Salafī Challenge and Māturīdī Response: Contemporary Disputes over the Legitimacy of Māturīdī kalām

Abstract

Abstract Salafī refutations of Sunnī kalām have long been focused almost exclusively on the Ashʿariyya. In recent decades, however, Salafī authors and activists have also turned their attention towards the Māturīdī current, which has been historically predominant in those parts of the Muslim world dominated by the Ḥanafī madhhab. In the present article, the characteristics of the Salafī challenge to the Māturīdiyya are presented and the main factors behind its emergence and dissemination are traced. It is shown that the recent growing awareness of the Māturīdiyya as a theological other among adherents of Salafī Islam owes much to the efforts of the Pakistani scholar Shams al-Dīn al‑Salafī al‑Afghānī, a graduate of the Islamic University of Medina. It is argued that his work, which was influenced both by his specific South Asian background and by his exposure to established forms of Salafī education and daʿwa in Medina, was instrumental in raising the spectre of a “modern Māturīdiyya” as a serious doctrinal challenger and impediment to Salafī expansion in South Asia and elsewhere. Hereby it was specifically the late Ottoman scholar Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī and his followers, as well as the South Asian Deobandī and Barelvī (i.e., Ahl-i Sunnat) masālik, which were identified as prime representatives of the contemporary Māturīdiyya. Finally, it is shown that the Salafī assault on the Māturīdiyya seems to have resulted in a revival of theological madh­hab‑consciousness, as well as in growing cooperation between Ḥanafī scholars in different parts of the Muslim world.