Framing Orthodoxy and Contesting Power: Al-Ahbash, Wahhabism, and the Transnational Struggle for Islamic Authority

M. Irfan Wahid

doi:10.21580/ws.33.2.25879

Authors

M. Irfan Wahid Universitas Islam Negeri Palangka Raya, Indonesia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21580/ws.33.2.25879

Keywords:

Al-Ahbash, Governmental Islam, Religious Authority, Takfir, Transnational Islam, Religious Moderation, Wahhabism

Abstract

Al-Ahbash, the movement that runs Lebanon’s Association of Islamic Charitable Projects (AICP), is usually described either as a small Lebanese sect or as a Sufi-leaning “moderate” alternative to Salafism. This article reads its long quarrel with the Wahhabiyya differently: as a dispute over who may define Sunni orthodoxy. It asks how the movement frames orthodoxy, how it obtains legitimacy, and how it moves across borders. The study compares Lebanon, Ethiopia and Indonesia, with Malaysia as a contrasting case. It applies framing analysis and critical discourse analysis to al-Ahbash treatises, Salafi-Wahhabi counter-polemics, official rulings and secondary scholarship from 1983 to 2024, drawing on Gramsci’s writing on intellectuals and hegemony, on boundary-making theory, and on debates about transnational Islam. Al-Ahbash uses takfir (declaring a Muslim an unbeliever) and tahdhir (religious warning) to turn the usual direction of theological exclusion against its Wahhabi rivals, and in doing so adopts much the same juristic vocabulary as they do. Its authority has been built together with states that want a manageable Islam, notably Lebanon under Syrian tutelage and Ethiopia in 2011–2012. These alliances opened doors but also provoked backlash and left the movement dependent on its patrons. Abroad, its Ash‘ari-Shafi‘i-Sufi message travels best where it echoes local tradition and worst where a state religious bureaucracy already claims that tradition as its own. The article proposes the term strategic traditionalism for this pattern. It shows that exclusionary boundary-making is not peculiar to puritan movements, and so adds to critical work on the politics of religious moderation and on state-managed Islam.

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