Sources and Agents of Religious Reform

Abstract

Abstract Changes in Damascene ulama’s status constituted one stimulus for subjecting prevailing religious beliefs and practices to reexamination. An additional stimulus came from their interaction with Islamic intellectual trends originating outside Damascus. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries religious reform movements that sprang up throughout the Muslim world appeared to represent a ubiquitous urge to revive "true" Islamic beliefs and practices.1 The “WahhiibI” movement in Arabia is the best-known example of the early modem religious reform movements (its first phase lasted from 1744 until 1818). Scholars have traced the roots of reform movements from West Africa to India to the Wahhiibts’ influence on ulama from those lands who visited Medina and Mecca and returned home imbued with WahhabI ideas. The question of whether the Arabian reform movement influenced Damascene ulama arises because of the Wahhiibts’ proximity to Syria and because Syrian opponents of religious reform accused the salafis of propagating Wahhabism. Another possible source of influence on Damascene salafis lay to the east in Baghdad, where the AliisI family of ulama led a reform movement in the nineteenth century.