In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East

Salafis explicitly base their legitimacy on continuity with the Quran and the Sunna, and their distinctive practices-praying in shoes, wearing long beards and short pants, and observing gender segregation-are understood to have a similarly ancient pedigree. In this book, however, Aaron Rock-Singer draws from a range of media forms as well as traditional religious texts to demonstrate that Salafism is a creation of the twentieth century and that its signature practices emerged primarily out ...