Salafi movement
The Salafi movement takes its name from a single Arabic word: salaf, meaning predecessors. The people it claims as its models are the first three generations of Muslims, those who lived alongside and just after the Prophet Muhammad. For Salafis, temporal closeness to the Prophet is itself a measure of religious authenticity. The nearer to the source, the purer the faith.
That conviction, simple enough to state, has powered one of the most far-reaching religious reform movements in the modern world. From the Damascene mosques where scholars gathered in the 1880s to index medieval manuscripts, to the political parties that entered elections across the Arab world after 2011, Salafism has taken on radically different shapes across continents and centuries.
Who counts as a Salafi? What do they actually believe? And how did a medieval Syrian jurist named Ibn Taymiyya, who died in 1328, come to be the most cited scholar in seminaries from Cairo to Kabul? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.
Ibn Taymiyya was born in 1263 and died in 1328. He was a controversial figure in his own lifetime, partly rejected by his contemporaries, yet Salafis today address him by the honorary title Shaykh al-Islam. His theological writings became the foundational texts for virtually every strand of the movement.
His approach to the Quran and the prophetic traditions was strict and amodal. Where other theologians used metaphor to interpret divine attributes described in scripture, Ibn Taymiyya insisted those passages be read in their apparent, literal sense, without importing philosophical frameworks that post-dated the Salaf. He stated this plainly in a fatwa, quoted in the source: "The way of the Salaf is to interpret literally the Koranic verses and hadiths that relate to the Divine attributes, and without attributing to Him anthropomorphic qualities."
His doctrine of Tawhid, the absolute oneness of God, was organised into three categories: oneness in Lordship, oneness in Worship, and oneness in Names and Attributes. That tripartite schema would become the creedal skeleton of the later Wahhabi and Ahl-i Hadith movements alike.
Damascus was a major centre of scholarship in the Muslim world, and it was there that the early Salafiyya coalesced during the second half of the nineteenth century. The movement took shape among reform-minded clerics in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, at a moment when European colonial power was pressing hard on the Islamic world.
Three figures stand out from this period. Tahir al-Jazairi, who lived from 1852 to 1920, worked alongside 'Abd al-Razzaq al-Bitar, born in 1837 and died in 1917, and Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi, who lived from 1866 to 1914. Together they organised the scattered writings of Ibn Taymiyya, indexed them, and made them accessible to a new generation of readers.
This early Damascus trend was not yet the hardline movement it would later become. Some of its figures tried to reconcile Ibn Taymiyya's theology with the mystical writings of Ibn Arabi. The jurist 'Abd al-Razzaq al-Bitar was described later by Rashid Rida as the "mujaddid madhhab al-salaf fil-Sham," meaning the reviver of the ancestral doctrine in Syria. His branch was more traditional and would become what later historians called the Salafiyya of Damascus.
The Syrian disciples of Tahir al-Jaza'iri who went to Egypt in the 1900s opened a bookshop in Cairo in 1909 called al-Maktaba al-Salafiyya, the Salafi Bookshop. From 1912, Rashid Rida cooperated with its owners, publishing classical works, treatises, and pamphlets through their journal al-Majalla al-Salafiyya. That Cairo operation was partly what put the label Salafiyya into wide enough circulation to catch the eye of Western scholars.
Muhammad Rashid Rida, who lived from 1865 to 1935, was the pivotal figure who carried the Salafiyya from a scholarly reform trend into something more combative and politically organised. His newspaper al-Manar, published from Cairo, gave him a platform that reached readers across the Arabic-speaking world.
Before the First World War, Salafi networks had operated quietly within Ottoman society. After it, Rida moved the movement into open agitation. He became fiercely hostile to Sufism in a way his Damascene predecessors had not been. Earlier reformers had criticised certain Sufi practices while retaining some appreciation for mysticism. Rida's critique extended to all of Sufism, including the chain-of-transmission structures that held Sufi orders together and the master-disciple relationship at their core. He rebuked the political quietism of Sufi orders in particular.
Rida also developed an argument that Athari theology, meaning the strictly literalist creed of Ibn Taymiyya, was easier for ordinary Muslims to understand than speculative Kalam theology, and therefore a stronger defence against atheism and heresy. He argued that intra-Sunni disputes between Atharis and Ash'arites weakened the Muslim community and made it easier for European powers to dominate Muslim lands. For most of the first two decades of the twentieth century, Rida therefore avoided an exclusivist stance against Ash'ari Muslims.
That relative openness began to close from the mid-1920s onward. Rida's student Muhammad Bahjat al-Bitar, born in 1894 and died in 1976, wrote treatises that revived Ibn Taymiyya's theological polemics in sharper form. His 1938 treatise Al-Kawthari wa-Ta'liqatuhu explicitly accused the Ottoman Maturidite scholar Muhammad Zahid al-Kawthari, who lived from 1879 to 1952, of heresy. Al-Bitar was respected across Syrian society, counting Islamist and apolitical scholars alike among his admirers. His student Nasir al-Din al-Albani, born in 1914 and died in 1999, regarded him as a master of creed and hadith.
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab died in 1792. He began his reform movement in Najd, a remote region of the Arabian Peninsula, inviting people to reject what he considered the idolatry of shrine veneration and the animist practices common among nomadic tribes. His alliance with Muhammad ibn Saud was the political breakthrough that allowed the movement to expand by force, demolishing shrines and establishing an Islamic state.
Ibn Abd al-Wahhab drew on Ibn Taymiyya and on early proto-Hanbali writers including 'Abd Allah ibn Ahmad, who died in 903, and Abu Bakr al-Khallal, who died in 923. He personally rejected taqlid, the practice of following a fixed school of law, though later Wahhabi scholars sometimes reverted toward the Hanbali school, producing internal tensions that led scholars like al-Albani to criticise Wahhabis directly on the taqlid question.
The Saudi propagation of Salafi-Wahhabi teaching became a global phenomenon during the Cold War. An internal U.S. State Department memo from 1957 records President Eisenhower discussing the use of religion as a counterweight to Soviet expansion. Mohammed bin Salman, describing Saudi Arabia's international outreach, said it was rooted in Cold War dynamics, with allies asking Saudi Arabia to deploy its resources against Soviet influence in Muslim countries.
Estimates suggest that between the 1960s and 2016, Saudi sources channelled over 100 billion U.S. dollars into spreading Wahhabi Islam. Yahya Birt calculated spending on around 1,500 mosques, 210 Islamic centres, and dozens of Muslim academies and schools at a cost of roughly 2-3 billion dollars annually since 1975. For comparison, the Soviet propaganda budget at its height ran to around 1 billion dollars per year. Ahmad Moussalli offered a formula that many analysts have found useful: all Wahhabis are Salafists, but not all Salafists are Wahhabis.
Quintan Wiktorowicz published a typology in 2006 that divided Salafis into purists, activists, and jihadists. It became widely cited and almost as widely criticised.
Purists focus on da'wah, education, and what they call purification of belief. They dismiss politics as an innovation that distracts from Islam. One strand of this tendency, known as Madkhalism after the Saudi cleric Rabee al-Madkhali, attracted controversy for its support of authoritarian governments in the Middle East. Several members of Saudi Arabia's Permanent Committee publicly denounced al-Madkhali personally, and the movement's influence shrank within the Muslim world to the point that analysts described it as largely a European phenomenon.
Activist Salafis, sometimes called haraki, work within political systems to advance Islamic law through legal and electoral means. After the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the Salafist Call movement created the Al-Nour Party, which won 111 of the 127 seats taken by the Islamist Bloc in the 2011-12 parliamentary elections. That bloc received around 7.5 million of the approximately 27 million valid votes cast. The party subsequently distanced itself from the Muslim Brotherhood during 2013 and participated in the protests that preceded the military removal of Mohamed Morsi.
Salafi jihadism is the smallest and most violent tendency. Journalist Bruce Livesey estimated that Salafi jihadists constitute less than 1 percent of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims, placing the figure at fewer than 10 million. Scholar Mohammed Hafez defined them as holding an extreme form of Sunni Islamism that rejects both democracy and Shi'a rule. Their intellectual inheritance runs from Sayyid Qutb, who led the radical wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s, through the Palestinian scholar 'Abdallah 'Azzam, who lived from 1941 to 1989.
Recent scholarship has challenged the Wiktorowicz framework substantially. Researcher Laurence Deschamps-Laporte, using Egyptian Salafis and the Al-Nour Party as a case study, argued that the three categories represent time-bounded political strategies rather than fixed identities. Samir Amghar went further, asserting that jihadism has diverged so significantly from mainstream Salafism over the decades that it can no longer be classified as part of Salafism at all.
Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani was born in 1914 and died in 1999. He was Albanian by origin, moved to Damascus, and became a hadith scholar of the first rank. Rashid Rida was an early influence on him. By the time al-Albani reached the peak of his career, he was widely regarded as the greatest hadith scholar of his generation within Salafi circles, a judgment that transcended the movement's internal divisions.
His contribution was to draw together three distinct traditions: the Wahhabi movement in Arabia, the Ahl-i Hadith movement in South Asia, and the Salafiyya of the Arab world in its late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century form. The synthetic approach he forged from the 1960s onward became what is now commonly called the Salafi Manhaj. It was al-Albani who most forcefully challenged even Wahhabis on the taqlid question, calling for a regenerated Wahhabism purged of its partial deference to the Hanbali school.
The Ahl-i Hadith movement that fed into this synthesis had its own deep roots in South Asia. Shah Waliullah Dehlawi, who lived from 1703 to 1762, is counted as its intellectual forefather. His son Shah Abdul Aziz, born in 1746 and died in 1824, sharpened the rejection of taqlid in a more puritanical direction. By the time Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi, born in 1786 and died in 1831, led what became known as the Jihad movement against both non-Muslim rulers and syncretic Muslim practices, the South Asian tradition had developed independently but along strikingly parallel lines to the Arabian Wahhabi movement.
As of 2017, journalist Graeme Wood estimated that Salafis probably make up fewer than 10 percent of Muslims globally. Yet the movement's ideas have spread far beyond its self-identified adherents, with many Muslims who do not call themselves Salafi having absorbed aspects of Salafi teaching through the decades of Saudi-funded outreach.
Common questions
What does the Salafi movement believe?
The Salafi movement holds that the purest form of Islam was practiced by the first three generations of Muslims: the companions of the Prophet Muhammad, followed by the Tabi'in and the Tabi' al-Tabi'in. Salafis rely on the Quran, the Sunnah, and the consensus of those early generations, giving those sources precedence over later legal interpretations. They oppose religious innovation (bid'ah) and generally reject blind adherence (taqlid) to the four classical schools of Islamic law.
Who founded the Salafi movement and when did it originate?
The Salafi movement as a distinct reform tradition emerged in the late nineteenth century among scholars in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Notable early leaders include Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi (1866-1914), 'Abd al-Razzaq al-Bitar (1837-1917), Tahir al-Jazai'iri (1852-1920), and Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935). The medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) is regarded as the most significant classical scholarly authority whose writings formed the doctrinal foundation of the movement.
What is the difference between Salafism and Wahhabism?
Wahhabism refers to the reform movement founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (died 1792) in the Najd region of Arabia, which secured a political alliance with the House of Saud. Scholar Ahmad Moussalli summarised the relationship as: all Wahhabis are Salafists, but not all Salafists are Wahhabis. Stéphane Lacroix of Sciences Po distinguished them by saying Salafism refers to the hybridisations that took place from the 1960s between Wahhabi teachings and other Islamic schools of thought.
What are the three types of Salafis?
Political scientist Quintan Wiktorowicz identified three categories in a 2006 article: purists (also called quietists), who focus on religious education and avoid politics; activists (haraki), who participate in political processes to advance Islamic law without violence; and jihadists, who advocate armed struggle. Journalist Bruce Livesey estimated Salafi jihadists represent less than 1 percent of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims. Subsequent scholars have challenged this typology as too rigid to capture how Salafi groups shift strategies over time.
How did Saudi Arabia spread Salafi Islam globally?
Saudi Arabia funded the global spread of Salafi-Wahhabi Islam primarily during and after the Cold War. Estimates suggest that between the 1960s and 2016, Saudi sources channelled over 100 billion U.S. dollars into this effort. Yahya Birt calculated spending on around 1,500 mosques, 210 Islamic centres, and dozens of Muslim academies and schools at approximately 2-3 billion dollars annually since 1975. Mohammed bin Salman acknowledged the campaign was rooted in Cold War logic, with allies asking Saudi Arabia to use its resources to counter Soviet influence in Muslim countries.
Who was Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani and why is he significant to Salafism?
Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani (1914-1999) is considered the spiritual father of contemporary Salafism and is regarded within the movement as the greatest hadith scholar of his generation. An Albanian-born scholar who worked in Damascus, he synthesised the Wahhabi movement of Arabia, the Ahl-i Hadith movement of South Asia, and the Arab Salafiyya into what became known as the Salafi Manhaj from the 1960s onward. He was a protege of Rashid Rida and is respected across Salafi tendencies.
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