Global Salafism Islam’s New Religious Movement By Roel Meijer, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 463 pages.)

Abstract

Roel Meijer’s edited Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement, one
of the first collected works to broadly analyze contemporary Salafism as a
global religious movement for English-speaking audiences, presents this
movement as a string of methods for approaching Islam’s canonical sources.
Its many methodological ambiguities and tactical classifications enable it to
incorporate a variety of local and international religious groups: those that reject
political participation (e.g., “Scholastic Salafis”), embrace their society’s
established political rules (e.g., “Sahwah Movement”), and seek radical transformation
often through violent means (e.g., “al-Qaeda”). In part, Salafism
symbolizes a varied scholarly attempt to disentangle long-simmering questions
about conservative forms of Muslim activism, most of which concern
the ethics of how Muslims are to conduct their lives, perceive their individual
and group identities, and understand the pious order of political and social
arrangements.
The volume has two primary goals: (1) to reveal the diversity among the
movement’s various groups and streams and (2) to reclaim the study of
Salafism from the field of security studies, which has, since 2001, influenced
much of our overall understanding of this rather new religious phenomenon.
The contributors challenge the widespread notion of Salafism as an exclusively
violent and intransigent Islamic movement by addressing the tensions
between basic Salafi doctrines (e.g., scriptural literalism, a sharp distinction
between in- and outsiders, and an active program for individual and communal
reform), its supposed attraction to growing numbers of Muslims, and its intrinsic
links to politics as well as to violence. The contributors argue that these
tensions have produced a whole range of consequences for primarily Muslim ...