The volume under review is a translated study from the original French on Salafism in modern Yemen since the 1970s. The study centers on the question of whether Salafism's presence in Yemen is the result of Saudi Arabia's policies of exporting its brand of Islam. The author, a political scientist, unequivocally answers that Salafism is not a Saudi export, but rather a product of complex domestic and transnational dynamics proper to Yemen itself, and cannot be captured by the official politics of state governments.
The author relies on a variety of sources to make his case: extensive fieldwork research and interviews as well as detailed analysis of texts and audiorecordings by various Salafis, many of which are polemical and center on issues of law and theology. And while in Yemen, as elsewhere, there are three types of Salafis (the quietists, the politically organized activists, and the militant jihadis), Bonnefoy's focus falls on the quietist branch and its principal ideologue, the late Shaykh Muqbil bin Hadi al-Wadiʿi (d. 2001). Al-Wadiʿi, a Yemeni of tribal origin, had spent time working and studying in Saudi Arabia and got caught up in the wave of arrests that followed Juhayman al-ʿUtaybi's seizure of the Great Mosque in Mecca in November 1979. After his release he returned to Yemen and founded the country's most important Salafi teaching center in his home village of Dammaj, not far from the Saudi border. From here his network of students spread Salafism's teachings throughout the country, but not without splits and factions emerging in due course over questions of leadership, which were often framed as differences about proper belief and practice. It is the process of Salafism becoming rooted in Yemen's religious, social, and political scene, as well as the multiple debates and entanglements that it engendered, that Bonnefoy addresses quite ably in this book.
The study is divided into three broad sections: the first presents Salafi doctrine and practice; the second the transnational relations that Salafis maintain beyond Yemen's borders; and the third how Salafism became embedded in Yemen's political life. In denying the influence of Saudi Arabia's official proselytizing efforts, Bonnefoy makes the important point that al-Wadiʿi was for at least a decade after his arrival in Yemen openly opposed to the Saudi political system. Nonetheless he also highlights the ideological affinities that al-Wadiʿi shared with a number of the leading Salafi scholars in the kingdom, most notably that all social and political associations (ḥizbiyya) were to be considered forbidden and constituted unbelief (kufr) because these divided the community of believers (umma) into factions. However, Bonnefoy correctly describes Salafism in Yemen as having a complex and ambivalent relationship with Saudi Arabia, one not driven exclusively by either elite scholarly connections or state-centered relations.
Despite focusing on religious doctrine in the first part of the book, Bonnefoy eschews the idea that Salafism can be understood through a study of creedal beliefs. Instead, he presents it as a set of practices that are informed by local context, individual agency, and other factors, such as commerce, migration, and informal interactions often taking place at the subnational as well as the global levels. He also asserts that Salafism's emphasis on “the individualization of identities” and its low level of institutionalization mean that it can readily adapt to local contexts. In what is perhaps the best chapter of the book (Chapter 5), the author takes us to the one field site he researched outside the capital Sanaʿa. This takes place in the Education Faculty of the village of Labʿus in Yafiʿ, a southern region that was once part of the communist People's Democratic Republic of Yemen. What Bonnefoy discovers here is that the Salafis were able to dominate this institution not due to factors related to Saudi sponsorship or even the dictates of the national Salafi leadership but rather because Salafis were able set the terms of debate on parochial matters. For example, they advocated that the consumption of Qat as well as the French chicken that was being served at the Education Faculty was un-Islamic (not halal). They also had charismatic leaders able to connect to the locals who had spent time as labor migrants in Saudi Arabia. And finally, the Salafis were able to take advantage of the local religious revival that followed after the long period of communist rule. In this context, Salafism had become fashionable, a subculture of sorts, so that many young people wanted to join the movement.
In the last chapters, Bonnefoy shows how the Salafis indigenize their movement by engaging with local Yemeni issues such as the division in the social hierarchy between the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (sayyids) and tribesmen, which they condemn as nefarious. They also attack in polemical fashion the Zaydi sect, the Sufis, as well as the secular forces, such as the Socialists. In the final stage under study, which corresponds to the period after the 9/11 attacks, Salafis transform into local political actors because they are co-opted by the government of President ʿAli Saleh in his struggles against the Muslim Brotherhood, the Huthi Zaydis, as well as the local branch of al-Qaʿida. And in so becoming, Bonnefoy states that one must understand “Salafism [as] a social, political and religious practice that is ever changing” (p. 283), and therefore not as an instrument of Saudi foreign policy.
It is undeniable that Salafis adapt to whatever local context in which they find themselves, but this does not mean that they abandon their distinctive beliefs and practices or that these do not have an effect on their social and political activities. The confusion over what constitutes Salafism and the extent to which one can attribute an influence to their beliefs arises because Salafis are fragmented when it comes to questions of law and politics. On matters of creed, however, they are relatively homogenous, and this manifests itself most clearly when it comes to the condemnation of fellow Muslims who deviate from their creedal beliefs, such as Sufis, Shiʿa, and Ashʿaris. Furthermore, Salafis are constantly engaged in an effort at purification, delimiting boundaries between what they consider to be the true believers and those who are deviants; this effort, whether in Yemen or elsewhere, has real social and political effects and these are often similar in a variety of different settings around the globe.
What is most valuable in the study under review is the emphasis on Salafis deriving their ideas and authority from multiple levels: the local, the global, and the transnational. This work, however, could have benefited from better editing and the correction of the multiple errors in transliteration. Finally, Bonnefoy overstresses the local and transnational agency of individuals while diminishing the role that state governments play in the politics of religion. As he acknowledges but does not sufficiently emphasize, the republican government in Yemen has been promoting a version of Salafism that has a local genealogy dating back to the 15th century. It has used an array of tools in order to accomplish this (e.g., channeling Saudi funding, legal reform, control of mosques, setting school and university curriculums, etc.) and all with the aim of generating a form of “Yemeni Islam” that would break with Zaydi Shiʿism. The government claims to rise above the sectarian and legal pluralism that defined the country's past. This is in fact false because the Yemeni state has promoted its own version of what one might term “Republican Salafism.” Without sufficiently taking account of this state project to define Islam in Yemen, it is impossible to understand, let alone account for, the rise and success of the Salafis described by Bonnefoy. States continue to matter, for better or worse.
