Salafists

Salafism is a creed founded in the late nineteenth century by Muslim reformers. It traces its origins back to Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). The term “salaf” (predecessors) refers to the original founders of Islam during the period of Muhammad and his immediate successors. Salafism appeals to a fundamental concept in Islam that Muslims ought to follow the example and teachings of Muhammad and the pious early generations of Muslims.

Many early Salafists were not hostile to mysticism or modernism. Rather, they were eager to find Islamic solutions to modern problems that rigid, traditional Islamic theology and law never anticipated. They were not anti-Western. In fact, most early Salafists eagerly sought to read modern western ideas like democracy or socialism into the early Islamic sources.

The appeal of Salafism is very strong for Muslims, because it is a call to build exclusively on an idealized concept of this early Muslim “Golden Age.” In doing so, Salafists sometimes ignore historical developments and interpret all later Islamic developments as corruptions that pull Muslims away from the original pure religion of Muhammad.

Over time, Salafists became apologists who argued that everything good in modern institutions was originally invented by Muslims during their Golden Age. Salafists came to believe that the best way to solve all modern problems was to give full expression to a recreated, modern – but still genuine – Islam.

Gradually, in the 1970s, through a complicated sociopolitical process, the radically violent Saudi Wahhabis, who were also inspired by Ibn Taymiyya, became indistinguishable from Salafists. Both believed that the imagined, original Golden Age could be entirely recreated in the modern era without the need to adapt it to the realities of the modern world. These simplistic, supremacist thinkers believe that violently recreating the Golden Age today will automatically result in a civilization better than any other ever witnessed.

Pakistani theologian and ideologue Mawdudi (d. 1979) and Egyptian Muslim Brother scholar and educator, Sayyid Qutb (executed in 1966) came to exemplify this influential supremacist thinking. Qutb strongly advocated the necessity of using violent jihad against Westernized Muslims and non-Muslims in order to re-establish the original utopian state that Muhammad set up in Medina in the 7th century. This 1970s blending of Salafism with Wahhabism underlies all of the violent Islamist movements today.

Despite the alarming practices of Salafi jihadists today, “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but…against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph 6:12). This is a spiritual battle against our adversary, the devil, who “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Pet 5:8).

We hate the darkness and underlying evil, and we grieve the resulting bloodshed and pain. Yet Jesus still says, “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:44). God’s love reaches not only those suffering under this oppression, but it reaches even into the ranks of the Salafists. Just as God transformed Saul into Paul through an encounter with Jesus, so can He transform today’s persecutors into tomorrow’s evangelists. And He is doing just that.