Understanding Salafism

This book addresses the issue of one of the most visible and debated currents in contemporary radical Islam. It sheds light on the history, the fundamental principles, and the political and religious translations of Salafism and explains current events involving Salafist actors in an objective and dispassionate manner. The author explains with precision the different contemporary Salafist mobilizations by illustrating them with specific cases while shedding light on the main debates related to this mode of understanding of the Muslim religion, such as its potential role in triggering certain forms of violence, the way to compare it to other fundamentalist versions in other religions, or the way to describe, in terms of social sciences, the main concepts and discourses that can be observed in this current of Islam today.

Examines how Salafism, a globally influential Muslim movement, is reshaping religious authority in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country.

One of the issues in contemporary Islamic thought which has attracted considerable attention amongst Muslim scholars and within the Muslim community is the valid and appropriate attitude of Muslims to relationships with non-Muslims. A major source of confusion and controversy with regards to this relationship comes from the allegation that Muslims must reserve their love and loyalty for fellow Muslims, and reject and declare war on the rest of humanity — most acutely seen through the Islamic concept of Al-Wala' wal Bara' (WB) translated as “Loyalty and Disavowal”, which appears to be central in the ideology of modern Salafism.This book investigates the dynamics and complexities of the concept of WB within modern Salafism and aims to understand the diverse interpretation of this concept; and how modern Salafis understand and apply the concept in contemporary religious, social and political settings. The book discovers that the complexities, diversities and disputes surrounding the concept in modern Salafism often revolve around issues of social, political and current realities.The significance of this book lies in the fact that comprehending modern Salafis' conception of WB, its realities and complexities has become an urgent priority in the lives of Muslims today.

Some Islamic scholars hold that Salafism is an innovative and rationalist effort at Islamic reform that emerged in the late nineteenth century but gradually disappeared in the mid twentieth. Others argue Salafism is an anti-innovative and antirationalist movement of Islamic purism that dates back to the medieval period yet persists today. Though they contradict each other, both narratives are considered authoritative, making it hard for outsiders to grasp the history of the ideology and its core beliefs. Introducing a third, empirically based genealogy, The Making of Salafism understands the concept as a recent phenomenon projected back onto the past, and it sees its purist evolution as a direct result of decolonization. Henri Lauzière builds his history on the transnational networks of Taqi al-Din al-Hilali (1894–1987), a Moroccan Salafi who, with his associates, participated in the development of Salafism as both a term and a movement. Traveling from Rabat to Mecca, from Calcutta to Berlin, al-Hilali interacted with high-profile Salafi scholars and activists who eventually abandoned Islamic modernism in favor of a more purist approach to Islam. Today, Salafis tend to claim a monopoly on religious truth and freely confront other Muslims on theological and legal issues. Lauzière's pathbreaking history recognizes the social forces behind this purist turn, uncovering the popular origins of what has become a global phenomenon.

One of the issues in contemporary Islamic thought which has attracted considerable attention amongst Muslim scholars and within the Muslim community is the valid and appropriate attitude of Muslims to relationships with non-Muslims. A major source of confusion and controversy with regards to this relationship comes from the allegation that Muslims must reserve their love and loyalty for fellow Muslims and reject and declare war on the rest of humanity most acutely seen through the Islamic concept of Al-Wala' wal Bara' (WB) translated as "Loyalty and Disavowal," which appears to be central in the ideology of modern Salafism. This book investigates the dynamics and complexities of the concept of WB within modern Salafism and aims to understand the diverse interpretation of this concept; and how modern Salafis understand and apply the concept in contemporary religious, social and political settings. The book discovers that the complexities, diversities and disputes surrounding the concept in modern Salafism often revolve around issues of social, political and current realities. The significance of this book lies in the fact that comprehending modern Salafis' conception of WB, its realities and complexities has become an urgent priority in the lives of Muslims today.

No topic has captured the public imagination of late quite so dramatically as the specter of global jihadism. While much has been said about the way jihadists behave, their ideology remains poorly understood. As the Levant has imploded and millenarian radicals claim to have revived a Caliphate based on the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed, the need for a nuanced and accurate understanding of jihadist beliefs has never been greater. Shiraz Maher charts the intellectual underpinnings of salafi-jihadism from its origins in the mountains of the Hindu Kush to the jihadist insurgencies of the 1990s and the 9/11 wars. What emerges is the story of a pragmatic but resilient warrior doctrine that often struggles - as so many utopian ideologies do - to consolidate the idealism of theory with the reality of practice. His ground-breaking introduction to salafi-jihadism recalibrates our understanding of the ideas underpinning one of the most destructive political philosophies of our time by assessing classical works from Islamic antiquity alongside those of contemporary ideologues. Packed with refreshing and provocative insights, Maher explains how war and insecurity engendered one of the most significant socio-religious movements of the modern era.

On Salafism offers a compelling new understanding of this phenomenon, both its development and contemporary manifestations. Salafism became associated with fundamentalism when the 9/11 Commission used it to explain the terror attacks and has since been connected with the violence of the so-called Islamic State. With this book, Azmi Bishara critically deconstructs claims of continuity between early Islam and modern militancy and makes a counterargument: Salafism is a wholly modern construct informed by specific sociopolitical contexts. Bishara offers a sophisticated account of various movements—such as Wahabbism and Hanbalism—frequently collapsed into simplistic understandings of Salafism. He distinguishes reformist from regressive Salafism, and examines patterns of modernization in the development of contemporary Islamic political movements and associations. In deconstructing the assumptions of linear continuity between traditional and contemporary movements, Bishara details various divergences in both doctrine and context of modern Salafisms, plural. On Salafism is a crucial read for those interested in Islamism, jihadism, and Middle East politics and history.

*Includes pictures *Includes quotes from the Koran and Hadith *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading "It's very simple. We want sharia. Sharia in economy, in politics, in judiciary, in our borders and our foreign relations." - Mohammed Abdel-Rahman, the son of Omar Abdel-Rahman, Time. October 8, 2012[ Beginning in 2010, much of the Middle East, including Egypt, was swept up by a series of revolutions later referred to as the Arab Spring. The wave of riots and demonstrations - some violent, some not, but all impactful and sizeable - began in Tunisia before spreading like wildfire to neighboring countries in Northern Africa and eventually into the Arabian Peninsula, including Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain. Though it eventually petered out by mid-2012, the Arab Spring led to the toppling of long-reigning monarchs and regimes, free elections, and attempts to build republics based on democratic principles. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring protests of 2010 and 2011, the world witnessed the rise of political groups in the Middle East who associated themselves with a movement called Salafism, such as the Nour ("Light") Party in Egypt. Prior to these popular uprisings, the Salafis were rather marginalized groups within the spectrum of Islam and, in many cases, did not share a cohesive and agreed upon set of beliefs that clearly differed from what many call "mainstream Islam." Prior to the Arab Spring, different Muslim religious scholars and leaders had emerged and led what they believed to be Salafi movements to return Muslims back to the origins of the religion. The Arab Spring protests did fuel the overthrow of some long-term dictators, start civil war in other nations, and impress upon the world the power of digital communications. Another important outcome of these events was the opening of a space for religiously motivated social and political movements that had been feared and repressed for many years in the Middle East, particularly by autocratic rulers that arose during the post-colonialism fallout in the region. The term "Salaf' or "Salafism" is becoming more mainstream and associated with many unfortunate events, such as the spread of a violent ideology in the Middle East, South Central Asia, Europe, and North America because the perpetrators of violence claim to have some wholly different understanding of Islam than the rest of the world's Muslims. As such, the media and its consumers have begun to conflate and confuse the term Salafism with extremist or radical Islam, terrorism, Islamist, and a whole slate of other terms used to negatively label the entire religion. The problem is that the users of these terms in the media and beyond generally do not bother defining what it means to be a "Salafi" and how its many manifestations differ country to country and person to person within a given time and context. This is true for nearly all religions in most regards, because to believe something about a religion is to hold a subjective perspective: the religion is what you make of it or what others tell you to make of it. So what is Salafism? "The word salaf means predecessors, and in the Islamic context, it usually refers to the period of the Prophet, his Companions, and their successors." In general, a Salafi refers to someone who claims to follow a particular understanding of the Salaf and claims to comprehend an authoritative sense of Islam - one that espouses a belief that their Islam is the original Islam in the way it was practiced and meant to be practiced at the beginning of the religion. Most Salafis claim to focus their religious interpretation on the Qur'an's words and vary on the level of importance given to the Hadith. Whether their claim to boast a more accurate and traditional belief in the religion is true or not is debated among believers, but the fact remains that the term's usage is on the rise.