Should Muslims wear shoes praying in a mosque?

A new book explores the intricacies of Egyptian salafi thought and practice

Every Monday, I review a new book on MENA politics (or whatever else I happen to be reading and thinking about). Subscribe to never miss a review essay!

Aaron Rock-Singer, In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East (University of California Press, 2022)

The electoral success of Salafi parties in Egypt’s first post-Mubarak elections got the attention of a lot of Middle East watchers. It wasn’t just that the Salafist al-Nour party won 28% of the Parliamentary seats, pushing an Islamist agenda in Constitutional negotiations and challenging the victorious Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party from the right. It’s that prior to that election, the Salafist movement seemed to have a firm, theologically grounded position rejecting political participation and democratic institutions. Indeed, this principled rejection of electoral participation was one of several key ideological and practical dividing lines between the Salafists and their Muslim Brotherhood counterparts. And then, overnight, that all changed. How could that be?

Electoral participation by previously quietist Salafi movements was only one reason for growing academic attention to Salafism, of course. The connection between Salafism and jihadism became a central concern for those studying terrorism and violent extremism after 9/11. That unleashed a tidal wave of scholarly and policy-oriented studies of Salafi-Jihadism over the past two decades, primarily analyzing the ideological foundations of violent jihadist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, their internal points of contention, their key ideologues and intellectual geneologies, their jurisprudence on violence and forms of jihad, and their uneasy and often contentious relationship with mainstream Muslim Brotherhood-style political Islam.

But that violent extremist trend captured only a small fragment of the broader Salafist milieu, much of which remained quietist. There’s been a minor boomlet in studies of such Salafi movements since 2011, thankfully, as scholarly and policy attention has turned to understanding a previously largely ignored phenomenon. Salafism was not totally ignored of course - Saba Mahmood’s influential study of women’s piety movements looked at Salafist mosques, for example - but it paled in comparison to the vast theoretically innovative and empirically rich literature on the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots. A decade later, there’s so much more: Roel Meijer’s influential edited volume Global Salafism; Henri Lauziere’s The Making of Salafism; Azmi Bishara’s On Salafism; Francesco Cavatorta and Fabio Merone’s Salafism After the Arab Awakening; Frederic Wehrey and Anour Boukhars’s Salafism in the Maghreb; Joas Wagemaker’s Salafism in Jordan; Laurent Bonnefoy’s Salafism in Yemen; Zoltan Pall’s Salafism in Lebanon; Mohamed-Ali Adraoui’s Salafism Goes Global; Raihan Ismail’s Rethinking Salafism: Transnational Networks of Salafi Ulema in Egypt, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia; Sebastian Elischer’s Salafism and Political Order in Africa; Alex Thurston’s Salafism in Nigeria. And that’s not even counting the vast literature in academic journals, or outstanding work in the pipeline like Stephane Lacroix’s definitive study of Egyptian salafism.

Aaron Rock-Singer’s In the Shade of the Sunnah steps into this rapidly growing literature with a unique perspective, drawing on a wide range of archival and Arabic popular media sources to trace the evolution of Egyptian Salafist practice as a response to competing social movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, transnational influences, and the demands of sustaining a social movement orthogonal to the national state.

Rock-Singer’s approach to Egyptian Salafism takes both ideas and practice seriously. In each chapter, he goes deep into the intricacies of a specific debate about religious practice - the length of beards or pants, whether to wear shoes in a mosque - at a length which, to be honest, left me somewhat despairing at the amount of brainpower devoted to such absurd questions. But Rock-Singer never leaves it there. He shows through close readings of context how those textual debates reflect a wider sociopolitical context, juxtaposing theological debate with the presence of religious or political competitors identified with alternative positions. As in his excellent previous book, Practicing Islam in Egypt, Rock-Singer draws creatively on a close readings of periodicals and publications produced by the Islamist movements he studies to reconstruct debates on their own terms and in their own words.

A couple of months ago, I hosted Aaron Rock-Singer on my podcast to talk about his book; you can listen to that here.

The seemingly peripheral and endlessly intricate debates over questions of practice such as the appropriate length of beards and pants or over praying in shoes play an important communicative role in Rock-Singer’s account. He “argues for the centrality of daily practice to both the movement’s development and impact… to be Salafi is not merely to hold specific theological or legal commitments but also to engage in particular visible practices.” Visibility is absolutely central, then, and not peripheral. In his conception of the Salafist movement as social rather than only theological or political, such physical demonstrations serve to signal identity commitments, raising boundaries between communities which both reinforce in-group cohesion while distancing others (like Muslim Brothers) who might otherwise seem to have quite similar political and even theological commitments. Such a politics of the self and practice of visibility really only makes sense within the context of mass urban society and all the anonymity that it entails.

Rock-Singer traces Salafism’s evolution through the 20th century, identifying its key intellectual figures and unifying features as well as how it took root in unique forms within Egypt’s specific national context. In the first two chapters, he carefully traces a shift in practice from the relatively inward-looking orientations of Ansar al-Sunna in the 1930s and 1940s to the much more self-conscious efforts to construct a Salafist project (manhaj) to shape a new generation and to change society in the 1970s and 1980s.

Each of the book’s case studies offers its own rewards. Throughout, I was especially impressed by the attention to both transnational flows of ideas and argumentation (especially between Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but with key innovations originating in Syria and Kuwait as well) and to often hyper-local political competition (especially with the Muslim Brotherhood’s alternative Islamist project). The dueling fatwas and intense controversies over wearing shoes in the mosque becomes, in his telling, a highly political one: “The choice of praying in shoes was about offering a practice that was at once undeniably performed by Muhammad and highly socially disruptive… not only about following Muhammad’s model but also about visually challenging and physically transgressing mosque norms.” And then, the transnational intrudes, with a shift in Saudi government efforts to increase control over mosque practice filtering back into leading Egyptian Salafists to de-emphasize the practice as well.

Gender segregation is perhaps the most critical case study here, and Rock-Singer delivers in his careful reading of the critical importance of context. Saudi-style gender segregation could never have worked in Egypt’s dense urban environment, and Egyptian Salafists didn’t try to simply adopt Saudi conventions. In the Shade of the Sunnah begins with the 1979 publication of an article in the leading Egyptian Salafist journal al-Tawhid calling for gender segregation in the workplace by Abd al-Aziz bin Baz — then an influential Saudi Salafist scholar, later Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti. Rock-Singer places bin Baz’s intervention within an ongoing transnational Salafist debate which involved Saudi and Egyptian (and Syrian and other Gulf-based) Salafist thinkers, highlighting the modernity of the dangers of gender mixing raised in these polemics.

A later chapter then goes into great detail on the practical complications and ideological challenges which shaped Egyptian Salafist approaches to regulating gender relations. The Salafists “competed with a reconstituted Muslim Brotherhood as each sought to lay claim to the mantle of religious authority… [which] would necessitate a self-differentiation that did not burn bridges with Salafi theological and legal commitments.” Rock-Singer shows how Salafist efforts to import Saudi practices and ideas of gender segregation were undercut by Muslim Brotherhood efforts to instead find practical solutions for enabling “virtuous” women’s presence in society.

In the Shade of the Sunnah is a fascinating window into Salafist thought and practice. Critically, Rock-Singer focuses on the issues which consumed the Egyptian Salafist movement itself, rather than the democracy or jihadism concerns which often preoccupy scholars and analysts, pays off with unexpected insights into transnational ideational flows and the lived nature of intra-Islamist competition. It’s well worth a read for those interested broadly in Islamism or in the Salafist milieu in particular, and makes for a useful, important and engaging contribution to the emergent and rapidly developing literature on Salafism.