About

Henri Lauzière (Ph.D., Georgetown University, 2008) is an associate professor in the Department of History at Northwestern University. His research interests lie at the intersection of Islamic intellectual history and the political history of Arab societies in the modern Middle East and North Africa. Lauzière's first book, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century, traces the history of Salafism as a concept and challenges long-standing narratives within the secondary literature. The book uses the intellectual journey of Moroccan religious scholar Taqi al-Din al-Hilali to illuminate the changing conceptions of Islamic reform over the last century, highlighting the shift from Islamic modernism to a form of Islamic purism that is arch-conservative. Lauzière joined Northwestern University after a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies, where he studied the Middle East since the First World War. He received his undergraduate degree in history from Université Laval in Quebec City and a master's from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. His scholarly work and teaching focus on Islamic thought, Arab intellectual production, and the political developments within the modern Middle East and North Africa.

Research topics

• Political Science
• History
• Geography
• Law
• Ethnology

Selected publications

• The earliest demarcations between Salafis and Wahhabis, and what we can learn from them

  Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society · 2026-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract On both sides of the Mediterranean, the first substantial attempts at distinguishing Salafis from Wahhabis took place in the aftermath of the First World War. Examining why this process occurred and how it unfolded provides valuable historical insights, especially into the initial conceptualisations of Salafism. In post-war Europe, the newly invented notion of a so-called Salafi movement emerged for intellectual and political reasons as a foil to the Wahhabi movement—of which it was supposed to represent the good twin. In Arab societies, it was the popularisation and conceptual expansion of the word ‘Salafi’ that eventually caused some Muslims to distinguish it from ‘Wahhabi’ in the late 1920s and allowed others to use ‘Salafi’ as a synonym for ‘Wahhabi’. In each of these cases, the criteria that past intellectuals employed to demarcate the two categories (or not) help us to infer how they understood Salafism and why they outlined its history or its genealogy in the way that they did.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Acknowledgements

  Manchester University Press eBooks · 2022

  • Political Science
  • History
  • Political Science

  A collection of essays about the Colonial Medical Service of Africa in which a group of distinguished colonial historians illustrate the diversity and active collaborations to be found in the untidy reality of government medical provision. The authors present important case studies in a series of essays covering former British colonial dependencies in Africa, including Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zanzibar. These studies reveal many new insights into the enactments of colonial policy and the ways in which colonial doctors negotiated the day-to-day reality during the height of Imperial rule in Africa. The book provides essential reading for scholars and students of colonial history, medical history and colonial administration.

  DOI

• Salafism against Hadith Literature

  Journal of the American Oriental Society · 2021-06-10

  article1st authorCorresponding

  
 
 
 This article examines the lexical emergence of salafiyya (used in the sense of Salafism) in the Algerian press between 1925 and 1927, which currently constitutes the earliest known use of this abstract noun in Arabic. An attentive reading of the sources reveals that, since it was a new category, it had not yet an established meaning. The task of outlining its definition and features fell to the reformers who first used it. One of them, Abū Yaʿlā al-Zawāwī (d. 1952), did so in a way that defies today’s conventional thinking: he laid claim to Salafism while disparaging the Sunna and attempting to reduce the authority of hadith literature. The article shows that the core intellectual features we routinely associate with Salafism were not necessarily embraced by the historical actors who used this term at its inception in the mid-1920s. This has implications for the proper historicization of Salafism as a category.
 
 

  PublisherDOI

• L’histoire du salafisme: ses pièges et ses mythes

  2017-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Islamic Nationalism through the Airwaves: Taqī al-Dīn al-Hilālī’s Encounter with Shortwave Radio, 1937–39

  Die Welt des Islams · 2016-04-19 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article examines the connection between shortwave radio technology and the rise of “Islamic nationalism” through the experiences of Taqī al-Dīn al-Hilālī (1894–1987). A Moroccan exile in Nazi Germany, al-Hilālī wrote extensively about shortwave broadcasting in the Egyptian press and became one of the first Arab speakers on Radio Berlin. He left behind a body of evidence that provides a rare window into the political and religious thought of an avid radio listener turned on-air commentator. A close study of this material reveals that radio technology paved the way for al-Hilālī’s articulation of Islamic nationalism, a concept that only came of age in the 1930s. Inspired by the new medium and its capacity to reach a mass audience in real time, al-Hilālī envisioned the umma as a modern “nation” that could be mobilized to defeat colonialism. The article thus argues that radio, like print, was an agent of ideological change.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab</i>. By Michael Crawford. London: Oneworld Publications, 2014. Pp. vii + 152. £30 (cloth).

  Journal of Near Eastern Studies · 2016-09-26

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Rejoinder: What We Mean Versus What They Meant by “Salafi”: A Reply to Frank Griffel

  Die Welt des Islams · 2016-04-19 · 12 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2015-12-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Extract A few years ago Professor Benjamin Braude of the history department at Boston College shared with me the memory of an event that took place at Harvard University in fall 1965. During an undergraduate tutorial on Middle Eastern history with distinguished historian L. Carl Brown, Braude and his fellow classmates were discussing Albert Hourani’s now famous book Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age–perhaps the most widely read book on modern Islamic reformers in a European language. In the course of their discussion, Brown asked the class about the salafiyya movement, or Salafism. The question prompted blank looks from the students. Brown was surprised that, despite reading Hourani’s masterpiece, they did not know the term. How could they have missed it? At that point, they pulled out the text and went through it. As it turned out, the term salafiyya was not listed in the index and seemed absent from the book as a whole. The students felt reassured, but Brown was puzzled. He had come to think of Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age as a monograph dealing with salafiyya and was so convinced of the centrality of this notion to Hourani’s work that he had failed to notice this was not the case. It never occurred to him that the book might not conform to his conceptual expectations. Undeterred by the absence of the term, Brown proceeded to rectify Hourani’s omission. When the discussion resumed, he explained that salafiyya was the name by which the Muslim reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries referred to their movement of Islamic modernism.

  PublisherDOI

• Rashid Rida’s Rehabilitation of the Wahhabis and Its Consequences

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2015-12-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter 2 focuses on Rashid Rida’s campaign for the rehabilitation of Wahhabism in the 1920s, which brought Taqi al-Din al-Hilali and other disciples of Rida to the Saudi state in an effort to assist and moderate the most intransigent Wahhabis.

  PublisherDOI

• Purist Salafism in the Age of Islamic Nationalism

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2015-12-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter 3 shows that the gradual and at times hesitant conceptualization of Salafism mirrored the dilemmas that reformers faced between the 1930s and 1950s. It thus traces the rise of purist Salafism in conjunction with the rise of Islamic nationalism.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Shannon L. Fogg

  Missouri University of Science and Technology

  16 shared

• Kate Fullagar

  Australian Catholic University

  16 shared

• Peter C. Hayes

  University of Limerick

  16 shared

• Paula Blaskovits

  The Ohio State University

  16 shared

• James R. Bartholomew

  The Ohio State University

  16 shared

• Patrick Clastres

  University of Lausanne

  16 shared

• Sarah Maza

  Northwestern University

  16 shared

• Keith Makoto Woodhouse

  16 shared

Labs

• Material History LabPI

Awards & honors

• Weinberg Distinguished Teaching Award (2015)