Reading List: Western Academic Literature on Salafism
The global movement is highly influential but also quite hard to define.
From time to time I’m going to offer reading lists on key topics as a way of going beyond the news of the moment. This is the second list; the first, on the Muslim Brotherhood, can be found here.
Salafism refers simultaneously to a theological point of view, a mode of being Muslim, and a loosely organized movement. Salafism is difficult to define and the politics of naming are intense - virtually whichever choice you make, you are at least implicitly taking sides on historical and theological matters, perhaps without even realizing it. The term derives from the Arabic phrase al-salaf al-salih or “the pious predecessors,” meaning the first three generations of Muslims who lived between 610 (the advent of Islam) and the early 9th century. Is Salafism today a faithful and accurate rendering of the theological beliefs and, more broadly, attitudes and modes of piety and worship among those early Muslims? Or is Salafism a more recent historical formation that draws selectively upon both early and classical Islam? (I think the latter, and so using the term “Salafi” ends up implicitly crediting the Salafi account of themselves as the “authentic” heirs to the early Muslims - all of which is quite problematic - but I also think we’re stuck with the term for now.)
The Salafi movement has attracted tremendous Western scholarly attention in political science, religious studies, anthropology, and history. The fascination stems in part from the clear importance of the Salafi movement, but also from other, more fraught factors - post-9/11 politics, intra-Muslim debates, and the perceived exotic quality of “fundamentalists.” Nevertheless, “Salafism studies” have produced some of the best and most compelling works on Muslims and Islamic thought in recent years; reading about Salafism not only sheds light on the movement, but on wider questions of how religiosity and politics are constituted in various countries.
Here are some of the best works and the order I would recommend reading them in. I’ve organized the list into nine baskets, some of which contain a single work and others of which represent entire sub-literatures.
The collection Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement (Columbia, 2009), edited by Roel Meijer. This volume was a landmark work and is still widely cited. It gives a tour of some key themes and contexts and introduces some authors who will appear later on this list. The chapters by Bernard Haykel, Stéphane Lacroix, and Noah Salomon are in my view the most important. Haykel lays out a view of Salafism as being cohesive and deeply historically rooted - a view that I would challenge, but that is crucial to understand. Lacroix introduces the reader to Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani (1914-1999), the most consequential figure in the shaping of contemporary Salafism. Salomon differentiates Salafism from Islamism in ways that have wide relevance for thinking about how Salafism is not a variety of Islamism but a fundamentally different formation.
The “Wiktorowicz debate.” Quintan Wiktorowicz published an article in 2006 whose influence cannot be overstated; Wiktorowicz laid out a typology of Salafism as having three steams - “purists,” “politicos,” and “jihadis.” The typology is both useful and limiting, and it has the weakness of being derived mostly from Saudi Arabian examples, meaning it doesn’t always travel well to other contexts. But again, you can’t escape its influence once you start reading and thinking about Salafism. This chapter by Joas Wagemakers, and this article by Théo Blanc, are important critical treatments of Wiktorowicz’s typology.
The “localization” literature. What is global about Salafism, and what changes through the evolution of Salafism in different settings? Is Salafism something that Saudi Arabia beams at the world and Muslims elsewhere simply imbibe? Or does local agency matter? Some key works here include Terje Østebø’s Localising Salafism (Brill, 2011) on Ethiopia, Laurent Bonnefoy’s Salafism in Yemen (Columbia, 2011), Frederic Wehrey and Anouar Boukhars’ Salafism in the Maghreb (Oxford, 2019), and Stéphane Lacroix’s Awakening Islam (Harvard, 2011). The first three show that Ethiopia, Yemen, and North Africa, respectively, were not merely passive theaters of Saudi Arabian influence; the last of these shows that Salafism inside Saudi Arabia itself was a moving target and partly a product of outside influences.
Henri Lauzière, The Making of Salafism (Columbia, 2015). Lauzière’s argument is complex and deserves to be read in full to be understood. But in brief, Lauzière traces the history of Salafism as a concept and a term, and is highly attuned to “the presence or absence of Salafi labels in primary sources.” Lauzière argues that (1) there was no “modernist Salafiyya” per se in the sense of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century movement that called itself Salafi, Salafiyya, etc. and (2) the adjective “Salafi” referred narrowly to a theological doctrine until the twentieth century, when Muslims began using “Salafi” to refer to a movement. The upshot of all this is that Salafism is a twentieth- and twenty-first-century movement, rather than a through-line in Muslim history. I find Lauzière’s methodology and the focus on usages of the words “Salafi” and “Salafiyya” to be somewhat limiting, but the underlying conclusions make sense to me. Here we should note that some insightful authors reject use of the term “Salafi” - one strong argument along those lines comes in Nabil Mouline’s The Clerics of Islam (Yale, 2014), which is also worth reading as part of this list because it is the most in-depth treatment I have seen of the Saudi Arabian religious establishment. So ironically Mouline will help you understand the Salafi movement even though he rejects the term.
Moving backwards historically: Even if we agree with Lauzière (again, I mostly do), an understanding of how Salafis themselves view their movement and their history is going to require us to have some deeper familiarity with the key moments that Salafis today see as historical landmarks. Specifically, we’ll want to read about Ahmad bin Hanbal (d. 855), Ahmad bin Taymiyya (d. 1328), and Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792) and the “Wahhabi” movement. You could spend the rest of your life reading about these figures, but four works to get you started are, respectively, Christopher Melchert’s biography of Ibn Hanbal (Oneworld, 2006), Jon Hoover’s biography of Ibn Taymiyya (Oneworld, 2019), and the books on Wahhabism by David Commins and Cole Bunzel. If you’re ready for some heavy-duty reading after that, Jonathan Brown’s The Canonization of al-Bukhārī and Muslim (Brill, 2007) will connect a lot of dots for you regarding the formation and transformation of Sunni identity, and will bring us full circle back to al-Albani.
Emad Hamdeh, Salafism and Traditionalism (Cambridge, 2020): Having spent most of our list thinking about things largely from the Salafis’ point of view, Hamdeh’s work brings a powerful juxtaposition of Salafis and some of their most learned and vociferous critics. Traditionalism merits a whole reading list of its own, but for the purposes of this list, Hamdeh’s work helps us think about how Salafis have been challenged in their interpretations of theology, law, and more.
Aaron Rock-Singer, In the Shade of the Sunna (University of California, 2022): Salafism isn’t just a set of postures and beliefs - it’s also something people do. Rock-Singer’s book calls attention to the discursive history and sociopolitical significance of seeming micro-practices such as how to wear one’s pants or how long to grow one’s beard. Many works on Salafism make passing references to these distinctive styles but Rock-Singer puts practice front and center, resulting in a very rich view of the Salafi movement. For those who read French, Rock-Singer’s work - which focuses on Egypt - would pair well with Lacroix’s new book on Salafism in Egypt. Rock-Singer’s book also makes for an interesting juxtaposition with Ousmane Kane’s Muslim Modernity in Postcolonial Nigeria (Brill, 2003); Salafism is so often thought of as anti-modern, but Kane argues compellingly that Nigeria’s Izala movement represents a version of “Muslim moderity,” as the title indicates.
Salafi-jihadism: If you’ve made it this far, then you’ve seen that there is much more to Salafism than jihadism. Indeed, Jacob Olidort’s line (from his paper on al-Albani and “the politics of ‘quietist’ Salafism,” which is very much worth reading for its own sake and in connection with the “Wiktorowicz debate”) has stuck with me since I read it: “While percentages are hard to measure, if most Salafists globally were involved in forming political parties or in direct violent activity, the world would look very different.” With that said, however, the jihadis obviously do deserve serious study even if they are fringe not just within the Muslim umma as a whole, but even within the Salafi milieu. Given that we’re interested here in jihadism in connection with Salafism, I would recommend three works in particular: Shiraz Maher’s Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea (Hurst, 2016) as an overview, Thomas Hegghammer’s edited collection Jihadi Culture (Cambridge, 2017) as a discussion of non-military aspects of the Salafi-jihadi movement, and Nathan French’s And God Knows the Martyrs (Oxford, 2020) for serious treatment of religious and theological aspects of Salafi-jihadism, a theme that often gets lost in a focus on “ideology” and tactics. Jihadism - and the criticisms of that term and how the movement has been studied - is very much worth a separate reading list, so I’ll plan to take that on at some point.
Salafism in the West: It is hard to find non-alarmist treatments of Salafism in Western societies. But there are high-quality, careful pieces of scholarship on this theme. Two are Mohamed-Ali Adraoui’s work on France (Oxford, 2020) and Sadek Hamid’s work on Britain (Bloomsbury, 2024).
Primary Sources
Honestly, if you are dealing with English-language sources, the best way to immerse yourself in the Salafi movement would be simply to let the YouTube algorithm take you on a journey into the vast and polemical world of online Salafism. But another place to begin would be the translations of al-Albani’s book on prayer (here is one translation), and to read it alongside the above-mentioned chapter by Lacroix and paper by Olidort, to give you a sense of the Salafi methodology and to begin seeing how and why Salafi interventions over worship practices ended up being so socially and politically consequential. Alongside al-Albani, the two most important Salafi shaykhs of the twentieth century were, in my view, the Saudi Arabian scholars ‘Abd al-’Aziz bin Baz (1910-1999) and Muhammad bin Salih al-’Uthaymin (1925-2001); many of their fatwas, lectures, and writings have also been translated into English. Another very interesting and important English-language text is Yasir Qadhi’s writing on the Salafi movement and why he no longer identifies with it - here you get Qadhi writing simultaneously as an analyst and historian, a former insider, and (I would say) a constructive critic of the Salafi movement. Another recent and fascinating personal narrative about gravitating towards and then leaving Salafism can be found here. Beyond these initial sources, it really depends on which countries/figures/time periods interest you the most.