It is a truism in accounts of modern Islam that Saudi Arabia emerged as a serious global religious player during the second half of the twentieth century. Media reports and scholarly studies alike point to the firepower of the country's petrodollars, which managed singlehandedly to transform Muslim communities worldwide by pushing the “rigid” Wahhabi creed. Michael Farquhar takes issue with such lazy conceptualizations of Saudi influence in his masterful book Circuits of Faith. Instead, he provides a careful and nuanced study of the most important instrument for the spread of Salafism, the Islamic University of Medina (IUM). Founded in 1961, it has become alma mater to tens of thousands of international graduates. In order to make sense of the dynamics of transnational flows, manifested in the circulation of teachers and students, as well as “social technologies” such as pedagogical methods, the author develops a sophisticated concept of “transnational religious economies” (p. 16). What an education at the Islamic University meant was the acquisition of “spiritual capital”, which in itself is a permanently contested category. It hinges on the particular subcultural context in which a Muslim is based, but at the same time constitutes also a “medium of conflict … in that accumulation of capital increases one's authority to engage in disputation over the definition of correct belief and praxis” (pp. 12–3). Importantly, however, Farquhar does not take economic terminology too far. In his view, any attempt at translating material into spiritual wealth ceases to be a process that can be tightly controlled. This implies that what happened over the last decades can hardly be termed as a straightforward and deliberate export of a pure Wahhabi doctrine. Instead, the author suggests thinking of the end result as an “expansion” of the initially local tradition from Najd. The missionary project itself was transformed by appropriating persons, resources and discourses from outside the Wahhabi fold while also trying to cater to the diverse needs of religious actors around the world (p. 191).
Farquhar's first two chapters, of seven, provide an overview of the informal educational landscape of the Hijaz that began to be shaped by Ottoman attempts at bureaucratization and strong linkages to the Indian subcontinent. The Saudi conquest of 1925 by no means extinguished these limited reforms, even though the new rulers founded a Scholastic Saudi Institute (al-Maʿhad al-ʿilmī al-suʿūdī) in order to emphasize the “unadulterated Salafi creed” (p. 51). Yet, the employment of foreign and in particular Egyptian staff led the Institute to display quite some openness towards pedagogical innovation and ideas fashionable in Cairo at the time, hence presaging the IUM (pp. 64–5). Chapter 3 turns to the University itself, and demonstrates its character as a royal project that was not only supposed to shore up domestic religious legitimacy for the monarchy but that should also be seen within the context of the country's regional rivalry with Nasser's Egypt and later Iran under Khomeini.
Chapter 4–7 form the empirical and argumentative heart of the book. Drawing on a broad range of monographs and articles in Arabic as well as interviews with former students, it looks at the inner workings of the IUM. Farquhar underlines the importance of non-Saudi faculty in helping to get the institution off the ground. Exiled Muslim Brothers from the Arab world played a large role in this, but connections with Salafi movements in Egypt and South Asia were substantial too (pp. 97–8). The presence of these foreign scholars was crucial for lending legitimacy to an institution “which was intended to address the entire umma but which might otherwise have been easily dismissed as the pet project of a marginal group of scholars” (p. 100). While the sensitive classes on God's unicity (tawḥīd) as the core of Wahhabi doctrine remained in the hands of mostly Saudi teachers, fixed syllabi and bureaucratic controls made it possible to hire even those who did not wholeheartedly embrace the religious outlook of the Saudi state. This transnational composition of the faculty has only given way since the 1990s in the context of Saudization and tighter political control. Shifting to the perspective of the IUM's international student body, chapter 5 gives a detailed description of the University's strict pedagogical regime that operates with surveillance and fosters competition, a far cry from the forms of instruction dominant in mosques of the Arabian Peninsula in the early twentieth century (pp. 124–7). Away from the IUM campus, chapter 7 sheds light on the many ways in which graduates have made use of their spiritual capital. Some have established their own educational institutions in places like Yemen or the United States (pp. 171–2) or have even turned into public critics of the University and Wahhabism more broadly (p. 181).
Between these discussions stands the highly intriguing chapter 6, which tackles the important question of how the content of the taught Wahhabi corpus has shifted. Fiqh instruction in particular moved away between the 1960s and 1990s from an exclusive reliance on Hanbali manuals towards a more comparative approach (pp. 146–8). Farquhar offers only some speculative reasoning as to why this happened by pointing to the presence of South Asian Ahl-i Ḥadīth scholars, known for their strong opposition to taqlīd within Islamic law, in the IUM's Advisory Council and faculty (p. 150). Unfortunately, however, the reader does not get to hear the voices of these potential agents of change beyond official announcements and only when they expressed themselves in Arabic. A widening of the source base and a greater concern for intellectual history, manifested perhaps in a case study of how this new legal approach found its way into theses written by graduates, would have surely strengthened this aspect of the book's argument. One is also left wondering whether Farquhar does not in general overplay the transformative strength of outside influences. He is very clear, for example, that the doctrinal core of Wahhabism was fiercely guarded at the IUM (p. 143). Preserving a strict focus on Hanbali law was perhaps only a minor concern in comparison with the University's emphasis on religious polemics against “wayward” Muslim sects and other religions which its graduates were supposed to produce. The latter texts, however, are not further explored by Farquhar beyond some cursory references to articles in the IUM magazine (pp. 131–7).
Overall, this is an outstanding, engaging and very clearly argued work that goes a long way in putting the study of transnational Islam on a sophisticated theoretical footing. Farquhar does not neglect the important issue of power but manages to show that even a missionary project as lavishly funded as the IUM faces real limits to its global influence and is in no position simply to dictate a hegemonic discourse. The book's accessible style should make it attractive for students and specialists alike.
