Richard Gauvain's latest book investigates ritual purity (tahara) in Salafi practice through ethnographic material collected in Cairo between 2006 and 2009. Making ritual purity the pivot of his analysis is well grounded. Salafism and purity, as Gauvain writes, are “natural bedfellows”: Contemporary Salafism's focus on everyday social conduct coupled with Salafis’ emphasis on individual virtue as the key to a pious society make ritual purity a rich topic for analysis.
Gauvain aims to read Salafi purity-related rituals, and specifically tahara and wuduʿ (minor ablution), which the author sees as often-disregarded aspects of Salafism, as they “absorb, reflect, and generate dominant religio-social concerns” (16). That is, Gauvain reads them as instruments for practitioners to reach ethical and moral goals and, at the same time, as expressions of social structure.
Salafi Ritual Purity is divided in three parts. Part One details the book's theoretical (chapter 1) and methodological (chapter 2) frameworks. Part Two illustrates the results of Gauvain's Cairo fieldwork delving into “the spiritual potential of ritual purity” (17), and the theoretical Sunni discussions about ritual impurities and their practical manifestation in the working class Salafi areas in the city's Shubra district (chapters 3 and 4). In chapter 5 Gauvain elucidates the results of his interviews with a number of Salafi women studying at AUC (American University in Cairo). Finally, Gauvain dedicates Part Three to the post-2011 socio-political developments in Egypt, in which Salafi groups strive to find a new place.
Especially fascinating are Gauvain's analyses of the spiritual meaning and tangible implications of ritual purity and purity rituals as discerned from men's courses in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) that the author attended. Here Gauvain emphasizes Salafis’ correlating the cleansing of the body through wuduʿ, and the purification of both horizontal impurities (i.e., misconducts towards other human beings that hinder the well-being of the community) and vertical wrongs (i.e., immoral acts affecting the believer's relationship with God). In Gauvain's words, the physical purification of wuduʿ “is a key strategy for cleansing one's heart of specific moral impurities [. . .]” (84).
In the last chapter of the book Gauvain extends his analysis to the January 2011 uprising. In particular, Gauvain links Mary Douglas’ concept of purity/impurity with the marking of strict boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims. Thought-provoking also are Gauvain's final remarks about the uncertain future of “the Salafi shaykh” as a “liminal persona” (ostensibly aloof from corruption, politics, and ordinary affairs) at the dawn of Salafi political involvement.
Gauvain's work certainly brings to the forefront a neglected dimension of ritual analysis. Nevertheless, a few analytical weaknesses bear comment. First, Gauvain draws on the “language of heart purity” in Shubra tahara lessons to argue for the influence of Sufism on modern Egyptian Salafism. Yet “the language of heart purity,” as Gauvain rightly states, originates in the Qurʾan and Sunna and is not a uniquely Sufi discourse, although being one of its central concepts. Second, Gauvain's reading of the liminal Salafi shaykh, while intriguing, remains embryonic rather than fully developed. Finally, chapter 5, which contains the narratives of Gauvain's women informants, is admittedly less detailed than the previous two chapters on men's Shubra groups. In the introduction, Gauvain rightly asserts that “[t]he chapter was written in the knowledge that both Salafism and ritual purity are rarely described in terms that do not imply gender hierarchization” (18). However, given that Gauvain acknowledges the difficulty of accessing Salafi women's circles in Shubra, its inclusion is puzzling. Readers might have benefitted more from an in-depth analysis of masculinity and gender relations within the Shubra men's circles.
That said, Gauvain's book remains an excellent ethnographic report of the practical, everyday working of an underexplored side of Islamic law, the ritual purity code. Moreover, it opens the doors for a more detailed research on the relations between Salafism and Sufism. Finally, Gauvain's interest in the use of purity language after the 2011 revolution raises interesting questions for scholars in the field of Christian-Muslim relations, as he briefly frames their sometimes hostile interactions in terms of purity-related community boundaries.
