Interview with Hoover Fellow Cole Bunzel

We spoke with Hoover Fellow Cole Bunzel about his intellectual journey and his work.

Could you share your intellectual journey and what ultimately brought you to Stanford?

I was drawn to the study of the Middle East largely because it was an area of immense topical interest during my college years (2004–08) and I aspired to a career in government service. I was always torn, however, between my interest in government and policy and my more academic interest in Middle Eastern and Islamic history. As an undergraduate at Princeton, I studied Arabic intensively and majored in Near Eastern Studies, after which I spent a year studying advanced Arabic in Damascus, Syria, as a fellow with the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA). Still thinking I would pursue a career in government, I moved to Washington, DC, to work at a think tank and completed an MA in International Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), also working part-time at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). My experience in government wasn’t inspiring, and my teacher at SAIS, Fouad Ajami, suggested I consider a career in academia, which led me back to Princeton where I completed my Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies in 2018.

At Princeton for the second time, I became enamored of two subjects in particular: (i) the history and present of militant Islamist movements including al-Qaida and the Islamic State, and (ii) the history of Saudi Arabia, especially the controversial Wahhabi movement that arose in tandem with the Saudi dynasty. I spent much of my time in these years (2012–18) following the social media of jihadi groups (first password-protected forums, then Twitter and Telegram) and writing occasional pieces on jihadi developments for the website Jihadica.com. This led to a more in-depth study of the ideology of the Islamic State published by the Brookings Institution in 2015 (From Paper State to Caliphate: The Ideology of the Islamic State).

Meanwhile, I was conducting research in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere on the history of Wahhabism, which I gradually learned was a subject on which much work remained to be done. There was also a connection here with jihadism, as Wahhabi texts and ideas were fundamental to jihadi ideology as it developed from the 1980s onward. My initial plan was to write my dissertation on a single Wahhabi scholar, Sulayman ibn Sihman (c. 1849–1930), who had lived through and who documented in poetry and prose a tumultuous period in Saudi history. Yet the more documents I discovered, the more I came to the view that a more comprehensive treatment of the subject was needed. This included numerous manuscripts from the eighteenth century revealing little-known details about the early development of the Wahhabi movement, such as anti-Wahhabi refutations by Muslim scholars in Iraq, the Hijaz, and Yemen. My reading of these documents, in addition to the published corpus of Wahhabi sources, much of it neglected in previous studies, led me to write a new history of Wahhabism from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century, when the modern Saudi kingdom was founded, together with a new assessment of the Wahhabi doctrine, namely the religious thought of the movement’s founder, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (c. 1703–92). A much-revised version of the dissertation was published by Princeton University Press in 2023 as Wahhābism: The History of a Militant Islamic Movement.

In short, the book demonstrates that the character of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s movement was from the beginning intolerant and incendiary. When the preacher launched his movement for the reform of Islam in central Arabia in 1741, he essentially condemned the mainstream practices and beliefs of Islam as akin to the polytheistic beliefs and practices of the pagan Arabs among whom the Prophet Muhammad preached in the seventh century. The principal target of his ire was the popular rituals surrounding grave visitation, in central Arabia as elsewhere in the Muslim world. Drawing on the ideas of the fourteenth-century Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), he considered these rituals to be polytheism (shirk) and those partaking in them to be polytheists (mushrikun). He urged a return to the foundational Islamic concept of monotheism (tawhid), which for him meant directing all worship to God alone without partner. Appealing to dead saints and holy men for help in this life or the hereafter amounted to assigning partners to God in worship. The movement, as I show, grew more aggressive and militant as it developed, threatening, by the early nineteenth century, the Ottoman provinces of Iraq and Syria with jihad on the basis of eliminating the alleged polytheism in their lands.

After a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Law School’s Program in Islamic Law and Civilization, I came to Stanford in 2019 as a “Hoover Fellow” at the Hoover Institution, this being a new position modeled on the lines of a junior professorship without teaching requirements. Hoover, as an academic think tank, fit me well given my parallel interests in policy-relevant research on the Middle East and the deeper history of the region.

During your time here, what were the main areas of focus in your research, and how did you engage with the Stanford community to share your work?

In addition to the work revising my book for publication, my research at Stanford has focused on different topics relating to Islamism and Saudi Arabia. I have written pieces about developments in jihadism, including for Foreign Affairs, as well as more academic journal articles and book chapters covering such things as the ideology of Hamas, the 1979 takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by millenarian zealots, al-Qaida’s strategic failure in Syria after the Arab Spring, and the radical transformation of Saudi Arabia being undertaken by Crown Prince Mohammed ibn Salman (MBS). As for engaging with the Stanford community, among other things I have given talks at Hoover and other parts of Stanford, I have taught an undergraduate class on Islamic political thought, and I have been the “faculty leader” of a Stanford Travel/Study trip to Saudi Arabia in 2023.

Your recent Abbasi Program book talk on Wahhabism has drawn significant attention on YouTube. What first sparked your interest in Wahhabism—and, more broadly, Islamic intellectual history?

My interest in Wahhabism was first sparked by coming across numerous references to Wahhabi ideas and scholars in the ideological literature of the Sunni jihadism movement—that is, the movement associated with al-Qaida and the Islamic State. For instance, one of the foundational texts in the jihadi canon, a short book called Millat Ibrahim (The Religion of Abraham) by the Jordanian-Palestinian Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, is in large part a series of quotations from Wahhabi scholars from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, all making essentially the same point: all forms of worship are due to God exclusively, and all that contravenes this principle of tawhid warrants excommunication (takfir), enmity (‘adawa), and jihad. Why did the jihadis draw so heavily on the Wahhabi tradition? That was the first question I asked, which led to more scrutiny of the Wahhabi tradition itself. As noted above, I found that much work remained to be done in reconstructing the history of this movement and taking apart its doctrine, and that is essentially what I set out to do in my dissertation and book. My starting point was the mystery of how this movement could be claimed simultaneously by the official religious scholars in Saudi Arabia and by the militant jihadis of the Islamic State and beyond.

My work on Wahhabism led to deeper study of the intellectual sources behind it, namely the religious thought of the controversial Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyya and his student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350). Much of the book, in fact, involves a careful assessment of this earlier strand of thought on which Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab so freely drew, and meticulous comparison of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s approach to tawhid, takfir, al-wala’ wa-l-bara’ (association and dissociation), and jihad. The long and short of it is that Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab depended heavily in his preaching and writing on Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim but took their ideas in a decidedly more radical direction.

Concerning the attention to my Abbasi lecture on YouTube, I think a lot of this is due to the fact that Wahhabism remains a highly contested subject in the Muslim world. Much of the debate one finds in the YouTube commentary, as in other Muslim commentary on the book, is between those who either despise Wahhabism as a fanatical and intolerant version of Islam that has wielded a pernicious influence on the faith in the modern world and those who revere the founder of Wahhabism as a great reformer who stands accused of a host of sins of which he is undoubtedly innocent. The debate echoes the numerous and highly charged polemical exchanges between the Wahhabis and their opponents in the eighteenth century and afterwards, but it is not one I wrote the book with a view to influencing or engaging in.

The book is intended as neither pro- nor anti-Wahhabi, and careful readers will I hope appreciate that. I do not, for instance, credit all the accusations leveled against Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab by his detractors, such as the idea that he claimed the ability to undertake ijtihad, or independent legal reasoning (he did not). I also acknowledge that some of his enemies were intent on killing him well before the Wahhabis had engaged in violence themselves. In general, however, the portrait of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab and his movement that emerges from my book does not favor the apologetic view—Wahhabism was, on my showing, aggressively intolerant to the point of waging jihad against professed Muslims on the grounds of fighting polytheists and eradicating shirk—and to that extent contemporary critics of Wahhabism may find here some justification for their views.

I remember earlier Orientalists, and even some contemporary scholars, who have likened Wahhabism to Christian Puritanism, suggesting that it represents a reformist current in Islam that might ultimately catalyze positive social change. How do you view such comparisons?

I think it’s natural for people to reason by analogy with what is familiar. The early European writers on Wahhabism, many of whom were travelers in Arabia, indeed tended to view Wahhabism as analogous to Protestantism, in part because both the Protestants and the Wahhabis opposed saint veneration and placed a great emphasis on the foundational religious canon. The analogy is not entirely wrong, but I don’t think it can tell us a great deal about Wahhabism beyond such points of commonality. Often it says more about the person making the comparison. Many of these observers were devout Protestants themselves, so in seeing something of their own faith in Wahhabism they were projecting a positive quality onto a movement about which they in fact knew quite little.

While working on your book project, what did you find most striking or unexpected? How do you see your work contributing to our understanding of contemporary Muslim political thought?

One of the most striking discoveries to me concerned the way Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s movement developed over time. One of my teachers at Princeton, Michael Cook, wrote in a seminal article from 1992 (“On the Origins of Wahhābism”) that in the mid-eighteenth century the young preacher “experienced something like a conversion,” whereupon “he considered most of the professed Muslims of his day to be polytheists who should be fought till they accepted Islam.” Cook was referring to an early epistle by Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab in which he declared that none of his teachers or anyone in central Arabia before him had understood the meaning of tawhid, and in which he referred to his own knowledge of tawhid as a unique “blessing” bestowed upon him by God. But what I learned from other sources is that initially Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab did not promote violence. He did declare his knowledge as God-given, but he did not set out, at least not initially, to convert the masses by violent means. At the outset, there was no jihad in the military sense. Rather, as I learned from rare manuscripts dating to the 1740s that preserve some of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s earliest writings, what he called for initially was for true believers to confront the alleged polytheists among them with “hatred” and “enmity,” in other words to antagonize and stigmatize them as polytheists destined for hellfire. In this Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab drew on the example of the Prophet Abraham in the Quran (60:4), as well as that of the Prophet Muhammad’s contentious preaching in Mecca that led one of the Meccans to say of him, “[He] has reviled our gods, denounced our religion, derided our traditional values, and told us that our forefathers were misguided.” In the early phase of his preaching, then, Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab saw himself, in his mission to revive and restore Islam to its proper foundations, as following the example of the Prophet Muhammad in the non-violent (but nonetheless provocative and antagonistic) phase of his preaching. It was only after Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab moved to al-Dir‘iyya, the home of the Al Saud dynasty, and became associated with an embryonic state, that he endorsed jihad against the opponents of his mission. In al-Dir‘iyya, in other words, he had graduated to the Medinan phase of the Prophet’s career, advocating jihad against the alleged polytheists in his midst. This development in the career of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab and in the trajectory of Wahhabism was one of the more notable discoveries, as it led me to conclude that the Wahhabis were to a large extent following what they saw as the warpath of the early Islamic state.

As regards Muslim political thought, it has been alleged that Wahhabism was essentially not political in its origins, even that it was manipulated to political ends by the Al Saud. There is some basis for this argument in the fact that Wahhabi scholars did not pontificate on political theory. The consistent focus of their scholarship was tawhid and shirk and the effort to enforce the distinction between the two. But in practice, as I seek to show, Wahhabism was by no means apolitical. Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, according to the earliest available evidence, was intimately involved in matters of state, and as indicated before he justified the expansion of the Saudi state as jihad for the sake of eradicating shirk. The political mission of the early Saudi state accorded quite well with the ethos of early Wahhabism. But again the Wahhabis produced practically nothing in the way of political theory, which I think goes some way in explaining how Wahhabism can be utilized by such divergent actors as the jihadis and the Saudi royals.

Can it be said that Wahhabis traditionally subscribed to political quietism toward their rulers unless the latter committed egregious violations of God’s laws — and that this is what has driven their recent turn toward jihadism — or is what we now see in Salafi-Jihadism more a contingent outcome of its fusion with Sayyid Qutb’s radicalization of Muslim Brotherhood thought?

I think the early Wahhabis took for granted the idea that the ruler of their community would be a loyal adherent of their version of the faith. There was very little discussion of such questions as when and when not it is legitimate to rebel against a Muslim ruler. As they saw it, they were the Muslims fighting against an outside world of polytheists and unbelievers. Were a Muslim ruler to be perceived as having apostatized, then of course rebellion would be sanctioned, but it would not be so in the case of a ruler failing to implement this or that aspect of the Sharia. Where Qutb matters is that he theorized that modern Muslim rulers were in fact flouting the entirety of the Sharia and thus in that sense had apostatized. He and his followers brought to the fore the question of a ruler’s apostasy on account of failing to apply the Sharia, so I think Qutbism deserves a lot of credit for developing this aspect of what would become Jihadi Salafism.

Outside your research, how did you spend your time at Stanford? Did you teach any classes? Is there a particular moment or experience that stands out as especially memorable?

At Hoover I work closely with the Hoover Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World, chaired by Senior Fellow Russell Berman, helping out with our programming, essays, and quarterly publication The Caravan. I am also an active participant in the Hoover History Lab chaired by Professor Stephen Kotkin. At Stanford I have taught a class called “Modern Islamic Political Thought,” a seminar that introduced students to a wide range of thinkers from the nineteenth century onward, from Muhammad ‘Abduh to Osama bin Laden. Engaging with students, both at Hoover and in my teaching, has been especially memorable.

Finally, what message would you like to share with the Stanford community about the future of Islamic studies at the university?

Unlike some leading American universities, Stanford does not have a department of Middle Eastern/Near Eastern Studies, which is typically where Islamic studies would find its home. But it does have some terrific faculty who teach on Middle Eastern and Islamic subjects, particularly in the Religion and History Departments. The Abbasi Program also plays a vital role in bringing faculty and researchers from across campus together in a shared setting, and this in an impressively non-political, non-ideological way. This is certainly to be celebrated in today’s polarized academic environment.

Thank you for this fascinating conversation!