In recent years, numerous scholars have sought to define Salafism in terms of its parameters and genealogy, offering new methodological approaches to exploring Salafi thought and contesting the origins and utility of the term in its contemporary usage. Aaron Rock-Singer’s In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East contributes to these ongoing debates, while shifting the traditional intellectual history approach to the study of such movements, focusing instead on practice rather than discourse. By turning our attention to the ways in which Egyptian Salafis and, to a lesser extent, those in Saudi Arabia use their bodies to display their understanding of the Prophetic model, Rock-Singer reveals “the social conditions that animate Islamic legal reasoning” (p. 11). He pays particular attention to the social and political contexts of Salafis from the 1930s to the 1990s as they selectively excavated four practices to display their understanding of piety as distinct from the sartorial and bodily ideals advanced by both the modern secular state and competing Islamic movements: praying in shoes, gender segregation, a distinctly Salafi beard, and shortened pants or robes. This approach reveals the practical challenges of implementing practices advanced in the abstract literature on which scholars have typically focused, as well as the ways in which Salafis have adapted their arguments in response to pressure and competition from state authorities, secularists, Islamists, and, indeed, other Salafis.

Rock-Singer’s primary contention is that Salafism did not merely emerge in the modern period, but rather “that modernity is constitutive of Salafism” (p. 9). Even though Salafis can point to clear prooftexts to support their claims of continuity with the Qurʾan and Sunna, their practices are largely a product of the modernity rejected by them. Intellectual historians’ traditional focus on abstract concepts and engagement with past authority detracts from this observation and privileges the perspectives of Salafis themselves, whereas Rock-Singer focuses on social practice and embodied performance, following the model of historians of nationalism and gender. This approach emphasizes the performance of Salafism over simple belief in Salafi principles and the competition with various ideological foes, which shaped the nature of said performance. In the first two chapters of In the Shade of the Sunna, the author charts Egyptian state efforts to “promote models of subjectivity that privileged visibility” as well as the influence of increased literacy rates and availability of periodicals on engagement with early Islamic texts in the 19th century (p. 27). He then outlines the legal innovations of the Egyptian Salafi group Ansar al-Sunna based on those developments in the 20th century. The transference of practices traditionally considered by scholars to be customary and determined locally to the realm of devotional acts (ʿibādāt) is key here. Salafi leaders advocated strict adherence to theoretically static models of Prophetic sartorial and bodily practice, despite the inability of scholars to agree on the details and their eventual downplaying of many of these practices not long after they had supposedly revived them. Rock-Singer shows that contemporary social concerns motivated the embrace of, followed by the backing away from, these practices. Therefore, scholars’ traditional focus on Salafi theory, in the abstract, fails to capture the reality of Salafi practices and the range of social pressures that influence them.

Despite his approach to the study of Salafism centering on the social, Rock-Singer acknowledges that the work is mostly an intellectual rather than social history, in the sense that his sources are predominantly Salafi periodicals, as there is very little of something akin to letters-to-the-editor to explore. However, while such periodicals have often been the focus of intellectual historians, Rock-Singer utilizes them with a keen eye on societal pressures and contexts. He does read fatwa requests critically, but unlike Leor Halevi’s Modern Things on Trial (2019), a social history of material and commercial pressures on modern Islamic thought through the lens of fatwa requests in Rashid Rida’s al-Manar, this analysis is a small portion of Rock-Singer’s work. Instead, he primarily draws on the publications of Ansar al-Sunna and other Islamic movements in Egypt, along with the publications and a limited number of fatwas of Saudi Salafis associated with the Permanent Committee on Religious Scholarship and Fatwas under Saudi Arabia’s Committee of Grand ʿUlamaʾ. These sources reveal that far from embracing Prophetic practices for strictly devotional purposes, Salafis in Egypt and Saudi Arabia communicated with one another and embraced visual markers to distinguish themselves as they competed with other Islamic actors and their respective states for control of religious authority and institutions.

With regard to debates over the applicability and genealogy of the term “Salafi” itself, Rock-Singer states clearly that he follows Henri Lauzière’s definition of Salafism in The Making of Salafism (2016). Rock-Singer builds on Lauzière’s assertion that the widespread use of the word to describe the Islamic modernists of the late 19th century is inaccurate, ahistorical, and provides further evidence that those to whom he applies the term “Salafi” post-1920 not only embraced a neo-Hanbali approach to theology but also “a distinctly Salafi legal approach of deriving all law from the Qurʾan and Sunna” (p. 15). This framing, notably, contrasts with the big-tent approach to the study of Salafism advanced by scholars such as Azmi Bishara, who includes both Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (d. 1792) and reformers such as Rashid Rida (d. 1935) among an array of Salafisms in On Salafism (2022), and Frank Griffel, who challenges Lauzière’s conclusions and maintains that there is sufficient historical continuity to apply the term to both Islamic modernists, such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897) and Muhammad ʿAbduh (d. 1905), and post-1920 purist Salafis in his article “What Do We Mean By ‘Salafi’?” (2015). Halevi, meanwhile, agrees with Lauzière’s contention that applying the term to 19th-century reformers is problematic but contests his demarcation of 1920 as the earliest bounds for the term’s use, exploring what he calls Rida’s “laissez-faire Salafism” stretching back decades earlier. This debate remains far from settled, but Rock-Singer’s work further distinguishes contemporary purist Salafism, the origins of which he locates in the 1930s, from all the other movements, thinkers, and groups to whom scholars have applied the term, whether or not these groups used it themselves. One area where Rock-Singer may have offered more clarity is how he would categorize Rida’s work, in particular. He references Rida several times, including works dating back to 1901, and implies that the roots of some later purist Salafi thought do reach back this far, but he might have addressed this point further. He does note that Rida maintained a traditional separation between required acts of devotion and customary practices such as dress, which would set him apart from the purist Salafis he examines in In the Shade of the Sunna.

Rock-Singer outlines three primary domains in which distinctly modern forces shape Salafism: the material conditions of modern states, mass media, and mass urban society; a modern conception of reforming the individual for the sake of a broader community; and embodiment as a mode of communicating ethics. The ways in which these forces influenced four distinct Salafi practices are the focus of subsequent chapters on each. He shows that as the Egyptian state in the 1940s and 1950s and the Saudi state in the 1970s exerted control over religious thought and practice and focused on hygiene and cleanliness in mosques, Salafis in the former, followed by the latter, promoted praying in shoes in opposition to the state, but then backed away from this position in the 1990s in the face of greater state pressure. This story, to be certain, is not just one of social pressures motivating Salafis to embrace specific practices to distinguish themselves, but also of how they “increasingly formulated justifications for abandoning a practice of the Prophet” (p. 135). From the 1970s to 1980s, Salafi scholars similarly developed an understanding of a “both Sunnaic and distinctly Salafi” beard and a prohibition against letting pants or robes hang too low to distinguish themselves from other Islamic groups, student activists, and, in Egypt, also jihadis (p. 171). Although Salafi scholars quibbled over the precise length of the beard and the point at which robes or pants must end, they broadly embraced the Prophetic nature of these sartorial and bodily practices to communicate a distinct form of piety to others in Egyptian and Saudi society.

Additionally, Rock-Singer scrutinizes the Salafi embrace of gender segregation along similar lines. While he acknowledges that, at first glance, gender segregation was not individual self-regulation to perform ethics through visible signs in the same way as the other three practices he considers, he contends that it “seeks to spatially regulate individuals so that they collectively constitute a virtuous social order” (p. 138). As was the case with praying in shoes, however, Egyptian Salafis eventually stepped away from arguments that all gender mixing should be completely banned, largely to distinguish themselves from the Muslim Brotherhood, because this practice simply was not practical in Egypt in the face of opposition from the state and most of the population. In Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, Salafis arguing for gender segregation found support rather than obstruction from the state. Across all of these examples, Rock-Singer shows that Salafis’ focus on self-regulation and their linking of ethics with visibility were “related to and products of the emergence of powerful states and modern mass societies” (p. 231). Moreover, Rock-Singer acknowledges that there is a good basis in Islam for all four of the practices he examines, but he maintains that Salafis crafted these arguments in the 20th century to serve contemporary needs, and primarily to serve as a social symbol. This is the reason for his fundamental assertion that not only did Salafism emerge in the modern era, but “that modernity is constitutive of Salafism” (p. 9).

Beyond his contributions to ongoing debates over the nature of Salafism and the methodological approaches to studying it, Rock-Singer’s innovative approach to social practice offers an excellent model for examining Salafi scholars, such as those in Egypt and Saudi Arabia from the 1930s to 1990s under consideration here, who seemed unaware of the social pressures motivating their endeavors. Unfortunately, a frustrating number of typos and syntax errors detracts from the text in places, which is criticism more for copyeditors than the author. This limitation aside, Rock-Singer’s writing style is sharp and engaging and will be accessible for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. In the Shade of the Sunna, ultimately, will be of great interest to scholars and students of Salafism and Islamic thought, as well as those interested in modernization, secular states, and religious traditionalism.