In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East

This book is an intellectual and social history of Salafism that moves beyond a focus on specific organizations or a commitment to the boundaries of particular nation states to trace the emergence of distinctly Salafi social practices from 1926 to the present. Salafis explicitly base their legitimacy on the word of the Qu'ran and the Sunna, and scholarship has taken them at their word by treating this movement as having sprung fully forth from Islam’s original teachings. Their distinctive public practices-praying in shoes, wearing long beards and short pants, and observing gender segregation-are thus understood to have a similarly ancient pedigree. Aaron Rock-Singer powerfully demonstrates that contemporary Salafism is in fact a creation of the twentieth century and that the movement’s signature practices emerged primarily out Salafis’ competition with other movements amidst the intellectual and social upheavals of modernity. Drawing from a range of media forms as well as traditional religious texts, Rock-Singer offers a three-dimensional portrait of a group often dismissed as a reactionary throwback to the past. In the Shade of the Sunna takes readers beyond the surface claims of Salafism’s own proponents-and the academics who often repeat them-into the larger sociocultural and intellectual forces that have definitively shaped Islam’s fastest growing revivalist movement.