Najd before the Salafi Reform Movement Social, Political and Religious Conditions during the Three Centuries Preceding the Rise of the Saudi State by Uwaidah M. Al Juhany. (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, in association with the King Abdul Aziz Foundation for Research and Archives, Saudi Arabia, 2002. 223 pages.)

Abstract

As the Muslim world searches for the right formula for reform, scholars
and intellectuals are invited to study Islamic reform movements and the
conditions that made their successes possible. In this context, Najd before
the Salafi Reform Movement is a timely contribution to the literature on
social conditions of reform in Muslim societies. The author correctly notes
that pre-Salafi Najd (central Arabia) was neither a center of religious learning
nor the site of large urban communities, which might be expected to
produce a reform movement of a size and significance of the Salafi movement.
Nevertheless, the Salafi movement managed to establish a strong
state that unified Arabia and imposed peace and order on its people for the
first time since the period of the early caliphs (pp. 1-2).
This book, originally a Ph.D. dissertation, seeks to solve this puzzle.
A six-page bibliography and a thirteen-page index are suffixed, along with
several maps and tables, and both the Hijri and the Gregorian calendars are
used to mark the general time periods. This book is particularly useful for
students of history, sociology, anthropology, or genealogy in an earlymodern
context, such as that of Najd between the mid-ninth/fifteenth and
mid-twelfth/eighteenth centuries. The author argues that nomadic migration
and settlement; the growth of a sedentary population, as well as
migration and resettlement; and the growth of religious learning combined
to create a new Najdi society that produced the Salafi reform movement
(p. 2). Each of these factors is addressed in one chapter.
The first chapter, “The Geographical and Ecological Background,”
demonstrates how Najd’s geographical setting and climatic conditions
(viz., a desert region with an unpredictable climate) dictated its people’s
hard lifestyle and activities. For example, a persistant drought could turn a
settlement, a region, or even the entire emirate into a wasteland (pp. 36-37).
The second chapter, “An Historical Background,” surveys Najd’s inhabitants
at the rise of Islam and follows its demographic and political developments
throughout the first 9 centuries of the Islamic era. On the eve of
Islam, Najd was populous and prosperous; however, by the third/ninth ...