About Henri

Henri Lauzière is Associate Professor of modern Middle Eastern history at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. His research interests lie at the intersection of Islamic intellectual history and the political history of Arab societies in both the modern Middle East and North Africa. His first book, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), traces the history of Salafism as a category and argues against the long-standing but largely mythical narratives of salafiyya embedded in the secondary literature since 1919. The book also uses the intellectual journey of Taqi al-Din al-Hilali (1894-1987), a Moroccan religious scholar and globetrotter, to illuminate and explain the changing conceptions of Islamic reform that underpinned different ideas about Salafism among Muslim activists from North Africa to India over the course of the last century.

His current book project is about the history of another abstraction that gained unprecedented momentum on a global scale in the modern period–namely, reason. The existing literature generally presents the story of reason in modern Islam as a mirror image of the moderately triumphalist narrative of the Enlightenment. Instead of an inspiring story of progress, scholars often tell a story of a decline in rationality that culminates in the rise of obscurantist, illiberal, and antirationalist religious ideologies alternatively identified as “Islamism,” “fundamentalism,” “Salafism” or “Jihadism.” The book project challenges this narrative by revisiting how key Muslim Arab intellectuals from Egypt to the eastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula conceived of and deployed rationality from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. Its main argument is that the modern intellectual developments which scholars rightly or wrongly consider regressive should not be attributed to a decline of, or an oppo­sition to, rationality. On the contrary, the ultimate authority of reason in the modern period prompted, facilitated and gave credence to much of these developments. Contemporary scholars who subscribe to the narrative of rational regress like to praise early Muslim scientists and philosophers who, they claim, followed reason wherever it took them. In the modern era, it just so happens that reason took many Muslim intellectuals to places that these contemporary analysts consider antithetical to intellectual, social, and political progress. One may not like the outcome, but to dismiss the process as a violation of reason paints a skewed picture of the Arab intellec­tual scene. Thus, Beyond Doubt seeks to shed more light on how Muslim actors made sense of new epistemological expectations and how they tried to meet them.