BERNARD HAYKEL D.Phil. 1998, Oxford University Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies 50 Washington Square South New York, NY 10012 tel: (212) 998-8919 fax: (212) 995-4689

My research and teaching interests lie at the juncture of Islamic law and political/social history. In my first book and publications, I have sought to show how apparently abstruse disputes in usul al-fiqh (principles of jurisprudence) and fiqh (substantive law) become entangled in intellectual movements and the legitimacy of states in both the contemporary and early modern periods. My book entitled Revival and Reform in Islam: the legacy of Muhammad al-Shawkani (Cambridge University Press 2003) is at once an intellectual biography of Muhammad al-Shawkani (d. 1834), and a history of a vital transitional period in Yemeni history. Shawkani was a scholar who led a reform movement in Yemen at a time when the state was reformulating the bases of its rule. He also was the inheritor of a long legacy of Traditionist or Salafi thought in Yemen, which at one and the same time opposed the various schools of law--in particular the predominant Zaydi school of the Yemeni highlands--rejecting taqlid in favor of ijtihad, by which he meant a literal return to the textual sources of the Qur'an and Hadith. The importance of Shawkani and his Salafi school lies in the seemingly paradoxical fact that he came to predominate in the political and legal institutions of the Zaydi imamate: a state which based its legitimacy on the very school Shawkani set out to undermine. I explain this paradox by showing that the nature of the state had changed by the 18th century: a period which forms a conjuncture in Yemeni history--of fairly autonomous political, economic and doctrinal developments--which allowed the Salafis to dominate the religious and legal scenes. A second aspect of my book delineates Shawkani's legacy since his time down to the present day. I show how the collusion between a reformist Islamic movement and the state in the late 18th century continued to be a feature of Yemeni political and juridical life down to the present time. I focus here on contemporary Yemeni religious and political life, and my primary sources consist of interviews, religious sermons, pamphlets produced by a variety of Islamist groupings and radio fatwas, all of which I collected during periods of fieldwork in Yemen. I discuss the means by which the state has tried to mold Yemeni religious identity, away from the Zaydi legacy of the past, by using Shawkani's ideas and discourse in a deliberate manner. An essential part of my work concerns the reception of reformist ideas at present, and analysis of the Salafi heritage in contemporary debate. The (perhaps unexpected) continuities between Shawkani's era and ours shed fresh light on current Islamist movements throughout the area. In this regard, the movement I have studied has parallels in other parts of the Islamic world: the Ahl-e Hadith movement in India, for example, was directly inspired by Shawkani's ideas, as many contemporary Islamists are.

My present research and writing project relates to the history of the Salafi movement in Saudi Arabia (a.k.a. the Wahhabiyya) from the early 1960s till the present. I have a publication contract with Cambridge University Press for this book project and I have begun writing its chapters. Here I focus on a network of scholars and their writings in Saudi Arabia as well as in a number of other countries where Salafis have established a strong foothold. I show how and why the Salafis under Saudi Arabia's patronage have become one of the most influential intellectual and political groups in the last half century. Salafism's reformist and strict constructionist discourse (i.e., literalist) has found wide appeal beyond the borders of the Saudi Kingdom, and the Salafi network, operated primarily by graduates who have studied in the Kingdom's Islamic universities, has now spread globally. Among other places, major Salafi scholars and activists can be found in Yemen, Jordan, India, Pakistan and the UK, and their teachings are ubiquitous on the Internet, on audio and video media and in journals and books. The activities and teachings of these scholars, the nature and functioning of their domestic and international networks, their relationship to the state and the intra-Salafi divisions and polemics have yet to be studied in English. Also not studied is the compelling nature of their religious message for modern Muslims. This, I argue, has much to do with the anti-hierarchical and individually empowering hermeneutics of this religious tradition, two facets that correspond well with specifically modern sensibilities.

I take the early 1960s as a point of departure because it is then that the Saudi government established major Islamic institutions in the Kingdom (e.g., the Islamic University in Medina in 1961) and the Muslim World League (est. 1962) as well as a number of other institutions that have proven seminal in the dissemination of Salafi teachings throughout the world. Furthermore, it is only with the rise of Islamism as a mobilizing political force, especially after defeats of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the mid-1960s and the Arab states in the June 1967 war that the Salafis have become an influential force. The oil boom of the 1970s has also played a critical role in their success insofar as it has significantly increased the financial resources that the Saudi state has been able to allocate to the propagation of Salafism (e.g. educational scholarships, constructions of madrasas, mosques and other Islamic institutions). Moreover, because large numbers of Muslim migrant workers arrived in the Gulf countries after the boom, these have experienced firsthand Salafi Islam and been influenced by it, leading in turn to repercussions in their respective home countries. Finally, Saudi control of the sanctuaries in Mecca and Medina, as well as the pilgrimage (hajj) to these, has made Salafism dominant in the very heart of the Muslim world.

Among the issues I analyze in my study are:

1. The constitutive elements of the Salafi worldview, that is its theology, legal teachings and political doctrines and the means used to propagate these.
2. The reasons for the Saudi state's promotion and patronage of the Salafis. In other words, what is it about the content of Salafi ideas that the Saudis find so attractive and in what ways do these fit their concrete interests.
3. The Salafis' relationship to the Saudi state and the ways in which the latter's political decisions have affected the movement.
4. I will present an analysis of the relationship between a selection of non-Saudi Salafis and their respective national governments and political processes. Here I will focus on the Yemeni, Indian, Pakistani and Jordanian Salafis.
5. The sociology of the movement, by which I mean an analysis of the social origins of the movement's leaders and adherents.
6. Salafi relations with and polemics against non-Salafis (e.g., Sufis, Shi`is, secularists, "traditional" Muslims).
7. Intra-Salafi polemics (e.g., mainstream Saudi-patronized scholars versus Jihadi Salafis such as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and Abd al-Mun`im Halima. Here the issues of political activism (al-harakiyya), the establishment of social welfare associations (al-jam`iyyat al-khayriyya) and political parties (ahzab siyasiyya or hizbiyya) and the controversial practice of takfir (i.e., declaring fellow Muslims to be infidels) will be some of the topics I will cover in depth.
8. How Salafis operate on multiple levels, the global as well as the local, and how they mediate the possible conflicts and contradictions that may arise from this. One of the principal aims of my book will be to provide a nuanced depiction of the Salafi movement, one that will elaborate on its appeal to many modern Muslims as well as its complexity and internal divisions. In so doing I hope to put the lie to the simplistic and villificatory characterizations of the Wahhabiyya that have become canonical in recent years.

I consider myself to be an historian who is not restricted by disciplinary boundaries or historical time frame. In my own work, I have drawn inspiration from anthropology, politics, history and philology. I bring this background to the classroom when teaching courses on Islamic law, intellectual history and the modern politics of traditionalism.

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• Revival and Reform in Islam: The Legacy of Muhammad al-Shawkani (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
• "Dissembling Dissent, or how the Barber Lost his Turban: identity and evidence in Zaydi Yemen", in Islamic Law and Society, 9.2 (2002) 
• "Reforming Islam by Dissolving the Madhahib: Muhammad al Shawkani and his Zaydi detractors in Yemen," in Studies in Islamic Legal Theory, Bernard Weiss (ed.) (Leiden: Brill: 2001)
• "The Ahl al-Hadith Scholars among the Zaydis of Yemen", in al-Masar, vol. 2.2 (2001) (in Arabic)

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