Defining Neighbors. Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter - Jonathan Marc Gribetz

RUHI AL-KHALIdI’S “AS-SAYūNīZM” • 65

would become known as the Salafi movement.^97 These modernists
sought to reform Islam by looking to the model of the earliest follow-
ers of Muhammad (known as as-­salaf­aṣ-­ṣāliḥ, “the worthy ancestors”).
The fin de siècle Salafis contended that much of contemporary Islam
did not conform to the practices of the original Muslim community
and was burdened with habits and practices that had no justification
in the religion. Islam thus could and should be creatively transformed
to accommodate the new social and intellectual realities of the modern
world, just as those original Muslims exercised judicious creativity in
interpreting the Qurʾan and the Sunna for their own time.^98
One of the most prominent and influential figures in the late
nineteenth- century modernist reform movement was the egyptian mufti
Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849– 1905).^99 ʿAbduh, according to George Hou-
rani, “denied that priority in time necessarily meant superior wisdom,
except in the case of the companions and Successors” of Muhammad,
that is, as-­salaf­aṣ-­ṣāliḥ. As a result, ʿAbduh was open to the possibility
of modifying the legal rulings of earlier generations, whether because
they can now be judged to have been mistaken or because, given new
historical circumstances, the older views are obsolete or even harm-
ful.^100 In ʿAbduh’s words, a generation’s “obligation to obey consensus
is due to the public interest, not to infallibility . . . and interest appears
and disappears, and varies with different times and conditions.”^101
Al- Khalidi— whose family library in Jerusalem contains many of
ʿAbduh’s works, including one autographed by ʿAbduh himself—
seems to have been influenced by this Salafi conception of evolving

(^97) The standard narrative of the birth of the Salafi movement has been provoca-
tively challenged by Henri Lauzière, “The construction of Salafiyya.” Muhammad Qasim
Zaman, however, contends that Rida and his associates employed the term Salafi as a
self- designation. Zaman, Modern­Islamic­Thought­in­a­Radical­Age, 7. In highlighting the
close relationship between the Khalidi family and the key figures of the Salafi movement,
Rashid Khalidi points to a photograph of the formal opening of the Khalidi Library, in
which the prominent Salafi Shaykh Tahir al- Jaza’iri appears. Al- Jaza’iri collaborated
with Hajj Raghib al- Khalidi in the creation of the Khalidi Library. “Several of al- Jaza’iri’s
books, some in multiple copies,” adds Khalidi, “are found in the [Khalidi] Library, to-
gether with many examples of the writings of other salafis such as al- Sayyid Rashid
Rida.” See Khalidi, Palestinian­Identity, 43– 45; Khalidi, “Intellectual Life in Late Ottoman
Jerusalem,” 224.
(^98) commins, Islamic­Reform.
(^99) On ʿAbduh, see, e.g., Sedgwick, Muhammad­Abduh; Hourani, Arabic­Thought­in­the­
Liberal­Age,­1798–­1939, 130– 60; Haim, ed., Arab­Nationalism, 16– 22; Adams, Islam­and­
Modernism­in­Egypt.
(^100) Hourani, “The Basis of Authority of consensus in Sunnite Islam,” 39.
(^101) Muhammad ʿAbduh, Tafsīr­al-­qurʾān­al-­ḥakīm, ed. M. Rashid Rida (cairo, 1927–
1936), cited in ibid., 40.