Review of Thomas Pierret, Religion and State in Syria: the Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution.

Abstract

Thomas Pierret has done us a great service with this book, which documents and theorises the practices of Syria’s Sunni religious scholars over the last 15 years, and their relationship to social and political power. His work fills an important gap in our knowledge; despite its presence in the headlines, Syria remains an understudied country, and much of the literature on Syrian Islam in the modern period concentrates on the better-known Muslim Brotherhood. Religious scholars – those whose authority is grounded in mastery of the classical legal-ethical written traditions of Islam – play an important social role, in Syria as in other Muslim-majority societies, yet scholarly analyses of their place in the modern world remain surprisingly thin on the ground. For exceptions to this, see Dhofier (1999, The Pesantren tradition, Arizona State), Eickelman (1985, Knowledge and Power in Morocco, Princeton), Skovgaard-Petersen (1997, Defining Islam for the Egyptian State, Brill), Vogel (2000, Islamic Law and Legal System: Studies of Saudi Arabia, Brill), Zaman (2002, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam, Princeton), and Zeghal (1995, Gardiens de l’Islam, Paris Sciences). Religion and State in Syria addresses this lacuna in style, taking the reader through the Sunni scene in Damascus and Aleppo, from the French Mandate (1920–1946) to the current uprising. In doing so, it offers two broad and innovative arguments that challenge and illuminate our understanding of the landscape of Sunni Islam in Syria. The first is that Syria’s Sunni religious scholars (ulema) have pioneered a social movement. Starting with a new generation of petit bourgeois clerics in the 1920s, the ulema have not just survived in a context of modern secular education, but flourished. They have done so not by doctrinal reform (the path taken by Salafis and modernist Islamic intellectuals) but by new ‘modes of practice’: in particular, organising religious education for graduates of secular schooling. Their preaching and teaching in organized circles of disciples nevertheless retained the traditional form of personal master-disciple Cont Islam (2015) 9:405–407 DOI 10.1007/s11562-014-0310-2