Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Denominations

Salafism

Also Known As Salafi The usual English name of the movement and of those who follow it.
Islam

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Origin 1880 to 1970

A Sunni movement holding that Islam should be practised as the salaf al-salih, the first three generations of Muslims, practised it, and that the accumulated apparatus of later tradition has obscured rather than preserved that. Salafis go directly to Quran and hadith rather than following one of the four established schools of law, insist on a literal reading of the divine attributes against the interpretive methods of Ashari theology, and are severe about anything they classify as bidah, innovation, or as shirk, the association of others with God. In practice that severity falls hardest on Sufi devotion: the visiting of saints' tombs, intercession through the dead and the veneration of shrines are rejected outright, and in several countries the rejection has taken the form of destroyed shrines and attacked congregations. Scholars usually divide the movement into a large quietist majority that avoids politics on principle, a political wing that contests elections and public argument, and a small jihadi minority.

Facts
Disputed
Separation or Divergence
No separation as a body 1
Roel Meijer's edited volume Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement, Hurst, 2009, brings together specialists on Islamic movements to document that Salafism did not separate from any prior body; it is a reform current within Sunni Islam that calls for a return to the practice of the first generations, the salaf, rather than a schism with its own founding break. The volume's comparative method, reading case studies of Salafi movements and their legal practice across different countries, finds real internal disagreement over whether that stance sits inside or outside the four traditional schools of law: some Salafis reject taqlid, adherence to any school, entirely, while others continue to operate within Hanbali jurisprudence specifically. That disagreement, not any external separation, is what the dispute over its status actually concerns.
Separation or Divergence
Salafism is a current within Sunni Islam calling for a return to the practice of the first generations 1
Roel Meijer's edited volume Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement, Hurst, 2009, brings together specialists on Islamic movements to document that Salafism did not separate from any prior body; it is a reform current within Sunni Islam that calls for a return to the practice of the first generations, the salaf, rather than a schism with its own founding break. The volume's comparative method, reading case studies of Salafi movements and their legal practice across different countries, finds real internal disagreement over whether that stance sits inside or outside the four traditional schools of law: some Salafis reject taqlid, adherence to any school, entirely, while others continue to operate within Hanbali jurisprudence specifically. That disagreement, not any external separation, is what the dispute over its status actually concerns.
Separation or Divergence
Whether it stands inside or outside the four schools of law is disputed within it 1
Roel Meijer's edited volume Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement, Hurst, 2009, brings together specialists on Islamic movements to document that Salafism did not separate from any prior body; it is a reform current within Sunni Islam that calls for a return to the practice of the first generations, the salaf, rather than a schism with its own founding break. The volume's comparative method, reading case studies of Salafi movements and their legal practice across different countries, finds real internal disagreement over whether that stance sits inside or outside the four traditional schools of law: some Salafis reject taqlid, adherence to any school, entirely, while others continue to operate within Hanbali jurisprudence specifically. That disagreement, not any external separation, is what the dispute over its status actually concerns.
Belief
Defining Doctrinal Position
The practice of the first generations as the sole binding precedent 1Tradition: Islam
Defining Doctrinal Position
The Qur'an is God's uncreated speech 1
Position on Sexuality
Same-sex orientation or practice is held to bar full membership or participation 2
Salafi legal scholarship, represented here by a dated fatwa from a leading Salafi doctrinal website founded and supervised by a named scholar, treats homosexual conduct as a grave sin and holds, as the position transmitted from the earliest generation of the Prophet's companions, that both parties to the act are to face execution, whether married or not, differing among classical jurists only on the method. This is a considerably more severe position than a bar on membership or participation, recorded here as a documented reading within Salafi jurisprudence rather than softened or left unrecorded.
Sexuality Position Detail
A dated fatwa from IslamQA.info, a Salafi doctrinal website founded in 1996 and operating under the general supervision of Sheikh Muhammad Saalih al-Munajjid, addresses the Islamic ruling on homosexual acts. It reports that classical jurists agreed the act is a grave sin and differed only on the method of execution, and states that the position transmitted from the earliest generation of the Prophet's companions and held correct is that both parties are to be killed, whether married or not, citing jurists including Ibn al-Qayyim and Ibn Taymiyah. Salafism is a transnational current within Sunni Islam rather than a single governed body, so no single date attaches to the movement's adoption of the position; the fatwa itself frames the ruling as inherited from the earliest generations rather than newly decided. 2
Origins
Origin Period
1880 to 1970 1
Origin Period
The movement takes its present form from the mid-twentieth century in Arabia, Egypt and South Asia 1
Place of Origin
The Arabian peninsula, Egypt and South Asia 1
Founder
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) stands behind one strand and the Islamic modernists behind another 1
Founder
No single founder 1
Organisation
Governance
Authority in trained scholars, with no central office 1
Governance
No central authority 1
No organisation: a current carried by scholars, students, satellite channels and states, and divided within itself over politics and over allegiance.
Ordination
No ordination; authority rests on learning or on the whole body 1
Practice
Liturgical Language
Classical Arabic 1
Status
Status Today
Living tradition, practised today 1
Learn More
Wahhabi, and Who Uses the Word

"Wahhabi" is a word used almost entirely by people describing somebody else. Those to whom it is applied generally reject it, and say Salafi, or ahl al-sunna wal-jamaa, or simply Muslim. The objection is theological before it is political: to name a school after a man is to suggest that he founded something, and the whole claim of the movement is that it founded nothing and restored what was already there.

The term was coined by opponents in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ottoman officials and rival Sunni scholars, and it has carried a polemical charge ever since. In current usage it is frequently a synonym for extremism, applied to Muslims who have no connection to the movement at all. Using it that way is inaccurate and it functions as a slur.

That does not mean the two words name the same thing.

  • Wahhabism, properly speaking, is the specific eighteenth-century movement of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in Najd, joined from 1744 to the political fortunes of the house of Saud, with its own scholarly establishment, its own legal tradition within the Hanbali school, and a particular history of destroying tombs and shrines.
  • Salafism as it exists now is a broader and later formation. It draws on the Najdi tradition, on the Egyptian Salafiyya of Abduh and Rida, and on the South Asian Ahl-i Hadith, and it took its modern shape from the 1960s, when Saudi funding and Muslim Brotherhood exiles met in the same institutions. Its characteristic method, the direct grading of hadith without deference to a school of law, owes as much to al-Albani, a Syrian-Albanian watchmaker who was not Najdi and was at odds with the Saudi religious establishment, as to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

Scholars disagree about how much of a distinction that is. Some treat Salafism as the export name for Wahhabism and regard the difference as presentational; others hold that the twentieth-century synthesis is genuinely a different thing from what preceded it, and point to the internal quarrels between Saudi state scholars and Salafis who reject their authority.

The practical rule this atlas follows: use Salafi for the movement, because that is what its adherents call themselves; use Wahhabi only for the specific Najdi movement and its institutional descendants, where the word does identifiable historical work; and do not use either as a description of Muslims in general.
Quietist, Political, Jihadi, and the Limits of That Grid

Salafis share a method and divide over what follows from it. The most used map of the divisions comes from Quintan Wiktorowicz, and it is worth knowing both what it explains and where it fails.

The shared method

All Salafis hold that the first three generations of Muslims understood Islam correctly and that everything added since must be tested against them. That produces a shared commitment to the literal reading of the Quran and the hadith, a rejection of the four schools of law as binding, and a hostility to shrine visitation, intercession through saints and theological speculation.

Three postures

Wiktorowicz separates purists, who hold that politics corrupts and that the work is teaching and purification; politicos, who hold that the method must be applied to political questions and who organise accordingly; and jihadis, who hold that violence against rulers and their backers is a present obligation. The three read the same texts and disagree about the analysis of the present situation rather than about the sources.

Where the map breaks

The categories are not stable, individuals cross between them, and the boundaries move with events. The typology also encourages the mistake of reading the third group as the natural end of the first, which the great majority of Salafis reject and preach against. Governments have used the grid to justify treating quietist teaching as a pipeline, and researchers who have tested that claim find the picture far less linear than the policy assumes.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Why this is disputed. The Saudi religious establishment during his reign held to the reformist tradition descending from Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and the global distribution programmes carried its editorial line with them.

This source names Salafism directly: "specialist contributors surveying Salafism as a global Islamic movement, each addressing its theology, politics or regional variation from their own documented area of research rather than one..."

Its self-description places it in the Salafi jihadist current.

This source names Salafism directly: "classification of which current within Salafism the film's subjects belong to; that classification is drawn here from a separate, independent academic source, Quintan Wiktorowicz's "Anatomy of the..."

Source Salafistes (Wikipedia and Studies in French Cinema)Wikipedia contributors; Maria Flood, Studies in French Cinema

Belongs to Tradition

Islam, Religions

Branch Of

Islam, Religions

Critiqued

Salafi scholarship rejects the Sufi chain of initiation as a ground of religious authority, holding that authority rests on evidence and transmitted knowledge rather than on initiation.

Wahdat al-Wujud, Doctrines

Wahdat al-Wujud, the unity of existence, is rejected in Salafism as a form of pantheism incompatible with a strict doctrine of Tawhid.

Wali, Religious Roles & Titles

This edge names the critiquing current rather than a contested claim in its own right. Wali's own tradition fact already carries the dispute over shrine visitation and intercession, including its rejection by Salafi and Wahhabi currents, in full.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)

Rejected Here

Ajmer Sharif, Sacred Sites

The refusal covers the annual commemoration and the offerings made at the tomb as well as the visitation itself.

Amulet, Sacred Objects & Ritual Items

Salafi teaching classes the wearing of an amulet as associating a partner with God, citing the prophetic condemnation of the tamima, and the objection extends to any object worn to avert harm.

Geomancy, Disciplines

Salafi teaching classes sand divination among the forbidden arts, reading it under the Quranic prohibition of divination by arrows.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)
Qasidat al-Burda, Hymns & Liturgical Texts

The poem's addresses to the Prophet are read as asking of him what may be asked only of God, and Salafi scholars have condemned it by name.

Qawwali, Sacred Sound

Sung devotion with instruments at a saint's shrine is refused on both counts, for the music and for the shrine.

Qutb, Religious Roles & Titles

Salafism refuses the Sufi hierarchy of saints as an unwarranted addition to the religion.

Source The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi ArabiaDavid Commins
Reliquary, Sacred Objects & Ritual Items

Relic veneration and the shrines built over graves are the practices the reform set out to remove, and their removal is the movement's most visible historical act.

Source The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi ArabiaDavid Commins
Sema, Sacred Dances

The turning ceremony is refused as an innovation with no warrant in the practice of the first generations.

The chain of masters is refused along with the order it authorises, since Salafi teaching admits no transmission of religious authority outside scholarship in scripture and hadith.

Star and Crescent, Religious Symbols

Salafi argument treats the crescent as a later borrowing with no warrant in the sources, and refuses the use of any emblem to stand for the religion at all.

Talisman, Sacred Objects & Ritual Items

A written or inscribed talisman falls under the same judgement as the worn amulet and is refused on the same ground.

Tariqa, Religious Organization & Structure

Salafi teaching holds the orders to be an innovation without warrant in the earliest generations, and rejects the initiation, the litany and the authority of the shaykh together.

The Tomb of Rumi, Sacred Sites

Salafi teaching refuses the visitation of tombs for intercession and the ceremonies held at them, holding both to be innovations without warrant in the earliest generations.

Western Astrology, Disciplines

Salafi teaching classes astrology among the forbidden arts of divination, citing the report that whoever goes to a fortune teller and believes him has his prayer refused for forty nights.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)

Holds Element

Salafi practice includes the recitation cure against possession and the evil eye, so the jinn are treated as a live matter and not a figure of speech.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)

Salafi teaching holds arrogance as the sin for which Iblis was cast out and treats it as a matter of creed rather than only of character.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)

Salafi scholarship generally holds the face veil to be obligatory rather than meritorious, which is the point on which it most visibly parts from the four Sunni schools.

Salafi teaching classes ostentation as the lesser association, an act done for the sight of people rather than for God, and warns of it sharply.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)
Shahada, Mantras

Read as excluding any intermediary whatever, which is the ground of the movement's objection to visiting shrines and asking the dead.

Salafi teaching prefers exegesis by transmitted report over exegesis by opinion, and this commentary is the great early monument of that method.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)

Tafsir Ibn Kathir, a commentary favored for its reliance on hadith and the interpretive precedent of the earliest generations, is a primary reference work in Salafism.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)

The ankle length robe is worn deliberately short of the ankle, on the prophetic report against letting a garment trail, which makes the hem itself a marker of the tendency.

Critiqued Here

Misbaha, Sacred Objects & Ritual Items

The beads are argued to be a later innovation, with counting on the fingers held to be the prophetic practice. The argument stops short of a prohibition and beads remain common among ordinary Muslims of the tendency.

Wali, Religious Roles & Titles

Salafi scholarship argues against the veneration of the friends of God and against the practices at their tombs, while the category of a righteous person beloved of God is itself scriptural and is not denied.

Source The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi ArabiaDavid Commins

Held Differently

Nasheed, Sacred Sound

Permitted only unaccompanied, and the voice-only nasheed became the characteristic Salafi song form precisely because every instrument is refused.

Tawakkul (Trust in God), Virtues

Salafi teaching holds trust in God as reliance joined to the taking of means, citing the report that one should tie the camel and then trust, and reads the abandonment of secondary causes as a departure from the prophetic practice.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)

Objects and Practices of This Tradition

Bidah, Doctrines

Bidah, religious innovation, is treated in Salafism as a serious departure from the practice of the earliest Muslim generations, the salaf.

Hadith are affirmed as a primary source of law and doctrine in Salafism, drawn from the Sunni six-book canon read with minimal later interpretive layering.

Salafi teaching holds that a Muslim should follow the evidence rather than a school, and the rejection of binding emulation is one of the movement's defining marks, though Salafis differ among themselves over how much training that requires.

Ruqyah, Practices

Contemporary Salafi scholarship has promoted ruqyah as the licit alternative to amulets and shrine visitation, and much of its present prominence follows from that campaign.

Source Sahih MuslimMuslim ibn al-Hajjaj
Source Salafistes (Wikipedia and Studies in French Cinema)Wikipedia contributors; Maria Flood, Studies in French Cinema
Sharia, Doctrines

Sharia, applied without what Salafism regards as later theological or juristic accretion, is affirmed as binding.

Tafsir Ibn Kathir, a commentary favored for its reliance on hadith and the interpretive precedent of the earliest generations, is a primary reference work in Salafism.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)
Tawhid, Doctrines

Tawhid is emphasized in Salafism through a tripartite framework, God's lordship, His sole right to worship, and His names and attributes, the movement's central organizing doctrine.

The Quran, held to be the literal and uncreated word of God revealed to Muhammad, is canonical scripture across every branch of Islam, including this tradition.

Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and CommentarySeyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief)

Opposes

The Createdness of the Quran, Doctrines

Salafi doctrine holds the Quran to be God's uncreated speech, carrying forward Ibn Hanbal's refusal through Ibn Taymiyya.

Originates in Language

Position On

The punishment of the grave is affirmed in Salafi doctrine on the hadith and is a standing item of the traditionalist creed.

Source Islamic Creeds: A SelectionW. Montgomery Watt
Barzakh, Doctrines

Barzakh is affirmed in Salafi doctrine.

Source The Islamic Understanding of Death and ResurrectionJane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad
Bidah, Doctrines

Every innovation in worship is misguidance, with no category of good innovation admitted.

The finality of prophethood is affirmed in Salafi doctrine without qualification.

Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and CommentarySeyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief)

The questioning of the dead after burial is affirmed in Salafi doctrine on the hadith.

Source The Islamic Understanding of Death and ResurrectionJane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad
Fitra, Doctrines

Fitra is affirmed in Salafi doctrine.

Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and CommentarySeyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief)
Haram, Doctrines

The forbidden category is affirmed in Salafi jurisprudence as the strongest of the five rulings.

Source Principles of Islamic JurisprudenceMohammad Hashim Kamali
Haya, Doctrines

Haya is affirmed in Salafi doctrine as a branch of faith, and is the ground on which much of the movement's teaching on dress and conduct is argued.

Source Sahih al-BukhariMuhammad al-Bukhari

Consensus is accepted in Salafi legal theory, restricted in practice to the consensus of the first generations.

Iman, Doctrines

Iman is affirmed in Salafi doctrine in the traditionalist form: faith is statement, conviction and act together, and it increases and decreases.

Jihad, Doctrines

Jihad is affirmed in Salafi doctrine as a chapter of law, and the movement is divided on it: the quietist current holds that it requires a competent authority, and the jihadi current does not.

The division into grave and lesser sins is affirmed in Salafi doctrine.

Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and CommentarySeyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief)
Kaffara, Doctrines

Kaffara is affirmed in Salafi jurisprudence as a defined expiation.

Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and CommentarySeyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief)
Mizan, Doctrines

The weighing of deeds at the judgement is affirmed in Salafi doctrine, and the traditionalist method takes the scales as real without asking how.

Source The Islamic Understanding of Death and ResurrectionJane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad
Qiyamah, Doctrines

The resurrection and judgement are affirmed in Salafi doctrine.

Source The Islamic Understanding of Death and ResurrectionJane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad

Analogy is accepted in Salafi legal theory, defended by Ibn Taymiyya against those who rejected it, though the movement subordinates it firmly to the texts.

Sabr, Doctrines

Sabr is affirmed in Salafi doctrine.

Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and CommentarySeyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief)
Shirk, Doctrines

Shirk is the organising category of Salafi doctrine, extended beyond idolatry to intercession, oath-taking by other than God and the veneration of tombs, which is what makes the charge operative against other Muslims.

Shukr, Doctrines

Shukr is affirmed in Salafi doctrine.

Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and CommentarySeyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief)
Sirat, Doctrines

The bridge over the fire is affirmed in Salafi doctrine on the hadith, taken as real without asking how.

Source The Islamic Understanding of Death and ResurrectionJane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad
Taqwa, Doctrines

Taqwa is affirmed in Salafi doctrine as the Quran's measure of human worth.

Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and CommentarySeyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief)
Tawakkul, Doctrines

Tawakkul is affirmed in Salafi doctrine.

Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and CommentarySeyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief)
Tawbah, Doctrines

Tawbah is affirmed in Salafi doctrine as a turning back to God.

Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and CommentarySeyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief)

The five rulings are the classification of acts in Salafi jurisprudence, taken from the standard legal theory the movement otherwise argues with.

Source Principles of Islamic JurisprudenceMohammad Hashim Kamali

Salafi legal theory takes the Quran and the Sunna as the roots and reads the later apparatus as subordinate to them, which is the practical content of the movement's text primacy.

Related To

Why this is disputed. Salafi scholars decline to mark Isra and Mi'raj at all, accepting the event and rejecting the commemoration as an innovation without warrant. Most other Sunni tradition, including the major historical madhhabs and Sufi orders, has long observed the twenty seventh of Rajab as a night of commemoration, so the disagreement is over the marking of the event rather than over the event's own historicity.

Close to the wider Salafi movement and often named interchangeably with it, though the two are not identical.

Studied

Ibn Taymiyya, Figures

Why this is disputed. Salafism and, more pointedly, some twentieth century militant movements draw on Ibn Taymiyya's rulings as precedent for positions his own writing does not obviously support in the same terms he wrote them. Scholars of Islamic intellectual history who study his reception, rather than only his own texts, are divided over how much of this represents a faithful extension of his actual legal and theological reasoning into new circumstances and how much represents a selective reading that isolates individual rulings from the fuller argument, often addressed to specific medieval circumstances, in which he originally made them.

Sources
1. Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement
Roel Meijer (ed.), Hurst, 2009On the formation and typology of modern Salafism
2. The Punishment for Homosexuality (IslamQA.info, answer 38622)
IslamQA.info, 2006the stated position on sexuality and its supporting detailView the Source
The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection
Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Oxford University Press, 2002View the Source
The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary
Seyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief), HarperOne, 2015View the Source
Sahih al-Bukhari
Muhammad al-BukhariView the Source
The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition
P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.), Brill, 2005View the Source
Islamic Creeds: A Selection
W. Montgomery Watt, Edinburgh University Press, 1994View the Source
Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence
Mohammad Hashim Kamali, Islamic Texts Society, 2003View the Source
Ibn Taymiyya (Makers of the Muslim World)
Jon Hoover, Oneworld, 2019View the Source
The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia
David Commins, I.B. Tauris, 2006On the Najdi movement and the term WahhabiView the Source
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