IS ISLAM EASY TO UNDERSTAND OR NOT?: SALAFIS, THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF INTERPRETATION AND THE NEED FOR THE ULEMA JONATHAN A. C. BROWN University of Johannesburg INTRODUCTION Addressing its audience in the north Indian lingua franca of Urdu, the eighteenth-century Ahl-e Hadis manifesto Taqwiyat al-;m:n explains that, ‘to comprehend the Quran and Hadith does not require much learning, for the Prophet was sent to show the straight path to the unwise’. 1 In India and Pakistan, this short treatise has been widely read in a variety of circles since it was penned almost two hundred years ago. First distributed in cheap printings and now available online, it remains one of the most accessible religious texts to lay Muslims in South Asia. 2 Written by the famous Indian Muslim scholar Sh:h Ism:6;l al-Shah;d (d. 1831), it condemns as heretical activities such as the visitation of saints’ graves. It also challenges directly the station of the ulema, the majority of whom had long defended such practices. Today, in response to controversial fatwas or the misguided actions of extremist groups, Muslim ulema and laity alike often blame insufficiently educated pseudo-scholars for twisting the true teachings of the Qur8:n and the Prophet. Violence and backwardness, it is held, are the predictable results of calls like that of Sh:h Ism:6;l, which declare that the interpretive tradition of the ulema can be dispensed with and Islam’s scriptures interpreted directly. Mainstream Sunni ulema often level this 1 Sh:h Ism:6;l al-Shah;d, Taqwiyat al-;m:n (Riyadh: Daftar bar:-yi dav6 at va tav6 iyat, 2006), 37. 2 Barbara D. Metcalf, ‘The Taqwiyyat al-iman (Support of the Faith) by Shah Isma6 il al-Shahid’ in (Metcalf (ed.) Islam in South Asia: In Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 202–3. ß The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Published online 10 December 2014 Journal of Islamic Studies 26:2 (2015) pp. 117–144 doi:10.1093/jis/etu081 at Georgetown University on June 20, 2015 http://jis.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from