In the Shade of the Sunna

Salafis explicitly base their legitimacy on continuity with the Quran and the Sunna, and their distinctive practicespraying in shoes, wearing long beards and short pants, and observing gender segregationare 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 of Salafis' competition with other social movements amid the intellectual and social upheavals of modernity. In the Shade of the Sunna thus takes readers beyond the surface claims of Salafism's own proponentsand the academics who often repeat theminto the larger sociocultural and intellectual forces that have shaped Islam's fastest growing revivalist movement.