Salafism

Salafism is a broad set of movements that take the belief and practice of Islam's earliest generations as the standard against which all later development is to be measured.

At a glance

The method is what defines it. Salafīs give priority to the Qurʾān and the Sunna as the sources of law, and admit the further instruments of classical jurisprudence — analogy and consensus — only where these can be shown to rest plainly on a text. From this follows a refusal of taqlīd, the binding adherence to one of the established schools, and a preference for the apparent sense of scripture over interpretive readings. Critics call the result literalist and note that rejecting the schools does not remove interpretation but relocates it; Salafī scholars answer that they are returning judgement to the sources rather than to men.

Its modern genealogy runs through the nineteenth century. The Ottoman decline and the visible material advance of Europe prompted a wide argument about why Muslim societies had fallen behind, and one influential answer was that the fault lay in an Islam encrusted with later accretions. Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and Muḥammad ʿAbduh urged reform of Islamic thought and institutions, and ʿAbduh's student Rashīd Riḍā redirected that impulse toward the practice of the salaf. Rising literacy and cheap print mattered as much as any argument: ordinary readers could now consult scripture directly and bypass the scholarly gatekeepers.

A second current fed in from Arabia. The Wahhābī movement founded in eighteenth-century Najd drew on Ibn Ḥanbal and Ibn Taymiyya to insist on a theology of revelation and early practice against what it judged conjecture and innovation, and its precepts shaped much of what became Salafism. Two strands then coexisted: one seeking to recover the salaf's intellectual approach and apply it to modern conditions, the other to reproduce their manner of life and withdraw from habits incompatible with it. On the account most often given, the first current largely fed into secular nationalist movements that kept Islam as heritage while the second became the recognisable Salafism of the present — though the genealogy is disputed, and scholars differ over how much today's Salafism really owes to al-Afghānī and ʿAbduh as against the Najdī tradition.

Salafism is frequently equated with Islamism, and the two are distinct. Islamism denotes political programmes that pursue sociopolitical objectives through Islamic symbols and language; most Salafīs are quietist and decline political engagement, and many Islamists do not accept that emulating the salaf should be the organising principle of modern practice. The categories are not opposed, and some movements are both — Egypt after 2011, where a Salafī party sat alongside the Muslim Brotherhood's, is the case usually cited — but they answer different questions and should not be used interchangeably.

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Curated reference on Islamic belief and thought. On matters where traditions differ, positions are attributed rather than adjudicated; verify points of doctrine with qualified scholars.