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To the Editor:
I write in response to the review of my
book by Zoltan Pall of the National Universi-
ty of Singapore in The Middle East Journal,
Volume 69, Number 3 (Summer 2015), pp.
481–82. When previous books of mine have
been reviewed by The Middle East Journal,
the authors took the time to read the material
and pen an educated review. This is not the
case with Pall, who fails, apparently on pur-
pose, to even bother read the manuscript and
yet makes brazen imprudent claims.
The following are his points and my
responses:
1. He claims that I deal with Salafism as a
social movement; however I don’t ex-
plain how Salafism fit in the larger family
of social movements.
Had he read or paid attention to the
sentences in the same paragraph, he
would have found out that I specifically
stated that “the methodological approach
to the study will be qualitative, based on
detecting and examining patterns and
HTTP://DX.DOI.ORG/10.3751/70.1.5
MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL ✭ 177
shifts in Salafi ideology and praxis.” Fur-
ther down, I also explained the limits and
restrictions of applying the theories of
social movement.
2. He claims that I have a shallow under-
standing of Islam and Salafism and this
has caused factual errors. He writes
“One example among several is in his
description of the Islamic Unification
Movement (IUM, or Harakat al-Tawhid
al-Islami in Arabic), which ruled Tripoli
from 1983–1985 as a ‘movement with
a Salafi tint.’” He writes, “Rabil does
not seem to recognize that tawhid (the
unity of God) is a fundamental Islamic
concept; therefore its presence in IUM’s
name is no indication per se of Salafi
influence.”
No doubt, tawhid is a fundamental
Islamic concept. But Salafi application
of tawhid stands in sharp contrast to oth-
er schools of Islam. Significantly, had he
read the previous or following sentences,
he would have discovered why I called
IUM a hybrid Islamist movement that in-
cluded Salafi impulses. Significantly, this
has been made clear by Muhammad Abi
Samra, author of Tarablus [Tripoli], who
identified “IUM as Salafi movement, led
by a Salafi shaykh who sought to walk
in the footsteps of the pious ancestors.”1
3. He claims that “Rabil also provides
lengthy but superficial descriptions of
the ideology of the quietist Shaykh Sa‘d
al-Din al-Kibbi, and the haraki Zakariya
al-Masri. While he gives some informa-
tion about the former, he fails to provide
any background on Masri.”
I am at a loss how could someone
consider himself an academic and fail
to follow through on the ideologies of
the various schools of Salafism, which
comprise an essential part of the book.
Significantly, his assertion that I did not
provide a background on Masri is by it-
1. Muhammad Abi Samra, Tarabulus: Sahat
Allah wa-Mina’ al-Hadatha [Tripoli: God’s
Square and the Port of Modernity] (Beirut: Dar
Al Saqi, 2011), p. 155.
178 ✭ MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL
self an ample proof that he did not read
the manuscript. Masri’s background in-
formation is listed on p. 132fn68.
4) Then he claims that the last three chapters
are extremely unbalanced. Defending
this claim is beneath me. I suggest that if
he does not have the time to have an hon-
est and sober read of the manuscript, then
I recommend he reads the reviews of the
book by experts in the field.
The book was laudably reviewed by the
Australian journal Quadrant, Boston Col-
lege’s The Levantine Review, The Cam-
bridge Journal of International Affairs, and
last but not least by Al-Quds al-‘Arabi.
ROBERT G. RABIL, PH.D.
Zoltan Pall replies:
Professor Robert G. Rabil, in his re-
sponse to my review of his book Salafism
in Lebanon, suggests that I have not read
his book and purposefully put it in negative
light. I would not expect such accusations
from a scholar. Below I answer to the three
main points of his response letter.
Rabil fails to understand my first criti-
cism. I claim that despite dealing with
Salafism as a social movement he does
not explain how Salafism fits to the larger
family of social movements. He does not
contextualize Salafism within the aca-
demic debate on Salafism. Before doing
any qualitative analysis on Salafism as a
social movement and detect and examine
“patterns and shifts in Salafi ideology and
practice (p. 16)” we would need to under-
stand what kind of social movement Salaf-
ism is. For example, can it be classified as a
“New Social Movement” whose main aim
is changing the identity and customs of the
individual, or it would make more sense to
regard it as a conventional one, which tar-
gets the political or economic system?
Furthermore, on p. 16 Rabil claims that
the “theories of social movement have sig-
nificant limitations, preventing a compre-
hensive understanding of the nuances and
ideological overlaps within and among the
Salafi schools.” He suggests that social
movement theories are not completely ap-
plicable to Salafism because Salafis do not
belong to organizations and do not con-
sider themselves as members of a move-
ment. First, according to the literature the
existence of a social movement does not
presuppose the creation of organizations.
There is a vast academic debate on social
movements whose structure is fluid and
rely on interpersonal networks rather than
organizations,2 and in their ideology and
discourses are far from uniform. The an-
tiglobalization movement or various envi-
ronmental and feminist movements are ex-
cellent examples. The participants of these
do not consider themselves necessarily as
members of a single movement.
In the second point of his letter Rabil
refuses my criticism that he mistakenly as-
sociates the Islamic Unification Movement
(IUM, or Harakat al-Tawhid al-Islami)
with Salafism. He highlights a sentence in
my review: “Rabil does not seem to rec-
ognize that tawhid (the unity of God) is a
fundamental Islamic concept; therefore its
presence in IUM’s name is no indication
per se of Salafi influence.” However, he
fails to adequately explain why my criti-
cism is wrong. He simply claims that if I
had “read the previous or following sen-
tences,” I would have discovered why he
called IUM a hybrid Islamist movement
that included Salafi impulses.
Those sentences mostly contain cita-
tions from Sa‘id Sha‘ban, the founder of
IUM, such as “Our da’wa is the da’wa to
2. For example: Mario Diani, “The Con-
cept of Social Movement” in Readings in
Contemporary Political Sociology, ed. Kate
Nash (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), pp.
155–76; Clare Saunders, Environmental Net-
works and Social Movement Theory (London:
Bloomsbury, 2013); Nancy Whittier, Feminist
Generations: The Persistence of the Radical
Women’s Movement (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1995); Alberto Melucci, No-
mads of the Present: Social Movements and
Individual Needs in Contemporary Society,
eds. John Keane and Paul Mier (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1989).

hold onto the Book (Qur’an), the Sunna,
and unity of the group that adhered to the
Sunna,” (quoted on p.74) or,
we called upon all parties to dis-
mantle their organizations and
enter anew the religion of God.
Many parties and movements
responded. . . . We believe in
the return of the ummah to its
Qur’anic essentiality (authen-
ticity], we call upon our Islamic
world in its various regimes to
be united, and we call upon the
Muslims peoples to return to
one ummah (pp. 74–75).
Rabil fails to recognize that these state-
ments are not specific to Salafis. All mod-
ern Sunni Islamist movements (such as the
Muslim Brotherhood or Hizb ut-Tahrir)
in one way or another call the believers to
hold fast to the Qur’an and the Sunna and
set unifying the umma as a strategic aim.
Sa‘id Sha‘ban’s lambasting on Arab rul-
ers “for establishing jahili regimes (p.75)”
also does not necessarily indicate Salafi
influence. Neither Abul A‘la Maududi nor
Sayyid Qutb can be regarded as Salafi in the
contemporary understanding of the term,
although they first applied the “Jahiliyya”
concept in modern political context.
In his third point of attacking my re-
view he claims that contrary to what I stat-
ed he provided background information
about Shaykh Zakariya al-Masri. Indeed,
in footnote 68 on p. 132 he tells us the
birth date of the shaykh, some information
of his education and work in Lebanon in
three sentences. Yet this hardly helps us to
put Shaykh al-Masri in context, especially
because Rabil dedicates a whole chapter to
discussing his ideology. The reader would
wonder why is it important to focus on the
discourse of this specific shaykh, since the
author does not adequately clarify in the
beginning al-Masri’s position and signifi-
cance in Lebanon’s diverse haraki Salafi
networks. Even the footnote with the
shaykh’s extremely short biography comes
towards the end of the chapter.
ZOLTAN PALL
MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL ✭ 179
To the Editor:
Thank you for choosing to review my
book Reclaiming the Faravahar in The
Middle East Journal, Volume 69, Number
4 (Autumn 2015), pp. 633–34. The criti-
cisms that Professor Richard Foltz has lev-
eled against my work stem from the meth-
odological differences between his disci-
plines of history and religious studies, and
my disciplines of cultural anthropology and
ethnography. Consequently, Foltz does not
evaluate this work based on what it actu-
ally is. Instead, he dismisses it for what it is
not without engaging with any of its central
themes and arguments.
Foltz castigates my book for what he
considers to be its shortcomings as a re-
search project on “Zoroastrian history and
beliefs.” The book is, instead, an ethno-
graphic study of the contemporary Zo-
roastrians’ interpretation of their history
and, more importantly, of the actual reli-
gious practices through which they give
expression to their beliefs. Therefore, in
providing an ethnography of a religious
minority, the book investigates the histori-
cal consciousness of average Zoroastrians
in today’s Tehran and furnishes a thick de-
scription and detailed analysis of the reli-
gious space they inhabit. This includes the
ways in which Zoroastrians understand,
discuss, and narrate their historical beliefs
and rituals, whether or not these are “prob-
lematic” or accurate from a historian’s
perspective. As such, following the We-
berian value-free sociological tradition,
my work in no way tries to evaluate the
history or the belief system of the Zoroas-
trians. Nevertheless, the book juxtaposes
their contemporary understanding of the
past to that of the scholarly textual his-
tories while accounting for the influence
of the regnant Shi‘a majority. This ethno-
graphic approach to history highlights, for
instance, the ways in which Zoroastrians
address their present-day monotheism in
relation to a historical dualism, or justify
the modification of the old rituals and the
development of new ones.
Similarly, Foltz disparages as common-
place the notion that minorities use their ritu-
als in order to remain distinctive. However,
180 ✭ MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL

establishing this fact is by no means the main preliminary matters of secondary impor-
contention of the book. The primary aim is, tance that have no relevance to the main
rather, to provide an analysis of how these contents and arguments of the book either.
rituals are historically, theologically, and po- Though even here there are inaccuracies.
litically informed and adjusted in the Zoroas- For instance, nowhere in the book do I refer
trian’s present marginalized lifeworld. Foltz to the Ahl-e Haqq as a “Muslim” or “Sufi”
“wonders how deliberately today Zoroastri- group. Nevertheless, contrary to Foltz, I
ans are busily constructing an alternate iden- would not consider their diverse communi-
tity or whether they are simply being their ties categorically as “non-Muslim” either.
non-Muslim selves just as they always have
been throughout their history” (p. 634). The NAVID FOZI
question of identity construction in fact con-
stitutes a main content of the study. Unlike Richard Foltz was offered the opportunity to
Foltz, however, I do not assume a socially respond, but declined.
isolated and historically static Zoroastrian
religious self and identity. Rather, my book
offers many instances in which members of
the community consciously and continuous-
ly express their differences from the domi-
nant Shi‘a: for example, in wearing white on
occasions of death as opposed to the Shi‘i
black, promoting gender equality while criti-
cizing the Shi‘a patriarchy, and emphasizing
Zoroastrian love for jubilation in contrast to
the mournful Shi‘i demeanor.
Foltz’s misunderstanding of anthropo-
logical research methods also leads him to
refer to the pages I dedicate to challenges
of positioning myself as an ethnographer
within, and gaining access to, the Zoroas-
trian community, as mere “complaints.” In
contrast to history and religious studies, it
is important for ethnographers to convey
to readers how their own social, political,
and religious identities mediate their rela-
tions to the informants and the knowledge
they produce. Such autobiographical and
relational discussions are important because
they help the readers gain an understanding
of the ethnographer’s possible biases as well
as the challenges and limitations involved in
conducting an ethnographic investigation.
That until my study no one had been able
to undertake ethnographic research on the
Zoroastrian communities in post-1979 Iran
bears a testimony to the preponderance of
these challenges and limitations, which
themselves require some analysis.
Accordingly, half of the Foltz review has
regrettably become a victim of the disciplin-
ary difference without engaging the central
themes of the book. It is unfortunate that he
has devoted the other half of his review to