DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  Middle Eastern and North African History

Thematic Field(s):  Religious History

Principal Research Interest(s):  Modern Middle East and North Africa; Islamic Intellectual History; Salafism

Biography

Henri Lauzière (Ph.D., Georgetown, 2008) is Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History and works primarily within the subfield of Islamic intellectual history. His first book, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 2016), traces the history of Salafism (al-salafiyya in Arabic), which, at the time of writing, was still beset by an apparent paradox: why does this concept refer to both a movement of Islamic modernism that allegedly dates from the late nineteenth century and a movement of Sunni ultra-orthodoxy that allegedly dates from the classical period? How can we tell the history of Salafism if it simultaneously stands for two different and largely incompatible approaches to Islam? The book argues that the answer lies not in using established definitions of Salafism and trying to work our way backwards, but in reconstituting the history of its conceptualization and working our way forward. This approach reveals that the lexical emergence of Salafism is more recent than commonly believed, that its meaning took more time to develop and crystallize than one might suspect, that its modernist definition owed far more to European Orientalists than to Muslim scholars, and that, for over ninety years, its misconstruction skewed the narrative of modern Islamic thought. Lauzière is now writing a second book on the use and misuse of an equally abstract but more familiar notion—reason—for producing historical narratives. Much of the research for this project took place in Cairo, Riyadh, Dubai, and Sharjah, thanks to a twelve-month fellowship at New York University in Abu Dhabi.

Publications

• The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 2016).
• “The Earliest Demarcations Between Salafis and Wahhabis, and What We Can Learn from Them,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 36 (2026): 173-207.
• “Salafism against Hadith Literature: The Curious Beginnings of a New Category in 1920s Algeria,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 141 (2021): 403-25.
• “Islamic Nationalism Through the Airwaves: Taqī al-Dīn al-Hilālī’s Encounter with Shortwave Radio, 1937-39,” Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016): 6-33.

Recent Awards and Honors

• Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2025)
• Senior Humanities Research Fellow for the Study of the Arab World, New York University in Abu Dhabi (2023-2024)
• Alumnae of Northwestern Teaching Professor (2020-2023)
• ASG Faculty Honor Roll (2011-2012, 2019-2020)