Salafism Goes Global

"Salafism has emerged as one of the most visible and questioned faces to contemporary Islam. In many countries from the East to the West, this fundamentalist vision seeking to restore a vision of Islam that is supposed to be pure and unchanged is increasingly successful. This is the case in France where thousands of Muslims are now dedicated to living this puritanical and fundamentalist religiosity. In connection with some Islamic countries, starting with Saudi Arabia, they appeal to a transnational narrative through which they promote a new face of globalization today. Reacting both political Islam and Jihadism, they prefer becoming entrepreneurs in order to seek for economic success. Splitting from the rest of the society, they prefer building a counter-narrative on behalf of which they represent the purest form of the Islamic identity nowadays. Through a prolonged immersion in French Salafist communities for several years, this book sheds light on the lifestyle, representations, profiles, and trajectories of these communities. By focusing on quietist Salafism and its formative ties with several Gulf countries, especially with Saudi Arabia, this book is also an attempt to understand contemporary religious globalizations. Besides this political globalization of Salafism, this also sheds light on a dynamic that is less centred on formal political entities, and which primarily refers to a globalization taking place in the margins that have been little studied for too long"--