-Nasiri (d. 1994) and ʿAllal al-Fasi (d. 1974).Footnote ⁹⁴ This constitutes further evidence that the European conceptualisation of Salafism penetrated inter-war Morocco and that local Muslim activists took this conceptualisation seriously.Footnote ⁹⁵ They eventually made it their own.

Indeed, al-Wazzani’s translation appears to have had an impact on Moroccan reformers. As early as 1936, another collaborator to the journal adopted its terminology and used ‘Salafism’ as a synonym for the type of religious reform that prevailed in Morocco.Footnote ⁹⁶ Many other reformers followed suit. In his article, Laoust had drawn a clear line between Wahhabis and Salafis, despite recognising some commonalities. For him, the label ‘Salafi’ applied to Islamic modernists of the type represented by al-Afghani, ʿAbduh, and Rida. Therefore, he considered Salafis to be more moderate religiously and more progressive socially and politically than the Wahhabis. From the mid 1930s onwards, self-proclaimed Moroccan Salafis generally continued to describe themselves in a similar way. Their more ‘modernist’ conceptualisation of Salafism, which ʿAllal al-Fasi later called ‘the new Salafism [al-salafiyya al-jadīda]’, could not be mistaken for Wahhabism.Footnote ⁹⁷

The linguistic and conceptual shifts that occurred in Algeria and Morocco, however, did not occur in the same way in the Arab East. There, the expansion of ‘Salafi’ beyond its traditional and narrower theological sense—and its connection to a broader reformist orientation called Salafism—happened at a slower pace, and the term did not acquire the meanings that North African intellectuals assigned to it. By the late 1930s, the abstract noun ‘Salafism’ still had not made enough inroads into the intellectual sphere to generate the kind of debates that arose in mid-1920s Algeria, and many self-proclaimed Salafis of the Arab East still shared too many affinities with the Wahhabis to insist on establishing a demarcation line. This was especially the case, of course, in the Saudi state.

Salafism as a synonym for Wahhabism

Like waves crashing against the shoreline, the conceptual expansion of the term ‘Salafi’ that began in the 1900s and 1910s, notably in the polemical writings of Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi and his associates, generated forces that went in more than one direction. There was not just an uprush; there was also a backwash. The uprush brought forward new and broader conceptions of what it meant to be a Salafi, which eventually prompted Arab intellectuals from North Africa to start drawing distinctions between Wahhabis and Salafis. The backwash, so to speak, had the reverse effect. In the late 1920s, it rolled a broader conception of ‘Salafi’ back towards the Wahhabis and negated any demarcation but in a way that had not quite occurred before. It was one thing for Arab intellectuals to recognise that all Wahhabis were Salafis in creed, in the narrow technical sense of the term. It was quite another to propose that any Salafi must maintain the devotional rigour that was specific to the Wahhabis.

Not much has been said so far about the labels that the Wahhabis of Najd used, but there is a good explanation for this: through much of their history, the Wahhabis did not often affix the labels ‘Wahhabi’ and ‘Salafi’ to themselves. It is well-established in the literature that the followers of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab only designated themselves as Wahhabis on occasions when they tried to reclaim the label as a badge of honour.Footnote ⁹⁸ This mostly occurred in polemical writings intended for readers outside of Najd. In the early 1910s, for example, the Wahhabi scholar Ibn Sihman wrote a famous line of poetry which reads: ‘Yes, we are Wahhabis [naʿam naḥnu wahhābiyya], the true monotheists who make our enemies suffer.’Footnote ⁹⁹ It turns out that Ibn Sihman wrote this in response to the fifth section of al-Nabhani’s Shorter Poem in R, but it did not occur to him to replace ‘Wahhabis’ (al-Nabhani’s label) with ‘Salafis’, as Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi had done in his own rejoinder.

This should not be surprising. After all, until the second half of the twentieth century, Najdis even more rarely called themselves Salafis. Examples can be found in written sources, but they are scarce. In the eighteenth century, Ibrahim ibn Yusuf al-Najdi (d. 1796), a Hanbali from the region of Ushayqir who had studied under Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab’s uncle, wrote at least two manuscripts in which he introduced himself as ‘Salafi in creed [al-salafī iʿtiqādan]’. But he did so after going into exile in Damascus in 1767, and he may well have been an opponent of the Wahhabi movement.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In the nineteenth century, besides the historian Ibn Bishr, who also called himself a Salafi in creed, the most explicit example comes from a letter by the Wahhabi scholar ʿAbd al-Rahman ibn Hasan (d. 1869), a grandson of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab. When rumours spread that men suspected of being Ashʿaris had been appointed to official positions in the region of al-Ahsa, Ibn Hasan defended Ahmad ibn Mushrif—the Maliki poet who served the second Saudi state—saying: ‘He is a Salafi man [huwa rajul salafī] who affirms the attributes of God in the way that He described Himself and that the Prophet described Him, in a manner befitting God’s majesty and greatness.’Footnote ¹⁰¹

In this letter, Ibn Hasan uses the term ‘Salafi’ in the same way as most Muslim scholars did from the classical period until the twentieth century—namely, as a narrow technical term for designating Sunnis who reject speculative theology and affirm God’s attributes in their plain sense. This was, historically, the core issue that served to distinguish Salafis from proponents of other theological schools. Wahhabi scholars did not dispute this convention, it seems, but they still had distinctive priorities. They generally placed more emphasis on conformity to a stringent conception of tawhid than on the proper interpretation of divine attributes per se. So, while Ibn Hasan mentioned the latter issue as the primary basis for distinguishing Salafis from Ashʿaris—as was customary—he made sure to point out that Ashʿaris were wrong in their understanding of tawhid, too.Footnote ¹⁰² Although they bear witness that there is no god but God, he wrote, they interpret this to mean that God is the sole creator (tawḥīd al-rubūbiyya, lit. ‘unity of lordship’) and fail to understand the other dimension of tawhid, which is that worship is for God alone (tawḥīd al-ilāhiyya, lit. ‘unity of divinity’). Consequently, Ashʿaris think that venerating prophets and dead Sufi saints as quasi-deities is acceptable.Footnote ¹⁰³

Ibn Hasan did not say that Sufism or the ‘worship’ of anyone other than God were specific to Ashʿari theology—they were not—nor did he define a Salafi as one who abides by the twofold conception of tawhid that the Wahhabis borrowed from Ibn Taymiyya. Nevertheless, the logic of his argument seemed to imply that a Salafi, by virtue of not being Ashʿari, would not and could not misunderstand tawhid as did the Ashʿaris (and, from the Wahhabis’ standpoint, as did most Muslims in the nineteenth century). If there was more to Ibn Hasan’s understanding of ‘Salafi’ than the proper affirmation of divine attributes, however, he did not state it outright.

One gets a similar impression when reading Wahhabi sources from the early twentieth century. The notion of tawḥīd al-ilāhiyya (which, among other things, imposed severe limitations on tomb visitations and prohibited Muslims from seeking help or intercession from the dead) was never far from the minds of Wahhabi scholars. But save for at least one known exception, they did not take the step of subsuming this notion under the label ‘Salafi’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In their writings, that label, which they still barely used in the 1920s, retained by and large its narrow traditional meaning.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Thus, the Wahhabi scholars of Najd cannot really be said to have initiated their own process of conceptual expansion. Still, their demanding conception of tawhid and their religious stringency were hard to ignore—so much so that they inevitably bled into discussions about what it takes to be Salafi.

To understand how this came about, it is necessary to reiterate that, during the first decades of the twentieth century, the Wahhabis of Najd were almost universally considered excessive in their quest for religious purity. Even their staunchest supporters acknowledged their overzealousness. Of all the Muslims who identified as Salafis in the narrower traditional sense, even if infrequently, the Wahhabis embraced something of a maximalist and intransigent position on what it meant to be Muslim. They held high expectations and were generally inflexible with those who did not live up to them. Outside of Wahhabi circles, however, there were self-proclaimed Salafis who held comparatively lower expectations, in that they accepted, or at least tolerated, practices that the Wahhabis condemned. What matters here is that these disagreements were not normally understood as disputes over who qualifies as a Salafi, as one might expect today. On the contrary, for many involved parties, these disagreements fell outside of the purview of the label ‘Salafi’—or, as mentioned earlier, outside the conceptual jurisdiction of the term understood in its technical, narrower sense.

Consider the following example. At some point between autumn 1920 and spring 1922, the Wahhabi scholar Muhammad ibn Maniʿ (d. 1965), then based in Qatar, sent two of his recently published works to Sulayman ibn Sihman in Riyadh. He asked the senior Wahhabi authority to tell him whether anything in them contradicted the doctrine of the salaf. Ibn Sihman gladly obliged and did not soft-pedal his criticisms: he produced enough material for a book. He ended up identifying twenty problematic creedal statements, which Ibn Maniʿ promptly recanted.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The very first error that Ibn Sihman noticed, however, was not even from one of those passages. It was from a seemingly trivial sentence that Ibn Maniʿ had written at the beginning of his 1918 treatise, al-Kawakib al-durriyya, which is a commentary on a theological poem by al-Saffarini (d. 1774), a major Hanbali scholar from Ottoman Syria. After mentioning that al-Saffarini had composed his poem ‘for a group of Salafi students [li-jamāʿa min al-ṭullāb al-salafiyyīn]’, Ibn Maniʿ simply stated that, while reading the biographies of distinguished Hanbalis (baʿḍ al-afāḍil min al-ḥanābila), he discovered that some of them had previously worked on al-Saffarini’s writings. One was the Syrian scholar Hasan al-Shatti (d. 1858).Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Ibn Sihman objected to this statement, arguing that these so-called distinguished Hanbalis were in fact not distinguished at all. It so happens that Hasan al-Shatti had been critical of the Wahhabi movement in the nineteenth century. So had his descendants since the turn of the twentieth century, as we saw in the case of Mustafa al-Shatti. Ibn Sihman gave other reasons for his judgement, however, and did not content himself with condemning Hasan al-Shatti alone. He condemned the entire al-Shatti family for its failure to abide by the Taymiyyan conception of tawḥīd al-ilāhiyya: ‘[The members of] the al-Shatti family are among the imams of misguidance. They are among those who call for the supplication of prophets and saints and who make it permissible to ask them for help. […] They are not from among the distinguished [min afāḍil] people of Islam, even if they are from among the Hanbalis.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Prominent members of the al-Shatti family were indeed vocal in rejecting the stringent conception of tawhid that the Wahhabis embraced. In 1922, not long after Ibn Sihman penned his condemnation, a younger scion of the family, Jamil al-Shatti (d. 1959), wrote still another book criticising the Wahhabis’ position on tawhid and their efforts to browbeat other Muslims into accepting it.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Yet it is telling that the al-Shattis’ refusal to align with the Wahhabis on this issue appeared to have no bearing on their status as Salafis. This can be explained by the same historical and semantic factors that explain why Mustafa al-Shatti recognised the Wahhabis as Salafis in 1900. As long as the term ‘Salafi’ retained its traditional narrow sense, which did not cover matters related to tawḥīd al-ilāhiyya, the rejection of speculative theology (kalām) and the affirmation of divine attributes in their plain sense remained necessary and, for all intents and purposes, sufficient conditions for being considered a Salafi in creed.Footnote ¹¹⁰ And on that front, the al-Shatti family was largely in the clear. Hasan al-Shatti, the patriarch, thus called himself a Salafi.Footnote ¹¹¹ In 1911, Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi introduced Hasan’s son, Muhammad, as ‘the savant of the Hanbali Salafis of Syria’.Footnote ¹¹² Hasan’s grandson Mustafa (the one who argued that Ibn ʿArabi and other major Sufis were proponents of the Salafi creed) and his great-grandson Jamil (himself a Sufi and a student of Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi) also rejected speculative theology and affirmed divine attributes in their plain sense.Footnote ¹¹³ Jamil spoke of ‘the Salafis [al-salafiyya]’ as those who hold such views.Footnote ¹¹⁴ To the al-Shattis, no doubt, one did not need to agree with the Wahhabis on tawhid in order to be Salafi.

Ibn Sihman did not say anything about the al-Shattis being Salafis or not, so we cannot know for sure what his thoughts were. If indeed he understood ‘Salafi’ in its narrower traditional sense, then he may have found the al-Shattis to be misguided despite their being Salafis (or, as he wrote, ‘even if they are from among the Hanbalis’, be it in creed or in law). This seems plausible in view of another piece of evidence. A few years later, the chief-qāḍī of the Hijaz, ʿAbdallah ibn Bulayhid (d. 1940), answered a question about the doctrinal stance of the Wahhabis in an interview for the Egyptian newspaper al-Siyasa. He told the journalist that all the people of Najd are Salafis in creed (hum salafiyyat al-ʿaqīda) and Hanbalis in law (ḥanābilat al-madhhab). Realising that this formula might not mean much to average readers, Ibn Bulayhid elaborated a bit on the distinction. He began by equating Salafi theology with Hanbali theology, which he explained by discussing nothing other than the affirmation of divine attributes in their plain sense. Then he went on to speak about proper devotional practice—the stuff of Islamic jurisprudence.Footnote ¹¹⁵

So, here was a high-ranking Wahhabi scholar who, in 1926, still conceived of abstract issues of creed and concrete issues of worship as separate domains, only one of which fell under the label ‘Salafi’. Both domains pertained to tawhid, Ibn Bulayhid explained, just not in the same way. As a creedal matter, the proper affirmation of divine attributes belonged to the category of ‘theoretical tawhid [al-tawḥīd al-ʿilmī]’, and this is what being a Salafi was all about. Matters pertaining to worship, such as the legality or illegality of venerating graves and supplicating or seeking intercession from anyone other than God, fell under the category of ‘practical tawhid [al-tawḥīd al-ʿamalī]’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ According to this conceptual schema, one could be a respectable Hanbali with respect to abstract creedal matters (that is, a Salafi) and still be an erring Muslim with respect to concrete acts of worship (as Ibn Sihman said of the al-Shatti family of Syria).

If this seems counterintuitive, it is because the term ‘Salafi’ encompasses more today than it did in the past. The fact that it has now become standard to define a Salafi as someone who first and foremost abides by a stringent Taymiyyan conception of tawhid (with special emphasis on tawḥīd al-ilāhiyya, which focuses on worship) only goes to show that a significant semantic change has taken place since the beginning of the twentieth century. As it happens, the Wahhabis played a somewhat inadvertent role in early efforts to increase the requirements for qualifying as a Salafi—inadvertent because it was not their initiative. In the late 1920s, ‘Salafi’ was not yet their preferred term of self-identification, and their use of it remained sporadic at best.

According to one prominent theory in the literature, this started to change in May 1929 when King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz (commonly known as Ibn Saʿud) made a speech in which he prohibited the official use of wahabiyya and instead favoured the term al-salafiyya, thus affirming that Wahhabism was merely a subset of the modern reformist movement known as Salafism.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Were it accurate, this story would indeed prove significant. It is, however, false on several counts. First, the king’s speech contained no prohibition or command about Wahhabi labels. The official journal of the Saudi state, Umm al-Qura, continued to print articles that spoke of ‘Wahhabis’, just as infrequently as before. It stopped using the word in the 1930s, not because it was forbidden but because its sectarian overtones displeased the ruling family. Second, the king did not use the word al-salafiyya at all in his speech, nor any derivative of the word salaf for that matter. And thus, third, the king did not present Wahhabism as a subset of a broader Salafi movement of reform, to which he made no reference whatsoever.Footnote ¹¹⁸

One must therefore look elsewhere for evidence of a shift towards privileging Salafi labels. Those who led the way in this process, and who used ‘Salafi’ in a newer, more capacious sense, were among the foreign religious scholars who moved to the Hijaz after 1925 to assume teaching duties. The most proactive in this regard was without question the Syrian scholar Muhammad Bahjat al-Baytar (d. 1976). A student of Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi in Damascus and an associate of Rashid Rida since 1919, al-Baytar was already a Salafi in creed when he moved to Mecca in June 1926 to attend the Islamic Congress—that is, he was a Salafi in the traditional, narrower sense. But he also came from an intellectual milieu in which the term ‘Salafi’ had begun to find wider use. As a teenager, al-Baytar, too, had written a counter-poem in response to al-Nabhani’s Shorter Poem in R. He had sent a first version of it to Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi in Baghdad, most likely in 1912, to have it printed along with the counter-poems of others.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Therefore, there is a good chance that at some point al-Baytar became acquainted with al-Alusi’s rejoinder (the one in which he used ‘Salafi’ in an expanded sense). Whatever the case, we know that al-Baytar already employed the term in a broader, non-traditional way while still in Syria. In a qualified defence of the Wahhabis written in 1922, he used ‘Salafi’ as a synonym for an admirer of Ibn Taymiyya and as an antonym for a Sufi admirer of Ibn ʿArabi, without any reference to divine attributes.Footnote ¹²⁰ This would have been enough to disqualify some members of the al-Shatti family.

After the Islamic Congress, al-Baytar stayed in Mecca to become a teacher at the Holy Mosque and to take charge of the Saudi Islamic Institute, a more modern type of secondary school. In the Hijaz, his tendency towards conceptual expansion further asserted itself, and his broader definition of ‘Salafi’ eventually came to match the Wahhabis’ religious expectations. It took some trial and error. Like the Algerian reformers, al-Baytar first had to make up his mind about what exactly he meant by ‘Salafi’ in a broader sense. There was no more natural or self-evident a meaning for him as there was for them. In an article published in December 1926 in Umm al-Qura, we see al-Baytar using the label as a vague descriptor for Ibrahim Adham al-Zahawi, the young nephew of the controversial Iraqi author Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi (d. 1936). Readers are made to understand that the nephew was a Salafi because he opposed his uncle’s unbridled modernism and disregard for Islamic tradition. One deduces, then, that a Salafi would not embrace Darwinism, question Qurʾanic prescriptions on women’s status, or show enthusiasm for the game of checkers, as did Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi.Footnote ¹²¹

But this was much too general a classification to be specific to the Wahhabis, and al-Baytar quickly picked up on the need to emphasise tawhid as the surest way to please his Saudi-Wahhabi hosts and to gain their confidence. A few months later, he made a point to proclaim his adherence to the Hanbali interpretation of divine attributes and, as principal of the Saudi Islamic Institute, to reassure the authorities that the school’s lessons on tawhid were irreproachable.Footnote ¹²² Yet al-Baytar remained, at heart, a reformer dedicated to civilisational progress. He had come to Mecca, in part, to promote such reform. So, in the summer of 1927, he sought to impress on readers of Umm al-Qura that there was no contradiction between worldly renewal (tajdīd) and pure tawhid (he focused specifically on tawḥīd al-ilāhiyya, so central to the Wahhabi movement). Following the path of the salaf, he argued, entails acceptance of both their religious and civilisational guidance. The pious ancestors were not only imams in religion; they were leaders in science, industry, innovation (ibdāʿ), and invention. Therefore, al-Baytar affirmed that all recent developments in the Saudi state—from the use of electricity, cars, and the telephone to the digging of artesian wells and the upcoming inauguration of a textile factory in Mecca (to produce the kiswa, the black cloth covering the Kaaba, which no longer came from Egypt due to political tensions)—were proofs of progress along the way of the ancestors (minhāj al-salaf).Footnote ¹²³

It would have been easy then for al-Baytar to bring together the religious and civilisational dimensions of the ancestors’ legacy under the same label, ‘Salafi’, and to propose it as a replacement term for ‘Wahhabi’. But this is not what he did. Instead, he doubled down on the use of ‘Wahhabi’, arguing that it had become a label of pride. And because the recent publication of a biographical dictionary of Iraqi scholars had motivated the writing of his article, al-Baytar took the late Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi as a case in point. Given that al-Alusi was a great reformer who combined tawhid and tajdīd, and given that his enemies called him a Wahhabi (as happened to many like-minded reformers), the label should no longer be deemed derogatory. Rather, it should be applauded. And it worked both ways: if a proponent of tajdīd like al-Alusi can be called a Wahhabi, then any Wahhabi deserves to be called a proponent of tajdīd as well. In sum, al-Baytar insisted that there was no difference between Wahhabis and reformers who call for civilisational progress. As an attempt to make modernisation more palatable to the Wahhabis, it was going to be a hard sell.

Incidentally, al-Baytar did bring up the word ‘Salafis’ in this context, but only through a quotation from the biographical dictionary that he was reviewing. Salafi labels appeared several times in that dictionary, but al-Baytar only quoted from the partial Arabic translation of a book review turned eulogy by a French orientalist who spoke about ‘the Wahhabism of [Mahmud] Shukri al-Alusi’ and who remarked that, ‘like other Salafis, [al-Alusi] loved the neo-Hanbali movement of Najd’.Footnote ¹²⁴ The orientalist in question, of course, was Massignon, and the translated excerpt included in the dictionary was from the 1924 volume of the Revue du monde musulman. It was the passage where Massignon described al-Alusi as a proponent of ‘Wahhabism’ in scare quotes, which was his way of saying that, as a Salafi, al-Alusi came close to being a Wahhabi without being one.Footnote ¹²⁵ For Massignon in 1924, Salafis and Wahhabis still constituted separate categories.

Al-Baytar, however, did not focus on Massignon’s use of ‘Salafis’. It was the ‘Wahhabism’ in scare quotes that resonated most with him. But there was a catch: the scare quotes did not appear in the Arabic translation. Although al-Baytar was a francophone, he probably never read the original French version, and there would have been no reason for him to do so. Therefore, the irony of Massignon’s language was lost on him, and he understood the passage as evidence that Wahhabism had indeed become a badge of honour. Surely, a major orientalist and a friend of the al-Alusi family would not eulogise Mahmud Shukri and call him a Wahhabi unless it was a mark of praise. This was precisely the message that al-Baytar wished to get across.

Why exactly al-Baytar thought that ‘Wahhabis’ with a positive spin remained a more acceptable, or more convenient, or more accurate label for Najdis than ‘Salafis’ is unclear. He seemed to think that this is what some Najdis wanted to hear. But he finally shifted to Salafi labels in 1929, and here there appears to be a connection with the speech that King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz gave in May of that year. Coincidentally or not, the royal speech reads like a direct rebuff of al-Baytar’s argument. The king not only expressed his disapproval of Wahhabi labels; he rejected the very conflation between tawhid and tajdīd that al-Baytar had put forward. After affirming that the people of Najd observe tawhid as the salaf understood it and as Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab taught it, the king declared: ‘As for the renewal [al-tajdīd] that some folks are trying to urge people to [adopt], claiming that it will save us from our pains: it does not lead us to the ultimate goal, nor does it bring us closer to the afterlife. […] [Muslims] will not attain happiness in this world and the next except through the pure declaration of tawhid. […] Muslims do not need renewal but rather a return to what the pious ancestors were upon [mā kāna ʿalayhi al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ].’Footnote ¹²⁶

In reality, the king was far from opposed to the type of civilisational development that al-Baytar advocated when he broached the notion of renewal. But given the resistance he faced from some religious scholars and militant Wahhabis, especially since 1927, the king knew when to be careful and to downplay reformist rhetoric that seemed a tad too progressive. In any case, if al-Baytar had any doubt, the speech made it quite clear that the palace had not favourably received his earlier suggestion that Najdis should be called Wahhabis and proponents of tajdīd.

It is possible that al-Baytar got wind of how the king felt before the latter gave his speech. Earlier in 1929, he started making adjustments in a new venue for publication: the Mecca-based journal al-Islah. Founded in 1928 by Muhammad Hamid al-Fiqi (d. 1959), another disciple of Rida who had migrated to the Hijaz, the journal served as the local mouthpiece of foreign reformers. Al-Baytar became a regular contributor in early 1929 after he left his position as principal of the Saudi Islamic Institute (by then renamed the Saudi Scientific Institute) to become inspector of religious education in the Hijaz. In the pages of al-Islah, no one used Salafi labels more often than he did.

Starting in February, al-Baytar referred to the Wahhabis as Salafis, seemingly in the narrow traditional sense: they were Salafis just like Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi and ʿAbd al-Razzaq al-Baytar in twentieth-century Syria, and like Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, and Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab in previous centuries.Footnote ¹²⁷ In the same issue, al-Baytar also referred to the journal’s editor, al-Fiqi, as ‘Salafi in creed and reformist in tendency [salafī al-muʿtaqad iṣlāḥī al-manzaʿ]’, thereby suggesting that being a Salafi and being a modern reformer were two different things that could coexist.Footnote ¹²⁸ Later in the summer, after the king’s speech, al-Baytar made the distinction more explicit. Whereas he had previously attempted to conflate the religious and civilisational legacies of the salaf—the pure Islam of the first Muslims on the one hand and the material and scientific achievements of the golden age of Islam on the other—al-Baytar was now treating them separately. Perhaps to avoid offending the sensibilities of the king, who did not appreciate the amalgamation (and who, like Wahhabi scholars, had a strictly religious understanding of ‘what the salaf were upon’), al-Baytar referred to ‘Salafis’ and ‘religious advocates of Islamic civilisation’ as two separate groups of people (farīqatayn) who needed to collaborate with one another. Each have their own tasks, he wrote: the Salafis work towards the purity of Islam, whereas religious advocates of civilisation seek to make life easier for Muslims.Footnote ¹²⁹

But al-Baytar also expanded the meaning of ‘Salafi’ in a new and more elaborate manner. He spoke of al-Islah as a journal with a religious Salafi approach (manhaj dīnī salafī) and linked the adjective to one of the earliest, if not the earliest, public use of the abstract noun ‘Salafism’ outside of North Africa.Footnote ¹³⁰ Al-Baytar gave a rough definition of it, explaining that ‘Salafism’s foremost concern and highest ideal [raʾs amr al-salafiyya wa dhurwat sanāmihā]’ is to affirm God’s names, attributes, and actions as He and His Prophet affirmed them, without metaphorical interpretation. He presented the matter as a branch of tawhid (or, as Ibn Bulayhid put it, ‘theoretical’ tawhid), but he subsumed other issues under the broader rubric of Salafism. He included the proper understanding of legislation (ḥikmat al-tashrīʿ) and the legal interpretation of scriptures in accordance with the method of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya.Footnote ¹³¹ Al-Baytar did not go into specifics at the time, but these were issues pertaining to ‘practical’ tawhid. In another article, he again referred to the people of Najd as Salafis who raised the banner of tawhid in Arabia by combating innovations and polytheism. But this time, he specifically mentioned (with approval) the severe restrictions on tomb visitation and the destruction of mausoleums.Footnote ¹³² In July, he invoked tawḥīd al-ilāhiyya, condemned the practices of asking the dead for help (istighātha) and seeking intercession from them (tawassul), and insisted, in Wahhabi fashion, that many people fail to grasp the meaning of ‘there is no god but God’.Footnote ¹³³

Al-Baytar never said that only the Wahhabis deserved to be called Salafis, but no reader could have missed his efforts to echo the core themes of Wahhabism, as did other writers in al-Islah who knew very well that Wahhabi scholars read the journal and carefully examined its contents. By defining both theoretical and practical tawhid in a way that matched Wahhabi expectations, and by claiming that this overall understanding of tawhid was itself ancestral, or Salafi, al-Baytar essentially restricted his use of the label to Muslims who saw eye to eye with the Wahhabis on major creedal and legal matters.Footnote ¹³⁴ Otherwise put, the more al-Baytar used Salafi labels in Arabia, the more he understood the need to use them in a way that satisfied the religious concerns of the Wahhabis he served and the more he raised the bar for what it meant to be truly Salafi. According to his broader and more demanding conceptualisation, it became even clearer that folks such as the al-Shattis of Syria (who remained Sufis and rejected the Wahhabis’ view on tawḥīd al-ilāhiyya) could no longer be counted among the Salafis.

Many self-proclaimed Salafis of North Africa were also excluded, but for the opposite reason: their views on divine attributes. And yet, ironically, it was a Tunisian intellectual, Mustafa ibn Shaʿban (d. 1938), who first referred to al-Islah and its editor as ‘Salafi’, months before al-Baytar did. Based in Tunis, Ibn Shaʿban was a long-time guest writer for the Algerian reformist press. He had thus participated in the popularisation and conceptual expansion of Salafi labels since 1925, especially in al-Shihab, which he also liked to call a ‘Salafi journal’.Footnote ¹³⁵ Ibn Shaʿban received the first issue of al-Islah in September 1928 and immediately wrote a glowing review of it in the Tunisian bi-monthly newspaper al-Wazir. He praised the Meccan journal for having ‘the exact same programme [barnāmaj] as the Salafis of North Africa’ and added that al-Islah was to the Hijaz what al-Shihab was to Algeria (though the editing team of al-Shihab had already insisted on demarcating Wahhabis as a different subset of Salafis a year earlier).Footnote ¹³⁶

This was an overstatement on the part of Ibn Shaʿban, to be sure. But if the analogy made sense to him, it is either because the first issue of al-Islah did not strike him as Wahhabi (understandably so, for it was the organ of foreign reformers who carefully vowed to advance their idea of civilisational progress) or because he found enough common ground between the two journals. Ibn Shaʿban was anti-Sufi, and he understood al-Islah to be equally committed to the struggle against Sufi masters and charlatans. He was correct to a certain extent, but it was not enough to equate the Salafis of Arabia with the Salafis of North Africa. Al-Zawawi had made that mistake in 1927 until the editing team of al-Shihab disagreed with him. Wahhabis and North African reformers did not necessarily oppose Sufism for the same reasons and in a similar manner. Moreover, the conceptual expansion of the term ‘Salafi’ had allowed many North African reformers to claim the label without paying much attention to its narrower theological origins. So, while Ibn Shaʿban appreciated what he read about practical tawhid in al-Islah, he neglected abstract tawhid and the interpretation of divine attributes, which was never a primary concern for North African Salafis. The use of Salafi labels in an expanded sense could thus create a false sense of shared identity that masked substantial creedal differences.

The fact that al-Baytar’s rough but Wahhabi-compliant definition of Salafism retained the Hanbali approach to divine attributes as its central feature serves as a reminder that, in the Arab East, qualified or unqualified opposition to Sufism had never been a sufficient condition for being considered Salafi. In effect, al-Baytar’s definition excluded the Moroccan Salafi Muhammad al-Makki al-Nasiri, to name just one figure. In the 1920s, al-Nasiri was already active in the Salafi circles of North Africa. He, too, opposed Sufi excesses and wrote in the Algerian journal al-Shihab, where he was once introduced as ‘the great poet of the Salafis of Morocco’.Footnote ¹³⁷ But here ‘Salafi’ must be understood in a different sense because al-Nasiri remained Ashʿari in creed. ‘Our Salafi movement was not Wahhabi’, he later claimed, arguing that it was consistent with Moroccan religious tradition.Footnote ¹³⁸ Moroccan Ashʿaris could find ways to pass as Salafis in creed, even in the Saudi state, but only as long as theological discussions remained superficial.Footnote ¹³⁹ In reality, they failed to meet a very basic requirement for being considered Salafi in the Arab East in general and in Arabia in particular—namely, not being Ashʿari. Al-Baytar’s conceptualisation of Salafism thus excluded Salafi Sufis as much as Ashʿari opponents of Sufism.

None of this should be taken as evidence that a religious orientation called Salafism changed or evolved differently in different locales, as the literature often suggests. It simply shows that different definitions of the neologism ‘Salafism’ emerged in different contexts starting in the 1920s. In Arabia, however, Wahhabi scholars did not immediately follow al-Baytar’s lead, and neither did the ruling family. The shift from ‘Wahhabi’ to an expanded redefinition of ‘Salafi’ (including the use of the abstract noun ‘Salafism’) did not truly catch on among the religious scholars of Saudi Arabia until about the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Yet al-Baytar had already laid the groundwork in 1929. As for King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, it was not in May 1929 that he officially embraced Salafi labels. Rather, it was in November 1946. ‘I am a Salafi man, and my creed is Salafism [ʿaqīdatī hiya al-salafiyya]’, the king declared in a speech. ‘They say that we are Wahhabis, but the truth is that we are Salafis.’Footnote ¹⁴¹ Wahhabism and Salafism were here considered synonyms rather than overlapping but separate categories.